Coronavirus truthers have a new boogeyman.
A far-right Facebook group that spans the U.K. and the U.S. recently erupted in alarm when a user posted, “There are people donating blood after being shot up with the covid crap. This terrifies me.” A wave of comments followed, all reflecting various degrees of deluded, conspiratorial thinking about shots that we know to be safe and effective.
“Isn’t there a rule not to??” one intoned. “Are people that stupid to donate blood after getting a shot?”
“Well, I will never get a blood transfusion ever now,” another declared. “Their blood has the death shot in it! No thank you!”
It took about an hour for a swastika to crop up. Covered partially by a face mask, the image was captioned, “It’s for your safety.”
Nathan Savoy, a 34-year-old from Houston, responded on a separate thread in the same group: “In the future ONLY the vaccinated will be able to give blood. Think I am joking? Just watch.”
While Savoy later told The Daily Beast his “comment was meant to be tongue-in-cheek,” he said he was concerned about receiving a blood transfusion from someone who had received the vaccine. “We know the health risk of COVID pretty well now,” he said. “We don’t know those from the vaccine. It might be minimal. However, unknowns rank higher in my risk ranking.”
Savoy also mentioned he “does not plan on getting any of the COVID treatments.”
While there are typically deferral periods for donating blood after receiving a vaccination for diseases like rubella, measles, and chicken pox, in most cases there is no such period for people who received the COVID-19 vaccine as long as they are feeling well. As a precaution when donating, potential donors must provide their vaccine manufacturer’s name. If they cannot, they are instructed to wait two weeks before donating.
Regardless, anti-vaxxers believe without evidence that the lack of a deferral period—and in some more extreme cases, allowing the vaccinated to donate blood at all—is a backdoor to genetic modification. In what appears to be the latest offshoot of the Great Reset conspiracy theory, which holds that global elites are manipulating the pandemic for twisted, totalitarian ends, these extremists claim vaccinated people donating blood might lead to the downfall of civilization as we know it.
Oh, and they think HIV is involved.
Dr. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a University of Pennsylvania misinformation expert, told The Daily Beast that the latest meltdown was easy to explain as “two fear-based beliefs colliding into one.”
“Vaccinations and transfusions are frightening to people who don’t understand them or don’t trust the science behind them,” she said.
Conversations with anti-vaxxers active on Facebook point both to that fear, and to a remarkably swift evolution of conspiratorial thinking among pandemic truthers as vaccines roll out worldwide.
Sandra Morgan, a 58-year-old U.K.-based caregiver, told The Daily Beast she thinks it’s “crazy that I’m not allowed to give blood because I had breast cancer, but that it’s ok to give blood after the magic jab.”
In fact, Morgan—who said she had breast cancer in 2013, had no recurrences, and was entirely off any drugs related to treatment long before 12 months ago—could likely donate blood, according to the Red Cross.
Regardless, she wants more research done on vaccinated donors, despite plenty of evidence that vaccines are safe.
“There is no data to see how it affects any part of the body,” she said. “How can they know if blood from a person who has had the jab is safe?”
Dr. Brittany Kmush, an assistant professor of public health at Syracuse University, explained to The Daily Beast that the very premise of anti-vaxxer fears here is nonsensical.
“The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are not live vaccines,” she said, referring to other vaccines that contain weakened versions of the virus they are meant to ward off. Indeed, the two vaccines in wide use in the United States are MRNA vaccines that do not contain any virus. A third vaccine authorized in the United Kingdom from AstraZeneca and Oxford does contain an adenovirus found in chimpanzees, but it cannot replicate in human cells. Likewise, the Johnson & Johnson vaccine authorized on Saturday in the United States contains an adenovirus but cannot replicate in the body.
“The reason we have deferral periods for donating blood after receiving a live, attenuated vaccine is because… in immunocompromised people, even a weakened virus could potentially be dangerous,” she explained. “And since people who are receiving transfusions are typically immunocompromised, there’s a two-week window for added safety.”
In short, the deferral window was initially conceived as a safety measure for traditional vaccines. Perhaps more important, as Dr. Alyssa Ziman, the chief of transfusion medicine for UCLA Health noted, there is no evidence that the novel coronavirus can be transmitted via blood transfusion.
Anti-vaxxers aren’t convinced any of this is relevant. Rather than being concerned about the vaccine containing active virus or not—or whether the blood donor is positive for COVID-19, which they dismiss—they instead pivot back to a longstanding fixation over what is in the vaccine itself, and how it might alter their genetic makeup.
“Blood is donated all the time from people who have viruses,” Jane Downall, another user active on the group, told The Daily Beast. “My concern is primarily that I don’t want this jab and I don’t want blood from anyone who has had it.”
Downall’s fear stems from believing that people “have been consistently lied to over all this COVID crap.” The paranoia with blood donations runs even deeper, however, and has some anti-vaxxers concerned that a blood transfusion might now be a “secret” way to target people who refuse the shot.
“Once [the vaccine] is in your body, it alters your genes so if a vaccinated person gives blood to an unvaccinated recipient, then that blood will alter the recipients’ genes,” she said, without evidence.
Despite mountains of data pointing to the vaccines’ safety, Downall thinks there should be more testing and more screening of shots.
“Before blood was screened, people were given blood from donors who were HIV positive,” she said. “Lots of the recipients went on to develop full blown AIDS. This COVID jab has not been properly tested, so many of the effects could be transferred to transfusion recipients.”
While there was evidence of people contracting HIV as a result of unscreened blood transfusions in the 1980s, it is vanishingly rare in modern medicine. A spokesperson for the American Red Cross told The Daily Beast, “We have many layers of safety in place to help protect the blood supply and health of our valued donors, including donor eligibility screening and rigorous testing performed on each donation. To ensure every unit is safe for transfusion, the Red Cross must test each donation for HIV, Hepatitis B virus, Hepatitis C virus and other transfusion-transmitted agents by one or multiple tests.”
But Hennig Sabine, 53, another anti-vaxxer active on the same Facebook thread, went so far as to say she was more concerned about contracting HIV than COVID—and that she wanted nothing to do with blood from vaccinated people.
“This is a way to speed up the Great Reset by speeding up the depopulation process,” she told The Daily Beast, referring to the far-right conspiracy theory about elite control of the population.
Sabine mentioned an Australian coronavirus vaccine candidate that led to false-positive HIV tests. Even though this vaccine was scrapped as a result, she still believes “there are parts of the HIV virus in the vaccine” currently being administered worldwide.
This, of course, is false.
Still, Sabine remains unconvinced—and went so far as to describe how her paranoia has impacted her personal life.
“I already broke off a personal relationship with someone who had sex with someone who had the vaxx,” Sabine said. “He could contract it from her and pass it [HIV] to me if the condom pops. Thank you, but no thank you. We are just friends now.”
She claimed to believe health officials should give people a choice: what she falsely described as gene therapy, or infection with the deadly coronavirus.
“I would take Corona,” she said.
