Anti-Antivax
When you win a sporting event, you are less likely to focus on your flaws. Conversely, the loser will have to face his. The same goes with larger groups of people: when everything is going fine in any given community, we tend to overlook outliers, lone voices of dissent, those who hold and posit radical positions. We typically brush them off as “originals” if their theories are not overly belligerent; we dismiss them as crazed individuals otherwise. Cases in point: extremist religious groups, Manson-like figures, the “America first” movement…
However, when a major crisis arises, we are suddenly faced with a tidal wave of questionable opinions, mostly brought on by fear and incomprehension, often coalescing around the very same extremist outliers we used to overlook. For they magically appear to have been the voice of reason all along, while the moderate majority was simply oblivious and/or ignorant and/or wrong. Such is the antivax movement: for years, we heard about people who refused to vaccinate their children in fear of a host of ludicrous diseases, the most absurd being that vaccination causes autism. That claim was fraudulently pushed by now former British physician Andrew Wakefield and has been debunked by every legitimate medical organization in the world. Nevertheless, Jenny McCarthy (in)famously blamed vaccines for her child being autistic…
With the 2020 Covid-19 epidemic arising, vaccination not only came back in the news, but it became a central topic in the fight against the disease. And along came the antivax people, only this time with a platform: if you thought they were lone buffoons before, you were now faced with millions of people fearful of the disease who fell prey to such once-considered ludicrous claims. In times of trouble, reason tends to subside while simplistic claims flourish… In France of all places, where the very principle of vaccination was developed over a century ago, antivax demonstrations are now taking place every weekend. In a country where the so-called “antivax movement” was nowhere near as visible as in the US prior to Covid, let it be noted. And where everyone assumed people would line up an get vaccinated to protect their health and the health of their loved ones…
Time and again, we as societies are faced with the same phenomenon when confronted with a crisis: the fear of the unknown inevitably drives sizeable portions of the population towards simplistic — if wrong — “solutions”. Thus deepening the underlying issues currently at play. The one and only actual solution against that? Education…