By Liz Szabo, Kaiser Health News
Anti-vaccine groups are exploiting the suffering and death of people who happen to fall ill after receiving a covid shot, threatening to undermine the largest vaccination campaign in U.S. history.
“This is exactly what anti-vaccine groups do,” said Dr. Peter Hotez, an infectious diseases specialist and author of “Preventing the Next Pandemic: Vaccine Diplomacy in a Time of Anti-Science.”
Anti-vaccine groups have falsely claimed for decades that childhood vaccines cause autism, weaving fantastic conspiracy theories involving government, Big Business and the media.
Now, the same groups are blaming patients’ coincidental medical problems on covid shots, even when it’s clear that age or underlying health conditions are to blame, Hotez said. “They will sensationalize anything that happens after someone gets a vaccine and attribute it to the vaccine,” Hotez said.
Anti-vaccine groups are exploiting the suffering and death of people who happen to fall ill after receiving a covid shot, threatening to undermine the largest vaccination campaign in U.S. history.
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The TimesDaily on health care workers in Alabama getting a COVID-19 vaccine and the devastation from the pandemic:
Shortly after receiving his COVID-19 vaccination early Thursday morning, Helen Keller Hospital pulmonologist Dr. Lynn Ridgeway offered an observation that everyone in the Shoals area can agree with.
“This is a huge sign of hope,” Ridgeway said of the first round of vaccinations.
That sign of hope could not have been delivered at a more appropriate time. Since March, nearly 9,500 residents of the Shoals have tested positive for COVID-19, and 120 have died.
They were our family members, our friends. Their importance is lost in the cold reality of an ever-growing number of infections.