There is some serious crazy in the air and it isn’t just QAnon:
While much of the country has embraced the rapid pace of COVID-19 vaccinations as a sign that a return to normal life is just around the corner, one segment of the population has been ginning up fears that mass inoculation is actually an existential threat to the future of the human race.This long-simmering idea, which could not only help to steer some people away from vaccines but also fan the flames of already volatile cultural divisions and conflicts, came into stark focus in mid-March, when a meme spread across pandemic denialist Telegram channels, featuring a large image of two sheep fucking, and a block of text that reads: “DO NOT BREED WITH SHEEP.”
“People who are vaccinated will have modified DNA,” it continues. “No one discusses that DNA is passed onto the next generation. The risk that your children will marry into other cultures is possibly now shadowed by the fact that your children may marry into a COVID vaxed gene group potentially shortening their lives and that of others.”
This is, of course, complete nonsense. Although they use genetically engineered components, none of the three COVID-19 vaccines available in the U.S. interacts with, much less changes, our DNA. “I don’t see any way the vaccines could even unintentionally cause genetic changes,” says Paul Knoepfler, a cell biologist and genetics researcher at the University of California, Davis. “It’s just not going to happen.”
Yet despite its wild and unfounded claims, this meme found some traction in niche Telegram dis- and misinformation groups, as well as on conspiratorial blogs with wider readerships; it’s even been reposted a few times on mainstream social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. A number of individuals have also been independently voicing similar concerns for months now: As far back as mid-December, a Redditor created a thread on the platform’s COVID conspiracy-obsessed No New Normal forum to ask, “Will the RNA covid vaccine effect the takers children’s DNA?”
Months later on the same forum, another user sparked a discussion essentially vilifying those who get vaccinated with a post complaining about the challenges of finding men to date who aren’t “mindless sheep” and arguing that people who get the jab will have “weird little vaccine effected offspring.” Responding to that post, yet another Redditor suggested that soon enough “only vaccinated people will marry each other while non vaccinated will also get married,” and that this “will split the human race into a fake race. The Vaccinated Race.”
The Daily Beast reached out to a number of individuals who have posted these sentiments, but none of them replied.
These lowkey freakouts about the supposed insidious, intergenerational genetic contamination COVID vaccines and vaccinated people are foisting on all of humanity are not exceptionally common, even in dedicated pandemic and vaccine skeptical spaces. But they are logical extensions of “a core misconception that the COVID-19 vaccines alter your DNA,” as University of Pennsylvania misinformation monitoring expert Kathleen Hall Jamieson puts it, which speak to the length some skeptics’ and denialists’ fears and conspiracies can go. And if these specific ideas gain adherents—as some experts believe they likely will over the coming months and years—they could exacerbate growing rifts between these groups and everyone else.
At their heart, Mark Alfano, a Macquarie University researcher who studies anti-vaxxer digital bubbles, suggests that concerns about vaccines causing fundamental and enduring contamination in people go back to at least the early-to-mid-19th century—before the discovery of DNA. Some folks at the time just couldn’t get past their gut feeling that inserting something created by scientists into a human body was so unnatural that it might “change something essential about a vaccinated person.”
Experiments with DNA in the mid-to-late 20th century, which led to the creation of genetically modified organisms, gave rise to a separate thread of conspiracies about the potential misuse of this tech to warp natural humans. And about the potential for poorly thought-out or controlled mutations to somehow spill into the wider world, causing untold—and usually unspecified—pain and chaos.
So, these sorts of conspiracy theories have been with us forever. I get that. (Some people might even think there are certain religions that fir the definition.) But these ideas today can be mainstreamed in a minute.
Take this, for instance:
The feminist writer Naomi Wolf garnered fame during the 1990s for her book The Beauty Myth and her work as an adviser to the presidential campaigns of Bill Clinton and Al Gore. But in recent years, she’s been better known for promoting an array of unhinged conspiracy theories, most recently regarding the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19. This combination has made her a perfect guest for Fox News.
Fox is far more interested in turning coronavirus into a political cudgel than in giving users accurate health information. And so the network’s hosts lean on Wolf’s liberal credentials while giving her a platform to claim that the Democratic response to the pandemic is aimed at dissolving society and enacting a totalitarian state comparable to Nazi Germany.
Since mid-February, she appeared at least seven times on Fox to discuss her views on the pandemic: twice apiece on Tucker Carlson Tonight and The Revolution with Steve Hilton, and three times on Fox News Primetime, the most recent of which came Monday night. Wolf cited the notorious anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. during that interview to argue that Dr. Anthony Fauci, Bill and Melinda Gates, the state of Israel, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were engaged in some sort of nebulous but sinister vaccine conspiracy.
It is irresponsible for a news outlet to give Wolf that sort of credulous attention. Her social media channels are littered with absurd claims about the virus and its vaccines. Between her first and second Fox appearances alone, she tweeted that a new technology allowed the delivery of “vaccines w nanopatticles that let you travel back in time”; that the Moderna vaccine is a “software platform” that allows “uploads”; and that due to face masks, children now lack “the human reflex that they when you smile at them they smile back” and have “dark circles under [their] eyes from low oxygen.”
On Sunday night, Wolf cited purported reports of women who “bleed oddly [from] being AROUND vaccinated women,” pointing her followers to a Facebook group which at one point had been titled “All Vaccines are Fake.”
Here’s Tucker this week:
Not too long ago, he had this to say:
There’s more at Media Matters about Wolf. It’s fine if she’s a nutball. But she’s out there on social media and television spreading this lunacy. People will believe her. And Tucker.
We have an information crisis in this country and it’s getting much, much worse.