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Are there sort of nuanced or structural reasons why the right seems more antivax especially recently? Or is it more just that’s the way the politics has sort o

Are there sort of nuanced or structural reasons why the right seems more antivax especially recently? Or is it more just that’s the way the politics has sort of played out.

xnx 2y ago
If the "libs" are for it, they are against it.
- bearjaws 2y ago
  Especially if certain "libs" are. It was easy with Bill Gates, Soros, AOC all getting vaccine around the same time.
- IAmGraydon 2y ago
  This is literally all it is. Funny thing is that the Covid vaccine was developed and rolled out under Trump.
- bluGill 2y ago
  The "libs" are not for it. Some libs are, but anti-vax has been a mainstay of liberal "soccer-moms" for decades before somehow the right got involved.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    Look to Marin County--the well-known Trump hotbed. /s
adamtaylor_13 2y ago
I believe it’s due to the way the COVID vaccine was handled. As an overly-broad rule of thumb, the right values freedom more than safety. The COVID vaccine was an example of very heavy-handed enforcement and I think whether for right or wrong the backlash has affected all vaccines. My personal take, unrelated to politics, is that getting a vaccine for a virus from last year while the current strain has mutated isn’t a particularly stellar strategy, especially when I get the effects of the flu from the vaccine anyway. I just roll the dice most years and I haven’t had the flu in over 10 years so it’s not worth it to me.
- happytoexplain 2y ago
  Yes, but this doesn't explain the safety-related fear-mongering that is also popular on the right (it gives you autism, etc).
- swiftcoder 2y ago
  > The COVID vaccine was an example of very heavy-handed enforcement In what country? Certainly not the US. The only federal vaccine mandate that actually survived contact with the judiciary was for healthcare workers in medicare-funded hospitals. There were obvious a variety of employers requiring their employees to be vaccinated, but that's not the government in any shape or form.
  - zmgsabst 2y ago
    There were numerous state level policies at the advice of federal agencies such as the CDC, that prohibited participation in public events.
    - theossuary 2y ago
      You'd think conservatives would be happy with states exercising their rights
  - abduhl 2y ago
    Employers were induced into requiring vaccination based on an impermissible OSHA rule that made vaccination mandatory. Acting as if the federal mandates eventually being stopped by the legal process means they did not shape private action is disingenuous. The federal government’s response to Covid is one of the primary reasons we have seen such a huge backlash to the administrative state, culminating in Donald Trump’s purported current quest to dismantle it, ironically by using its own power to destabilize and destroy it. I say purported because whether Trump’s goal is to dismantle the administrative state or to reform it as a tool for himself, his friends, and his donors remains to be seen. It’s probably the latter.
    - 2y ago
Kenji 2y ago
[dead]
devmor 2y ago
People will tell you it has something to do with covid, but this movement has been growing since the late 90's with the rise of the dot com millionaire nouveau riche - a large class of fairly uneducated people with a lot of money to swing around. There are a myriad of complex reasons, but one important note is that many high profile donors of the current right wing believe in early 20th century Eugenics - blind to the advantages they have received from modern medicine and civilization, they see themselves as having "superior genes" and implements like vaccines as some kind of crutch that only prop up the weak and pollute the species with lineage that doesn't deserve to be there. It's a belief system fully rooted in undeserved ego and pure scientific ignorance.
- zmgsabst 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - kemotep 2y ago
    And the Republican party used to have the nickname the Wide Awakes and were home of large elements of the Progressive movement in the mid 19th through early 20th century. Teddy Roosevelt being a famous example of a Progressive President at the time. So what does what a movement 100 years ago have to do with modern politics? Edit: Since the comment died: Who is even talking about eugenics in 2025 in the United States? Does either political party have an agenda of sterilizing mentally ill children? I haven’t even seen attack ads from Republicans saying Democrats are doing that. Trump nor Harris had anything about sterilizing mentally ill children on their campaign websites or even preventing it from happening. So where is this coming from?
    - zmgsabst 2y ago
      [flagged]
- IAmGraydon 2y ago
  >many high profile donors of the current right wing believe in early 20th century Eugenics - blind to the advantages they have received from modern medicine and civilization, they see themselves as having "superior genes" and implements like vaccines as some kind of crutch that only prop up the weak and pollute the species with lineage that doesn't deserve to be there. Quite a claim. Where is your evidence of this?
