Anti-Vaxxers Go Berserk

Recently Emerald Robinson, a “reporter” for the right-wing news network Newsmax, tweeted that covid vaccines contain a “bioluminescent marker” to track people. Newsmax, incidentally, is a TV outfit with over a million viewers. Robinson observed significantly that the marker is called Luciferase and warned: “Read the last book of the New Testament to see how this ends.” No, Robinson was not fired. No, she was not packed off to the nearest insane asylum. She remains at large and the chief White House reporter for Newsmax, whose pathetic attempt to distance itself from her ravings make clear that its correspondent is free to sing her loony tunes on social media with little more than a wink from her employer.

This bioluminescent hallucination definitely belongs in the top ten greatest anti-vax lunatic hits. It’s up there along with the claim that the covid vaccine makes you magnetic. One nurse, Joanna Overholt attempted to convince the Ohio legislature of this. She “tried to place a key and bobby pin against her body in an effort to prove that both would stick to her skin…the attempt ultimately failed,” the Hill reported June 12. Another anti-vax fanatic, Sherri Tenpenny, believes not only that the vaccine magnetizes you, but that it can “interface” with 5G cellular towers. What it does then is an open question; maybe it enables hostile aliens in their spaceship laboratories to decode the DNA of freedom-loving Amuricans and “interface” with it. Probably something like that. No doubt the best protection against this 5G interface is a tin foil hat. The already-vaccinated could use their magnetism to keep it in place on a windy day.

Also ready for the men in the white coats are those convinced the covid vaccine turns people into zombies. According to a video shared in a March 31 Facebook post, USA Today reported, the mRNA vaccine transforms the human body into a “viral making factory” that “attacks itself, ultimately giving rise to a generation of zombies.” This novel theory laid out in the video “has amassed nearly 10,000 interactions on Facebook.”

Lots of supposedly functional people posted approving responses to this zombie dementia, which just goes to show that raving lunatics are everywhere and that a sucker is born every minute, with no fantasy too outlandish to reel them in. Though, one may ask, reel them in for what? There’s little someone who believes this horse-manure about zombies can be good for besides filling a bed in a mental hospital, because anyone this stupid has no doubt already or will soon be relieved of every last cent they possess by internet charlatans. Next thing you know, the covid vaccine zombie apocalypse will be a fundraising tool. That’ll financially finish off the anti-vax psychos, tout de suite.

Of keen interest to psychiatrists would be those who believe the covid vaccine injects a chip into the patient’s bloodstream, though the anti-vaxxers are vague on this chip’s nefarious purposes. Is it to enable the CIA to monitor the chip recipient’s every action from breakfast to the bathroom – our cell phones already do that – or is it a more sinister step toward mind-reading and mind control, as if the so-called thoughts of an anti-vaxxer interested a security state organization busy destabilizing governments, helping drone terrorists who turn out to be luckless wedding guests and secreting its mammoth opium profits in offshore bank accounts, but sure, I’m game, maybe the CIA DOES want to control the putative minds of nitwits. It’s up to its eyeballs in all sorts of nonsense. After all, an outfit that tried several hundred times to assassinate Fidel Castro and never came close might very well see the allure of an army of nincompoops.

Related phantasmagoria include that the covid vaccine turns you into a drone for the federal government. Some wild-eyed “experts” claim it makes you a cyborg. But it’s hard to see how this varies significantly from the CIA chip mind-control madness. Clearly these minutiae can only be parsed by those certifiably off their rocker. Rational beings would do well to avoid such conversations. After all, who knows? These people are bonkers and what they’ve got could be catching.

Greatly of concern to those with over-heated imaginations and garden-variety dimwits is that the vaccine rewrites your DNA. They never say, rewrite to do what? Presumably this dreadful fate involves being rewritten into a monkey or a mass murderer or degenerating into a giant amoeba. However, doctors report no instances of vaccinated patients growing fur, swinging from trees and eating bananas. As for the mass murderers, the U.S. is chock-a-block with them and gun stores hand out their merchandise like candy, just to keep it that way – for a healthy profit of course. Alarmingly, there is no evidence to dispute the giant amoeba hypothesis, since vaccine victims thus afflicted have undoubtedly disappeared into the sewer system.

Some educators – in Florida, where else? – at Centner Academy became concerned early on that the vaccine made people contagious. They warned their students not to hug their recently vaccinated parents, who were supposedly “shedding” the virus. Though these teachers’ toys clearly got lost in the attic years ago, they were neither dismissed from their jobs nor reprimanded in any way. On the contrary, the school threatened to fire their colleagues who got vaccinated. Also, Centner’s policy was to prohibit recently vaccinated teachers from coming near students. This anti-vax mania did not harm Centner at all, no, no, in fact, it led to numerous parental inquiries about enrolling their children.

Let’s not forget the Wyoming department of health official, who claimed in December 2020 that covid vaccines would make you a communist. Igor Shepherd, speaking at an event in Loveland, Colorado, informed his no doubt astonished listeners that a covid vaccine would be a biological weapon used by Russia and China to spread communism. A vaccine, he warned, is a communist ploy. Now there is a rich strain of lunacy in Amurica, one that views any public health measure as a communist subterfuge – think the John Birch Society in the 1950s and ‘60s claiming that fluoridating water to protect teeth was a communist plot to turn us all into “mongoloid idiots.” But the covid vaccine transforming us into card-carrying communists and, undoubtedly Manchurian candidates, well, I gotta say, that was…unexpected.

Then there’s the obvious untruth that the vaccine makes you infertile (unfortunately for this thesis, vaccinated women have been getting pregnant at rates normal enough to disprove it). A related panic is that the vaccine causes testicles to swell. In fact, one celebrity, Nicki Minaj, claimed that exactly this embarrassing bloating had happened to her cousin’s friend in Trinidad. Both these theories have the advantage of sounding plausible, that is, they’re not stark raving mad like the vaccine turning you into a zombie or a magnet or making you glow in the dark or making you de-evolve into a fully aquatic rodent by “rewriting” your DNA or riddling your bloodstream with CIA chips. The infertility and swollen testicles theories are up there with the supposedly respectable Havana syndrome, a mysterious ailment – aka mass psychosomatic hysteria – that only afflicts U.S. embassy personnel, mainly in countries the U.S. has targeted for regime change.

The absence of intelligent dismissal of both of these so-called theories proves that the menu for media entrees is limited and tends toward fiery extremes. On one side Qanon and rightwing psychotics, on the other, corporate news outfits with more former military, FBI and CIA commentators than you can shake a stick at. And then there are the run-of-the mill GOP nuts, one of whom, running for congress in Tennessee, said Big Bird would die, because he just got vaccinated. Not to be outdone, a Republican senator from Arizona called Big Bird a communist. This, to say the least, ain’t conducive to mental health.

Lastly there are the lunatics who go straight for the jugular and claim the vaccine kills you. This may come as news to the hundreds of millions of vaccinated people who are still up, out and walking about. But hey, maybe they’re really zombies and they just don’t know it.