The Covid-19 pandemic is not over and neither are attempts to push conspiracy theories about … [+]
A film entitled Died Suddenly premiered Monday on Twitter and, spoiler alert, it wasn’t a rom-com. But that doesn’t mean that the film didn’t have a whole lot of fiction, even though a website bearing the movie trailer claimed that the film will “present the truth about the greatest ongoing mass genocide in human history.” This website also asserted that “the global elite have broadcast their intentions to depopulate the world.” And take a wild guess as to what this film claimed that these elite have been using to do their genociding and depopulating the world thing. Nickelback music? Low rise jeans? No, Covid-19 vaccines.
Yes, welcome to yet another conspiracy theory about Covid-19 vaccines. Actually, this conspiracy theory isn’t completely new and has been sticking around for the past two years or so, kind of like gum on an Ugg boot. It’s been one of a salad bar of anti-vaxxer claims that have emerged since late 2020, ranging from Covid-19 vaccines turning people into gigantic magnets where keys can stick to their foreheads to Covid-19 vaccines causing completely healthy people to drop dead. The title of this film is kind of like the movie titles Snakes on a Plane and Sausage Party in that it captures the story that the film is trying to tell. Died Suddenly spends much of its hour and eight minute run time suggesting that many people have been dying suddenly after getting Covid-19 vaccines.
Throughout the pandemic, many conspiracy theories have emerged about Covid-19 and Covid-19 … [+]
Note the word “suggesting” rather than “showing” or “proving.” While the film shows headlines and stories of people dying suddenly, it never really provides much concrete scientific evidence linking Covid-19 vaccines to all these sudden deaths. It essentially just says oh look at all these sudden deaths over the past couple years and, oh. people, in general, have been getting Covid-19 vaccines. Never mind the fact that people have been dying suddenly ever since, oh, the beginning of human existence. Never mind the fact that over a million people in the U.S. and over 6.6 million around the world have died from, you know, Covid-19, since early 2020. Never mind the fact that people have been dying suddenly since Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene (R-Georgia) was elected to Congress when the film doesn’t try to link these two sets of events.
In fact, the film shows images of people falling over who didn’t actually end up dying, as Angela Rasmussen, PhD, a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, indicated in the following tweet:
From Twitter
Hmmm, showing people that look like they’re keeling over when they really aren’t is a lot of innuendo in your end though, right?
The film presents a clot of innuendo as well. It shows pictures of what looks like blood clots yet never really confirms the true origins of them. To suggest that these were caused by Covid-19 vaccines as the film did would be kind of like showing pictures of mullets and then claiming that vaccines caused such hairstyles. In the film, a person blurred out did say in a distorted voice what sounded like, “as a Canadian embalmer, I have found that everyone who I have embalmed for over a year had fibrous mass clots.” However, you can’t really tell who this person really is, because saying “Canadian embalmer” isn’t quite the same as saying something like “billionaire who bought Twitter.” It doesn’t really pinpoint who the person is. In fact, you can’t really tell the identities of many of the people featured in the film since there is relatively little use of captions.
In general, the film is a mish-mosh of clips, audio bytes, interviews, and other things often taken completely out of context and cooked together like a gigantic conspiracy theory frittata. For example, early in the film, actor Tom Hanks can be seen on the Today Show talking about Malthusian Theory, which is the belief that the world’s population is growing at a rate far outpacing the growth of the food supply. This wouldn’t be good news for anyone that has to eat and apparently provides the rationale for why the “elite” may want to depopulate the world, although the film didn’t show Hanks going on to say something like, “and that, kids, is why the world needs to be depopulated.” Heck these days with some video editing software and a bunch of film clips that you could splice together you could make it look like anyone is saying anything like Bella Hadid or Jason Momoa telling you how sexy you are.
Many anonymous accounts on Twitter have been pushing this film, similar to how the anti-vaccination films Vaxxed and Plandemic were previously pushed on social media, as Alastair McAlpine, MD, a pediatric infectious diseases doctor, pointed out:
From Twitter
This may have been the reason the words “Died Suddenly” trended on Twitter on Monday:
A @DiedSuddenly_ Twitter account certainly has been promoting this film quite aggressively and single-mindedly. The @DiedSuddenly_ hasn’t exactly been tweeting things like, “look my cat is shedding on my keyboard again” or “look at this mouthwatering mac and cheese with bread crumbs on top #lifeiswonderful.” And beginning at 6 pm Eastern Time on November 21, @DiedSuddenly_ tweet-posted the film:
From Twitter
The account also has been pushing the words “Died Suddenly” on social media, even posting “Its [sic] time to kill the [vaccine emoji] once and for all” on Twitter:
From Twitter
Who exactly is running this account? Well, the account is accompanied by a blue check mark, which must mean that Twitter verified it as a legitimate account, right? Well, either that or the owner of the account just happened to have a spare $8 to pay Twitter.
The film and its promotional materials does indicate that Stew Peters is behind the film. Is Peters a medical expert or some type of scientist? No, he was a bounty hunter before becoming a radio show host. He was also the person who said that National Insititute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Anthony Fauci, MD, “should be hanging by the end of a noose somewhere,” during the 2022 America First Political Action Conference, which isn’t exactly a nice thing to say about anyone:
Peters has had a history of making unfounded claims about Covid-19 policies and interventions. For example, Spotify bounced Peters’ show from their platform after he made some WTH statements about Covid-19 vaccines such as calling them a “military bio-weapon” that contains metallic parasites, as described by Zachary Petrizzo in a Daily Beast piece entitled “Spotify Booted Far-Right Podcaster Stew Peters Over COVID Lies.”
While the Covid-19 vaccines are not perfect and the scientific community and science journalists have reported on rare side effects when they have emerged, there is no real evidence that Covid-19 vaccines are being used as a “military bio-weapon” to depopulate the Earth or commit “the greatest ongoing mass genocide in human history.” In other words, don’t expect to see much science suddenly in the film “Died Suddenly.”
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