Anti-vax advocacy groups online are helping to radicalize the QAnon movement
The alliance between anti-vaxxers and QAnon followers is rapidly increasing as they continue their plight to spread massive amounts of disturbing misinformation amid the pandemic. One glaring example centers around one incident that occurred last week.
Facebook opted to nix a massive anti-vaccination propaganda group with more than 200,000 members last week. However, the group was not shut down for the dangerous public health misinformation its members posted, but rather, the disturbing promotion of QAnon, reports Huffington Post.
On Monday, Larry Cook, the founder of the “Stop Mandatory Vaccination” movement took to Facebook in his final Facebook Live video before the group was removed to warn that vaccines were a plot “to literally enslave every human on the planet,” In the video, Cook also included the QAnon hashtag #WWG1WGA in the upper left corner and the QAnon logo in the upper right corner.
“The purpose of vaccination is to literally slaughter the population and dumb everyone down and render them helpless,” Cook said. “It is a global plan to literally enslave every human on the planet.”
As he spoke, comments poured in from viewers who expressed gratitude for the “truth” and “awakening” he shared in his video. Like Cook, other anti-vaxxers including David Wolfe along with Ty and Charlene Bollinger have all begun to expose their large followings to the QAnon rhetoric.
Laura Muhl, one of Instagram’s most popular anti-vax influencers has also shared relatively dangerous claim insisting the government “engineered” many of the problems currently plaguing the United States. In a meme, she criticized the media with a comparison of covering up the so-called “rigged election” to an attempt to cover up “the truth about vaccines.”
“The virus is engineered. The pandemic is engineered. The second wave is engineered. The need for a vaccine is engineered,” said the mother of five.
Now, the anti-vaccination pushback and in misinformation rapidly circulating on social media has accelerated with groups joining forces with QAnon. The result is accelerating the effort to discredit science and the integrity of public health.
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