My Auntie Spread Anti-Vax Misinformation

Here's why I'm leaving her alone about that after digging up the truth

Dec 21, 2023

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Picture in your head a beauty queen riding a horse. The horse is riding faster than you’re imagining, though, even in the small arena, and even so the rider is calmly waving to the cheering crowd. She appears calmer, more self-possessed, and fluid than all the rodeo queens visiting from other towns. That she is lovelier than a 1940s Hollywood starlet seemed not exactly beside the point but also not the main point of her power. This is my Auntie Kanoe (kuh-NOY) in 1980. I was a 10-year-old boy, and she was the rodeo queen in Sisters, Oregon.

She has always been a star to me. My grandparents’ house was overfilled with cups and trophies and ribbons, mostly blue, that she won at horse shows all up and down the west coast. According to family lore, the only reason she was not a two-time rodeo queen is that she refused the entreaties of the town fathers to occupy the post on a more permanent basis. I grew up surrounded by evidence that she was the absolute queen of all horses. It has never occurred to me that a man could do anything in a saddle better than she could.

Because I love her, I don’t comment on her posts about politics.

These days she gets paid to train horses, not to wave from them, and she’s married – happily, this time – to the artist who paints the poster for the town’s rodeo every year. I don’t like talking on the phone and visit so rarely that we mostly keep up on social media, commenting on and liking each other’s posts. Hers are mostly about horses, or her dogs, or Jesus, and sometimes politics. And because I love her, I don’t comment on her posts about politics.

The other day, though, she posted a link to a story from a Substack writer who billed himself as a “pro-freedom citizen journalist” but did not share his name. The post had a picture of a young man with a neat beard over a background of police tape, and the headline read, “Italian Health Minister Under Investigation for Concealing COVID-19 Vaccine Deaths.” My Auntie, whom I love, added one word of commentary: “Wow.”

To be fair, that would be my reaction if this were true as well. I try to keep myself open to all manner of remarkable improbabilities in this world, chief among which are that I am sometimes wrong. And just because some people I don’t agree with politically have politicized this public health issue doesn’t excuse me from doing so from the other side, so, what the hell, I clicked.

“Former Italian Health Minister Roberto Speranza is under investigation for homicide after emails reveal that from the very start of the vaccinations, he knew the shots were killing people and gave orders to local health authorities to conceal deaths and serious side effects in order to reassure Italian citizens of their safety and to not jeopardize the vaccination campaign,” reported InfoWars contributor Greg Reese in viral X post shared by Alex Jones.

Yes, that Alex Jones.

Yes, that Alex Jones, the guy who pushed a painful lie that the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting was a ruse to hasten tyrannical limits on gun ownership. The same Alex Jones who lost a massive $1.5 billion lawsuit brought by the parents of those very-real children who were killed. The same Alex Jones who spread medically dangerous rumors, false narratives, and – I mean, let’s just call them lies – about the coronavirus. The same Alex Jones who Elon Musk just reinstated on the anti-social media platform, which is where he pushed this remarkable claim: “Italian Health Minister Gave Orders To Conceal Vaccination Deaths – Now Under Investigation For Murder.”

There is a limit to how much rope I’ll use to hang myself. If I’m giving the benefit of the doubt to news endorsed by Alex Jones, then I’d expect men in white coats come to fetch me soon. But let’s put a pin in that for a second, because as much as Alex Jones’ presence on stage means we’re attending a farce, we’re still seeing words such as “health minister” and “investigation for murder” that don’t sound like fiction. Alex Jones said Sandy Hook was a false flag operation, but that didn’t mean there was never a Sandy Hook Elementary. As sure as I was that the vaccines are safe and that Alex Jones is a professional liar, I suspected there had to be an original truth that had ended up twisted on my Auntie’s Facebook page.

