The sister of a young woman whose death has been wrongfully associated with the Covid-19 vaccine and used to push an anti-vaccine narrative has criticised those “degrading her memory.”
Nicole Cahill (22) died in March this year after suffering with health problems for many years.
But within two days of her funeral, her family became aware of social media posts wrongly linking her death to the Covid-19 vaccine.
“It wasn't even two days after she died, that the first post had gone up,” her sister Debra told RTÉ’s Liveline.
The initial post was a screenshot from RIP.ie of her sister’s death notice and a picture of her vaccine card with the text “another young life gone from the vaccine.”
“Having to go on to social media when you've been grieving and having to see that, it’s not fair on the family, especially when it was coming for people who hadn’t a clue who Nicole was,” she said.
The Wexford woman said the family was still grieving. “Calling the family murderers because we let her take the vaccine is doing a lot of damage to the family. They [the campaigners] don’t understand that she already had underlying conditions,” she told The Irish Times.
The family wanted Nicole to be remembered as a bubbly person who loved Westlife and Demi Lovato, not for the notoriety of being included in an anti-vaccination protest.
Family upset
Ms Cahill said that the family had been particularly upset at the accusation that they had “covered up” Nicole’s death.
She said she had appealed to anyone who shared the post on social media to take it down and a number of individuals who had shared it had done so. She urged the public not to share any further posts about her sister.
Ms Cahill said she decided to highlight the matter in advance of an anti-vaccination rally scheduled for this week. She said she had not engaged with the campaigners and none of them had tried to contact the family in advance of using the image of her sister on social media.
She also asked Twitter to take down references to her sister but they told her that she would have to prove that she was a family member first.