larrywright 2y ago
My perception is that many on the right bought into conspiracies about Covid and the Covid vaccines. That led to them consuming more general antivax content, as well as an overall greater distrust of science and medicine in general, who were seen as the enemy.
whoitwas 2y ago
MAGA has targeted low information voters who aren't logical or rational. They don't think critically and believe what they see even if it contradicts something they previously believed. The structural reason is mass manipulation through omnipresent disinformation campaigns enabled by social media addiction and user trauma.
- zmgsabst 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - whoitwas 2y ago
    I disagree and honestly don't know what you're referencing. Maga has created an entire disinformation space in the past 5 or so years. Trump has Truth social. Musk bought Twitter. There are new entertainment outlets like Newsmaxx. An entire disinformation industry emerged from nothing. Trump literally just banned AP from the press pool it created for speech violation.
wrfrmers 2y ago
An aspect of this phenomenon (though not the entire explanation): Conservatives tend to oppose initiatives that are broadly beneficial - especially if they stand to help marginalized groups - if they require even a minor or suspected sacrifice on their part. In this case, inclusive of having to sublimate oneself to a public health campaign/the purported risk of side effects or autism, respectively. I've also noticed that conservatives tend to have a pronounced reaction to the prospect of ills that have visited marginalized groups also becoming their problem. The US has a limited but sharp history of medical exploitation, particularly of minorities. Many conservatives think, "We're next, unless we resist forcefully."
- abduhl 2y ago
  This is political drivel meant to superficially denounce "conservatives" by using soft words ("tend to," "broadly beneficial," "marginalized," "minor or suspected," "many conservatives") and it falls apart upon closer scrutiny. The hardest part of modern day political discourse is saying something that is insightful while being concrete and, for insults/criticisms, not equally applicable to the "other" side. You haven't done that here. You can replace "conservative" with "liberal" in your post and have it be just as applicable because you haven't actually said anything.
  - wrfrmers 2y ago
    Ironic reply. Feel free to scrutinize.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- myheartisinohio 2y ago
  Maybe it has something to do with the fact that pharmaceutical companies are profit driven and large swaths of the country have been impacted by pill addictions. Trust the science- the pharmaceutical industry pushed the idea that Oxy is a less addictive than morphine. State medical boards across the country put their thumbs in their pockets. But wait there's more! The whole concept of selling SSRIs to people based on another lie that they have a "chemical imbalance" when exercise has proven to be more beneficial. What else? Oh, mass prescribing stimulants to children.
UncleMeat 2y ago
Covid. Covid response was partisanized very quickly. Some people will say this was because of overly aggressive regulation from blue states, though I don't think it would have been different even if the response was significantly more tepid. By the time the vaccine was available, we'd had a year of people screaming that Fauci was a satanist and that we just needed to accept deaths in order to keep the economy moving. The pump was primed for the vaccine to be made into an extreme partisan issue. Trump's rhetoric didn't help things. This very naturally spread outwards, latching on to pre-existing antivaxx sentiment derived from Wakefield's criminal paper. Once you are deciding that one vaccine is actually a mind control serum, it isn't a terribly large jump to decide that they are all lowering sperm counts or whatever.
ifyoubuildit 2y ago
Is it limited to the right? Have you seen the uptake numbers for covid shots this year? Many of the replies so far seem to be focused on how dumb/evil/selfish/etc the entire right is. I wonder if thats the nuance you were looking for?
- techorange 2y ago
  > Many of the replies so far seem to be focused on how dumb/evil/selfish/etc the entire right is. I wonder if thats the nuance you were looking for? Decidedly not
  - ifyoubuildit 2y ago
    I apologize if that sounded like I thought you were asking for that response. I only meant to point out that there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of nuance being discussed.
fhd2 2y ago
