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Strangely, anti-vax sentiment is surging in a lot of countries. Canada has higher rates of vaccine rejection than the United States in some categories, as one e
by Aurornis 2mo ago
Strangely, anti-vax sentiment is surging in a lot of countries. Canada has higher rates of vaccine rejection than the United States in some categories, as one example.
It’s a strange global phenomenon and I don’t think there is one single root cause. MAGA/MAHA definitely jumped on to the anti-vax train as it became popular, but many forget that Trump presided over the rushing of the COVID vaccine into availability and production. He hasn’t done vaccination any favors in recent years, but I’m skeptical that the widespread rise of vaccine skepticism can be attributable to this administration alone.
I think there’s a bigger story about the cyclical nature of how the dangers of threats that previous generations faced is slowly lost over time, combined with the rise of contrarianism and conspiratorial thinking on social media.
- renegade-otter 2mo agoAnti-vaxxing goes back literally centuries, but the internet definitely made it a THING.
- crabette 2mo agoI would blame the "social" media, on the old internet they had barely any visibility. Now that we have the blame let's talk about the punishment.
- ceejayoz 2mo ago> I would blame the "social" media, on the old internet they had barely any visibility. They managed to get plenty of visibility long before computers. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leicestershire-50713991 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leicestershire-50713991 > There followed a 100-year battle between the authorities and an often sceptical, sometimes aggressive, public. In Britain, a succession of laws made vaccinations free, then compulsory - backed by fines and even imprisonment. While riots flared in some towns, there was also more restrained opposition in the form of anti-vaccination leagues. For an increasingly literate population, pamphlets were produced with titles like "Vaccination: its fallacies and evils", "Vaccination, a Curse" and the suitably Gothic "Horrors of Vaccination".
- crabette 2mo agoI do not disagree, but I don't remember antivax to be visible in pre-facebook internet either, so I only blame it for ~current wave
- renegade-otter 2mo agoPre-facebook, the barrier of entry was high enough that only fairly educated, students, and the nerds were driving the content. Once the barrier came down and the floodgates of "average intelligence" were opened, it was over.
- crabette 2mo agoNope, the move from nerd to professional publishing was around 1996, many years before "social".
- bluGill 2mo agoIt was there, and growing for decades. Pre Facebook it was a small niche but don't blame Facebook, that is mostly coincidence
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- tim333 2mo agoI just looked it up and anti-vax arguments predate actual vaccines - they were used for variolation which was similar: >in a 1722 sermon entitled "The Dangerous and Sinful Practice of Inoculation", the English theologian Reverend Edmund Massey argued that diseases are sent by God to punish sin and that any attempt to prevent smallpox via inoculation is a "diabolical operation" Vaccines date from about 1800.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- simonw 2mo agoGiven the amount of cultural influence the USA has and the universal nature of the internet it seems likely to me that global anti-vax sentiment could have started with the USA.
- Aurornis 2mo agoThe pivotal paper that tried to link vaccines to autism came out of the UK and was published in The Lancet. Assuming that the US was the root of the current surge of anti-vax idealism is not supported by the facts.
- anonymars 2mo agoIn fact, you can bet that other states deliberately stirred the pot
- Aurornis 2mo agoThere is some evidence that anti-vac activism was one of the key topics pushed by foreign influence campaigns at several points. I think the simple explanation is that they pushed any topic which could be used for political divisiveness and unrest, but fomenting anti-vac sentiment is especially damaging due to the physical harms it causes.
- simonw 2mo agoLooks like Russia did that: https://firstdraftnews.org/articles/anti-pfizer-vaccine-narratives/ https://firstdraftnews.org/articles/anti-pfizer-vaccine-narr... ... and the USA did it too, trying to discredit China’s Sinovac: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-covid-propaganda/ https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-covi...
- simonw 2mo agoI don't think the general public were as influenced by a paper in the Lancet as they were by other members of the public (and media) talking about that study.
- pacija 2mo agoContemporary pharmaceutical companies, as well as contemporary government and private health institutions are my enemy. I would rather die than live using their products and services. When more ethical entities take over their business I will gladly start using them once again, as I did back in the day before they turned evil.
- anonymars 2mo agoWhen did that particular switch flip?
- sterlind 2mo agointeresting. so if you get a bacterial infection, you plan to succumb to it rather than take antibiotics?
- pacija 2mo agoI'm not that extremist. My dentist is cool, my childrens' pediatrician as well. I trust them entirely and I know they would never compromise their credibility or my health for financial gain. I always take medicine they prescribe (mostly generic stuff whose patents expired a century or so ago). They always steer me to healthy habits such as excercise and eating fruits instead of taking supplements etc. Unfortunately, they are the only ones like that I know. Most other I encountered just peddle products for their financial gain. Snake oil salesmen. I am aware I live in a dictatorship which drove a lot of smart and good people away from the country, skilled doctors and nurses were among the first to go. Hopefully it'll get better once we overthrow the dictator.
