Cont: Corona Virus Conspiracy Theories Part V

[LDE1976]

Artificial Intelligence 1 - 0 Genuine Stupidity

 

[dann]

Well, it remains to be seen how Grok responds to questions like this now that Musk has made it go full MechaHitler.
Does Grok 'know' that Hitler was a big fan of vaccines but didn't want non-Aryans to be vaccinated?

How anti-vaxxers radicalize (Arolsen Archives, Dec 21, 2021)
vaccination was heavily promoted in the Third Reich as a means of protecting public health. The Reichswehr, in particular, lobbied against any relaxation of vaccination requirements that could compromise their ability to maintain military effectiveness.

Will Grok continue to tell the truth about vaccines but every damn time add that people with "surnames like Goldstein, Rosenberg, Silverman, Cohen, or Shapiro" shouldn't be allowed to get them? And will it result in a rush of people who used to drink milk to prove their Aryanness to now get vaccinated instead?

I'm not sure, but we do indeed live in 'interesting times' as the alleged Chinese curse goes.
I just never imagined that those interesting times would be so utterly stupid.

 

[dann]

Grok continues to impress me:

Soul Evans on X, July 28, 2025
More people died from corona after being vaccinated.
Of those who didn’t get vaccinated, they died to corona at less a rate than those who were vaccinated.
A lot of factors for sure, mainly I would think because those who were vaccinated felt safer to be in public when they weren’t actually safe because they lied about those vaccines. And because they caused those crazy blood clots.

Goddess Emberly on X, July 28, 2025
@grok is this true?

Grok on X, July 28, 2025
No, this claim is false. Data from CDC, WHO, and meta-analyses show vaccinated individuals have significantly lower COVID-19 death rates (up to 99% effectiveness against mortality) compared to unvaccinated. Unvaccinated die at higher rates. Blood clots are rare; false security may play a role but doesn't reverse the protective effect.

Alice Lumpa Lenshina on X, July 28, 2025
Damage is higher in the vaccinated people who never got the virus

@bitexe on X, July 28, 2025
@grok Is this true? What are the facts?

Grok on X, July 28, 2025
No, the claim is not supported by evidence. Studies show COVID-19 vaccines reduce long-term damage risks, cutting long COVID by over 60% with 3 doses (Karolinska Institutet, 2025). Rare vaccine side effects (e.g., slight autoimmune risk increase in children, HR 1.23) are far outweighed by benefits, averting 2.5M deaths globally (JAMA, 2025). Infection causes more harm than vaccination.

It is peculiar that antivaxxers still haven't heard about the blood clots caused by the COVID-19 infection, and that they still seem to think that myocarditis occurs more frequently after vaccinations than after the infection. Many of them seem to actually believe it.
Antivaxxers also have a hard time understanding the survivorship bias meme:

 

[Chris_Halkides]

At Beyond the Noise Dr. Paul Offit wrote, "In November 2023, Robert Malone testified in front of a congressional committee that the mRNA vaccines made by Pfizer and Moderna were contaminated with fragments of foreign DNA, which, he argued, altered our own DNA, causing cancers and autoimmune diseases among other disorders. For pregnant women, Malone warned that these DNA fragments could cross the placenta and cause birth defects...At the same committee hearing, Malone said that the FDA, CIA, and other government agencies knew about this DNA contamination but were covering it up. “The CIA has its fingers all over this,” he declared. Even more insidious, these DNA fragments could be used by the federal government to monitor who had been vaccinated and who hadn’t." I don't have a link to a detailed rebuttal of Dr. Malone's comments handy, but I consider Dr. Offit to be a reliable source of information.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

At Respectful Insolence Orac discussed a paper studying DNA fragments in the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines against Covid-19. He concluded "In the end, this is yet another awful study that, even if taken at face value and assuming the methodology was valid and analyzed correctly, doesn’t show what the authors claim that it shows. Add the methodological questions and the lack of some key controls, and it’s not only not good evidence for harm from residual plasmid DNA left in COVID-19 vaccines, but it’s downright uninterpretable."

In a different essay he examined a related question. "COVID-19 misinformation has been coming at me (and everyone) so fast and furious that to me it seems like only yesterday that I was addressing the resurrection and repurposing of an old antivax claim that SV40 had contaminated COVID-19 vaccines, making them carcinogenic. It wasn’t, though. It was well over a month and a half ago. As you might recall, at the time an microbiologist turned COVID-19 conspiracy theorist named Kevin McKernan had, either cluelessly or intentionally, confused simian virus-40 (SV40) that had contaminated live attenuated virus polio vaccines 60 years ago, leading to an old antivax claimthat polio vaccines cause cancer with the SV40 promoter, a DNA element from the virus that, when in front of a gene, can stimulate cells to make a lot of that gene’s product, and then fear mongered about it."

It is not immediately clear if these are among the studies that influenced Dr. Malone, the subject of my comment #1424.

 

[dann]

There's no reason to think that Malone still reads studies, is there?
"In June 2025, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. named Malone to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices." (Wiki)

 

[dann]

A crisis of credibility: the global cost of US vaccine misinformation (The Lancet, July 30, 2025)
The global health community faces a deepening challenge—not only from infectious diseases but also from a pandemic of misinformation. The US, long a cornerstone of global health leadership, has become an unexpected source of global instability in vaccination confidence. While US institutions such as the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and National Institutes of Health (NIH) remain internationally respected, their credibility has been compromised by domestic political interference, institutional undermining, and unregulated digital platforms. The consequences are global.

ETA:

Ousted vaccine panel members say rigorous science is being abandoned (AP News, July 31, 2025)
“An alternative to the Committee should be established quickly and — if necessary — independently from the federal government,” they wrote. “No viable pathway exists to fully replace the prior trusted and unbiased ACIP structure and process. Instead, the alternatives must focus on limiting the damage to vaccination policy in the United States.”
Options included having professional organizations working together to harmonize vaccine recommendations or establishing an external auditor of ACIP recommendations. There are huge challenges to the ideas, including having access to the best data, the authors acknowledged.

The vaccine conspiracists are still going strong.
It seems like Trump's fans still aren't "tired of winning" as he boasted that they would be.

 

[dann]

Conspiracy theories kill!

What we know about Friday’s shooting at the US’s top public health institute (CNN, Aug 9, 2025)
Authorities have not confirmed a motive, but sources told CNN the shooter may have targeted the CDC over personal health concerns he blamed on the Covid-19 vaccine.Here’s what we know.
Why did the shooter allegedly target the CDC?
After speaking with family members of the suspect, police are operating under the hypothesis he was either sick or believed that he was sick and blamed the illness on the Covid-19 vaccine, a law enforcement official told CNN.

 

[dann]

Officials say gunman who attacked CDC may have had anti-Covid vaccine beliefs (BBC, Aug 9, 2025)
"We know how shaken our public health colleagues feel today. No-one should face violence while working to protect the health of others," said Kennedy.
Kennedy has previously expressed doubts about the side effects of vaccines, especially Covid vaccines, and has been accused of spreading misinformation.
Some former CDC employees who were fired as part of Elon Musk's campaign to shrink the government rejected Kennedy's statement.
"Kennedy is directly responsible for the villainization of CDC's workforce through his continuous lies about science and vaccine safety, which have fueled a climate of hostility and mistrust," one ex-employee wrote, according to the Associated Press news agency.
Another former CDC employee told the outlet that the shooting was the "physical embodiment of the narrative that has taken over, attacking science, and attacking our federal workers".

People fired by DOGE may obviously be disgruntled. However, people still employed at the CDC may be afraid to speak out.