Damar Hamlin’s Tragedy, Anti-vaxxers’ Gold

By Caroline Mimbs Nyce, The Atlantic
On Monday, the Buffalo Bills player Damar Hamlin collapsed from cardiac arrest during an NFL game. Nearly right away—with little information about Hamlin’s condition publicly available—vaccine-disinformation purveyors hopped onto Twitter to promote the myth that athletes are dying because of the coronavirus shot.

By Tuesday, according to data from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit that studies disinformation and online hate, tweets containing the phrase “died suddenly” (which the group labels an “anti-vaxx trope”) had quadrupled, numbering almost 17,000—four times the daily average of about 4,000.

I spoke over the phone to the CCDH’s CEO, Imran Ahmed, to talk about the entire episode—and how it compares with previous vaccine-disinformation campaigns on Twitter. Ahmed did not hold back when discussing “the sociopathic, predatory nature of these people who prey on tragedy to spread bullshit.” (As of this writing, Hamlin remains in critical condition but his prognosis has improved.)

Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Caroline Mimbs Nyce: Can you talk to me a little bit about what you saw after the Hamlin collapse—what the volume of the anti-vax disinformation looked like online?

Imran Ahmed: First of all, it’s worth saying that anti-vaxxers have proven extremely opportunistic—parasites, really, who feed on the algorithmic salience of breaking news and current events to amplify their own narrative.

We have seen consistently that every time a high-profile death has occurred, very quickly, anti-vaxxers have jumped on and said, Yes, that happened because of the vaccine, and here’s the information about it. Right now, they’re trying to promote the anti-vax documentary Died Suddenly. MORE