Unraveling viral disinformation and explaining where it came from, the harm it's causing, and what we should do about it.
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But at the same time his son, Don Jr. was raising conspiratorial questions about the timing of the announcement, suggesting without evidence that Pfizer had withheld the news until after the election to harm Trump’s campaign.
By Tuesday morning, the president was fully on board the conspiracy train, adding unfounded claims that the Food and Drug Administration — whose commissioner was appointed by the Trump administration — had somehow colluded with the Democrats to delay the announcement from a private company that had not taken any U.S. government money to develop its vaccine.
Trump’s vaccine misinformation efforts were just one strand of a much broader effort to undermine the integrity of last week’s election. But for the anti-vaxxer community, which has been preparing for this moment for months, it simply added more credence to their already well-established conspiracy theories — from a figure who they count as one of their own.As president, Trump has not questioned the benefits of vaccines, but he is an anti-vaxxer from way back, as tweets like this clearly show:
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“When I was growing up, autism wasn’t really a factor,” Trump said during a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida in 2007. “And now all of a sudden, it’s an epidemic. Everybody has their theory. My theory and I study it because I have young children, my theory is the shots. We’re giving these massive injections at one time, and I really think it does something to the children.”Trump repeated this claim almost verbatim during a Republican presidential debate in 2015.With Trump willingly undermining the credibility of the Pfizer announcement, it was no surprise that anti-vaxx comments spread quickly and widely on social media.The posts typically centered on baseless claims that the vaccine will be made mandatory, that the vaccine would result in horrific side effects, and of course, cthat the vaccine is simply a ruse by Microsoft founder Bill Gates to implant microchips in everyone to conduct mind-control experiments.Many of these claims are simply rehashes of conspiracies that have been spreading on social media since the pandemic began and the race to create a vaccine kicked off.Social media companies like Facebook and Twitter had attempted to clamp down on anti-vaxxer communities, but in recent months anti-vaxxers have infiltrated anti-lockdown, QAnon, anti-5G, and anti-masks groups, where they have found an eager audience for their misinformation. And as well as questioning the timing of the Pfizer announcement, anti-vaxxers are following Trump’s lead in questioning statements from health agencies and public health figures, at a time when roughly one third of Americans say they would not take a new coronavirus vaccine.
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