Academy Award nominee and Saturday Night Live host Woody Harrelson was criticized and is in the middle of a controversy when he shared his anti-vax views during his opening monologue with a joke about a script he recounted reading before the COVID-19 pandemic.
“So, the movie goes like this,” said Harrelson. “The biggest drug cartels in the world get together and buy up all the media and all the politicians and force all the people in the world to stay locked in their homes, and people can only come out if they take the cartel’s drugs and keep taking them over and over.”
Anti-vax Campaign
After Harrelson’s speech was aired, the star was bombarded with disapproval and condemnation online.
“With Woody Harrelson’s monologue on SNL, the anti-vax stupidity in America just peaked,” wrote one Twitter user.
Another tweet of Harrelson’s comments said: “Does #SNL think [it’s] just harmless noise? Normalizing #antivaxx conspiracies does real harm!”
“Anti-Vaxxers won’t listen to highly educated people who’ve spent their lives devoted to science and medicine—but they will listen to a guy whom they saw in that movie they watched a few years ago,” one other individual posted.
“Whenever anyone spews anti-vax stupidity, I always think of the countless videos of traumatized/crying doctors, nurses, and hospital workers who were climbing over bodies in Covid’s early days,” another Twitter user wrote. “So yeah, f— Woody Harrelson.”
Rather Absurd
The True Detective alum has shared similar views in the past, telling Vanity Fair last May of his stance on masking: “As one who doesn’t believe in the germ theory, I find it rather absurd.”
Harrelson also shared a conspiracy theory linking 5G networks to COVID shortly after the pandemic began in 2020. “I haven’t fully vetted it [but] I find it very interesting,” he wrote in the since-deleted Instagram post, according to the New York Post.