Fascism mostly works by distracting people from the real issues and giving them someone or something to direct their negative feelings towards instead, a seemingly simpler solution to their problems. What or who that is, seems kind of arbitrary to me. It just has to be something people can get riled up against comparatively easily. Conspiracy theories (e.g. around vaccinations) are a good staring point for something like that. Put another way, if you want power, you can just listen to what issues (regardless of whether they are real or even plausible) people complain about, and tell them you agree with them and are gonna fix that. And by the way, it's also why they can't have nice things, are in danger, or whatever else you can find that riles them up more. The point is, they'll follow you. If you "well, actually" angry or otherwise irrational people instead, you're kinda painting a target on your back. Someone following the other strategy can now use _you_ as the scapegoat.
mhb 2y ago
A lot of comments without any mention of how our public health officials, previously respected, managed to lose the confidence of the public by ends-justifies-the-means reasoning. Also the hypocrisy of many elites regarding social distancing for the masses, an arbitrary, never-justified buffer of six feet, exceptions for essential services like bars, dearth of criticism for certain close quarters protests, etc. Public health was MIA for most of the epidemic regarding true and actionable information. And you're asking if this is just how the politics has played out? It's not at all nuanced.
- techorange 2y ago
  So, in response to public health officials being wrong about X, we get new public health officials who are wrong about Y? I totally understand what you’re saying, but it doesn’t sound like they tried to explain that this was a bad campaign, they just ended it.
  - mhb 2y ago
    Not sure what you're looking for. Public health officials sacrificed their hard-won trust based on empiricism and truth-telling at the altar of expediency in an "emergency". After that's done, all that's left are arguments from authority. In that environment, apparently more people are receptive to the idea of picking their own authorities regardless of their objectively harebrained notions.
ryandvm 2y ago
Conservatives generally focus on forces that directly affect them, progressives generally focus on forces that affect others. Through this lens, much of political nonsense in the US can be understood.
Asooka 2y ago
The left took a hard stance in support of forcing COVID-19 vaccines based on mRNA technology (i.e. Pfizer's, Moderna's, etc.) on everyone, so now coronavirus (i.e. flu) vaccines are a left/right issue. My anecdotal evidence from the last 5 years is that I haven't seen a COVID-19 vaccine affect the outcome in individuals under 70 years old. I chose not to vaccinate myself, because I had the option of staying home and not contacting anyone for long lengths of time. Other family members made the choice to vaccinate. The severity of the disease progression between us was most strongly correlated with age, vaccination status didn't seem to play a role. First time I got COVID, I had to visit the hospital. Second time, a year later, I barely got a fever and didn't even need to take time off (obviously I stayed home!). Vaccinated family members had the same experience. The mRNA COVID-19 vaccine did not offer protection anywhere close to having had previous infection among the people I know. That said, THIS IS NOT A STATEMENT FOR OR AGAINST mRNA VACCINES! TRUST YOUR DOCTOR! What I want to point out, is that such anecdotal experiences exist and I expect a lot of people have had the same experience, which would lead them to thinking they were tricked or forced by the Democratic administration to get vaccinated not for their benefit, but for the monetary profit of "Big Pharma". Absent a science-based education, a lot of people do not have the tools to judge the validity of their observations. The entire messaging from the Biden administration during COVID was an abject PR disaster. Censoring people who had misgivings for the vaccine, or wanted to discuss implications of statistics, was also not helpful[1]. It erased trust in vaccines in general, erased trust in the Democratic party, erased trust in media, etc. I expect that for decades to come this event will be studied in management classes with workshops for "How would you have handled it better?" To be fair, I have no idea how it could have been handled better given the information at the time, but the gamble they took was severely miscalculated. I don't see how it could have been handled any worse. [1] As an aside, I see a similar censorship-led effect amongst youth who say "The Holocaust didn't happen!" simply because questioning it leads to their post getting deleted and banned. It doesn't matter whether the arguments they want to discuss are in any way valid or absolutely fucking stupid - the fact they're getting censored is a signal that gets interpreted as "they are trying to hide the truth!". Ultimately I think we need to tolerate a certain amount of misinformation, hate speech, and so on online, so that new people can see that yes - this thing was asked, it is a valid question, but it is absolutely wrong, because so and so. Too many of the once fully integrated communities online have become quite isolationist. People end up in echo chambers and cults, leading to the above described effects.

