The Return of the Anti-Vax Movement

 The Anti-vaccination movement is coming back. It's going to come back strong and there is very little that can be done about this anymore. 

It is going to seem reasonable to a much wider audience than before. This new movement is going to combine the pseudoscientific beliefs of the twelve year old movement with the libertarian-sovereign citizen motive that has always been around; and again, there's very little that can be done about it. 

The previous movement combined a few things: a cultic milieu that came into being alongside universal high speed internet. This phenomenon did not create the distrust of experts but it hastened its growth to people that otherwise would not have this tendency. It was spearheaded by an actress with no qualifications but who seemed real earnest in what she was talking about. She spoke for a well-qualified medical doctor who published a study in a very well respected medical journal that seemed to argue that the MMR vaccine was not as safe as previously thought. All of this combined with a complete lack of awareness regarding the danger of the three diseases the vaccination prevented allowed them to come back.

Then came their rallying cry of 1:33. Meaning one child out of 33 was now diagnosed with ASD. This represented a sharp growth in the diagnosis of the condition. It didn't correlate with the vaccination rate, but that didn't matter. The narrative had been spun that the diagnoses were on the increase. None of them, for all of their "university of Google" expertise, ever bothered to find out that what happened was change from the DSM IV to the DSM V. Autism was no longer a single condition but now a spectrum that ranged from light asperger's to severe autism. That mental retardation and Down's syndrome took a sharp decline never factored into their story. As for their evidence?

The study was retracted. The doctor was discredited and stripped of his license. The actor faded back into obscurity then it was revealed that her child never had autism to begin with. The cultic milieu did not disappear, it just became more nebulous in its substance. Then 2016 came and we were told by those in charge that there are two kinds of facts, real facts and alternative facts. An entire segment of the English speaking world latched on to this idea. Now, the view that crime was down was a "liberal statistic" not hard data out of the FBI. We were told that the population which attended the newly sworn in president's inauguration was larger than the previous one--if we wanted it to be so. 

Combine these factors and add in the current pandemic. Things are going to get worse. The anti-vaccination movement has been percolating throughout all of these years and come 2021 is when we are going to see a sharp epistemic division in this country between those who will take the vaccine and those who will not. 

Those who will not will be full on conspiracy theorists in a way that the government and the media is not prepared for. The media is going to false balance the story, giving more credence to the movement. Or, it is going to ignore it altogether, leading to the false cry of censorship. The government, especially if Biden becomes president, is going to have to mandate the vaccine and then follow up with prosecution. When it does so it will have the force of law on its side (Jacobson v. Massachusetts 197 U.S. 11), but it's not going to be easy and popular. This fight is going to have two prongs, one is the obvious conspiracy crowd: The Bill Gates, 5g, microchip, mark of the beast crowd. The other prong is the sovereign citizen, my body my choice (though ironically not when it comes to abortion or euthanasia) who are going to argue that the government does not have the right to mandate vaccinations. 

These two crowds are going to point to a singular case of the 1976 Swine flu vaccine. In 1976 U.S. Army private David Lewis died of a new disease now identified as a type of swine flu. This flu bore a relationship in some features to the 1918 Spanish Flu (which originated in New Jersey) and president Ford went into a panic to prevent another worldwide scourge. The U.S. secretary of health, F. David Matthews, was sure that the pandemic was coming and by Mid-April a national immunization program was signed into law. The problem? The swine flu epidemic never happened. It just fizzled out. 

A vaccine had been developed and 40 million people had received the inoculation. However it was not just unnecessary, it inadvertently caused a few problems. The first was that Ford had pushed the panic button effectively screaming that the sky was falling. In this we have to contrast with the behavior of presidents Bush and Obama who cautiously dealt effectively with pandemics during their tenures. They didn't freak out but engaged with experts and that was the end of their pandemics. 

The further problem is that the press treated every single non-violent death among those that had received the vaccine as being caused directly by the vaccine. This is the conspiracy theory's prime argument: the last time the government pushed the emergency vaccination button there was widespread death and disease from it. Yet the numbers do not back this story up. 

40 million people received the vaccine. Of that group 94 reported paralysis. 450 people contracted Guillian-Bare syndrome. While this latter statistic might seem alarming as Guillian-Bare is an autoimmune disorder, it really isn't. The incidence rate of Guillian-Bare is .9:100,000 people; meaning that out of the 40 million that received the Swine flu vaccine we would normally expect to see 360 cases of Guillian-Bare. There are further problems that the definitive tests for Guillian-Bare hadn't been developed yet and the criteria for what counts as having the disease was not that strong. Even further, the problem is that no one, even today, knows what causes the condition. Pointing the blame at this vaccination may not be inaccurate but it is done so without evidence. 

The press linked any condition amongst the vaccinated to the vaccination. However distant the link might actually have been. Three people died of heart attacks after receiving vaccines in Pittsburgh, which was blamed on the shot. Yet subsequent investigation did not bear out any link. 

The story is what matters and the story is that the 1976 vaccine poisoned an entire generation of people. It simple did not, but the anti-vaccination people will be dredging up this story for when they resist the COVID-19 vaccine. We can add to that the public feud between the president, the CDC, various states' governors, the WHO, and the medical experts; all concerning the president's denial and pushing of alternative medicine cures like bleach and white oleander. The groundwork has been laid and it is going to bear fruit.