Died Suddenly Review: This anti-vaccine documentary needs to die suddenly

Earlier this week, a previously unheard-of documentary film premiered on Twitter, titled Died Suddenly. In the span of three days, the film has received over 1.6 million views on its Twitter broadcast. What on earth is Died Suddenly and why has it captivated the attention of millions?

Claiming to to present the “truth about the greatest ongoing mass genocide in human history”, the hour-long documentary has attempted to draw connections between reports of people ‘dying suddenly’ under unexplained circumstances and the Covid-19 vaccination programme. In other words, the film is yet another desperate attempt by the anti-vaxx community to prove a ridiculous point.

It seems the world will never outlive the anti-vaxxers, even two whole years since the pandemic first hit. Whatever their reasons may have been in the past, anti-vaxxers have hit a new low with the production of this one-of-a-kind documentary specimen, for the entire film hinges on the belief that the vaccines have killed people. The number of people that have wantonly bought into this hoax however, seems to have dwarfed the number of people the film claims the vaccine to have killed.

The film begins with a choppy montage of news bytes ranging from Lee Harvey Oswald’s assassination of John F Kennedy, to Jeffrey Epstein’s death, to even an ISIS beheading; in good fashion as all anti-vaxx documentaries should of course. 

A quick 20-second definition of Malthusian Theory by Tom Hanks precedes the basis of the documentary’s argument: that the coronavirus and the vaccination programme is a part of a larger conspiracy by powerful world leaders to curb population growth. And on that hearty note, the film commences in its one hour and eight minutes of ‘professionally vetted’ anti-vaxx propaganda.

The documentary is produced by an American radio talk show host, Stew Peters, one of the better known anti-vaxxers in the US, most famous for having his show kicked from Spotify for claiming vaccines are “military bio-weapons that contains metallic parasites” and calling for the former Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Anthony Fauci, to be “hanging by the end of a noose somewhere”.

The trailer for the film features 12 people fainting or getting seizures, implying that they died from vaccines when in fact, at least four of the people shown did not die, and there were no links to the vaccines in their fainting episodes. Such is the evidence provided by the filmmakers in another extended montage of random people falling on their faces. 

Some fairly dramatic music gives way to a bunch of embalmers and medical personalities offering their ‘expertise’ on the subject of the apparent cases of blood clotting in those who took the vaccine. Prolonged sequences of long, tapeworm-looking clots of blood being yanked out of random corpses by an unknown embalmer seems to suggest that the clotting has been the product of the Covid vaccine. 

The fact that blood clots are commonly found in corpses and are caused by a wide variety of things ranging from smoking to bed-sores, seems to have been lost on the makers of the film. But oh well, we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt.

Though who are the cinematic masterminds behind this extraordinary piece of investigative journalism that have had the anti-vaxxers in a chokehold since its release?

The brevity of the credits is thanks to the two-man army behind this project - written, directed, produced, filmed and edited by Matthew Miller Skow and Nicholas Stumphauzer - both responsible for yet another conspiracy theory documentary produced by Stew Peters that attempts to uncover a seemingly dark underworld of sex trafficking and paedophilia. 

While it feels comical to have put myself through over an hour of crudely put-together, unsubstantiated rubbish under the cleverly-marketed garb of a vaccine exposé; it's also just as concerning how a series of emotional stories, backed up by ‘official’ numbers make a powerful persuasive tool.

But what’s even more so frustrating is how under new Twitter management, these deceptive pieces of media are allowed unchecked freedom to proliferate and propagate, that too under the legitimacy of a conveniently purchased $8 official status. 

At the end, the very act of drafting a writeup attempting to debunk and deter the joke that is Died Suddenly, sort of defeats the very same purpose by giving it a little more time in the limelight than it deserves.

For those still curious enough to put themselves through 68 minutes of an anti-vaxx pyramid scheme, here's the full film: