We and our vendors use cookies and similar methods (“Cookies”) to recognize visitors and remember their preferences. We also use Cookies for a variety of purposes, including analytics, to measure marketing effectiveness and to target and measure the effectiveness of ads. You can accept or reject the use of Cookies for individual purposes below. Some vendors process your data on the basis of their legitimate interest - you can object to such processing below. Your preferences will be saved in a cookie named “fides_consent” for a maximum duration of 12 months, as well as in your registered user account if you are logged in. If you previously accepted these methods through our prior banner, then we will use your data for targeting. Your preferences will apply on nytimes.com, as well as our News, Cooking, Games and Audio apps. Your preferences here are unrelated to Apple’s App Tracking Transparency Framework.
Supported by
By Céline Gounder
Dr. Gounder is an infectious disease physician and epidemiologist.
On Friday, someone anonymously emailed me an article from a far-right American website as supposed proof that I had killed my husband with Covid vaccines — a reboot of the same baseless narrative first pushed in the weeks following his death in late 2022. According to mRNA vaccine conspiracists, any untimely death or health affliction since the pandemic is because of the Covid mRNA vaccines, often linking unrelated medical events to vaccination without any evidence. My husband died from a ruptured aortic aneurysm; his condition had no connection to Covid vaccines. Autopsy results confirmed that. But in the conspiracist worldview, any such event can be folded into the narrative.
