Now anti-vaxxers turn on Pfizer and Moderna after AstraZeneca's decision to ... trends now
Anti-vaxxers today called for Pfizer and Moderna to urgently withdraw their Covid jabs in the wake of heightened safety fears.
AstraZeneca's landmark decision to withdraw its lockdown-banishing vaccine from global markets sparked hysteria online about the rival jabs – made using pioneering tech never utilised until the virus crisis spawned.
The UK-based pharmaceutical titan insisted its decision was a commercial one due to demand being slim, with its jab no longer being manufactured.
Ministers favour superior mRNA jabs, like those of Pfizer and Moderna, nowadays — yet these themselves have been wrongly linked by conspiracy theorists to a rise in heart-related deaths.
Once heralded as a 'triumph for British science', AstraZeneca's vaccine, created with scientists at Oxford University, is estimated to have saved millions of lives during the pandemic.
Swedish journalist and political commentator Peter Imanuelsen labelled the move as 'massive', and said 'raise your hand if you agree Pfizer and Moderna should be next'. In 2017, Mr Imanuelsen was accused of denying the Holocaust in social media posts. One allegedly claimed 'Hitler had some good points'. At the time he claimed these screengrabs were fabricated
Mr Imanuelsen's thoughts were echoed by other social media users, including one account with over 9,000 followers who said: 'Why has the AstraZeneca vaccine been withdrawn but the Pfizer vaccine hasn't?
Other tweets questioned the effectiveness of mRNA jabs, with one by user @MarwanNawaz claiming 'two gene editing mRNA vaccines from BioNTech-Pfizer and Moderna vaccines retain approval.' Messenger RNA, or mRNA, is a genetic blueprint that instructs cells to manufacture proteins in the body. For Covid, the mRNA vaccine instructs cells to make the spike protein found on the surface of the virus itself. It does not 'gene edit', unlike other therapies designed to disable genes
Yet is has faced intense scrutiny in recent months for a rare side effect which causes blood clots.
Eighty-one deaths in Britain have been linked to the blood clotting complication that AstraZeneca is facing legal action over. None of these are proven and are based on self-reported submissions to the UK's medicines regulator.
Yet experts insist the jab is still safe.
Critics of the vaccine roll-outs, which scientists say consigned lockdowns to history at a time when nations had no other weapons in their arsenal, today weaponised the firm's withdrawal.
Swedish journalist and political commentator Peter Imanuelsen labelled the move as 'massive', and said 'raise your hand if you agree Pfizer and Moderna should be next'.
Mr Imanuelsen, who boasts 600,000 followers on X/Twitter as 'Peter Sweden', then added the raise your hand emoji.
In 2017, Mr Imanuelsen was accused of denying the Holocaust in social media posts. One allegedly claimed 'Hitler had some good points'. At the time he claimed these screengrabs were fabricated.
Mr Imanuelsen's thoughts were echoed by other social media users, including one account with over 9,000 followers who said: 'Why has the AstraZeneca vaccine been withdrawn but the Pfizer vaccine hasn't?
'According to the EU three times more people have died following the Pfizer than the AZ.'
Figures released by the European Medicines Agency in 2023 show more than 11,000 people are thought to have died after receiving a Covid vaccine.
Of these, around 8,000 were attributed to a Pfizer jab and 1,500 AstraZeneca.
