As it turns out, conservatism was the real plague all along.

It really is rather astonishing what one idiot in the right place at the right time can accomplish. For example, if you had asked me to describe a typical anti-vaxxer anytime before 2020 I would have described someone a lot like a hippie. Someone who smokes a lot of weed, makes their own clothes, shows up at all the mid-week protests against factory farming, that sort of thing. If you asked me that same question now you’d get a very different answer and it really can be summed pretty succinctly in the acronym MAGA.

I’m sure the first type is still out there but the second type is much more interesting in the academic sense of the word. These are people who were openly mocking anti-vaxxers less than 5 years ago. These are the people who didn’t think twice about mandatory vaccination days in school or the military. This sort of person flipped their whole attitude towards the medical community almost exclusively because one loud idiot who obviously doesn’t have a fucking clue how any of it works told them that he knew better. That’s amazing.

Our 13 month old is fully vaccinated. We do this crazy thing where we trust our doctor. He’s doing great and we’re doing our part…it is so frustrating how stupid Republicans are

It’s a combination of things and to just simply blame MAGA is doing a disservice. Before we had MAGA we had antivax on the rise. We did after all have Andrew Wakefield and Jenny McCarthy.

But more importantly what fuels a lot of this is ignorance. Some willful, some that cannot be helped, and some just not an easy thing for one to wrap one’s head around. That ignorance fuels fear, uncertainty, and doubt something that’s sometimes referred to as FUD. And that can manifest into all kinds of things, chief among them is outrage which MAGA acolytes feed into for political gain. Because that’s how the MAGA crew keeps fuel in it’s tank, feeding into outrage.

And for a moment, I’d ask everyone to take a look around. Look at the world we are in. Plenty to be outraged about, right? But while you might find specific things to be outraged about, the MAGA crowd keeps it unfocused. What’s woke? It’s whatever it needs to be for the time and place. Who is in the Soros Cabal? Whoever needs to be for the particular discussion at the moment.

But it’s important to remember that the MAGA crowd feeds into something that can be traced even further back. There’s an ongoing dogma about vaccines that’s roughly the equal to the myth of the Inuit having 400 words for snow. Note, the Inuit DO NOT have 400 words for snow. But like anything, once something gets started, it becomes really hard to shake. The dogma of antivaxxers relies on three components:

• An uncertainty about the makeup of a vaccine — Which may be heard as folks citing the Tuskegee experiments or the CIA experiments.
• A lack of widespread evidence showing what a lack of vaccines looks like — At one point everyone knew what Polio looked like and now through the success of the vaccine, almost nobody has any real understanding of what Polio actually looks like or what it can do.
• A lack of real risk analysis — Actual death from Childhood vaccines is almost unheard of at this point, compared to the 0.12 ‰
  who will die from measles. A lot of folks don’t even know what ‰ means. Additionally, a lot of people do not know the history behind the VAERS database, nor are aware that the funding allocation from Congress to arrest anyone who makes a false report is currently $0 and has been that rate since it’s inception.

These things sow a level of distrust and when paired with the rapacious nature that is the American healthcare system, there is massive amounts of gasoline being poured by folks who are interested in profits, that contrarians, shysters, and grifters are more than happy to ignite to further their agenda. We didn’t just get here by ignorance, we got here by a bunch of folks who would use that ignorance for their own gains. Like Andrew Wakefield, so many antivaxers I know indicate his research while casually omitting that he had published that paper in order to enact an elaborate fraud. The idea was to get people to select his “safe” version of the MMR vaccines that would have made him a ton of profit. Nor do people speak about Brian Deer who did the investigative research and reporting that eventually undid, at least in a legal sense and brought about his removal as a licensed doctor, Andrew Wakefield’s report. No what most people remember is that Wakefield published a report and there’s been this sorting of those who bought into it and those who didn’t. And all of that was on the background of Autism, a disease that initially no one had any idea existed which feeds into that whole FUD.

The MAGA crowd has made it political. Lots of people are wondering about that “medical record” and why tax payer money can only be unlocked by the public on condition that they take a shot. That latter part was predicated on the notion that everyone at one point knew that they did NOT want to catch any disease that the MMR shot protected against. And if you’ve ever talked to any “sovereign citizen” type, you can just take that mentality and extend it to say “roads”. Why predicate having a license on the ability to use a road one paid for? Why pay for it? Why think taxes are legal? It’s road for sure, but there’s lot of similarities along the way.

There’s a level of contempt for our Government. I mean just look around, one wouldn’t be hard pressed to find a clear example. There’s been a lot of failure globally in Democratic order because quite a few are more interested in profit to be made than benefit to society. The thing with the antivaxxers is they’ve taken that contempt and made choices and commitments that are dangerous for themselves, their children, and their locality. They’ve allow that contempt to be woven into an identity and there are all kinds of agents out there that will validate that identity in exchange for profit or power. But we should remember that if we are going to simplify it, those are the true drivers.