A woman from one of the Bay Area's most highly vaccinated cities against COVID-19 admitted she is operating a prominent, misleading anti-vaccine website.
Piedmont resident Liz Willner, 55, told Logically, a tracker of online misinformation that utilizes artificial intelligence and machine learning, in a story published Thursday she is part of a "team" behind OpenVAERS, a popular anti-vaccine website that misrepresents federal data on the potential adverse effects of vaccination.
Willner’s site has contributed to the spread of vaccine misinformation online, all as she resides in a city that is highly vaccinated against COVID-19. Nearly 87% of Piedmont residents aged 12 or older have been fully vaccinated, according to Alameda County data.
Piedmont’s vaccination rate is higher than any other city in the county, which has fuly vaccinated almost 73% of eligible residents.
OpenVAERS pulls raw, unverified data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (or, VAERS, which is co-managed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.) and presents it as fact in an aesthetic which looks friendly and official enough to share on social media.
Until Logically and VICE News reported on Willner and the site this week, it also didn’t include the Health and Human Services disclaimer that VAERS data "may contain information that is incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental (or) unverifiable."
"The point of the data is to be used by a wide range of scholars and to be accessible to the general public," Willner told Logically. "At no point have we ever taken data out of context. We have used the data exactly as it was intended to be used."
VAERS' guide for interpreting its data says no causal relationship has been established with its data. OpenVAERS, until it linked to the Health and Human Services disclaimer, made no such distinction, presenting that same data as if there is a causal relationship between, say, the thousands of people the site claims have died after taking the COVID-19 vaccine.
Over the last six months, OpenVAERS has had about 1.5 times as much web traffic (1.23 million visitors, according to Logically researchers) as the VAERS site (about 800,000). Traffic actually increased in July, as the COVID-19 delta variant started to take root in the U.S. and vaccination rates around the country began plateauing. Screenshots have also become increasingly common on social media platforms, including Twitter and TikTok.
Willner has been an anti-vaccine advocate since 2019, after she said her child was injured after being vaccinated. She vocally opposed a California law later that year that tightened possible vaccine exemptions for children, and Willner launched OpenVAERS as its own website in January.
Logically researchers determined Willner, who has a background in web design, was the site’s administrator through the records of web domains connected to The Arkvist, OpenVAERS' original home until it spun off as its own website in January, and an anonymous Twitter account that shared anti-vaccine misinformation.
That account consistently linked to the two websites. It also once quoted Willner in responding to a news report on the aforementioned state law.
Willner told Logically she is not the site's only operator, claiming it's "the work of many people."
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