Covid conspiracy victims piling up

Even as he was rushed to hospital with acute symptoms last week, Mohammed Shaar took to social media to assure his fans that he merely had a cold and not to worry.

Loved ones of the preacher, who runs the Ruqyah healing centre in Chester Hill and is also a marriage celebrant, have now asked people to pray for him as his condition rapidly deteriorates.

Amanda Gulasi, a disability support worker from Sydney, changed her anti-vaccination tune this week after contracting Covid-19 and winding up in hospital.

The 42-year-old mum-of-three told A Current Affair she regretted her stance and had been convinced by conspiracy theorists.

“Vaccinate people, vaccinate. No, seriously, it’s not fun,” she said. “At the start of covid, I was completely on the side of the conspiracy theorists. Now I definitely believe it, and it will kill you. It is true, it is real.”

Across forums, within social media profiles and on dedicated websites, the names and faces of Covid-19 sceptics, conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers who’ve been struck down are being meticulously collated.

Many have fallen gravely ill and some have died, with their stories serving as a kind of cautious warning, with a dollop of ‘told you so’ and a sprinkling of schadenfreude on top.

There’s an entire subreddit dedicated to recipients of the Herman Cain Award, named after the Republican powerbroker and presidential hopeful who downplayed coronavirus before dying from it.

And operators of the website sorryantivaxxer.com say they can’t keep up with submissions.

A recent fixture on both platforms was American conservative radio host Marc Bernier, who proudly called himself “Mr Anti-Vax” before he fell ill with coronavirus in mid-August.

Bernier, a star broadcaster in Florida, railed against pandemic restrictions and efforts to roll out the vaccine, saying federal health officials were “acting like Nazi Germany”.

He died last week from Covid-19.

It came just weeks after fellow Floridian firebrand media personality Dick Farrel, who was an opponent of vaccines and mandated face masks, perished from a severe Covid-19 illness.

A third right-wing shock jock, Phil Valentine, also succumbed to the virus last month, after famously declaring in December: “What are my odds of getting covid? They’re pretty low.”

Valentine also believed his chances of dying were “probably way less than 1 per cent” and regularly downplayed the seriousness of the pandemic, undermining public health efforts in his native Nashville.

His brother Mark told newspaper The Tennessean that in his final moments, Valentine regretted “not being more adamant about getting the vaccine”.

A recent well-known victim was Caleb Wallace, a 30-year-old Texan who co-ordinated vast anti-face mask protests and founded coronavirus sceptics group the San Angelo Freedom Defenders.

In late July, he began feeling unwell but initially refused to go to hospital, instead taking the livestock de-worming medication ivermectin that health authorities have repeatedly urged people not to consume.

He died from Covid-19 at the weekend. In a GoFundMe, his widow Jessica said that her husband was “an imperfect man but he loved his family and his little girls more than anything”. The crowd-funding page was raising money for Jessica, their three children and their soon-to-be-born baby.

Another social media anti-vaxxer to die and leave behind a pregnant wife was Marcus Birks, a 30-year-old from the UK, who died yesterday.

Before he passed away, a remorseful Mr Birks said: “First thing I am going tell all my family to do is get the vaccine and anybody I see.”

Similarly, Brian Eskew from the US state of North Carolina expressed his regret at being a vaccine sceptic and conceded he was wrong about Covid-19 being a “plandemic” orchestrated to seize control of people’s assets.

He died in mid-July aged 48, leaving behind two children and a devastated family.

Even after her 16-year-old son Jordan Sinor died from coronavirus, a defiant April Mathews told KATV in Arkansas that she didn’t believe the vaccines were safe.

Jordan was eligible for a shot from the start of the rollout because he had Down syndrome and was at increased risk of infection and serious illness.

A number of frontline workers who were proudly anti-vaccination, some of whom have railed against mandatory jab requirements in several US states, have also died in recent months.

Olivia Guidry, a 23-year-old nurse in Louisiana, was diagnosed with Covid-19 and suffered a stroke when she developed a fever, before dying in mid-July from neurological complications.

Her Twitter account contained a number of posts urging people not to get vaccinated, wrongly claiming they “manipulate your DNA” and that recipients were part of a “social experiment”.

Colorado police officer Daniel Trujillo, 33, was an ardent critic of the vaccines and shared countless conspiracy theories on his Facebook page. He died from Covid-19 in May.

The majority of anti-vaxxer or pandemic sceptic deaths chronicled are in the US, which has been ravaged by the virus and is now in the midst of a devastating new wave thanks to the Delta variant.

Health authorities have voiced their growing concern about the persuasive nature of misinformation shared online.

Maria Van Kerkhove, the World Health Organisation’s technical lead on Covid-19, said she blamed myths, lies and conspiracies spread on social media for keeping people from getting vaccinated, helping to drive an increase in cases.

“In the last four weeks or so, the amount of misinformation that is out there seems to be getting worse, and I think that’s really confusing for the general public,” Dr Kerkhove said earlier this week.

That misinformation is a huge factor in “really allowing the virus to thrive”, she said.