M.I.A. faces backlash for bizarre tweets about Alex Jones and COVID vaccines
'This is about as crazy as we should get before a nuclear war wipe out the human race,' singer tweeted
By Tomás Mier
M.I.A. has faced criticism after she decided to compare a conspiracy theorist lying about the massacre of innocent children to promoting the Covid vaccine.
On Wednesday, after a jury decided that Alex Jones will have to pay the families of the children who died at Sandy Hook Elementary School nearly $1 billion in damages after spreading lies that the shooting never happened, M.I.A. shared that celebrities, too, should pay for promoting vaccines.
“If Alex jones pays for lying shouldn’t every celebrity pushing vaccines pay too?” she tweeted.
To back her claim, the musician tweeted a screenshot of trending topics on Twitter, including one about the Pfizer vaccine that referred to a year-old Reuters fact check about the transmission of the virus while vaccinated.
“Alex jones lying and Pfizer lying both trending. One with penalty other without,” M.I.A. wrote. “If you have no critical thinking faculty, this is about as crazy as we should get before a nuclear war wipe out the human race.”
After the Sandy Hook massacre, where 26 people — including 20 children — were killed, Jones used his InfoWars platform to describe the shooting as a “hoax,” and claimed that the parents of the children were “crisis actors.”
A rep for M.I.A. did not immediately respond to Rolling Stone‘s request for comment.
The tweet from M.I.A. should come as no surprise as she revealed in March 2020 — as Covid roiled the United States — that she would be choosing not to get the vaccine, writing, “If I have to choose the vaccine or chip I’m gonna choose death.”
Shortly after that tweet, she claimed British Vogue had decided to pull a feature on her due to her comments about the virus. “Anti vaxer [sic] is your term. It didn’t exist before this binary addiction everyone has to separate everything into this and that,” she wrote on Instagram in April 2020. “Anti this anti that. I prefer to not make everything so black and white.”
She’s also set to release her album MATA, which features singles “Beep” and “Popular,” on Friday.