A vaccination volunteer is vaccinating a frontline worker during COVID-19 vaccine dry run. COVID-19 vaccine dry run is happening in all over west Bengal with three sites in Kolkata, 69 in West Bengal. (Photo by Dipayan Bose / SOPA Images/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images)

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When Dr. Carrie Madej took the stage at the MAGA Freedom Rally D.C. on Wednesday, police sirens wailed as pro-Trump rioters stormed the Capitol. The presidents guest speaker told the crowd, a mix of QAnon supporters and far-right MAGA fans, her thoughts on the COVID vaccine: that it contains bio-sensing nanomachines designed to alter human DNA and control peoples minds.

This is not your normal flu vaccine, Madej said. This is something totally different. This is a witches brew. Ive never seen anything like this in science or medicine.

Theres many ways it can be taken up into our genome, she continued. So when this gets into the genome, if its permanent, guess what? You, as a human, can be patented and ownedlook it up!

Madej describes herself as an osteopathic doctor and a child of God and a believer in Jesus Christ. Shes also a QAnon believer who questions why COVID-19 has been a bigger story than what she describes as a global elite pedophile ring and reposts byzantine diagrams supposedly revealing Bill Gates as the mastermind behind the global pandemic.

This past summer, she was convinced that a long-debunked website advertising the Cannibal Club restaurant in Los Angeles was in fact a real eatery serving human flesh. We taste like pork, she tweeted. Dear Godhelp us change this world for the better!

To many, Madej successfully passes herself off as a medical expert, but she operates at the intersection of QAnon conspiracy theories and anti-vaxxer science, with a dollop of Christian fundamentalism and Trump-worship added to the mix. Yet the unfounded ideas she promotesthat coronavirus vaccines are part of a global effort to change the human genome and control the populationare spreading and have already had an effect. Last month, a pharmacist attempted to destroy 500 doses of Modernas COVID vaccines because he believed they were going to change peoples DNA.

This is not your normal flu vaccine. This is something totally different. This is a witches brew. Ive never seen anything like this in science or medicine.

The specter of DNA-altering vaccines didnt originate with Madej, but shes helped popularize it to the extent that its now just taken as a given in many right-wing spheres, without the need for citation or proof. While Madej has been banned from YouTube, she still has tens of thousands of followers across other social media, like Twitter, Instagram, and Parler. And thousands more heard her unfounded conspiracies on Wednesday when she spoke as a featured guest at the Freedom Rally, alongside the president and several other big names on Team Trump.

Guys, listen, that is the ulterior motive, that is one of the agendas of this: the ultimate enslavement of humanity, she said, Wake up! Wake up! Do your due diligence. Look this up. This is real.

Needless to say, the idea that a coronavirus vaccine contains spying, mind-controlling nanomachines has been debunked. They do not affect or interact with our DNA in any way, the CDC writes, in no uncertain terms, about the shots.

Madej says she started studying vaccines as a teenager, when she first came to doubt the tetanus vaccine. (She claims to be unable to find anyone who ever actually died from tetanus.) After earning her doctorate of osteopathic medicine from the Kansas City University of Medical Biosciences, she went on to practice in Georgia.

She currently lives in the Dominican Republic, she says, because its not safe for whistleblowers like her in the United Statesher long-standing skepticism about vaccines, after all, is dangerous knowledge when elites are pushing coronavirus vaccinations for their own agenda.

Madej first began sounding the alarm about supposed gene-altering vaccines in June on YouTube. The site eventually pulled her video for being misleading and blocked her account, but you can still easily find her video titled Human 2.0 Warning - Doctor Issues Wake Up Call to the World.

Wearing a labcoat and a cross around her neck, Madej appears as a talking head on a soft blue backdrop. Over the course of 20 minutes, she focuses on Modernas vaccine, which uses messenger ribonucleic acid, or mRNA, to produce an immune response in humans. Although theyve been researched for decades, COVID-19 vaccines are the first mRNA vaccines approved by the FDA.

