in a brief summary of its work this year, a fact checking joint venture between the ABC and RMIT titled CheckMate has found vaccines remain a major catalyst for misinformation and one of the operation's major work areas.
here's a summary of some of the year's work in the vaccine area. It directly refutes some of the garbage and gibberish posted by antivaxx muppets and twerps on many threads on HC.
CheckMate:
"Vaccines remain a major catalyst for misinformation."
"the third year of the pandemic, much of the misinformation coming across our desk involved the safety of COVID-19 vaccines.
"While some people argued without evidence that vaccines were causingmiscarriage and fertility problems, others relied on flawed interpretations of data to claim that vaccines were behind falling birth rates.
"Then, as monkeypox arrived, social media users baselessly claimed the disease — along with HIV/AIDS and Japanese encephalitis — was a side effect of COVID-19 jabs.
"Others maintained, wrongly, that the vaccines altered recipients’ DNA, increased the chances of catching COVID-19 or simply failed to work.
"The swirl of misinformation ultimately coalesced in the film "Died Suddenly", which CheckMate picked apart to discover a dizzying array of misappropriated case studies involving people — and, bizarrely, in one case a gaming platform — who had supposedly died suddenly after being vaccinated.
"This followed two earlier instances of anti-vaxxers using the tragic deaths of Australian children to make their case, and a baseless claim by one federal parliamentarian that Australia was forcing people to be "opportunistically" vaccinated while sedated.
"Along the way, CheckMate found no evidence to support claims of a surge in cases of "sudden adult death syndrome", of serious heart conditions linked to the jab or of additional deaths due to vaccination — of either people or cattle."
Bellcurve: the summary of the findings of CheckMate's work on vaccines this year won't surprise many who come to the issue with a rational mind and are biased towards knowledge and the experiences of long standing experts who can discuss issues without an axe to grind.
the findings on these issues are unlikely to tone down the noise and space fill generated by the misinformed antivaxx rabble. They acquire their misinformation within an echo chamber where about 70% of posts on social media have been found to have originated from sites in the US associated with the dirty dozen, which includes names like Mercola, Tenpenny, Kennedy, McCullough, etc, who generate income from books, product sales and speaking tours.
the antivaxx muppets and twerps, like screaming toddlers, seem impervious to normal communication methods. Their attention is captured and held by bizarre fantasies about govts, pharmaceutical companies, medical researchers and science more generally as they fight the good fight, slay their mythical beasts, in their self-appointed roles as Heroes of The Modern World.
CheckMate deserves applause for calling out some of the rubbish published by antivaxxers. Medical professionals clearly avoid engagement with these nutters as they have work to do and don't want to waste time entertaining the veracity of fictions perpetrated by these outliars.
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