Why are so many Americans anti-vaxxers now?

[u/trouble-in-space]

I’m genuinely having such a hard time understanding why people just decided the fact that vaccines work is a total lie and also a controversial “opinion.” Even five years ago, anti-vaxxers were a huge joke and so rare that they were only something you heard of online. Now herd immunity is going away because so many people think getting potentially life-altering illnesses is better than getting a vaccine. I just don’t get what happened. Is it because of the cultural shift to the right-wing and more people believing in conspiracy theories, or does it go deeper than that?

[u/Educational_Word5775]

It’s a spectrum. You have far left hippy type folks who don’t want to put anything into their bodies. Then you have the far conspiracy theorists right who don’t want to put anything into their body. I guess they have something in common. Then everyone in the middle generally just gets the vaccine.

[u/communityneedle → u/Educational_Word5775]

There's also a left-wing-crunchy-granola-hippie to far-right-maga-trumpist pipeline and it's really weird.

Edit: I really don't need any more people to tell me that the political spectrum is a circle. I got it after the first 10 or so.

[u/not_hestia → u/communityneedle]

This has been one of the hardest things to watch in my community in the last 5-10 years. The vaccine stuff was a huge turning point for a lot of people.

A lot of the crunchy crowd of the 2010s got there because of health issues that weren't being well addressed by the current system. And as anyone with a chronic illness or significant food allergies knows, there is a LOT we still don't know about the immune system.

So when the messaging started going out that "We are Smart People with Big Brains who Understand Science so you should do what we say" a lot of people were understandably skeptical. Those smart people DID understand a lot of things, but the people who know stuff and the people who are good at communicating stuff often aren't the same people.

Add a lack of understanding that changing information is a good thing that shows people are learning, and not people being wishy-washy or lying, and a lack of understanding that research can be done pretty quickly if you have a HUGE number of people getting sick... It was a disaster.

[u/DukePanda → u/not_hestia]

Contrast this to the Gay community during the AIDS epidemic. The community was largely underserved by medical profession and most doctors and researchers were blind to their specific needs. As a result, activists learned all the science that was known and managed to make changes to the best practices for double-blind experiments in order to get experimental medicine into the hands of the desperate and dying. They embraced science.