***

I don’t trust people who say they don’t have regrets. Among mine is this: On the morning of Kanoe’s second wedding day, I asked her to iron my shirt. Kanoe did not have to say anything. When she thinks you’re being an abject idiot, she raises one eyebrow. She looked immaculate, and that eyebrow, raised from such a height, cut me to the quick. But she stayed with me in the laundry room as I ironed the shirt that I would wear to witness her wedding to a man who later proved unworthy of this domestic chore, let along my beloved Auntie.

But we did not know that then. I asked if she had any advice on the subject of marriage, what with her on the cusp of becoming a repeat customer.

“Marriage is the best thing,” she said, “and the hardest thing.”

“Marriage is the best thing, and the hardest thing.”

I thought I understood then what she meant. I did not. Now, I think I do. Kant had to look at the overwhelming might of nature to see the sublime. My Auntie Kanoe knew better.

***

In her acclaimed Easy Beauty: A Memoir, Chloé Cooper Jones described losing her preschool-aged son in Torqued Ellipses, an installation of sculptures by Richard Serra. The cylindrical sculptures are too large to see over, through, or around; you have to walk among them, as if in a garden where what you see depends on where you stand. Serra says the installation draws from the Japanese concept ma in which the space between things is as important as the things themselves. In this way the sculptures aren’t the big metal things but the spaces between them. In case I haven’t made this obvious enough, the art is the relationships between two points that force you consider different perspectives.

Richard Serra | Torqued Ellipse | The Guggenheim Museums and Foundation

***

The truth of what happened is not as interesting as how it got twisted. Roberto Speranza was the Italian Minister of Health from September 2019 to October 2022. In February 2020, Italy was the epicenter of the epidemic. And on February 22, the Italian government attempted to contain the contagion by canceling public activities – work, school, sports, travel – and quarantining 50,000 people in Northern Italy. It did not work, and as the coronavirus spread so did the quarantine until all 60 million people in Italy were locked down on March 8. Three days later, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic.

Speranza had failed, and the families of those who as-yet unquarantined hotspots drove prosecutors to open a criminal inquiry into public health officials who, they argued, could have saved 4,000 lives if they had closed things down sooner. And in March 2023, Esperanza and 16 others, including a former prime minister, were placed under investigation for suspicion of “aggravated culpable epidemic” and manslaughter — not because they hid deaths due to the COVID-19 vaccination, but because they were not more aggressive in locking down Italy.

The truth of what happened is not as interesting as how it got twisted.

In June, an Italian court dismissed the charges, saying “There is no evidence of the connection between the dead and the failure to extend the red zone.” Besides, noted the court, “Speranza has adopted the health measures proposed to him by experts – measures which, moreover, at European level, have been among the most restrictive.”

This was reported widely in respectable publications, and not just in Italy. The Guardian covered it, as did the Australian Broadcasting Company, Yahoo!, and Politico EU. American papers avoided it, focusing more on the debt ceiling crisis, Donald Trump’s indictment in the classified documents case, and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s impeachment for random acts of corruption.

***

In November, a conservative Italian newspaper resurfaced the criminal accusations against Speranza, losing something in the retelling. Instead of being criticized for not locking a hot spot down quickly enough, this time he was supposedly under investigation for lying about deaths from the COVID-19 vaccine, of which there have been zero.1

Facts did not get in the way of Greg Reese, author of the self-published Sex Drugs and Om: An Autobiography of an American Yogi and “one of the most trusted journalists of the post Wikileaks2 era,” according to his own website that claims he has “created a new form of journalism with his short videos” that appear on Jones’ InfoWars website. Why just the previous month, Reese did a video questioning the Holocaust, which Jones said “needs to go viral.”

On Dec. 12, Reese did the video on Speranza, claiming, “He knew the shots were killing people and gave orders to local health authorities to conceal deaths and serious side effects.” Later that morning, Alex Jones boosted Reese’s report to his 1.8 million followers on X two days after Elon Musk reinstated him onto the platform. The Vigilant Fox, who bills himself anonymously as a “pro-freedom citizen journalist,” reported this as news on his site, the Vigilant Fox. Later that, afternoon, my Auntie Kanoe posted it on her Facebook page with only the one word of commentary: “Wow.”