Most people are familiar with injecting a piece of weakened or inactivated germ into the body for inoculation, like the flu vaccine. The COVID vaccines work differently: They contain a piece of the coronavirus mRNA that, once inside the body, provokes cells to produce a distinctive (but harmless) part of the virusa spike protein. The immune system, in turn, learns to defend against this protein, thereby creating antibodies that can protect from actual COVID infection.

Madej claims that process changes a recipients DNA, making them a genetically modified organism thats subject to patent law. Further, she contends, the vaccines use nanotechnologya word that simply describes extremely small tools but is often associated with tiny computers. Those tiny computers, she claims, can be used to both monitor everything happening inside our bodies and possibly remote-control our thoughts and emotions.

Although the COVID vaccines do use nanotechnology, its not computersits simply extremely small droplets that carry the mRNA into the body. Theres no massive DNA reprogramming and nanobot-insertion program designed as a part of a transhumanist push to "Human 2.0.

Nevertheless, Madejs story found an audienceand continues to. As of late July, her YouTube video had 300,000 views, according to BBC, and archives suggest her videos were still available under her name on the platform in late August, with tens of thousands of subscribers and millions of views. Even now, supporters try to sneak her videos past YouTubes safeguards.

The idea that the COVID vaccine will alter a recipient's DNA even recently led to criminal charges. Last month, Steven Brandenburg, a 46-year-old pharmacist from Grafton, Wisconsin, attempted to destroy more than 500 doses of coronavirus vaccine because he reportedly thought it could hurt people by changing their DNA," according to the detective who took his probable cause statement. Its unclear whether Brandenburg was directly exposed to Madejs content, but it doesnt matterher ideas are in the ether now, carried on the winds of right-wing social platforms and media.

Since being banned from YouTube, Madej has made her home on BitChute, where she has more than 2,000 subscribers. Shes on Parler, too, with 2,800 followers; she follows lawyer and Trump conspiracist Lin Wood, the Daily Caller, Breitbart, Ron and Rand Paul, and Bongino Report. And on Twitter, she emphasizes her medical credentials (her Twitter handle is @DrMadej and her avatar features her with a stethoscope around her neck) while encouraging her more than 26,000 followers to resist vaccination.

Our genome should not be played with like a Fisher-Price playset, she tweeted on Tuesday. Say No to being in these dangerous experiments. Say No to the Va$$i&e.

Her Instagram account with 6,500 followers is a constant feed of vaccine conspiracy theories. Alongside one meme showing The Munsters, with one normal, smiling blonde family member, is the caption, That one family member who refused the vaccine. She also once posted a screenshot of the CDCs tongue-in-cheek guide to zombie preparedness and asked with no apparent irony, Why is this on the CDC website?

Of course, Madej has chatted with Alex Jones, still the semi-tarnished king of conspiracy mongering, and he opened his interview by saluting her for her courage. Farther afield, shes appeared on the podcast of anti-vaxxer Robyn Openshaw. She joined Christian preacher Bradlee Dean, whom Popular Information calls a super-spreader of health misinformation, on Facebook Live, likely violating any number of Facebook rules while telling viewers that the coronavirus vaccine is also causing HIV. Bradlee Dean has almost 800,000 followers.

Madej is also a mutual Twitter follower of Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, the radical anti-vaxxer who has called out the impending transhumanist plot, saying Bill Gates is behind it all and is working toward blocking out the sun. Dr. Ben Tapper similarly trades on his medical authority, while telling his 15 thousand Twitter followers that the vaccine will change their DNA.

In other words, the belief in gene-altering, nanobot-spying, mind-controlling vaccines is now bigger than Madej, one of its earliest, most persuasive, and prominent proponents. And with people like her stoking paranoia, next time it might not be the Capitol thats besieged by angry MAGA-hat wearing believersbut a stockpile of life-saving vaccines instead.

Originally posted here:

The QAnon Doctor Pushing Wild Conspiracies About the COVID Vaccine - VICE