- 1234letshaveatw 2mo ago[flagged]
- nephihaha 2mo agoI'm afraid to say my last few experiences with antibiotics have been dismal. I got given three different types of antibiotics for one infection, none of which cleared it up much at all. Last time I appeared to have successful antibiotic treatment for something was in the 2010s.
- somenameforme 2mo agoHere [1] is a montage of some of the public messaging around the COVID vaccines. [1] It was quite simply dishonest. That, paired alongside the effort to force people to take the shots, completely destroyed public trust on a level that will take many decades to repair. Generalized vaccine skepticism follows naturally from that. I'm certainly a part of that group. For instance I ended up doing extensive research on e.g. MMR before deciding to vaccinate my kids for it. If this were a decade ago, I almost certainly would have done it without a second thought, just as I took all recommended vaccines before traveling without a second thought. So I'm obviously not anti-vaccine in the least, but I no longer trust public messaging on the topic. It was just another (of the increasingly endless) examples of governments/companies pursuing short-term interests while ignoring long-term consequences. When it comes to what people put in their bodies, trust is more important than literally anything else. [1] - https://xcancel.com/ITGuy1959/status/1581034815700488192 https://xcancel.com/ITGuy1959/status/1581034815700488192
- GrinningFool 2mo agoBut this has been building for years ahead of COVID. COVID just gave people something to latch on to. And in spite of COVID vaccine issues, the latest numbers i saw suggest around 80% of people still support standard childhood vaccinations.
- somenameforme 2mo agoThe media has been referencing this for years now, but the data don't show that there was any meaningful effect on a national level. Here [1] are CDC data on various childhood vaccines. Childhood DTP/MMR vaccination rates varied very little over the past 15 years and never fell below 94%. They actually hit a record high in 2019 right before COVID - of about 95% each. Now they're both at record lows (around 92%) and continuing to trend lower. [1] - https://www.cdc.gov/schoolvaxview/data/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/schoolvaxview/data/index.html
- biophysboy 2mo agoWhy is it bad for a public health communicator to say that vaccines stop spread by lowering the effective reproduction number of a pathogen? Its correct. Your extensive research didn't seem to work.
- its_ethan 2mo agoI am very prepared to get downvoted for bringing this up - but I'm not convinced that the "anti-vax movement" most people think of is truly to blame (that is, crazy people who think it gives you autism or whatever). At least in my area, there are pockets of (relatively) new immigrants that have MMR vaccination rates at around 30% (that's very low, much lower than the anti-vaxxer population could account for imo), and the reasons for that have nothing to do with MAGA/MAHA as far as I can tell. It's an entirely different problem (that needs solving), and pretending that this is simply the by-product of uneducated crazies on the internet feels like it's over indexing on a loud and flashy but ultimately small part of the problem.
- ChrisLTD 2mo agoWould you say that the government telling those people that they should be afraid of vaccines will help or hurt in this case?
- r_lee 2mo agoI don't think people base their beliefs purely based on what the administration says the whole rollout and lockdowns, Fauci, etc. were a perfect storm to cause skepticism towards vaccines
- somenameforme 2mo agoI don't think it was the roll-out or anything along those lines, so much as the lying. Saying people won't get sick or won't catch COVID if they get the vaccines [1] was just false and very myopic. Obviously the intent was to try to get people to take the shots, but they completely destroyed trust in the process. Broader skepticism predictably follows from there. [1] - https://xcancel.com/ITGuy1959/status/1581034815700488192 https://xcancel.com/ITGuy1959/status/1581034815700488192
- its_ethan 2mo agoI gotta be honest, I don't really think these immigrant groups see or care what Trump/RFK are saying. If anything they see them as an "enemy" who they should not trust.. This is an incredibly left-leaning city where the majority of public health information (or any other messaging) being disseminated is counter to what the current federal admin is saying (as a rule, it seems). So to answer your question, I don't personally think it helps or hurts in any significant amount relative to other cultural drivers.
- biophysboy 2mo agoThey are not the progenitors of the skepticism, but they gave the skeptics significantly more authority than they previously had. Over surveillance networks, vaccine scheduling, public health comms, etc. MAGA sees them as useful idiots for the coalition, rather than threats to the US.
- jijijijij 2mo agoLooking at global population stats, you can clearly see where germ theory and vaccines entered human civilization. All this "natural something" and antivax movement certainly is the other direction. Maybe it's subconscious population control, maybe informational warfare... maybe people just got a little detached from reality by not dying all the time, as you suggested.