Are there sort of nuanced or structural reasons why the right seems more antivax especially recently? Or is it more just that’s the way the politics has sort of played out.

xnx 2y ago

If the "libs" are for it, they are against it.

bearjaws 2y ago
Especially if certain "libs" are. It was easy with Bill Gates, Soros, AOC all getting vaccine around the same time.
IAmGraydon 2y ago
This is literally all it is. Funny thing is that the Covid vaccine was developed and rolled out under Trump.
bluGill 2y ago
The "libs" are not for it. Some libs are, but anti-vax has been a mainstay of liberal "soccer-moms" for decades before somehow the right got involved.
- ghaff 2y ago
  Look to Marin County--the well-known Trump hotbed. /s

adamtaylor_13 2y ago

I believe it’s due to the way the COVID vaccine was handled. As an overly-broad rule of thumb, the right values freedom more than safety. The COVID vaccine was an example of very heavy-handed enforcement and I think whether for right or wrong the backlash has affected all vaccines. My personal take, unrelated to politics, is that getting a vaccine for a virus from last year while the current strain has mutated isn’t a particularly stellar strategy, especially when I get the effects of the flu from the vaccine anyway. I just roll the dice most years and I haven’t had the flu in over 10 years so it’s not worth it to me.

happytoexplain 2y ago
Yes, but this doesn't explain the safety-related fear-mongering that is also popular on the right (it gives you autism, etc).
swiftcoder 2y ago
> The COVID vaccine was an example of very heavy-handed enforcement In what country? Certainly not the US. The only federal vaccine mandate that actually survived contact with the judiciary was for healthcare workers in medicare-funded hospitals. There were obvious a variety of employers requiring their employees to be vaccinated, but that's not the government in any shape or form.
- zmgsabst 2y ago
  There were numerous state level policies at the advice of federal agencies such as the CDC, that prohibited participation in public events.
  - theossuary 2y ago
    You'd think conservatives would be happy with states exercising their rights
- abduhl 2y ago
  Employers were induced into requiring vaccination based on an impermissible OSHA rule that made vaccination mandatory. Acting as if the federal mandates eventually being stopped by the legal process means they did not shape private action is disingenuous. The federal government’s response to Covid is one of the primary reasons we have seen such a huge backlash to the administrative state, culminating in Donald Trump’s purported current quest to dismantle it, ironically by using its own power to destabilize and destroy it. I say purported because whether Trump’s goal is to dismantle the administrative state or to reform it as a tool for himself, his friends, and his donors remains to be seen. It’s probably the latter.
  - 2y ago

Kenji 2y ago

[dead]

devmor 2y ago

People will tell you it has something to do with covid, but this movement has been growing since the late 90's with the rise of the dot com millionaire nouveau riche - a large class of fairly uneducated people with a lot of money to swing around. There are a myriad of complex reasons, but one important note is that many high profile donors of the current right wing believe in early 20th century Eugenics - blind to the advantages they have received from modern medicine and civilization, they see themselves as having "superior genes" and implements like vaccines as some kind of crutch that only prop up the weak and pollute the species with lineage that doesn't deserve to be there. It's a belief system fully rooted in undeserved ego and pure scientific ignorance.

zmgsabst 2y ago
[flagged]
- kemotep 2y ago
  And the Republican party used to have the nickname the Wide Awakes and were home of large elements of the Progressive movement in the mid 19th through early 20th century. Teddy Roosevelt being a famous example of a Progressive President at the time. So what does what a movement 100 years ago have to do with modern politics? Edit: Since the comment died: Who is even talking about eugenics in 2025 in the United States? Does either political party have an agenda of sterilizing mentally ill children? I haven’t even seen attack ads from Republicans saying Democrats are doing that. Trump nor Harris had anything about sterilizing mentally ill children on their campaign websites or even preventing it from happening. So where is this coming from?
  - zmgsabst 2y ago
    [flagged]
IAmGraydon 2y ago
>many high profile donors of the current right wing believe in early 20th century Eugenics - blind to the advantages they have received from modern medicine and civilization, they see themselves as having "superior genes" and implements like vaccines as some kind of crutch that only prop up the weak and pollute the species with lineage that doesn't deserve to be there. Quite a claim. Where is your evidence of this?

