According to the autopsy report, the cause of Junior’s death was an “enlarged heart.” Upon receiving the news, Ramirez lost all desire to go on living. But after the initial shock subsided, Ramirez decided to travel and speak about Junior’s fate, in hopes that he could help other families avoid similar tragedies.
That plan proved more difficult than Ramirez anticipated. In September 2021, GoFundMe removed an account he had opened to raise money for a trip to the nation’s capital to share his son’s story. “The content of your fundraiser falls under our ‘Prohibited Conduct’ section,” the company’s email explained. Ramirez lost the donations he had thus far received. Two months later, Twitter took down a photograph Ramirez had posted depicting him standing beside Junior’s open casket, along with the caption “My good byes to my Baby Boy” followed by three brokenheart emojis. Even a father’s simple expression of grief was apparently forbidden by the social media platform’s government-supported censorship regime.
Around that time, Ramirez met Brianne Dressen, a 40-year-old woman who had volunteered for the AstraZeneca vaccine trials and suffered a severe adverse reaction diagnosed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as “post-vaccine neuropathy.” Her varied and acute symptoms at times required use of a wheelchair and drastically curtailed her ability to participate in her young children’s lives.
For a time after her diagnosis, Dressen fell into a severe depression. However, during the spring of 2021, she discovered online support groups for vaccine-injured individuals and their family members. Connecting to others who understood her plight greatly improved her outlook on life, and she began serving as an administrator of several of the groups.
But in July 2021, less than 24 hours after Dressen participated in a press conference with U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Facebook shut down one support group’s account. Though participants had merely discussed their often-harrowing personal experiences and shared medical treatments that they found helpful, Facebook claimed they were spreading harmful “misinformation” that warranted the group’s removal.
The cascade of shutdowns of support groups and accounts belonging to the vaccine injured on Facebook and other social media platforms continues to this day. Ramirez, Dressen, and others learned that when their accounts weren’t suspended or removed, they were shadow-banned—meaning that the platforms’ algorithms buried their posts so that they were rarely, if ever, viewable, even to like-minded individuals facing similar health problems. In Dressen’s words: “The constant threat of having our groups shut down and our connections pulled apart left me and many other members and leaders frozen, unable to communicate and connect with those who needed our help the most. We spent more time managing the chaos of the censorship algorithms that continued to evolve, than we did actually helping people through the trauma of their injuries.”