Don’t believe everything you read online. Except this. You can totally believe this, it’s fact-checked and everything.
Joe Biden said last week that Facebook is “killing people” with vaccine misinformation and lies, a statement he was later forced to walk back due to outrage from, well, Facebook executives. With media literacy seemingly at an all-time low and misinformation running across social media platforms unchecked, there are plenty of falsehoods your favorite NFL wide receiver or right-leaning uncle is seeing on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter these days.
Which is why it’s important to know that, well, some of it is just plain bullcrap. Including a recent rumor that Big Bang Theory star Mayim Bialik is refusing to get vaccinated. A post about Bialik, who earlier this year hosted Jeopardy!, refusing the jab cropped up on social media in recent days. An actress from one of the most popular sitcoms of the last decade refusing the vaccine would be big news to fans of CBS evening programming, but as USA Today reported on Monday that’s simply not true. She’s vaxxed up. Sorry, Uncle Bob.
As the report details, Bialik once admitted in a book that she hadn’t followed regular vaccination schedules for her children. That spiraled into her being labled ‘anti-vax’ over the years and she’s had to consistently clarify her support of vaccines, including the COVID-19 vaccine introduced last year.
The Facebook post from July 14 lists Bialik’s degree alongside the claim that she “refuses to vaccinate.” That isn’t true. In fact, Bialik and her sons have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19, Heather Besignano, a spokeswoman for Bialik, said in an email.
“I have never, not once, said that vaccines are not valuable, not useful or not necessary, because they are,” she said in the YouTube video.
Bialik clarified that while her two children did not follow a traditional vaccine schedule, they have been vaccinated.
“As of today, my children may not have had every one of the vaccinations that your children have had, but my children are vaccinated,” she said. “I repeat my children are vaccinated.”
That video, which you can watch below, was released in October and as of Monday had just over a half million views. Which pales in comparison to the viral misinformation that can easily find millions of eyeballs on Facebook and further cause vaccine skepticism and keep vulnerable populations at risk as the Delta variant of coronavirus ravages under-vaccinated population centers.
The lesson here is to take an extra second before you share absolute nonsense on social media, or at least ignore whatever dreck your uncle is digging up from the worst spaces online and sharing to all your friends and family thanks to an algorithm no one can comprehend but wields more power than you or anyone you know will ever have on the fate of humanity itself. Anyway, have a good one.
[via USA Today]