How does one trace rumor originators?

[SujiwanKenobee]

My 62 year old brother is an OH evangelical, Trumpist believer who refuses to get any covid shot. He's just going to pray about it according to family. The rest of related nuclear family are not evangelicals and live in the south, but all got the shot . They are all Democrats. This brother is an outlier from everyone else and seems to be getting increasingly strident and cannot be dissuaded by anything that is presented by science/logic/CDC/Fauci. He says he "does not trust" those sources. The last was that having a covid shot would affect menstrual cycles. So, he's a man but is concerned that he will magically affect the menses of other women by being in their presence after getting the shot and of course he wouldn't want his daughter or wife to get it either as a result.

I searched with keywords to find who came up with this thinking and did not find the scientist's name but general info that this rumor was the result of some conjecture by a : "German epidemiologist said the COVID-19 vaccines might make women’s bodies reject a protein that’s connected to placenta, therefore making women infertile. He thought this because the genetic code of the placenta protein, called syncytin-1, shares a hint of similarity with the genetic code of the spike protein in COVID-19. This, however, was a theoretical risk that was completely disproven in the clinical trials and continues to be disproven in real time as more women of child-bearing age become fully vaccinated.
“It’s inaccurate to say that COVID-19’s spike protein and this placenta protein share a similar genetic code,” says D’Angela Pitts, M.D., a maternal fetal medicine specialist with Henry Ford Health System. “The proteins are not similar enough to cause placenta to not attach to an embryo.”

Who is actively searching for and spreading the initial disproven finding and making these things viral? Is there a way to shine light on these people or groups? Is it foreign disinfo? I would really like to actively become involved in exposing and stopping rumors in some way before they get spread so widely. Is there anyway to do that?

[jmbar2]

1. That's a really interesting question

I did a search on "covid vaccine pregnancy rumor source", and found several articles debunking the rumor, but no source yet. Facebook is a major disseminator of the rumor, with multiple sources.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-04-01/covid-vaccine-and-fertility-facebook-s-platform-is-letting-fake-news-go-viral

I'd do another search to see if it's traced back to Russia or China. It would be much easier for them to defeat us if they could just convince a key percentage of the population to jump off cliffs voluntarily.

[mopinko]

2. snopes is always a good start.

i dont know how good wiki is on stuff like that, but i use them a lot, too.
they're been shown to be pretty accurate for science type stuff.

[Chainfire]

3. Related anecdote

Several years ago, when involved in a long-winded, discussion on a forum about the curious, nasty, sticky, orange grease that the Warsaw Pact nations used for long-term protection of WWII metal items, (similar to the American preservative known as Cosmoline) I thought that the subject had gone off the deep end, so I made a very tongue-in-cheek reply on the subject.

I suggested that I had some evidence that the protective grease-like material was actually ear wax. I went into a long discussion about how, in the war-time Soviet Union, petroleum based product was so scarce, that the government sent teams unit to unit, on a regular basis, to collect ear wax from Soviet soldiers that they then processed into a metal preservative. I probably went on for several paragraphs as I can sometimes be a bit long-winded when I am being sarcastic.

So, I made my post, had my little chuckle and forgot about it.

Two years later, on a different forum, a similar discussion arose, and low and behold if a poster didn't mention that he had read that the preservatives found on Soviet surplus firearms was actually ear wax.....

That is how easy it is to get false, even ludicrous rumors, started on the world wide web.

[Klaralven]

4. You missed an opportunity. You should have said it was earwax from Gulag prisoners.

It would have then been in propagandists' interest to amplify and spread the ludicrous rumor.

The false rumors that propagate best are those that align with some faction's interest.

[Bev54]

5. Tell him that there is some research out there

that shows by getting covid it can reduce his sperm count and cause infertility as well as erectile dysfunction in men. So his problems would be so much more if he gets the illness rather than the vaccine.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/victoriaforster/2020/11/15/covid-19-compromises-sperm-count-and-quality-in-recovering-patients

https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20210407/erectile-dysfunction-risk-6-times-higher-in-men-with-covid#:~:text=April%207%2C%202021%20%2D%2D%20COVID,in%20a%20real%2Dlife%20setting.