Someone please fetch the fire hose as we need to hose down another COVID-19 conspiracist, this time an Iranian cleric who has warned his followers that taking the COVID-19 vaccine has turned people into raging homosexuals.
Of course, there is simply no scientific evidence to support such claims, but this wasn’t enough to stop Ayatollah Abbas Tabrizian of Qom – the city which is at the epicentre of the country’s COVID-19 outbreak – from taking to the instant messaging platform Telegram, to warn others “to not go near those who have had the COVID vaccine as they have become homosexuals.”
Tabrizian in his absurd claims follows in the footsteps of other religious leaders, including Israeli Rabbi Daniel Asor who last month also claimed that the COVID-19 vaccine turned people gay.
Having long been a denier of western science and medicine, in 2020 Ayatollah Abbas Tabrizian burnt at copy of Harrison’s Manual of Medicine in a viral video shown to his more than 200,000 followers on social media.
A BBC investigation, concluded in August last year, found that deaths from coronavirus in Iran were nearly triple what Iran’s government had claimed. So far the country has had more than 1.5 million cases of the virus, and each day, is edging closer still to 60,000 causalities, with the countries health system overwhelmed and at breaking point.
Read the article by Jessi Lewis in Star Observer.