To antivaccine conspiracy theorists, it is always of the utmost importance to find a way to explain deaths from the pathogens that cause vaccine-preventable diseases as somehow not being due to that pathogen. The reason is simple. If antivaxxers can spin a convincing sounding narrative claiming that a specific pathogen isn’t causing disease and death that can be prevented by vaccines targeted against that pathogen, then they can add to that narrative the claim that the vaccine doesn’t work (because it’s not targeting the “true” cause of the disease and death) and is therefore unnecessary.
Antivaxxers are still doing it, as I noticed over the weekend when I came across a Substack post published last [September 1] —because of course it was a Substack post spreading COVID-19 misinformation—by Mathew Crawford entitled The COVID-As-Pneumonia Hypothesis.
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In his Substack, Crawford cites a number of “sources,” to justify the conspiracy theory that it’s bacterial pneumonia, not viral pneumonia associated with COVID-19 that killed most COVID victims and that “They” are intentionally misclassifying these deaths as due to COVID-19. Unsurprisingly, nearly all of his sources are other Substack articles by COVID-19 cranks and antivaxxers.