***

When I was in college, Kanoe went to culinary school to reinvent herself. When she got a job at a casual restaurant named Honkers near home Central Oregon, she gave me a summer job. Everything about it was great except for the fact that she made us answer the phone, “Honk, honk. May I help you?” Someone named Wally was hired, too, but never showed up, so I wore his name tag and created a secret Wally menu that was popular with the lifeguards. When I walked into parties that summer, people yelled, “Wally!”3

That summer was significant for reasons other than me creating a celebrated persona based on remarkable achievements with frozen yogurt. (Seriously, people still talk about the Wally Cone, and by “people” I do not only mean me but mostly do.) She quickly realized that she didn't want a future in food service, and let’s just say that customer service was not a core competence of mine. For me, it was a summer job. For her, that summer was professional limbo. We marked that time together, and we became each other’s people.

Time passed. I got caught up in starting a family and a business, then holding the business together and raising my sons during a divorce, and then starting a new marriage, thankfully more successfully. Kanoe got into training horses, and to no one’s surprise she’s quite good at it. She also got happily married to a quiet artist who used to be a Gold Gloves boxer. They’ve got a small place in Sisters, and I can never tell from Facebook exactly how many square-headed and extremely adorable dogs they have at any one time.

I can, however, tell what political positions she holds, none of which we share in common. Back when I used to post my political opinions more often on social media, hers used to make me upset. I felt estranged from her and wondered what information she needed to bring her out of the wilderness and back into the light.

More time passed, and now I’m as bored of my own opinions as I am doubtful that they have any effect on the world. There are things I do that play a role, sure, but I doubt if my pontification on the absurdity of certain politicians would ever convince them to be less absurd or their acolytes to support them less. And I have years of evidence to back me up on this.

“Wally!”

When I decided to write about the spread of this ant-vax misinformation, I knew I had to include where I found it, which begs the question: Did I need to convince my Auntie that she was wrong?

I don’t think so. I have more boosters than a rocket ship, and despite seeing her article, I’ll get as many more as the CDC and Walgreens tell me to. And I’ll get the flu shot every year and whatever else they tell me to do because being a doctor is their job. Being a good American is my job.

But I did need to call her, because my obligation is not to correct her opinions but to maintain the relationship. It was the first time in a few years that I’d heard her voice. After assuring her that I wasn’t calling to tell her she was wrong or to try to change her mind, I explained how she ended up with an article saying pretty much the opposite of what happened.

She laughed — she has a bright, happy chuckle — and said, “Everybody has an opinion” before talking about how vaccines have caused all sorts of problems and are ruining people’s immune systems. And I didn’t mind so much, because she sounded happy. Not about the immune systems, mind you, but her life. She sounded like the sun was shining in a clear blue sky and there was fresh snow on the pasture. She’s found a great partner and an undetermined number of dogs. What good would come of trying to change her mind, which would be tantamount to picking a fight.

Besides, reality doesn’t care about her opinion or mine. Her believing vaccines kill people won’t prevent vaccines from saving lives, and her spreading misinformation probably won’t change anyone’s mind. It certainly didn’t change mine.

I don’t know if I did the right thing in not picking that fight, and if something happens to her because she didn’t get vaccinated I know I’ll never forgive myself. But I’m beginning to suspect that the important thing isn’t her position or mine or having a pitched battle over who is right. Maybe the real thing is the space between our positions, that is, maintaining a relationship. We haven’t always held these political positions, but ever since she brought candy cigars to the fourth grade to celebrate when I was born, she’s been my Auntie. And I think that’s more important than what I think she’s wrong about.

Jason Stanford is a co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. Follow him on Threads at @jasonstanford, or email him at jason31170@gmail.com.