Anti-vaxxers are pushing a nonsensical claim about the coronavirus vaccine and "disappearing needles"
Anti-Vaxxers and givers of life (to long-dead and completely preventable diseases) are hell bent on disseminating absurd falsehoods about vaccines. And naturally, they’ve recently turned their attention toward the coronavirus vaccine. In the most recent of shenanigans some of these lovely folks involves an alleged “disappearing vaccine needle” being used to administer the vaccine. Spoiler alert: It “vanishes” because this vaccine is being given with a retractable needle.
These are gaining popularity in hospitals, as they’re safer because they supposedly protect against accidental pricks. They, like the invention of the retractable pen solving inky pockets, aren’t trying to hurt us needlessly. But, of course, the new-ish needle type is being used to spread a wild conspiracy: that the COVID-19 vaccine is a hoax.
A video taken Tuesday at the University Medical Center of El Paso, Texas, shows an unidentified male nurse having a syringe inserted into his arm, and the conspiracies surrounding the image are similarly wrapped in tinfoil lined, unproven ideas. Why are there so many of these “disappearing needle” ideas of a sudden? Perhaps now that Trump is truly getting evicted from the Big Brother House, conspiracy-weavers have turned their focus to coronavirus.
The video has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times with varying captions, and many in the anti-vaxx community have taken the video as proof that vaccine injections captured on camera are fake, and just part of the plan by the “elites” to trick ordinary people into taking the vaccines, which is in fact a way for the government — or Bill Gates — to control them.
The video has successfully polluted the major America-based social networks: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Instagram, and the platforms are not doing much to help, either, by keeping the videos up. As of right now, Twitter, new King of Call Outs, hasn’t labeled them as misinformation yet, yet. On Wednesday, Twitter said that they won’t begin placing warning labels on “unsubstantiated rumors, disputed claims, as well as incomplete or out-of-context information about vaccines'' until early 2021, in an announcement.
Casual social media company attitudes aside, the videos and theorizing around it is spreading rampant — like a measles outbreak in a Southern California private elementary school. Coronavirus is a much bigger enemy, and 300,000+ Americans who aren’t alive anymore cannot debate the facts with anti-vaxxers. The CDC has authorized and recommended vaccines to prevent COVID-19 in the United States, and contrarians be damned: COVID-19 is on its way out, if enough of us are informed, safe, and get the jab. The end is almost here, if the Presidential election proved anything to us, it's that the trolls don’t win every time.