From time to time, someone makes a contribution to journalism so truly awful, Crikey likes to recognise it with Wankley Award. And today, there is no one more deserving than Seven News’ online news team for its clickbait-y suggestion that flu vaccinations had killed eight people — including a young student — this year.

The story, on the Yahoo7 news website’s top stories yesterday and posted to Facebook, was given the headline, “Warning over Australia’s flu vaccine revealed as teen becomes latest victim”, and the Facebook description said the story contained “troubling revelations about the flu vaccine”.

The first line of the story, written by “Yahoo7 and Agencies”, reports that, “As a Queensland family mourns the sudden death of an 18-year-old student who fell ill with the flu, experts have revealed this year’s vaccine ‘wasn’t a perfect match’.”

That’s right. She didn’t die from the flu vaccine, as the headline suggests. Madeleine Jones, 18, was on holidays with her boyfriend when she came down with the flu, and died a few days later.

In fact, if you read further down in the story: “It is not known whether Ms Jones was vaccinated or not.”

Then, inexplicably, the author has decided to roll in comments given to News Corp about how successful the flu vaccine had been this year — the flu strain had changed this year and there were multiple strains, so the vaccine hadn’t worked as well as the experts had hoped. There was nothing in the story about vaccines harming or killing anyone.

But if you’d only read the headline, as we all know happens on social media, you have a perfect propaganda tool for anti-vaxxers. And the Facebook comments have a sharp divide between them and people who actually read the story, and called out the shoddy journalism.

So, in a story of a young woman’s untimely death from the flu, Seven has managed to provide material for anti-vaccination crusaders. 

It’s not the first time the Yahoo 7 newsroom has produced some below-par work. Earlier this year the outlet was fined $300,000 and convicted of contempt of court over a court story one of its journalists wrote without attending the case, which resulted in a trial being aborted.

Yahoo7 was the fourth-most read website in Nielsen’s monthly ratings last month.

After Crikey contacted Yahoo 7 for comment, it changed the headline and removed it from Facebook, saying in a statement: “The story is an accurate report, however, we accept that this headline did not clearly reflect the contents of the article or the video content. We take our editorial credibility seriously and have subsequently edited the headline on the Yahoo7 website and removed the story on Facebook.”