M.I.A. is no stranger to stirring the pot, and it appears she’s back at it in a recent post shared to social media.
Like many Wednesday (Oct. 12), the rapper — real name Mathangi Arulpragasam — weighed in on the ruling brought down on Infowars host Alex Jones. Jones was ordered to pay to families of Sandy Hook victims $965 million for falsely and repeatedly claiming the school shooting was part of a conspiracy to take away Americans’ guns.
On Twitter, M.I.A. gave her two cents about the ruling, likening it to vaccines in the process.
“If Alex Jones pays for lying shouldn’t every celebrity pushing vaccines pay too?” she wrote in a tweet. See below.
M.I.A. continued to try and make her point in another tweet that showed Jones as one of the trending topics on Twitter alongside the Pfizer vaccine. However, her screenshot included a 2021 Reuters fact check article about the efficacy of the vaccine on COVID-19 transmission, not on prevention. According to the article, “vaccines were found to give recipients a high level of protection against severe disease.”
“Alex Jones lying and Pfizer lying both trending. One with penalty other without. 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,” M.I.A. tweeted.
This isn’t the first time M.I.A. has spoken out against the COVID-19 vaccine. In 2020, she fired off a series of tweets against getting vaccinated.
“If I have to choose the vaccine or chip I’m gonna choose death,” she wrote, claiming in a since-deleted tweet that “science is in bed with business” and “corona[virus] is in bed with science.”
Shortly after posting the tweets, M.I.A. claimed British Vogue pulled an article they wrote about her due to her anti-vax comments. According to The Guardian, M.I.A. posted a since-deleted screenshot of a conversation between her and British Vogue editor Edward Enninful in which he appeared to withdraw the feature.
Across her career, M.I.A. has scored a slew of Billboard Hot 100 hits, including the No. 1 single “Franchise” with Travis Scott and Young Thug.
22 Celebrities Who Have Made Anti-Vax Statements
Whatever the reason, celebrities often have a lot to say about vaccines and vaccination, whether they’re lobbying against legislation, questioning scientific data or spreading misinformation by way of opinion disguised as fact. Below, find out which star was so upset that his wife vaccinated their children that he ended up getting lawyers involved, as well as which star has been under fire for spreading misinformation about the link between autism and vaccines.