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Carrie Madej passes herself off as a medical expert, but she operates at the intersection of QAnon conspiracy theories and anti-vaxxer science, with a dollop of Christian fundamentalism and Trump-worship added to the mix.
She promotes the view that coronavirus vaccines are part of a global effort to change the human genome and control the population,
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Excerpts:
Coronavirus: False and misleading claims about vaccines debunked
By Jack Goodman and Flora Carmichael
BBC Reality CheckPublished26 July 2020
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The anti-vaccination movement has gained traction online in recent years, and campaigners opposed to vaccination have moved their focus to making claims relating to the coronavirus.
Claim about the impact on DNA
First, a video containing inaccurate claims about coronavirus vaccine trials, made by osteopath Carrie Madej, that has proved popular on social media.
Carrie Madej’s video makes a false claim that the vaccines will change recipients’ DNA (which carries genetic information).
“The Covid-19 vaccines are designed to make us into genetically modified organisms.”

She also claims – without any evidence – that vaccines will “hook us all up to an artificial intelligence interface”.
There are 25 different candidate vaccines in clinical trials around the world according to the World Health Organization (WHO), but none of them will alter human DNA and they do not contain technology to link people up to an artificial intelligence interface.
The vaccines are all designed to provoke an immune response by training our bodies to recognise and fight the virus.
Carrie Madej makes a number of other false claims, including that vaccine trials are “not following any sound scientific protocol to make sure this is safe”.
“New vaccines undergo rigorous safety checks before they can be recommended for widespread use,” says Michelle Roberts, BBC online health editor.
We have asked Carrie Madej for comment about these claims, but have received no response at the time of publication.
Where has the video been shared?
It was first uploaded to YouTube in June, where it clocked more than 300,000 views, but it has also been popular on Facebook and Instagram.
It’s still circulating in the United States, the UK and elsewhere.

A scientist in South Africa, Sarah Downs, who writes under the alias Mistress of Science, said she was alerted to the video by her mother whose prayer group had shared it.
The scientist sent her own debunking information to this group and says: “They are now much better informed, which I’m so glad about, because they were all taken in by that video.”
Claims about the pace of vaccine trials
When the preliminary results of the Oxford coronavirus vaccine study were published on Monday, the topic provoked much debate in coronavirus-focused Facebook groups.
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Claims about vaccines and Spanish flu
A meme circulating on social media claims vaccines were responsible for 50 million deaths during the Spanish flu pandemic in 1918.
But this is completely wrong.

Firstly, as the US Centers for Disease Control states, there was no vaccine at the time.
Scientists in Britain and the US did experiment with basic bacterial vaccines, but these were not vaccines as we would recognise them today, says historian and author Mark Honingsbaum.
This was “for the good reason that no-one knew that the influenza was a virus”.
There were two main causes of death – the initial flu infection or from the strong enormous immune response the virus triggered leading to lungs being filled with fluids.
Additional reporting by Olga Robinson, Shayan Sardarizadeh and Peter Mwai.

