Antivax is more ideology and conspiracy than science. The recent accusation that antivax influencers are running “limited hangouts” as part of “controlled opposition helps illustrate this characteristic, in which the insufficiently radical are portrayed as useful idiots for the enemy or even heretics.
There has long been a huge appeal in medicine that derives from being an “apostate”. Since COVID-19 hit, apostasy has become like a drug among too many doctors, and social media has amplified the popularity of “medical apostates” beyond anything I’ve seen previously.
Paul Thacker proclaims, “Vaccines are magic!” and likens them to religion that you can’t criticize. This is an old antivax narrative that he’s now parroting.
If one wants to see how much alike antimaskers and antivaxxers are, just look at their rhetoric about vaccines and masks as religion, slavery, and magic.
Recently, a longtime antivaccine activist likened the reaction of vaccine advocates to getting the COVID-19 vaccine to an orgasm (a “v-gasm”) and the vaccine to religion. What does this say about antivaccine thinking, or is this just a really confused analogy?
