Thomas claims that COVID vaccines were developed with the use of "aborted children." [View all]

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Mark Joseph Stern @mjs_DC

In his dissent, Thomas claims that COVID vaccines were developed with the use of "aborted children." https://supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/21-1143_3f14.pdf

9:53 AM · Jun 30, 2022

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Brooke Binkowski @brooklynmarie

This is a heavily weaponized antisemitic narrative that has no basis in reality. It's part of the reworked Doctor's Plot conspiracy theory that the far right has taken to with such enthusiasm. People who put disinformation into the record have no business on the Supreme Court.

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Brooke Binkowski @brooklynmarie

Here's my article on this particular conspiracy theory.

https://www.truthorfiction.com/anti-vaccine-disinformation-campaign-echoes-doctors-plot-rhetoric/

...The darkly speculative narratives of shadowy medical practitioners lying to the public so that they can do nonspecific (but always evil and frightening) things is reminiscent of the Soviet “Doctor’s Plot” of 1953, detailed here in a 2002 article in BMJ:

In general [Joseph] Stalin severely mistrusted doctors—whatever their nationality. In his memoirs Dmitri Shostakovich tells the tale of Vladimir Bekhterev, a world renowned psychiatrist who at 70 was summoned to assess Stalin’s mental condition.9 The good doctor described him as ill, perhaps even paranoid. And how right he was. Bekhterev died immediately afterwards—poisoned by Stalin.

But Stalin’s special hatred was reserved for Jewish doctors. Although in the last decades of Tsarist rule Jews were restricted from owning land and excluded from most other professions, they had indeed entered medicine in numbers far out of proportion to their small percentage in the overall population.6 So when Stalin decided to resolve the Soviet Union’s “Jewish problem,” it made perfect sense to open the campaign with a show trial against a group of (mainly Jewish) doctors who were often branded “Zionists” or agents of the “Joint” (an international Jewish charitable organisation).