Yep. I was warning that #VAERS would be misused by antivaxxers this way since before any #CovidVaccine got an EUA, as were others familiar with antivax misinformation. I’ve been writing about how antivaxxers misuse VAERS since around 2006. @OpenVAERS deception is nothing new.
https://twitter.com/advocartis/status/1445329683776557063
Provaccine advocates found it very frustrating how hardly any of our colleagues listened to took the warnings seriously, even though we had been showing how antivaxxers had been abusing #VAERS this way for two decades at least.
The only difference between disinformation efforts like @OpenVAERS and, pre-pandemic, dumpster diving #VAERS studies by antivax quacks Mark and David Geier claiming to show that vaccines cause autism is scale.
Also, prepandemic, misuse of #VAERS by antivaxxers to attribute all sorts of death and injury to vaccines was a fairly niche bit of disinformation. Now, it's being weaponized by huge disinformation actors in a way that's never happened before, even if the techniques are the same.
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