A controversial documentary with misleading information and old, dated unrelated footage cunningly linked by the producers to Covid-19 vaccines, has prompted a slew of social media effort by physicians to rebut what they call “blatant, over-the-top lies”.
Dr Jonathan Laxton of the University of Manitoba Max Rady College of Medicine in Winnipeg is one of the experts leading the effort to set the record straight regarding the claims made in the film titled Died Suddenly.
“My first impression was it’s just basically lies to scare people away from getting the Covid-19 vaccine,” he told MedPage Today. “But it’s so over-the-top that it actually won’t convince anybody who doesn’t already believe it.”
Died Suddenly was simultaneously released on Twitter and Rumble on 21 November, and has been viewed more than 12m times.
It features several embalmers and funeral directors who claim to be coming forward for the first time to share their concerns over supposedly unusual blood clots found in deceased people they prepared for burial. But the main individual featured in the film is Dr Ryan Cole, who owns a medical lab in Idaho and who has a history of promoting false claims about the Covid vaccines and cancer.
Katrine Wallace, PhD, an epidemiologist at the University of Illinois Chicago School of Public Health, debunked several of the claims from the film on her social media accounts, where she has become known for her work in pushing back against public health disinformation. She said the film follows a consistent pattern for disinformation campaigns.
“A lot of the tropes in this video are rehashed,” Wallace told MedPage Today. “They just throw everything at the wall because something is going to appeal to someone’s emotions.”
The film focuses on two main claims against COVID-19 vaccines: extensive blood clots, and the sudden onset of cancer.
Dr Eric Burnett of Columbia University’s Irving Medical Centre said neither of those claims holds up to scrutiny.
“I see a lot of blood clots in the hospital, Burnett told MedPage Today. “Just looking at those blood clots from the movie, they look like very common postmortem blood clots, and … just the shock and awe value of using these images of blood clots taken out of context to scare people.”
One scene in the film featuring the removal of a large blood clot during heart surgery was actually footage of a pulmonary embolectomy in 2019, which Burnett discovered via a Google search.
“To suggest people are walking around with these massive clots filling up arteries and veins, without being symptomatic, without seeking medical attention, is a little hard to believe,” Burnett said.
As for the cancer claims, Laxton said Cole started pushing that misinformation in April 2021, just a month after most people had access to the COVID-19 vaccines.
“(It’s) biologically implausible for any carcinogens or cancer-causing agents to suddenly produce cancer within a month of exposure,” he said.
Wallace emphasised that these easily disproven claims underlie one of the most confounding elements of disinformation films like this one.
“If this is happening, why do they not coordinate some effort to publish this case series of strange postmortem events so that the medical community can comment on it?” she said. “If Dr Ryan Cole really has seen hundreds of thousands of weird cases in his microscope, why is he not publishing those cases?”
Wallace said when cases of myocarditis with the mRNA vaccines and blood clots linked to the Johnson & Johnson vaccine appeared, researchers published case studies and the medical community reviewed and commented on them. If cases like the ones presented in the film exist, then Cole should follow standard scientific practice to review that data with the wider medical community, she said.
“Science is not done on Rumble,” she added. “That’s not how we do things.”
Ongoing fight against misinformation
Experts said the constant fight against misinformation and disinformation can be exhausting.
Wallace, who posts TikTok videos and Twitter threads debunking Covid misinformation, said she never intended to be a social media public health influencer. Nonetheless, she believes more researchers and healthcare professionals should consider sharing their perspectives with a wider audience.
“I encourage other people to do it, too, just because there is no end to the energy on the anti-vaccine and medical misinformation side of things to create new lies, recycle old lies, and create new content (to) scare people,” she said. “The more sensible voices we have, the more we get the right information out there the better, because people believe this.”
Burnett agreed that pushing back against false claims and misinformation is a necessary burden for medical professionals.
“What’s more concerning for me is they had actual physicians on that documentary who were propagating this nonsense,” he said. “If it’s just some random person, like your conspiracy theorist uncle who’s saying this stuff, that’s one thing, but when there's a doctor with credentials, those credentials carry a lot of weight.”
Having accredited medical professionals pushing these false claims provides an air of legitimacy, Burnett said. It’s becoming even more important to have conversations with patients about these claims, he added.
If more medical professionals speak out against false claims like those made in this video, it will make the efforts to push back easier for everyone and less of the burden would fall to a few self-selected individuals, Laxton said.
MedPage Today article – Experts Debunk Claims From New Anti-Vax Documentary
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