"I Lost My Baby. Then Antivaxxers Made My Pain Go Viral."

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Amanda Makulec MPH
@abmakulec
Last year, our loss was manufactured into a viral lie about COVID-19 vaccines.

More than seven months later, I wanted to share that experience to give the world a glimpse into the human impacts of misinformation. Remember, there are real people at stake.

nytimes.com
Opinion | I Lost My Baby. Then Antivaxxers Made My Pain Go Viral.
There’s a human toll to misinformation.
5:09 AM · May 11, 2022

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/11/opinion/vaccines-antivaxxers-pregnancy.html

No paywall
https://archive.ph/2f9nI


I was one of many women who had a pandemic baby. Few people saw me pregnant, and even fewer met my second-born son, or ever will. In September 2021, just shy of 3 months of age, my son died. He was one of the most bright-eyed, happiest babies I’ve met and spent every day of his short life loved and adored.

The day it happened, I shared news of his loss in a short Twitter post. The impulse to share was a protective one. As someone active on social media, I wanted to avoid the inevitable question from friends and acquaintances: How’s your baby?

Within a day, a stranger had gone through my old tweets and found confirmation that I had been vaccinated against Covid-19 during my pregnancy. That person created an image of my tweets side-by-side: one from July where I shared my relief at being vaccinated while pregnant and another from September with the story of my loss. A stranger had written “safe … and effective” alongside the screenshots, implying that my being vaccinated in pregnancy had caused my son’s death. The implication captured in this image, which lives on in various corners of the internet, is a lie: The autopsy showed no connection between our son’s death and any vaccinations.

Losing a child is one of parents’ greatest fears; it seems unfathomable until you find yourself in that awful statistical minority. Yet the immediate response from many people to the false framing of our story was often not comfort but questions over what I did to cause such a terrible tragedy.

*snip*