Joe Duffy has spoken about the recent abuse he received after speaking with a young Irish woman about how her family had anti-vaxxer groups falsely using her late sister's image for their campaigns.
Deb Cahill told the Liveline host that after her sister’s funeral she began noticing inaccurate posts online about the cause of Nicole’s death - with some referencing the vaccine as the reason.
One group had taken Nicole’s death notice from RIP.ie and a photo of her as well as an image of her vaccination card from Instagram and used it without permission.
Deb said: "People were trying to say 'oh another young life gone from the vaccine' - which wasn’t the case.”
She then explained that nobody had contacted the family to enquire about the cause of death before posting the photos and said "no one that has put up these things knows anything about her because they didn’t know the family."
The Cahills began asking each group to take the news down as it was false, and quickly they began to be accused of covering it up and were even called ‘murderers’ by people on these anti-vaccine pages.
The family was deeply upset about this and reached out to Duffy’s listeners to ask if they saw any more false stories using her sister’s image, not to share them.
Speaking about the segment back in August where Joe called out anti-vaxxer groups live on air, he said: "That was the lowest of the low.
"I’ve been wanting to call them out for a long time, people seem to be afraid of them."
Since then, Duffy said that videos have been surfacing online of him, where he is being slammed for his opinion on the matter - however, he says "I can handle it".
"But they’ve spent the last week putting up videos of me and calling me every name under the sun and every insult, but that’s okay, I’m well able for that, I’m a presenter now for 25 years at this stage, I can handle it."
