A prominent QAnon conspiracy theorist who said only “idiots” get vaccinated has died from COVID-19.
According to the Daily Beast, Cirsten Weldon was a leading voice in the QAnon movement who used her influence to tell her tens of thousand of fans on right-wing networks to not get vaccinated. She also opposed efforts to limit the spread of the virus and at one point called for Dr Anthony Fauci “to be hung from a rope”.
Weldon also filmed herself harassing people waiting in line to get vaccinated, telling them that the vaccine kills.
“The vaccines kill, don’t get it!” Weldon said. “This is how gullible these idiots are. They’re all getting vaccine!”
In late December, Weldon began showing symptoms of COVID-19. In her last video she struggled to get through a rant about overthrowing the government because she was coughing and admitted that she was exhausted.
Three days after that video was posted she was hospitalized in Camarillo, California. While hospitalized, she posted a picture of herself wearing an oxygen mask to Instagram and claimed she had “bacterial pneumonia,” the Daily Beast reports.
In one post on the right-wing social network Telegram, she said she refused to take the drug Remdesivir, calling it “Dr Fauci’s Resmedervir (sic).”
It was reported that she died on Friday.
After news of Weldon’s death began to circulate, her fans and allies in the QAnon movement began to threaten staff at the hospital where she died, the Daily Beast reports.
In a post on Telegram, Scott McKay, a QAnon believer known as the “Patriot Streetfighter,” said the hospital staff should be sentenced to death, or be murdered in vigilante violence.
“If it’s not done in a military tribunal then it’s going to be done in the street eventually and not to my wishes,” McKay wrote. “That’s my greatest fear. But if it’s necessary, it’s going to be necessary.”
Weldon’s death comes days after another popular QAnon figure who opposed vaccination, radio host Doug Kuzma died from COVID.
