Senator Gerard Craughwell has told Gript he was “rather shocked” to learn that the HSE had reported a video of the Senator, speaking in the Seanad, as misinformation.
It appears the HSE flagged the video as part of its policy of reporting social media posts that the HSE believes “are potentially harmful to people’s health or contain deliberate misinformation.”
The video in question shows the Senator speaking about the risk of blood clotting from the AstraZeneca vaccine, a risk which the European Medicines Agency (EMA) confirmed was real in April of this year when they found it was a “very rare side effect” of the vaccine.
The Senator said that this risk, combined with a policy under which older people were told they had to take the AstraZeneca vaccine or “go to the back of the que”, was causing anxiety and fear amongst older people.
Whilst the tweet containing the video has not been removed from Twitter, it does now carry a warning that it is misleading, and most of the ways to interact with the Tweet have been disabled.
Senator Craughwell told Gript that “I simply spoke of my own fears and the fears of many of my age group surrounding the AstraZeneca vaccine.” The Senator said he was “a supporter of the vaccination programme”, but that “I would be lying if I said that I was happy about the way people over 60 were treated.”
Sen. Gerard Craughwell describes his fear at feeling forced to take the AstraZeneca jab due to his history of heart problems and the vaccines known side effect of sometimes causing serious blood clots. #CovidVaccine #astrazeneca #Covid19ireland pic.twitter.com/Gz2WcyjmOo
— JRD (@JRD0000) April 23, 2021
We asked the HSE if it had any comment to make on why a video of a sitting Irish parliamentarian, speaking in the Seanad in an official capacity, was flagged by the HSE as containing harmful misinformation, despite the fact it only contained concerns which were deemed to be valid by the EMA, but we have yet to receive a response.