Warning: Fake News!
Conspiracy theory websites around the world lit up yesterday following the first confirmed death linked to the Pfizer vaccine - before being forced to figure out ways to work around the fact that the deceased person was in fact hit by a delivery truck.
The unnamed German man was apparently ‘wandering across the road looking at his phone’ near Leipzig when he was struck by the delivery vehicle carrying the Covid vaccine, prompting anti-vaxxers to issue headlines like these on their social media channels:
Pfizer Vaccine and 5G Phone Signal: A deadly combination.
Deadly Pfizer Vaccine Claims First Victim! Don’t say we didn’t warn you!
Pfizer Vaccine Death Toll in Europe Increases 100 percent in Single Morning.
So far, posts about the incident have been shared 10 million times on Facebook and Twitter and, although the body copy of the articles (mostly) explain that the man was in fact hit by a truck and not killed by the vaccine itself, very few people bothered to read down that far and have instead decided that the incident ‘proves them right’, which is all they wanted all this time.
Of course, and sorry about this, this fictitious story would be much funnier if it wasn't so plausible. Just to be clear: the driver of the Pfizer truck escaped without injury and nobody was harmed 'crossing the road'.