larrywright 2y ago

My perception is that many on the right bought into conspiracies about Covid and the Covid vaccines. That led to them consuming more general antivax content, as well as an overall greater distrust of science and medicine in general, who were seen as the enemy.

whoitwas 2y ago

MAGA has targeted low information voters who aren't logical or rational. They don't think critically and believe what they see even if it contradicts something they previously believed. The structural reason is mass manipulation through omnipresent disinformation campaigns enabled by social media addiction and user trauma.

zmgsabst 2y ago
[flagged]
- whoitwas 2y ago
  I disagree and honestly don't know what you're referencing. Maga has created an entire disinformation space in the past 5 or so years. Trump has Truth social. Musk bought Twitter. There are new entertainment outlets like Newsmaxx. An entire disinformation industry emerged from nothing. Trump literally just banned AP from the press pool it created for speech violation.

wrfrmers 2y ago

An aspect of this phenomenon (though not the entire explanation): Conservatives tend to oppose initiatives that are broadly beneficial - especially if they stand to help marginalized groups - if they require even a minor or suspected sacrifice on their part. In this case, inclusive of having to sublimate oneself to a public health campaign/the purported risk of side effects or autism, respectively. I've also noticed that conservatives tend to have a pronounced reaction to the prospect of ills that have visited marginalized groups also becoming their problem. The US has a limited but sharp history of medical exploitation, particularly of minorities. Many conservatives think, "We're next, unless we resist forcefully."

abduhl 2y ago
This is political drivel meant to superficially denounce "conservatives" by using soft words ("tend to," "broadly beneficial," "marginalized," "minor or suspected," "many conservatives") and it falls apart upon closer scrutiny. The hardest part of modern day political discourse is saying something that is insightful while being concrete and, for insults/criticisms, not equally applicable to the "other" side. You haven't done that here. You can replace "conservative" with "liberal" in your post and have it be just as applicable because you haven't actually said anything.
- wrfrmers 2y ago
  Ironic reply. Feel free to scrutinize.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
myheartisinohio 2y ago
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that pharmaceutical companies are profit driven and large swaths of the country have been impacted by pill addictions. Trust the science- the pharmaceutical industry pushed the idea that Oxy is a less addictive than morphine. State medical boards across the country put their thumbs in their pockets. But wait there's more! The whole concept of selling SSRIs to people based on another lie that they have a "chemical imbalance" when exercise has proven to be more beneficial. What else? Oh, mass prescribing stimulants to children.

UncleMeat 2y ago

Covid. Covid response was partisanized very quickly. Some people will say this was because of overly aggressive regulation from blue states, though I don't think it would have been different even if the response was significantly more tepid. By the time the vaccine was available, we'd had a year of people screaming that Fauci was a satanist and that we just needed to accept deaths in order to keep the economy moving. The pump was primed for the vaccine to be made into an extreme partisan issue. Trump's rhetoric didn't help things. This very naturally spread outwards, latching on to pre-existing antivaxx sentiment derived from Wakefield's criminal paper. Once you are deciding that one vaccine is actually a mind control serum, it isn't a terribly large jump to decide that they are all lowering sperm counts or whatever.

ifyoubuildit 2y ago

Is it limited to the right? Have you seen the uptake numbers for covid shots this year? Many of the replies so far seem to be focused on how dumb/evil/selfish/etc the entire right is. I wonder if thats the nuance you were looking for?

techorange 2y ago
> Many of the replies so far seem to be focused on how dumb/evil/selfish/etc the entire right is. I wonder if thats the nuance you were looking for? Decidedly not
- ifyoubuildit 2y ago
  I apologize if that sounded like I thought you were asking for that response. I only meant to point out that there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of nuance being discussed.

