Anti-vax activist claims COVID-19 vaccines cause AIDS

Right-wing anti-vax activist Dr. Sherri Tenpenny was ridiculed for her statements

Published April 3, 2022 4:00AM (EDT)

Close up of a Pfizer booster vaccine on the day that the vaccination campaign with Pfizer's third booster shot has started on October 6, 2021 in Utrecht, Netherlands. (Patrick van Katwijk/BSR Agency/Getty Images)
Close up of a Pfizer booster vaccine on the day that the vaccination campaign with Pfizer's third booster shot has started on October 6, 2021 in Utrecht, Netherlands. (Patrick van Katwijk/BSR Agency/Getty Images)

This article originally appeared on AlterNet.

Right-wing anti-vax activist Dr. Sherri Tenpenny recently proclaimed that recipients of the COVID-19 vaccine will develop an AIDS-like illness sometime in 2022. Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome is the fatal late-stage complication from untreated Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) infection, which attacks the immune system over time.

Tenpenny – who was banned from Twitter last summer for peddling vaccine misinformation – cited a debunked Exposé story that circulated earlier this year on Facebook which claimed that the German government had conducted a study that determined that coronavirus inoculations lead to AIDS. It did not.

This was not the first time that Tenpenny, a licensed osteopathic physician from Cleveland, Ohio, has promoted such a bizarre conspiracy theory. In January, Tenpenny asserted that coronavirus vaccines "are creating 'quantum entanglement' between those who take them and 'the Google credit scores and the dematrix and all of those things.'"

She was also busted a year ago for teaching an online "COVID-19 conspiracy 'boot camp'" on "how to target vaccine-hesitant" people as well as the "potential hacking of vaccine passports," according to a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation report.

Nevertheless, there is no evidence that COVID-19 vaccines cause AIDS. But that has not stopped Tenpenny from promulgating the lie.

"The more shots you get, the more – the more you destroy your immune system and the faster that happens. And it's anticipated, the German data says, that by the end of 2022, every fully vaccinated person over the age of 30 may have the equivalent of full-blown vaccine-induced immune-suppressed AIDS," said Tenpenny, who in November admitted to traveling on airplanes while displaying COVID-19 symptoms.


By Brandon Gage

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Aids Alternet Covid Partner Sherri Tenpenny