RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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There is no evidence to support the claim that Parton’s death had anything to do with the vaccine. Parton, 80, died after “a short battle with cancer,” her family said in a statement. In May, Parton shared that she was responding well to treatment related to her immune system and digestive system.
In 2020, the singer donated $1 million to fund research in support of the vaccine. The following year, she filmed herself getting the vaccine, singing an adapted version of her hit song Jolene before receiving the shot. “Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, I'm begging of you, please don't hesitate," Parton sang in a video.
Now, a number of influential right-wing conspiracy theorists and MAGA-aligned pundits have spent the past few days claiming—or, in many cases, suggesting—that the vaccine killed Parton.
“Was Dolly Parton yet another Covid vaccine victim?” far-right radio host Wayne Allyn Root, who recently interviewed President Donald Trump on his show, wrote on X. "She took the vaxx on TV. She changed the name of her hit song 'Jolene Jolene' to 'Vaccine, Vaccine.' She encouraged fans to get it. Now she's dead of cancer. This sounds like another case of 'turbo cancer. RIP Dolly.” (Earlier this month, Root urged Trump to declare a national emergency during the midterms when he had the president on his show. “Let me just say, stranger things have happened, OK?” Trump responded.)
“Dolly Parton thought she was doing the right thing by backing the Moderna mRNA Covid shot,” Toby Rogers, who works with the Brownstone Institute, a think tank founded to oppose Covid restrictions and which has deep ties to the Trump administration, wrote on X. “But it very well may have killed her.” The Brownstone Institute was founded by Jeffrey Tucker, a close ally of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has long undermined trust in a variety of vaccines.
While Kennedy has not commented publicly on Parton’s death, he has spent recent days blaming the Covid lockdowns for measles-related deaths, after the measles-related deaths of two unvaccinated people in Pennsylvania this week.
Valerie Anne Smith, a health influencer with 273,000 followers on X, shared multiple posts about Parton’s death, all of them suggesting that the Covid-19 vaccine was the cause of her death.
“Soon after being injected she developed severe autoimmune, liver and kidney issues,” Smith wrote. “Cause of death ... CANCER.”
“Dolly Parton was as universally beloved as a person can be,” Travis View, cohost of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, tells WIRED. “That’s exactly what made her a target for conspiracists online. Many anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists despised Parton because she not only encouraged others to get the vaccine, she even helped fund vaccine development.”
The conspiracy theories were not limited to X. Facebook was also flooded with wild allegations about Parton’s death, none of which provided any evidence to back up their claims.
One of the most popular themes focused on a video Parton made just weeks before her death in which she thanked pop star Taylor Swift and her husband, NFL star Travis Kelce, for their $2 million donation to Imagination Library, Parton’s childhood literacy charity. She jokingly also asked the couple if she could have their “firstborn” child.
The conspiracy theories focused on a brief moment in the video when Parton was moving her hands. Some social media users claimed that if paused, the video showed her making a “devil horns,” sign. The still image has been posted dozens of times on Facebook in recent days, garnering tens of thousands of likes and shares.
“Nothing to see here, folks, just Dolly Parton—the same woman who dropped $1 million to help fund the Moderna Covid vaccine—flashing devil horns while casually demanding Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s firstborn child,” an anonymous X account named Red Pill USA wrote, adding: “It’s a big Satanic club … and you ain’t in it.” The post has been viewed almost 1 million times.
On YouTube, conspiracy theorist David Nino Rodriguez, who has 613,000 followers, also referenced the Taylor Swift video and dedicated his show on Wednesday to claims that Parton’s death had been prophesied, and that it was a “marker for what comes next.”
“Some of these theories came specifically from her advocacy for the Covid vaccine and gay rights, and they're pretty rare when balanced with the outpouring of love,” Mike Rothschild, an author who writes about conspiracy theories, tells WIRED. “But a lot of what was said about Dolly was just standard-issue brain rot. There is a small part of the internet that now believes nobody dies without some involvement from the Covid vaccine, trafficking, or Satanism.”
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