A couple in New Zealand refuse to allow their four-month-old baby to undergo heart surgery using blood from vaccinated donors against Covid. The case has attracted the attention of the international press for illustrating the risks of the growth of the anti-vax movement across the globe.
The newborn has a severe case of Pulmonary Valve Stenosis (PVS), which means his pulmonary valve is too narrow to allow blood to flow from the heart to the lungs normally.
His mother says she wants the operation to be done urgently, but requires the use of what she calls “safe blood”, free of traces of vaccines that use messenger RNA, or mRNA. Technology is one of the main targets of anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, which erroneously claim that immunizers of the type can modify DNA, cause numerous diseases or cause the same diseases they should fight, among others.
New Zealand’s blood bank says it makes no distinction between materials from vaccinated and unvaccinated donors, while the state public health service attests that immunizations pose no risk to the child. Last week, the service filed an action asking for temporary custody of the baby to perform the surgery – the Auckland High Court decides whether to grant him guardianship of the newborn this Tuesday (6).
The family — represented by a lawyer known for her anti-vaccine positions — insists that state intervention is unnecessary, as there are unvaccinated donors willing to provide blood.
The legal dispute has exposed the extent of skepticism about the Covid vaccine in some communities in New Zealand, a country that came to lead the fight against the coronavirus during the pandemic. And it got into politics, with the support of Winston Peters — leader of the populist minority party, New Zealand First, and a former deputy prime minister — to the family.
“We have a context where parents say they want the donation for their child to come from unvaccinated individuals, and I can’t understand why that can’t be done and why we’re wasting time in a court of law,” Peters told New York. Times in a report published this Monday (5). “The issue is not about being for or against the vaccine, or denying the science: it is about freedom, truth and fact-based decisions.”
The case has even been singled out by experts as particularly illustrative of the dangers of the antivax movement. According to them, the pseudoscientific arguments used by the family exemplify the reach of conspiracy narratives and continuous flows of disinformation.
Also to the New York Times, Sanjana Hattotuwa, from the New Zealand organization Disinformation Project, said that videos and texts about the case have been seen by tens of thousands of people on Telegram and on websites that host far-right content in recent days, many of them inciting their readers to violence.
This month, a 62-year-old man was arrested for planning to knock out the country’s power system to draw attention to his anti-vaccination convictions, in what was New Zealand’s first sabotage court conviction.
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