Anti-vaccine myths surged on social media ahead of the CDC shooting

Before the shooting, social media companies relaxed their protocols around misinformation.

In the weeks and months before the Aug. 8 shooting at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters in Atlanta, posts tying Covid vaccines to mental illness accrued millions of views online.

Previously more tightly moderated, some of the world’s largest social media platforms now operate with far fewer guardrails, allowing vaccine misinformation to flourish.

On X, for example, verified accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers openly claimed in recent weeks that Covid vaccines act like “chemical lobotomies,” which is false.

On Facebook, health influencers with broad reach alleged that Covid vaccines cause severe brain damage or other severe side effects such as cancer, despite no scientific basis for those claims.

And on TikTok, videos repeating the debunked claim that vaccines cause autism drew hundreds of thousands of views this year, spreading doubt to wide audiences.