Fact Check: Is Covid-19 vaccine changing people into man-eaters?

People are claiming that Covid vaccine is making patients zombies which is fake (Image: Tumisu/Kevin Phillips/Pixabay)

The covid vaccine will make you impotent, Covid vaccine causes an erection, Covid vaccine is a cover-up to inject nano tracker in you, Covid vaccine will make you slave of Bill Gates, Covid Vaccine has pork, Covid vaccine works better if injected in the penis, and Covid vaccine contains human foetus cells. There are some of the most bizarre claims that have been made since many variants of the Covid-19 vaccine was developed and went into trials.

You may think the conspiracy theorists would have used all their brain-juice to cook up stories. Well, you are wrong. They are getting weirder every day, and unfortunately, no vaccine can stop the spread of this disease of misinformation. In a recent claim, the conspiracy theorists and fear mongers have claimed that after receiving Covid-19 vaccine patients have started eating each other. In simpler terms, they have become man-eaters or zombies or cannibal.

The straight-out-of-horror-movie-like image has the CNN logo on the bottom right, and it reads, “Hospitals on lockdown as first Covid vaccine patients start eating other patients.” The first thing that may strike in some people’s heads is “I am not going to take the vaccine!”

Image via Twitter
Image via Twitter
Image via Twitter
https://twitter.com/mfigroid/status/1341424292999774210?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

But hold-on! Think about it first. Look at the image. Can you see any human parts that alleged patients have left behind or they ate bones too? Let’s not make it scarier and investigate what actually is happening here.

Patients do not get the vaccine

First and foremost, you need to understand who gets the vaccine. And before that, you need to understand what exactly a vaccine is? When you get a vaccine for any disease, you are basically getting injected with the same condition but in non-potent format. They are either killed or weakened so that they do not harm you.

A vaccine trains your body to fight the disease and stimulates your immune system to produce antibodies if the condition tries to infect your body. In case you are already suffering from the disease, like in this case with Covid-19, experts have advised waiting for 14-days before getting vaccinated. The claim in the image that the patients who got the vaccine are eating other patients stays incorrect because ‘patients’ do not get the vaccine in the first place.

Now coming to the image, we did some digging and reverse searched the image being used in the claim. We found that the image is from February 14, 2019, and was used in a report by The New York Times titled “I Remember the First Time I Saw a Teenager Die”. It was clicked by Eric Curran at the trauma bay in the emergency department at Temple University Hospital after resuscitation efforts failed. Basically, the image is from the time when Covid-19 was not even around.

Screenshot of New York Times’s report carrying the image from 2019.

Verdict

No, Covid-19 vaccine is not creating cannibals/zombies/man-eaters. Moreover, vaccines are cleared for use only after extensive clinical trials on hundreds of volunteers. There are several vaccines in the world now. The UK and the US have already started mass vaccination drives. There are no zombies eating other people anywhere in the world. The ‘information’ is FAKE. The claims may be the plot of some cheap movie, but it is certainly not a part of reality.

P.S. If we go by the latest standards, we would like to call them “person-eaters” just to make sure no gender out of countless that now exist, get offended by calling these alleged person-eating vaccine-receivers ‘man-eaters’.

Anurag: B.Sc. Multimedia, a journalist by profession.