https://www.bbc.com/news/53525002
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Excerpts:
Vice News
The QAnon Doctor Pushing Wild Conspiracies About the COVID Vaccine
Dr. Carrie Madej spoke at the Capitol riots Wednesday and called the COVID vaccine a “witches’ brew.”
by Jesse Hicks
When Dr. Carrie Madej took the stage at the MAGA Freedom Rally D.C. on Wednesday, police sirens wailed as pro-Trump rioters stormed the Capitol. The president’s guest speaker told the crowd, a mix of QAnon supporters and far-right MAGA fans, her thoughts on the COVID vaccine: that it contains bio-sensing nanomachines designed to alter human DNA and control people’s minds.
“This is not your normal flu vaccine,” Madej said. “This is something totally different. This is a witches’ brew. I’ve never seen anything like this in science or medicine.”
“There’s many ways it can be taken up into our genome,” she continued. “So when this gets into the genome, if it’s permanent, guess what? You, as a human, can be patented and owned—look it up!”
Madej describes herself as an osteopathic doctor and a “child of God and a believer in Jesus Christ.” She’s also a QAnon believer who questions why COVID-19 has been a bigger story than what she describes as a “global elite pedophile ring” and reposts byzantine diagrams supposedly revealing Bill Gates as the mastermind behind the global pandemic.
This past summer, she was convinced that a long-debunked website advertising the “Cannibal Club” restaurant in Los Angeles was in fact a real eatery serving human flesh. “We ‘taste like pork,’” she tweeted. “Dear God—help us change this world for the better!”
To many, Madej successfully passes herself off as a medical expert, but she operates at the intersection of QAnon conspiracy theories and anti-vaxxer science, with a dollop of Christian fundamentalism and Trump-worship added to the mix. Yet the unfounded ideas she promotes—that coronavirus vaccines are part of a global effort to change the human genome and control the population—are spreading and have already had an effect. Last month, a pharmacist attempted to destroy 500 doses of Moderna’s COVID vaccines because he believed they were going to change people’s DNA.
“This is not your normal flu vaccine. This is something totally different. This is a witches’ brew. I’ve never seen anything like this in science or medicine.”
The specter of DNA-altering vaccines didn’t originate with Madej, but she’s helped popularize it to the extent that it’s now just taken as a given in many right-wing spheres, without the need for citation or proof. While Madej has been banned from YouTube, she still has tens of thousands of followers across other social media, like Twitter, Instagram, and Parler. And thousands more heard her unfounded conspiracies on Wednesday when she spoke as a featured guest at the Freedom Rally, alongside the president and several other big names on Team Trump.
“Guys, listen, that is the ulterior motive, that is one of the agendas of this: the ultimate enslavement of humanity,” she said, “Wake up! Wake up! Do your due diligence. Look this up. This is real.”
Needless to say, the idea that a coronavirus vaccine contains spying, mind-controlling nanomachines has been debunked. “They do not affect or interact with our DNA in any way,” the CDC writes, in no uncertain terms, about the shots.
Madej says she started studying vaccines as a teenager, when she first came to doubt the tetanus vaccine. (She claims to be unable to find anyone who ever actually died from tetanus.) After earning her doctorate of osteopathic medicine from the Kansas City University of Medical Biosciences, she went on to practice in Georgia.
She currently lives in the Dominican Republic, she says, because it’s not safe for whistleblowers like her in the United States—her long-standing skepticism about vaccines, after all, is dangerous knowledge when elites are pushing coronavirus vaccinations for their own agenda.
Madej first began sounding the alarm about supposed gene-altering vaccines in June on YouTube. The site eventually pulled her video for being misleading and blocked her account, but you can still easily find her video titled “Human 2.0 Warning – Doctor Issues Wake Up Call to the World.”
Madej claims that process changes a recipient’s DNA, making them a genetically modified organism that’s subject to patent law. Further, she contends, the vaccines use nanotechnology—a word that simply describes extremely small tools but is often associated with tiny computers. Those tiny computers, she claims, can be used to both monitor everything happening inside our bodies and possibly remote-control our thoughts and emotions.
Wearing a labcoat and a cross around her neck, Madej appears as a talking head on a soft blue backdrop. Over the course of 20 minutes, she focuses on Moderna’s vaccine, which uses messenger ribonucleic acid, or mRNA, to produce an immune response in humans. Although they’ve been researched for decades, COVID-19 vaccines are the first mRNA vaccines approved by the FDA.
Most people are familiar with injecting a piece of weakened or inactivated germ into the body for inoculation, like the flu vaccine. The COVID vaccines work differently: They contain a piece of the coronavirus mRNA that, once inside the body, provokes cells to produce a distinctive (but harmless) part of the virus—a “spike” protein. The immune system, in turn, learns to defend against this protein, thereby creating antibodies that can protect from actual COVID infection.
Madej claims that process changes a recipient’s DNA, making them a genetically modified organism that’s subject to patent law. Further, she contends, the vaccines use nanotechnology—a word that simply describes extremely small tools but is often associated with tiny computers. Those tiny computers, she claims, can be used to both monitor everything happening inside our bodies and possibly remote-control our thoughts and emotions.
Although the COVID vaccines do use nanotechnology, it’s not computers—it’s simply extremely small droplets that carry the mRNA into the body. There’s no massive DNA reprogramming and nanobot-insertion program designed as a part of a transhumanist push to “Human 2.0.”
Nevertheless, Madej’s story found an audience—and continues to. As of late July, her YouTube video had 300,000 views, according to BBC, and archives suggest her videos were still available under her name on the platform in late August, with tens of thousands of subscribers and millions of views. Even now, supporters try to sneak her videos past YouTube’s safeguards.
The idea that the COVID vaccine will alter a recipient’s DNA even recently led to criminal charges. Last month, Steven Brandenburg, a 46-year-old pharmacist from Grafton, Wisconsin, attempted to destroy more than 500 doses of coronavirus vaccine because he reportedly thought “it could hurt people by changing their DNA,” according to the detective who took his probable cause statement. It’s unclear whether Brandenburg was directly exposed to Madej’s content, but it doesn’t matter—her ideas are in the ether now, carried on the winds of right-wing social platforms and media.
Since being banned from YouTube, Madej has made her home on BitChute, where she has more than 2,000 subscribers. She’s on Parler, too, with 2,800 followers; she follows lawyer and Trump conspiracist Lin Wood, the Daily Caller, Breitbart, Ron and Rand Paul, and Bongino Report. And on Twitter, she emphasizes her medical credentials (her Twitter handle is @DrMadej and her avatar features her with a stethoscope around her neck) while encouraging her more than 26,000 followers to resist vaccination.
“Our genome should not be played with like a Fisher-Price playset,” she tweeted on Tuesday. “Say No to being in these dangerous experiments. Say No to the Va$$i&e.”
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