fhd2 2y ago

Fascism mostly works by distracting people from the real issues and giving them someone or something to direct their negative feelings towards instead, a seemingly simpler solution to their problems. What or who that is, seems kind of arbitrary to me. It just has to be something people can get riled up against comparatively easily. Conspiracy theories (e.g. around vaccinations) are a good staring point for something like that. Put another way, if you want power, you can just listen to what issues (regardless of whether they are real or even plausible) people complain about, and tell them you agree with them and are gonna fix that. And by the way, it's also why they can't have nice things, are in danger, or whatever else you can find that riles them up more. The point is, they'll follow you. If you "well, actually" angry or otherwise irrational people instead, you're kinda painting a target on your back. Someone following the other strategy can now use _you_ as the scapegoat.

mhb 2y ago

A lot of comments without any mention of how our public health officials, previously respected, managed to lose the confidence of the public by ends-justifies-the-means reasoning. Also the hypocrisy of many elites regarding social distancing for the masses, an arbitrary, never-justified buffer of six feet, exceptions for essential services like bars, dearth of criticism for certain close quarters protests, etc. Public health was MIA for most of the epidemic regarding true and actionable information. And you're asking if this is just how the politics has played out? It's not at all nuanced.

techorange 2y ago
So, in response to public health officials being wrong about X, we get new public health officials who are wrong about Y? I totally understand what you’re saying, but it doesn’t sound like they tried to explain that this was a bad campaign, they just ended it.
- mhb 2y ago
  Not sure what you're looking for. Public health officials sacrificed their hard-won trust based on empiricism and truth-telling at the altar of expediency in an "emergency". After that's done, all that's left are arguments from authority. In that environment, apparently more people are receptive to the idea of picking their own authorities regardless of their objectively harebrained notions.

ryandvm 2y ago

Conservatives generally focus on forces that directly affect them, progressives generally focus on forces that affect others. Through this lens, much of political nonsense in the US can be understood.

Asooka 2y ago

The left took a hard stance in support of forcing COVID-19 vaccines based on mRNA technology (i.e. Pfizer's, Moderna's, etc.) on everyone, so now coronavirus (i.e. flu) vaccines are a left/right issue. My anecdotal evidence from the last 5 years is that I haven't seen a COVID-19 vaccine affect the outcome in individuals under 70 years old. I chose not to vaccinate myself, because I had the option of staying home and not contacting anyone for long lengths of time. Other family members made the choice to vaccinate. The severity of the disease progression between us was most strongly correlated with age, vaccination status didn't seem to play a role. First time I got COVID, I had to visit the hospital. Second time, a year later, I barely got a fever and didn't even need to take time off (obviously I stayed home!). Vaccinated family members had the same experience. The mRNA COVID-19 vaccine did not offer protection anywhere close to having had previous infection among the people I know. That said, THIS IS NOT A STATEMENT FOR OR AGAINST mRNA VACCINES! TRUST YOUR DOCTOR! What I want to point out, is that such anecdotal experiences exist and I expect a lot of people have had the same experience, which would lead them to thinking they were tricked or forced by the Democratic administration to get vaccinated not for their benefit, but for the monetary profit of "Big Pharma". Absent a science-based education, a lot of people do not have the tools to judge the validity of their observations. The entire messaging from the Biden administration during COVID was an abject PR disaster. Censoring people who had misgivings for the vaccine, or wanted to discuss implications of statistics, was also not helpful[1]. It erased trust in vaccines in general, erased trust in the Democratic party, erased trust in media, etc. I expect that for decades to come this event will be studied in management classes with workshops for "How would you have handled it better?" To be fair, I have no idea how it could have been handled better given the information at the time, but the gamble they took was severely miscalculated. I don't see how it could have been handled any worse. [1] As an aside, I see a similar censorship-led effect amongst youth who say "The Holocaust didn't happen!" simply because questioning it leads to their post getting deleted and banned. It doesn't matter whether the arguments they want to discuss are in any way valid or absolutely fucking stupid - the fact they're getting censored is a signal that gets interpreted as "they are trying to hide the truth!". Ultimately I think we need to tolerate a certain amount of misinformation, hate speech, and so on online, so that new people can see that yes - this thing was asked, it is a valid question, but it is absolutely wrong, because so and so. Too many of the once fully integrated communities online have become quite isolationist. People end up in echo chambers and cults, leading to the above described effects.