r/HermanCainAward: The Subreddit Cataloguing Anti-Vaccine COVID Deaths (2020-2022)
September 2021
Created in September 2020 and named after a Republican figure who died of COVID-19, r/HermanCainAward grew to hundreds of thousands of members documenting people who publicly dismissed vaccines or masks and then died of the disease — a viral phenomenon that forced a public debate over pandemic misinformation, grief and online shaming.
What happened
The subreddit r/HermanCainAward was created on September 21, 2020, taking its name from Herman Cain, the former Republican presidential candidate who died of COVID-19 in July 2020, weeks after attending a maskless Trump campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The community's stated function was to document social-media users who had publicly expressed anti-vaccine or anti-mask views and subsequently became seriously ill or died of COVID-19. Posts followed a fixed convention: a submission was flaired 'Nominated' when the person was hospitalized and 'Awarded' upon their death.
The forum was dormant for much of its first year and then grew explosively during the Delta wave of 2021. By Slate's count it went from roughly 2,000 members in early July 2021 to about 276,000 by late September 2021, passing 375,000 in October 2021 and half a million by May 2022. At its peak it was among the fastest-growing communities on the platform and drew close to a million unique daily visitors, with individual posts collecting thousands of comments.
The subreddit became a lightning rod in the wider argument over pandemic misinformation. Supporters framed it as a grim public-health warning — some readers said the posts had persuaded them or their relatives to get vaccinated — while critics, including WebMD and outlets such as NBC News, argued it turned private deaths into instruments of public shaming and risked harassing grieving families. In response to concerns about doxxing and harassment of the deceased and their relatives, moderators tightened rules requiring that names and identifying details be redacted from screenshots.
Reddit itself was drawn into the controversy. In late September 2021 the company said it was reviewing the community for potential content-policy violations amid complaints that it harassed the dead and their families; it ultimately did not ban or quarantine the subreddit, distinguishing it from the anti-vaccine communities it removed in its August 2021 crackdown. r/HermanCainAward therefore sits at an unusual intersection of Reddit's problems — a community born out of the platform's role in both spreading and cataloguing health misinformation, and a test of where Reddit draws the line between commentary and harassment.
Impact
r/HermanCainAward became one of the defining Reddit phenomena of the pandemic, drawing sustained mainstream coverage and crystallising a public argument about misinformation, grief and online shaming. It highlighted the platform's double role in the COVID-19 information war — hosting both the anti-vaccine communities Reddit eventually restricted and the forum built to memorialise their consequences — and forced Reddit to articulate, through its decision not to act, where cataloguing preventable death ends and harassment of the bereaved begins.