A 17-year old beautician died in her sleep due to unknown causes on September 14th, in Sudbury, Suffolk, England. The grieving family is horrified that many antivaxxers, desperate to discredit the vaccine any way they can, started to claim that the death was due to the COVID vaccine.
Maddy Campbel is a beautician with a promising future, but her life was cut short, and a postmortem was unable to establish a definite cause of death. Yet after the limited release of news on Instagram, antivaxxer trolls started to inundate the announcement and the inbox with claims that "COVID vaccine killed her", probably accompanied by "it's a government cover-up".
What the trolls don't know is that Maddy had NOT received any COVID vaccine. Not even a single dose. So her death has NOTHING to do with the COVID vaccine.
Her father called out the antivaxxer trolls, "Anybody spreading such rumours should hang their heads in shame."
Her place of employment also issued a statement: "We are horrified to hear that people are trying to sue Maddy's death as an 'anti vaccine' news story. Maddy would not wish to have her name used to dissuade people against having the vaccine. I would like to confirm that Maddy had neither doses of the COVID vaccine, her unexpected death was in no way linked."
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Unfortunately, this sort of vaccine-blaming happens QUITE OFTEN online. Any time there's a death, antivaxxers assess the death, and see if it can be blamed on vaccines somehow. Baby deaths are most often blamed, because a lot of children receive vaccines when they are young. Some grieving families are harassed into quitting social media, then the antivaxxers claim "cover-up".
For example, Ashley Spivey, one-time contestant on The Bachelor back in about 2010 or so, suffered a stillbirth, at 30 weeks. It appears that the cord has twisted around the fetus's neck. Such things happen. What Ashley did NOT expect, however, are the antivaxxers who insisted that the flu shot she got a week earlier was what killed her fetus. And given that Ashley had announced that she's getting her flu shot to protect the herself and the baby, the antivaxxers claimed they "tried to warn you [Ashley]".
It's a bit perverse when a mom's story about the death of a child/fetus, or even the struggles of her child with a medical condition was targeted by the antivaxxers for harassment. And Ashley is hardly alone in that.
Don't be a COVIDiot or antivaxxers. Don't join a group so eager to prove a falsehood they are willing to harass grieving mothers and families.
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