Is there an authentic article with a headline that reads, "They knew: why didn't the unvaccinated do more to warn us?" No, that's not true: There is no evidence that an article with this headline was ever actually published on a website. Lead Stories could not find any instance of the headline appearing beyond a supposed screenshot. The purported headline first appeared in 2023 when some social media users suggested The Conversation published it; however, the outlet publicly stated at the time that the headline was fake.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) published on Facebook on January 26, 2025. The post included an image that looked like a screenshot from an article. The image read:
Health & Wellness
They knew: why didn't the unvaccinated do more to warn us?
The unvaccinated knew what we didn't. Some of them said too little. Most said nothing at all. A lot of blood is now on their hands.
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Mon Jan 27 15:47:28 2025 UTC)
This supposed headline first appeared in 2023 when social media users shared it online, claiming that an article had been published under the same title in The Conversation. Some instances of the screenshot were altered images of an authentic article (archived here) posted on The Conversation on January 6, 2023, and titled "COVID: unvaccinated people may be seen as 'free riders' and face discrimination."
At the time, the outlet acknowledged (archived here) that the headline, "They knew: Why didn't the unvaccinated do more to warn us," was fake. The supposed headline recirculated again in January 2025, when it was shared on Facebook, this time without a connection to The Conversation.
When we searched for the headline on The Conversation's website, we found no relevant results (archived here).
Lead Stories searched for the headline in the image via Google and Google News (archived here). The only credible results were other fact checks of the claim, which reported that the article was not genuine.
Lead Stories also performed reverse image searches on Google, Yandex, Bing, and TinEye. None of these searches provided a source for the article nor proved that it actually existed.
At the time this was written, the claim had also been reviewed by multiple fact checking organizations, including Reuters, AP News and USA Today, all in 2023.
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Other Lead Stories fact checks of claims related to vaccines can be found here.
