Here is a bizarre twist on the anti-vax theme: those who are vaccinated are a risk to those who aren’t. David Broniatowski, associate director for the Institute for Data, Democracy & Politics at George Washington University, says, “It’s like taking the common vaccine conventional wisdom and flipping it on its head …”
It’s the first time he’s seen this, Broniatowski tells Salon:
The conspiracy centers on one particular myth that people who are vaccinated can emit contagious particles of the coronavirus’s Spike protein and can infect others, a process referred to as “vaccine shedding.” Vaccine shedding is a very rare possibility with live-attenuated vaccines that use a diluted version of a disease to stimulate an immune response. In the rare case there’s enough germ to spread, the shedding usually happens via feces— for example, with the polio vaccine or the measles vaccine.
“For the measles vaccine, later in life — and again this is super rare — it’s possible that the live virus could revert to a condition called Subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE),” said Dr. Monica Gandhi, infectious disease doctor and professor of medicine at the University of California–San Francisco. “But in no way can you shed it and give it to someone.”
But this issue is moot in the case of messenger RNA, or mRNA vaccines, like the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines — which the majority of the vaccinated American population has been administered with. These kinds of vaccines work by instructing the body to make a bespoke Spike protein to trigger an immune response. After an immune response is triggered, the protein disappears. In other words, viral shedding is an impossibility for these mRNA vaccines.
The AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson products are adenovirus vaccines and work differently. They use a harmless virus to deliver instructions to cells that invoke an immune response to the real COVID-19 virus.
But that’s just the science talking. For some naysayers, it’s back to grade school.
I know you are but what am I?
Imran Ahmed, the CEO of The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), tells Salon:
“The problem that anti-vaxxers are having is they’re asking people to become disgusting to other people [by not getting vaccinated], and they know that that’s a major barrier to people accepting their recommendations, which is that people don’t want to be seen as disgusting,” Ahmed said. “So what they’re doing is trying to muddy the waters in this crucial battleground — what is it that people find to be disgusting, a potential disease vector? And they’re saying, ‘Hey, you’re not the disease vector by being unvaccinated, they’re the disease vector.'”
“There is no longer any reason to try to ‘understand’ these people,” Charlie Pierce wrote of people who clearly have chosen to live in an alternate reality — the 56% of Republicans who believe the election was rigged or the result of illegal voting, and the 53% who think Donald Trump is the actual President. And then there are the spreaders of pseudoscience and quackery and vaccine disinformation. The latter are a surprisingly small group, Ahmed says:
“We know that 65 percent of the misinformation shared on social media originates from just 12 individuals and the companies . . . that they use to promote their information,” Ahmed said. “There are specific individuals within that who target women and women who are interested in health and wellness.”
And promoters target them with misinformation.
I’m old enough to remember when you could simply trust Walter Cronkite.