Online trolls have reached a new low with their latest targeted campaign of cyberbullying. In recent weeks, pregnant people have become a new target for the faceless crowd of anti-waxxers, thanks to the increase in popularity of posting “vaccination selfies” following the availability of the new COVID-19 vaccination shot. But as with everything on the internet, things quickly soured.
Pregnant women have become the latest targets for online trolling, and many of them have seen their joyous vaccination posts cruelly transformed into platforms for defamation and abuse. These attacks were even more difficult for women who shared their stories about pregnancy loss because commentators falsely correlated the two unrelated events.
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Dr Michelle Rockwell experienced the brutal attention of internet trolls last week when she discovered that her story of pregnancy loss was being used as a warning not to get the vaccine pregnant, as Daily Beast reports. Images taken from her popular Instagram account were used to spread malicious lies about how the first dose of COVID-19 vaccine Rockwell received caused her miscarriage in November.
“Dec. 21 she got it, ”reads the report. “Jan. 24th she lost her baby. ”
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Rockwell quickly went to her Instagram account to address the misinformation. ‘First. This is bullshit. If someone really goes to my IG and flips through my posts, they will see that I had a miscarriage three weeks before I received the vaccine, ‘she writes along with an image mentioning the misinformation surrounding her loss. “I had my D&C 2 days after the vaccination, but my sweet baby was gone long before.” We cannot imagine having to deal with the grief of a pregnancy loss and then see the same loss manipulated to bully a pregnant woman. “Second, how soulless and predatory that someone takes someone’s grief and changes it to advance their own agenda.”
Unfortunately, Rockwell was not the only one targeted in this way. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter were all full of threads spreading false information about the impact of the vaccine on pregnancy, specifically targeting women who receive the shots and paint it as the reason behind their pregnancy losses. The Instagram account cv19vaccinereations (which somehow has more than 100,000 followers) shared a screenshot of a Twitter post that seems to link a recent vaccination and miscarriage, by the date of the injection, the date of loss and a Vaccine Adverse. Event Reporting System) number.
On Twitter, Dr. Candice Cody reported on receiving her vaccination at 35 weeks pregnant and said how lucky she was to be able to get the first dose while she was pregnant, hoping it would pass on some of the antibodies on her baby. “Grateful to be part of ending the pandemic,” she wrote.
The comment section of the report is full of unsubstantiated allegations about the safety of the vaccine and what its reception said during pregnancy about Cody. @aspiringlockpic chastised Cody for getting a ‘rushed’ vaccine. “It has to be magical. Strength. You need it, ‘they wrote. User @ joelNicholas19 simply wrote ‘fucking pycho’. These types of reactions are exactly why so many medical professionals go to social media to share their stories so that the public can see that those with medical education and training believe in both safety and effectiveness.
And if we talk about efficiency. There are still questions regarding the safety of the vaccination during pregnancy or breastfeeding, as none of the safety trials involved pregnant women. Experts, however, agree that the dangers of catching COVID-19 during pregnancy pose a much greater risk, especially to those working on the front line, than any expected side effects. That’s why so many mothers with medical education stand in line, and perhaps that’s why most of the disagreements you hear come from the guts of social media.
These famous moms opened up about pregnancy loss.
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