This association was particularly strong in Western nations, like Canada and the U.S. And a large investigation into the anti-vaccination phenomenon, conducted in 24 countries by a team at the University of Queensland, revealed a strong pattern: people who reported more conspiratorial beliefs tended to be more anti-vaccine. Those who reject vaccines may have a skewed perception of the risks posed by them and the diseases they prevent, with some evidence showing that Internet searches may increase the perception that childhood vaccines are risky. Interviews with Australian parents who reject vaccines revealed they see themselves as virtuous but oppressed, and vaccinators are perceived as an “Unhealthy Other”. For the same time points, Republicans went from 93% to 82% to 79%.īeyond political affiliation, researchers can shed some additional light on who an antivaxxer tends to be and how they think. For the years 2001, 20, the percentage of Democrats who say it is either extremely or very important for parents to vaccinate their children has moved from 97% to 88% to 92%. This association between the current right-wing of American politics and questioning the value and safety of vaccines can also be seen in Gallup polls. A survey involving Americans who voted in the 2016 presidential election revealed that Trump voters expressed more vaccine concern (specifically about the MMR vaccine, wrongly linked to autism) than non-Trump voters, a result which the authors conclude was explained by their conspiracist ideation. Trump, it should be pointed out, is the first American president to be on the record as having anti-vaccine views, an influence that cannot be ignored. Kennedy, Jr., to chair a commission on vaccine safety (which ended up dying on the vine). He has helped raise money over the years for his friend Bob Wright, who founded the charity Autism Speaks whose stance on vaccines has been deemed “controversial.” And Trump himself invited Robert F. But there is a segment of the anti-vaccination movement on the far right, drawn to its libertarian streak of distrusting the government, and there exists at least one prominent bridge between leftist antivaxxers and the political right in the United States: Donald Trump.īefore associating with the Republicans and as far back as 2007, Trump had publicly expressed the erroneous belief that vaccines cause autism. The embedding of antivaxx sentiment within this nature worship is familiar to many of us. Vaccines are just one more synthetic loaded gun aimed at our immune system, they say. Their wrongful idea that nature is inherently good ends up framing their thinking, which is why in the age of COVID we read about their “natural immunity theory”: that barriers to germs, like physical distancing and masks, weaken our immune system. This branch of the movement shows a distrust of pharmaceutical companies and a pursuit of purity. Kennedy, Jr., a Democrat and environmentalist, who is a major public figure on the anti-vaccination scene as the chairman of the Children’s Health Defense. Joe Mercola made his fortune selling natural health products and has contributed more than $2.9 million to the National Vaccine Information Center in the U.S., an anti-vaccine advocacy group. It’s a hippy-dippy attitude, we often think, borne out of an irrational fear of chemicals, and there are indeed prominent spokespeople for the movement who fit this sketch. This tenet, we easily imagine, is tightly wedded to the political left. The central dogma of the anti-vaccine ideology is that vaccines cause autism and other bad health effects, and that governments and the pharmaceutical industry knowingly suppress this information. This may leave you wondering just what is happening to the anti-vaccine movement in 2020. What has happened in recent years is that this demographic of homeschooling is being now recruited by the radical right on social media, and some are turning right. They were very much a part of the early efforts to ‘stop the Food and Drug Administration’ from regulating alternative medicine. “The first antivaxxers I ever met were left-leaning unschoolers when I was an unschooled teenager. This phenomenon can also be seen among homeschoolers according to Anne Borden, a pro-vaccine homeschooler who fights against phony autism cures. ![]() ![]() ![]() Coverage from these protests often show people holding signs slapped with antivaccine rhetoric next to pro-militia activists and white supremacists. What does an antivaxxer and a far-right activist have in common? If the thought of someone who opposes vaccines brings to mind tie-dye shirts and tree hugging, your answer may be “nothing.” But clearly, some do have a commonality: protesting the COVID-19 lockdowns.
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