A (brief) critique of anti-vaxxer reason


The World Health Organization has named ‘vaccine hesitancy’ as one of its top ten threats to global health in 2019, while the number of measles cases worldwide has increased by thirty per cent. The percentage of unvaccinated American children under two years old has quadrupled in the last eighteen years, while experts predict some US states are primed for a measles epidemic. New Zealand has had 914 confirmed cases of measles this year. The virus has even spread to the happiest place on earth. People still won’t bloody well vaccinate their children, and it doesn’t seem to matter how much we shout at them in Facebook threads or hand out public health leaflets or wave peer-reviewed studies in their faces.

The most vocal anti-vaxxers share with other groups a general mistrust of science and authority, and their doubts are exacerbated by an inability to assess large amounts of information for credibility and accuracy. They often exhibit a conspiracist mindset, and are prone to inferring dark motives behind events they experience or read about. These tendencies are encouraged by the algorithms of Facebook and YouTube. All this has been said before and is broadly true. However, the scepticism over vaccinations also contains a more specific strand of suspicion partly tied to the legacy of the women’s health movement, which fought against an ongoing pattern of sexist and racist medical paternalism.

Vocal anti-vaccination activism on social media is dominated by women. One in-depth 2019 study of Facebook postings had the gender of the participants at 89% female. Although a significant number of men may also be anti-vaccination or vaccine-hesitant, women spend the most time discussing their views publicly and are also the decision-makers. Parenting and choices made about child health are, of course, most often left up to women, so this isn’t really a surprise. However, what analyses of the movement often leave out is why women, in particular, might be suspicious of doctors and ‘big pharma’.

In the twentieth century, the women’s health movement fought for rights we still consider worthy of defending or expanding. Contraceptive rights. Abortion rights. The reduction of unnecessary medical interventions during childbirth. The expansion of medical trials to women, where once they were limited to men. More rigorous testing of the drugs used on women. The right for women to make their own decisions about their healthcare. The right for women to keep their healthcare private from their husbands or fathers.

These causes were important because pharmaceutical companies and doctors – primarily men, primarily white, all of them products of their upbringing and training, existing within patriarchal medical systems in patriarchal societies – treated women unacceptably, and women of colour especially so. The willy-nilly prescription of thalidomide to pregnant people from 1957 until the early 1960s caused tens of thousands of babies to be born with malformed limbs, brains or eyes, many of whom died. In their haste to get the contraceptive pill on the market in the late 1950s, researchers carried out cursory experiments on women of colour in Puerto Rico (not even bothering to disguise their racist desire to quell the ‘population explosion’ in developing nations), then marketed pills to the general population many times stronger than current dosages. This caused widespread side effects and many documented deaths from blood clots. The Dalkon Shield, an intrauterine device common in the 1970s, caused thousands of people to contract pelvic inflammatory disease and become infertile. Over 200 000 women filed lawsuits against the parent company. Black and indigenous cis women in the USA, Canada, and Australia were coerced into sterilisation, or sterilised without their knowledge throughout the twentieth century. In what became known as ‘Unfortunate Experiment’, New Zealand’s own version of the Tuskegee trials, doctors at the National Women’s Hospital deliberately under-treated women with cervical abnormalities for two decades (from 1966 onwards) without their knowledge or consent, leading to approximately twenty-five deaths.

Just ask fat women. Doctors often have negative attitudes toward them, spend less time with them, and are less likely to test them for a number of medical conditions. Fat women are consistently undertreated for conditions such as breast or cervical cancer, and are therefore more likely to die from them. Fat brown or black women are even more disadvantaged.

Those primarily white and middle class women who are vocally against immunisations on social media also create a smokescreen that masks another, less clamorous problem: that the many health inequities plaguing our societies, of which unequal immunisation rates are only a small part, are a manifestation of structural racism and the ongoing effects of colonisation. They are caused by things like poverty, or unconscious bias on the part of medical professionals, or ongoing – and sadly, often well-founded – suspicion by marginalised groups. Black children in the United States are less likely to be fully vaccinated than white children. The coverage for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children has only recently reached parity with other Australian children, while indigenous American children have reached parity in the last 10-15 years. New Zealand childhood vaccination rates among Māori are still strikingly low. In Te Tai Tokerau, an area with twice the percentage of Māori compared to the rest of the country, only 53.2 percent of Māori children are currently being fully immunised according to the schedule.

If your health systems and the governments which support their infrastructure are unable to treat people equitably, how truly disinterested and objective can they be? If doctors and the pharmaceutical industry are quick to fall prey to social biases and slow to accept that they have been wrong even though people suffer, perhaps – think the anti-vaxxers – they are wrong about this too.

Some of the most vocal anti-vaxxers will appeal to medical sources, but they are usually alternative or discredited. If you don’t know which authorities are credible and which are not, and you don’t have the skills to assess information adequately, pharmaceutical companies and the medical profession have given you plenty of cause, for decades, not to trust them entirely. As the old joke says, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that they aren’t out to get you. Shouting at people about how the science of vaccines is settled isn’t going to change their minds.

