Tuesday, December 28, 2021

Candace Owens claims Trump supports COVID vaccines because he's 'old' and 'came from a time before TV'


Peter Weber, Senior editor
Mon, December 27, 2021

Candace Owens
 Jason Davis/Getty Images

Conservative millennial commentator Candace Owens spent Christmas weekend arguing on Twitter with less-conservative millennial commentator Meghan McCain over an interview Owens conducted with former President Donald Trump last week. In the interview, Trump stood up for the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines after Owens suggested they didn't work.

The Owens-McCain spat quickly devolved into personal insults — McCain called Owens an "anti-vaxxer," and Owens called McCain fat — but Owens used subtler means to dismiss Trump's vaccine boosterism, arguing he's "too old" to find the "obscure websites" where people do their own research on the vaccines.

"People oftentimes forget that, like, how old Trump is," Owens said on an Instagram Live post Thursday night. "He comes from a generation — I've seen other people that are older have the exact same perspective, like, they came from a time before TV, before internet, before being able to conduct their independent research." Trump, who famously had his own reality TV show, never lived in "a time before TV," but he also doesn't use a computer.

Trump's vaccine support isn't "evil" or "based in any corruption," Owens told her followers, but "he needs to have a larger conversation to understand what's going on and why so many people are horrified by his remarks."

In the same Instagram broadcast, Owens talked up colloidal silver as one way to ward off the coronavirus, telling one follower she takes a "teaspoon a day" or "more when I'm sick." Colloidal silver "has no valid medical purpose and plenty of potential dangers," including organ failure in extreme circumstances, The Daily Beast notes, citing the Mayo Clinic. "But colloidal silver's most famous side effect is argyria — a condition that turns users' skin a bluish-gray color, usually permanently."

"In the year since the first shots began going into arms, opposition to vaccines has hardened from skepticism and wariness into something approaching an article of faith for the approximately 39 million American adults who have yet to get a single dose," The New York Times reports. "Unvaccinated Americans this year have made up the vast majority of severe cases and deaths from the virus," and "health experts say the roughly 15 percent of the adult population that remains stubbornly unvaccinated is at the greatest risk of severe illness and death from the Omicron variant."

OH WODE IS THEE
Candace Owens Tells Fans to Take Quack Cure That Turns Skin Blue

Will Sommer
Sun, December 26, 2021

Jason Kempin/Getty

Right-wing personality Candace Owens is urging her fans to consume a quack medical cure known for turning users’ skin blue.

In an Instagram video posted on Thursday, Owens praised the use of colloidal silver as a daily supplement, a treatment that comes with no valid medical use and plenty of health risks.

“Yes, colloidal silver!” Owens said in the video. “I take colloidal silver every single day, I love colloidal silver. That is a great one. That is another one that people probably know nothing about.”

While Owens and others have praised preventative use of colloidal silver as a way to stave off illness, colloidal silver has no valid medical purpose and plenty of potential dangers. In extreme cases, according to the Mayo Clinic, colloidal silver can cause seizure or organ problems.

Owens didn’t respond to a request for comment.

But colloidal silver’s most famous side effect is argyria—a condition that turns users’ skin a bluish-gray color, usually permanently. Despite those risks, colloidal silver has sometimes been embraced by political outsiders, including some libertarians seeking treatments for a variety of illnesses outside the medical system. Montana Libertarian politician Stan Jones, for example, turned his skin blue by consuming colloidal silver.

Owens laid out her colloidal silver regimen in a follow-up Instagram comment to a fan asking for more information about colloidal silver, claiming she takes a “teaspoon a day” and “more when I’m sick” in a post first highlighted by liberal activist William LeGate.

As little as that one teaspoon of silver a day could be enough to cause argyria, depending on the concentration of the silver solution. According to medical research, a 56-year-old man who took a teaspoon every day for “allergy and cold medication” noticed that his fingernails were turning blue.

Owens isn’t the only far-right figure to endorse silver as a fringe medical cure. In 2020, the FDA warned InfoWars chief Alex Jones to stop promising that silver toothpaste and other silver products sold on his website could prevent or treat the coronavirus.

Fake Utah Doc Peddled ‘Ingestible Silver’ as a Bogus COVID Cure: Feds

Owens’s pro-colloidal silver video came days after a disastrous interview where Owens, who works for conservative commentator Ben Shapiro’s The Daily Wire, interviewed former President Donald Trump. In a surprise move, Trump rebuffed Owens’ criticism of the coronavirus vaccines, praising the vaccines’ results as “very good.”

In the same video in which she praised colloidal silver, Owens downplayed Trump’s support for the vaccines, claiming Trump is “too old” to read anti-vaccine information on the internet. She also attacked vaccinations more broadly, claiming, among other things, that there’s “real evil” behind tetanus shots.

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