'I Am Legend' Writer Forced To Address Conspiracy Theorists Amid Anti-Vaxxer's Wild Comparisons Between Pandemic, Film

Addressing the latest convoluted push of anti-vaccination groups, an Academy Award-winning screenwriter has been forced to post a rebuke on Tuesday, Aug. 10, when he learned that COVID-19 deniers and anti-vaxxers were using his film as a means to demonize the vaccine.

Akiva Goldsman, a 59-year-old Hollywood screenwriter, posted a tweet chiding the use of a film he wrote, 2007’s "I Am Legend," as a propaganda tool by anti-vaxxers attempting to spread an anti-vaccination message online, CNN reported.

“Oh. My. God. It’s a movie. I made that up. It’s. Not. Real,” he wrote in a tweet directly responding to the anti-vaccine interpretation of the film.

Many anti-vaxxers have used a vague and incorrect interpretation of the film’s plots in order to push their anti-vaccine agenda forward.

They claim that the film itself is about a shot that turns the world’s humans into zombies when the film is really about a genetically-reengineered virus that mutated into something that kills a majority of the human race, the New York Post said.

To that point, the COVID-19 vaccine has no evidence of producing any zombie-like traits to the people who got the vaccine, the auteur doubled down.

Vaccines continue to be the best way to build antibodies against the COVID-19 virus and harmful side effects are statistically minor at best, according to the CDC.

Anti-vaccination groups have also claimed that the film starring Will Smith is set in 2021. This, however, has been proven false, as the film’s setting puts it squarely in 2012, according to the BBC.

"I Am Legend" is an adaptation of the 1954 Richard Matheson novel of the same name and portrays the last man in New York as he battles to survive against scarce resources and human beings who were mutated by a virus.

Akiva Goldsman, its writer, is well-known for writing popular films like "Batman and Robin," "The Da Vinci Code" and its sequel "Angels and Demons," and "A Beautiful Mind," for which he won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2001.

Smith has yet to release a comment about the film’s popularity with anti-vaxxers.