As scientists race to develop a vaccine against the novel coronavirus, far-right conspiracy theorist and anti-vaxxer Alex Jones is urging his substantial audience to not take the yet-to-be-developed vaccine when it becomes available. In recent weeks, Jones has also claimed to have taken his conspiracy theories about the coronavirus and his attacks on vaccine-proponents Bill Gates and Dr. Anthony Fauci to White House advisers with the hope of influencing President Donald Trump, who himself has promoted false claims about vaccines and has praised Jones’ “amazing” reputation.
Public health experts have emphasized the importance of developing a vaccine against the novel coronavirus in order to protect the world’s population and allow public health orders promoting social distancing to be safely relaxed or ended. As Saint Louis University infectious disease researcher Sarah George explained to Popular Science, “We’re not going to get this virus under control until either we get a vaccine or it infects 80 or 90 percent of the population, and the latter is an outcome we don’t want because a lot more people will die.”
Jones’ attempts to damage public perception around a forthcoming coronavirus vaccine pose a danger to public health. And he is increasingly able to spread his message through his recently launched online streaming platform banned.video, where dozens of videos from his Infowars outlet and affiliated far-right personalities are posted each day, routinely garnering hundreds of thousands of individual views. Jones also continues to broadcast his show throughout the U.S. via terrestrial radio. Recent polling indicates that many Americans are susceptible to conspiracy theories about the development of a vaccine for the novel coronavirus.
Major social media platforms are primed to help Jones spread his attacks on the novel coronavirus vaccine and its proponents. While social media networks including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram have taken action against Jones in recent years, enforcement remains spotty. In one glaring example, Media Matters recently documented that banned.video Infowars videos containing coronavirus misinformation were widely circulating on Facebook and receiving hundreds of thousands of views on the platform in some cases, despite Facebook’s supposed blanket ban on Infowars content.
Alex Jones’ “vaccine infowar”
Jones summarized his efforts against the novel coronavirus vaccine during his May 14 broadcast of The Alex Jones Show, saying, “Get ready for the vaccine infowar” before citing “big tech companies,” the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Clinton Global Initiative as the leaders of a supposed effort to track Americans and create “a million-person army of young, power-tripping leftists to come to your house and take your children from you” in order to intentionally trigger a civil war.
The primary theme of Jones’ attacks on the forthcoming novel coronavirus vaccine are claims that it will be intentionally engineered to reduce the world’s population. These claims make little sense, as the vaccine does not yet exist and there are numerous independent attempts underway to develop it (though in one instance Jones promoted an unfounded claim that “Fauci and the globalists” have actually already created a vaccine that will “attack your testicles”).
For example, during his broadcast referencing the “vaccine infowar,” Jones claimed a “big problem” with upcoming vaccines is that they will include an additive that will attack women’s ovaries, while adding that “these new vaccines just so happen to attack your testicles as well -- oh, and so does COVID-19.” Jones, who previously claimed that the dietary supplements he sells provided a benefit against the novel coronavirus, then touted supplements as a preventative against harms the new vaccines would supposedly cause.