The plot for the 2007 post-apocalyptic “zombie” film I Am Legend is pretty straightforward. In the movie, Will Smith plays a pathologist named Robert Neville who attempts to create a cure for cancer by re-engineering the highly contagious measles virus. Instead, the experiment goes horribly wrong and large swaths of the Earth’s population are turned into sunlight-allergic mutant cannibals who almost wipe out all of humanity until Neville successfully finds a cure in the film’s climactic ending.
For the record, I Am Legend is clearly a work of fiction. We’re talking about a basically impossible scientific feat, just going off of the premise of curing cancer with measles. Add zombies into the mix, and we’re completely in the realm of science fiction here. More importantly, at absolutely no point in I Am Legend is a “vaccine” the cause of the zombie apocalypse, and yet, that is one of the reasons why people on social media are advising others against getting the COVID shot. It’s tempting to say something like “You cannot make this stuff up,” except for the part where some people apparently can. And, for some reason, did.
In a New York Times report on an optical business that’s struggling to encourage its employees to get vaccinated, one of the workers reportedly cited a social media post on the “vaccine” in I Am Legend as a reason to abstain from the shot:
One employee said she was concerned because she thought a vaccine had caused the characters in the film “I Am Legend” to turn into zombies. People opposed to vaccines have circulated that claim about the movie’s plot widely on social media. But the plague that turned people into zombies in the movie was caused by a genetically reprogrammed virus, not by a vaccine.
As of this writing, 166.7 million Americans have been fully vaccinated, according to the CDC. Not one of them has turned into a mutant zombie that’s allergic to the sun or tried to eat Will Smith. Get the jab.
(Via New York Times)
