Thread by @DrEricDing

FRESH HELL—Anti-vaccine Facebook groups have a new message for their community members: ‘Don’t go to the emergency room, & get your loved ones out of ICU’, instead—they are promoting increasingly dangerous at-home #COVID19 treatments.

By @oneunderscore__
nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news…

2) “Consumed by conspiracy theories claiming that doctors are preventing unvaccinated patients from receiving miracle cures or are even killing them on purpose, some people in anti-vaccine & pro-ivermectin FB groups are telling those with #COVID19 to stay away from hospitals”

3) “The messages represent an escalation in the mistrust of medical professionals in groups that have sprung up in recent months on social media platforms. And it’s something that some doctors say they’re seeing manifest in their hospitals as they have filled up”

4) “We were down to four Covid patients two months ago. In this surge, we’ve had 40 to 50 patients with Covid on four different ICU services, 97 percent of them unvaccinated,” said @WesElyMD, an ICU doctor and professor of medicine at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.

5) “We were making headway, and now we’re just losing really, really badly. There’s something that’s happening on the internet, and it’s dramatically increasing steam.” Says @WesElyMD

6) “Those concerns echo various local reports about growing threats and violence directed toward medical professionals. In Branson, Missouri, a medical center recently introduced panic buttons on employee badges because of a spike in assaults.”

7) “While Covid misinformation has been a persistent problem since the start of the pandemic, the introduction of vaccines has invigorated the anti-vaccine community and sparked a renewed push to find and promote alternative treatments — some of which are potentially hazardous.”

8) “In recent weeks, some anti-vaccine @Facebook groups and conspiracy theory influencers on the encrypted messaging app Telegram have offered instructions on how to get family members released from the hospital, usually by insisting they be transferred into hospice care”

9) “Some people in groups that formed recently to promote the false cure ivermectin, an anti-parasite treatment, have claimed extracting Covid patients from hospitals is pivotal so that they can self-medicate at home with ivermectin.”

10) But as the patients begin to realize that ivermectin by itself is not effective, the groups have begun recommending a series of increasingly hazardous at-home treatments, such as gargling with iodine, & nebulizing & inhaling hydrogen peroxide, calling it part of a “protocol.”

11) On Tuesday, the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America even put out a warning against nebulizing hydrogen peroxide.

https://twitter.com/aafanational/status/1440403985685303310

12) lots of nonsense is spread not just on FB but directly on Fox News. FB misinfo groups are merely a dark underbelly that amplifies a lot of Fox misinfo.

https://twitter.com/drericding/status/1440756222622240772