Screenwriter Forced to Tell Anti-Vaxxers ‘I Am Legend’ is Fake

The screenwriter who penned the 2007 zombie film I Am Legend starring Will Smith has been pressured to make clear one thing on Twitter that’s positive to make us all depressed at present. The author, Akiva Goldsman, needed to clarify that I Am Legend is, in actual fact, fiction. It’s not a documentary about zombies or one thing like that.

“Oh. My. God. It’s a movie. I made that up. It’s. Not. Real,” Goldsman tweeted Monday night.

Why on Earth would Goldsman really feel the necessity to make clear one thing so apparent? It would seem that anti-vaccination advocates who’re campaigning towards covid-19 vaccines have turned I Am Legend into a meme.

The meme incorrectly asserts that zombies have been created within the film from a vaccination program gone awry, as if that might have some relevance to the real-world covid-19 pandemic which has sickened at the least 203 million folks globally and killed 4.3 million.

A report from the New York Times about one one that believed the meme is perhaps actual went viral, and included arguably one of many weirdest explanations within the paper’s historical past:

One worker mentioned she was involved as a result of she thought a vaccine had brought on the characters within the movie I Am Legend to show into zombies. But the plague that turned folks into zombies within the film was attributable to a genetically reprogrammed virus, not by a vaccine.

But that is removed from the primary time that the film has come up in mainstream information reporting about resistance to the covid-19 vaccine. The Washington Post included the same anecdote from an anti-vaxxer back in May.

Simmons, a Democrat, informed The Post that she had been haunted by a 2007 horror film, “I Am Legend,” which starred actor Will Smith. That movie depicts a botched most cancers treatment that kills most individuals and transforms the survivors into monsters — and Simmons mentioned the picture ran via her head final yr as she heard concerning the speedy improvement of the coronavirus vaccines.

“I love that movie, for all kinds of reasons. But that was kind of scary. Don’t want to be a zombie,” Simmons mentioned.

If that is all too miserable to consider, simply keep in mind that the quantity of people that suppose I Am Legend is actual might be small. But not sufficiently small for it to resonate within the broader anti-vaccine group.

Meanwhile, the U.S. is experiencing a troubling surge in covid-19 circumstances because the extremely infectious delta variant of the virus makes its approach via the unvaccinated inhabitants. The seven-day common of recent circumstances within the U.S. is presently greater than 124,000 circumstances every day, the very best since early February.

Hospitals in Mississippi and Texas are operating out of ICU beds and the Governor of Texas has even requested hospitals on Monday to voluntarily delay non-emergency surgical procedures to make room for covid-19 sufferers. That governor, Greg Abbott, has been actively hostile to any measures to mitigate unfold of the virus.

Many anti-vaccine idiots insist that taking the covid-19 vaccine is all about private decisions. But as loads of folks have identified, these private decisions ripple via society. If you reside in locations like Austin, Texas or Jackson, Mississippi, right here’s hoping you don’t want medical care this month. All these “personal choices” by the unvaccinated are presently taking over life-saving beds.