After a month of close monitoring, officials have yet to identify one death related to the global monkeypox outbreak.
But influential conspiracy theorists insist that they have tracked down at least one victim of the outbreak. Her name is Michele Fallon, and she supposedly died in February—over two months before public health officials identified the first cases of this particular wave of monkeypox.
The thing is, Fallon is very much alive.
“I don’t even know what to say to people who say I’m dead,” she told The Daily Beast in a recent interview. “I’m not.”
On Jan. 21, a dump truck hit another truck carrying about 100 lab research monkeys on a road outside of the town of Danville, Pennsylvania. Fallon, a Danville local who was on the road at the time, witnessed the crash and pulled over to assist. She came into close contact with a few of the monkeys, and a few days later she fell mildly ill, with pinkeye and minor cold symptoms.
All of that is true and well documented.
But conspiracy theorists baselessly add that, after the media stopped following this story, Fallon's condition deteriorated, and that she died about a month later—clearly due to her exposure to infectious primates. Conspiracists clash over the exact details, but most are fairly certain that this crash was somehow part of an evil plot that led to the current outbreak, or that it seeded some mysterious new disease that officials are currently passing off as monkeypox. Either way, they thus suggest that Fallon was an early monkeypox martyr, and that medical officials and the media have been covering up her death as part of some broad yet vague sinister scheme.
“Holy shit… they covered up Michele Lee Fallons [sic] death,” a May 20 post on a conspiracy forum on Reddit with over 1.7 million users reads. “She was the one exposed to Monkeypox.”