As the Omicron variant keeps surging, we hear of yet another needless death.
A leading QAnon promoter who urged both her followers and strangers she passed on the street not to take the COVID vaccine died Thursday of the coronavirus, making her just the latest vaccine opponent killed by the disease.
Cirsten Weldon had amassed tens of thousands of followers across right-wing social media networks by promoting the pro-Trump QAnon conspiracy under the screenname “CirstenW.” She was prominent enough to become a sort of QAnon interpreter for comedian conspiracy theorist Roseanne Barr and started recording videos about QAnon with her.
Weldon focused on attacking vaccines and other efforts to fight COVID-19, saying in one video that Dr. Anthony Fauci “needs to be hung from a rope.” She claimed the vaccine killed people and even recorded herself yelling at people standing in line to receive vaccines.
“The vaccines kill, don’t get it!” Weldon warned the waiting vaccine recipients in an undated video posted to one of her online accounts. “This is how gullible these idiots are. They’re all getting vaccine!”
In late December, however, Weldon started showing symptoms of coronavirus infection. In her last video, posted on Dec. 28, Weldon struggled through her remarks about the coming overthrow of the United States government, coughing and complaining that she was exhausted.
Three days later, Weldon was hospitalized in Camarillo, California. She posted a picture of herself wearing an oxygen mask to Instagram and claimed she had “bacterial pneumonia.” Weldon wrote in a post on the social media network Telegram that she refused to take coronavirus treatment remdesivir, calling it “Dr Fauci’s Resmedervir (sic).”
Weldon’s death from COVID is just the latest instance of a far-right personality who opposed vaccination being killed by the virus. On Jan. 3, radio host Doug Kuzma died while infected with the coronavirus. In August, QAnon promoter Robert David Steele died of the virus shortly after posting a picture of himself in an oxygen mask and vowing to still refuse the vaccine.
You would think that these developments would give vaccine skeptics pause. And maybe it has for some of them. But clearly not for all. As is often the case with people who are determined to stick with a belief whatever the counter-evidence, they have come up with yet another explanation of why these vaccine deniers are dying, and it is a real doozy.
In the face of these deaths, their surviving friends and supporters have started to allege that the dead QAnon figures are being murdered, either because they were refused internet folk remedies like ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine, or because they were killed by the deep-state to cover up their conspiracy theories. In December, Kuzma and a number of other conspiracy theorists were sickened with COVID-like symptoms after appearing together at a conference. Rather than acknowledge that they had COVID, the far-right influencers suggested they had been targeted by an anthrax attack.
After Weldon’s death, her QAnon allies threatened to pursue violent action against staff at the hospital where she died. Scott McKay, a QAnon personality known as the “Patriot Streetfighter,” said he would publicize the names of doctors and nurses involved in treating Weldon, saying he wanted to “put the fear into these medical professionals” in a Telegram post. McKay proposed the hospital staff be sentenced to death, or be murdered in vigilante violence.
Weldon seems to have really believed her own words and paid a very high price for doing so. I blame her death on all those people, especially at Fox News, who, purely for their own advantage, have cynically expressed doubt and contempt for the vaccines and spread lies about them, while knowing better and even quietly getting vaccinated themselves.
This is all so tragically unnecessary. We will all die of something some day and it will be because of some unavoidable cause. To not do simple things that prevent premature death because of some ideological fixation is something that I find really hard to wrap my head around.
How many leaders of the anti-vax movement need to die before their followers start to realize that they have been sold a highly dangerous bill of goods?
Ho hum. At this point I cannot even begin to care about these morons dying. I dont feel bad for them or their families and friends. Frankly, lets hope all the anti vax leaders or followers die because they refuse to stop acting like fools. Play stupid games… Its not even tragic anymore. If they refuse to see the truth that is right in front of them, let them reap the benefits of their actions.
Cirsten Weldon has blood on her hands.
That she died isn’t a tragedy at all, it makes the world a slightly better place.
When she last made a video, she was very sick and in Florida.
Three days later, she was admitted to a hosptital. In Camarillo, California.
So, how did she get from Florida to California?
Spoiler alert, she got on a plane and flew there. While sick with the Covid-19 virus.
So how many people did she expose and infect? Who knows but it is a lot.
This is common among the antivaxxers. Since the Covid-19 virus doesn’t exist and masks don’t work and are a commie plot, when they get sick, they still go out in public and expose anyone they come across. Until they are so sick they are forced to go to a hospital or just die somewhere.
“How many leaders of the anti-vax movement need to die before their followers start to realize that they have been sold a highly dangerous bill of goods?”
All of them, and even that wouldn’t work. Anti-vaxx belief isn’t rational and so doesn’t respond to actual events. It’s in the primitive brain, seemingly to do with tribal identity, and so reason and observable consequences don’t budge it. People are, apparently, willing to die to preserve their tribal identity, and so no deaths, not even their own, will change their minds.
I’ll bet that even these prominent people who’ve died wouldn’t change their ways if they had a choice.
I hope the staff involved in her care are OK, it is awful that medical professionals giving the best care they can are threatened for their work.
It isn’t about being sold a highly dangerous bill of goods. It is about “winning” from the other, the ones not in their tribe. And their tribal leaders have proclaimed any COVID mitigation efforts are a dastardly plot from those others so they as tribal members in good standing just have to resist the enemy by fighting tooth and nail against what the enemy proclaims to work.
As Trump has shown there are no takesy backsies by the leaders, just trying more then as a passing remark or pretending it was a joke will mean loss of power and possibly exile from the tribe.
That also means it doesn’t matter how many of those leaders keel over and that reason why they keel over will never be something pointed out by the outsiders.
“anti-vaxxer dies”
Good.
This may seem like very bad taste, but some people have invented an award for such people: the Herman Cain awards, after a former Presidential candidate who did just that -- https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/07/herman-cain-mask-mandate-opponent-dies-covid-19-tulsa.html -- “Herman Cain, Conservative Culture Warrior Who Opposed Mask Mandates, Dies of COVID-19”
There is even a subreddit of reddit.com dedicated to such people, and there are a *lot* of them.
lpetrich @7- I spent waaay too much time at the Herman Cain Awards. One thing you realize is that the stories fall into a very narrow range of categories. One is men with goatees. I joke with my students how it illustrates causation vs. correlation (not A causing B (or vice versa) here, but how C can cause A and B).
“I blame her death on all those people”
But not on herself?
“How many leaders of the anti-vax movement need to die ….?”
Many more. From this point of view her death may have been needless, it was also useful if her death managed to convince only one anti-vaxxer.
The latest cure is pee. At least it is cheap, and not needed by someone else.
Can we now revive the word ‘virtue signaling’ that was allowed to be abused out of existence by racists homophobe and transphobes? It’s not a matter of stupid, it’s a matter of survival of humans requires the assistance of other humans. If your in-group does it, or if you plan to lead your in-group by means other than direct force, then; not only must they risk harm/dying, you do too.
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Fashion requires you to suffer.
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These people are literally proving their faith and are being sanctified. If it wasn’t all about the hagiography, they’d Go Fund Me for the biologically active chemicals that are their own particular sick kinky fetish. They’d then find it in a back alley like any other recreational drug.
Nᴏ, sᴛᴏᴘ, ᴘʟᴇᴀsᴇ ᴅᴏɴ’ᴛ ɢᴏ…