Oh Nice, DCEU Star Zachary Levi Is Elevating Anti-Vaxx Alarms After Tweeting About Phizer

Hollywood is often written off as a bastion of unfettered liberalism, but it’s more diverse than one would think. In the comic book movie world alone there’s room for not one but two vaccine skeptics. Now it appears there might be a third: Shazam! star Zachary Levi.

Late Saturday night, Levi quote-tweeted someone who asked if Phizer, one of the companies responsible for COVID-19 vaccines, is a “real danger to the world.” Levi responded, “Hardcore agree.”

The tweet sparked a huge backlash, with people expressing horror that the guy from Chuck, who has a big, pricey comic book movie due in a month-and-a-half, could be a vaccine skeptic. It’s not clear he is, even after he followed that up hours later with a slight clarification: a post directing to a 2009 Justice Department settlement, in which the pharmaceutical company had to pay $2.3 billion for misbranding and defrauding Medicare with its arthritis medicine Bextra.

“Just one example of what I’m referring to…,” Levi wrote. As of this writing he hasn’t clarified any further.

Amidst the backlash, some shared Levi’s recent appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, in which he praised weepy “intellectual” Jordan Peterson and didn’t push back when Rogan deadnamed and misgendered Elliot Page.

And of course there were lots of jokes, some about what this means for the ongoing DCEU makeover.

Levy’s post comes mere days after Shazam! Fury of the Gods dropped its latest trailer, which boasts a Game of Thrones reference and Lucy Liu and Dame Helen Mirren as evil sisters. Even if it winds up being true that Levy is among Hollywood’s elite anti-vaxxers, it might not matter at the box office, at least. Letitia Wright’s antics didn’t torpedo Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and Ant-Man 3 will probably do fine despite Evangeline Lily getting called out by her own colleagues.

(Via The Daily Beast)