I want to be completely clear: vaccinations are great, and if you are able to, you should get them and so should your kids. They’re a medical success story for which we should all be profoundly grateful. But the paranoia about them springs from a thorny and complex cultural and political context. It will take a multi-faceted effort to eradicate it – not just another public health education campaign.

Those asking the general public to ‘trust the science’ are often uncomfortable or hostile when asked to acknowledge how biased medicine can be, and how it has even very recently committed crimes against marginalised groups in the name of health. We can only start having the right conversations about vaccine hesitancy when we start being more honest: about medical science being a product of the people who create it, about the disparities that still exist (and why), and about the need for committing to real changes in how our health systems work.

 

Image: James Gillray ‘The Cow-Pock—or—the Wonderful Effects of the New Inoculation!—vide. the Publications of ye Anti-Vaccine Society’ (1802). Wikimedia Commons.

Danielle Moreau

Danielle Moreau is a part-time legal researcher and a full-time parent and feminist in Auckland. She tweets at @dimsie.

More by Danielle Moreau ›

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  1. Good stuff. I think too that some anti-vaxxers don’t strike me as being anti-vax so much as being anti-UNSAFE vaccination. As in, hearing multiple anecdotes of people who have crazy responses to a vaccination that they should be able to tolerate. I have an autoimmune disease so I guess this isn’t as controversial to me as it may be to people whose bodies respond properly.

    Neither does it seem controversial to me that in an era where autoimmune diseases are proliferating (climate change coming home to roost internally perhaps?) that adverse bodily overreactions to a perceived threat could also be growing. Our bodies are under constant assault from the literally thousands of invisible chemical compounds that make up modern invisible global capitalist industrial life, and from eating in a Big Ag world, to give just two examples. Putting aside the vax-causes-autism group, there ARE many anecdotal stories of immunocompromised, allergy-prone people’s bodies responding to a vaccination in a completely over the top way. Or do we think all of these reports are untrue?

    I wonder if it isn’t this perspective that many antivaxxers come from. We’re all still quite neoliberalised enough that we’ll frame the discussion all Murdochian like, and blame people for being dipshits rather than consider they may actually be quite fine with science – it’s capitalist corporatocratic science that makes them suss. The system is killing the shit out of us and the earth. Of course people are suspicious of the way it practices science, seeing science is always positioned within the system and this one’s a fricken death cult.

  2. Thank you for your considered analysis.I have experienced and witnessed these prejudices embedded in the health system. Yours is an important voice for our time.

  3. I thoroughly dislike the term ‘antivaxxer’. Many tarred with that disparaging blanket term are in fact vaccine safety advocates who simply question aspects of proscribed vaccine timetables and adjuvants. ‘Antivaxxer’ is meant to be a divisive term and basically a put down, and usually an insult to the intelligence of the individual labeled with the term. I neither advocate for or against some vaccines but regarding measles specifically then I am of that generation for whom measles was simply a part of childhood. Yes, some may have died but the very vast majority of us lived and now have natural immunity. Rudolf Steiner theorised childhood illnesses strengthen our immune system. Perhaps he was onto something?

    1. I know, right? Our level of discourse is the house that Rupert built – shame people out of questioning anything. It’s the same as, say, 5G. I do love Paul Barry but he was quite dismissive and contemptuous of a recent spate of articles questioning its safety. These articles were all written for Murdoch rags and so now, even though several cities such as Brussels have put its rollout on hold, to even dare to ask the questions about its safety is to be a right winger and a conspiracy theorist. It’s a real stranglehold on discourse going on here. We don’t need a dictatorship to silence us – we do it ourselves.

    2. Yea but Rudolph Steiner also believed that potatoes were evil so take his advice with a grain of salt. Measles is scientifically proven to severely damage the immune system of people who catch it, for weeks and months after catching it. That’s how measles works, it doesn’t attack you, it attacks your immune system. It attacks your immune system to the point that people don’t die of measles, they die of secondary infections like pneumonia.

  4. I contracted every childhood disease going in the 1950’s, and have lived to tell the tale. However, it was overwork and being rundown in the 1990’s that was the cause of my pneumonia, for which I was hospitalized! Measles, chickenpox, mumps etc was something we took for granted back then. The only child I remember back then dying was due to chronic asthma.

    1. But you must have lived through the polio epidemic, I have several friends affected by polio, and yes it killed many… remember the iron lungs.

  5. This article is written by an ill-informed person who talks about people who believe in what they read and now you are doing the same thing – believing the constructed criticisms about anti-vaxxers as if they are one dumb entity, concocted to shame the rest from questioning the private profit-centric companies who make up the rules. If you are so informed, then how is it you missed pointing out that two of the head scientists who developed the vaccinations, Judy Mikovits and Kent Heckenlively, reported a number of years ago, major concerns regarding the retroviruses within vaccines that were activating once they hit the bloodstream, when in pristine lab tests had previously laid dormant. These retroviruses were linked to several diseases, cancers and Autism. The MA, aware of the consequences of this going public, raided her lab, confiscated all her research and silenced her for 5 years, and threatened her life. The two have since published a book about it. The ones concerned about this aren’t necessarily against immunisation, they are against the many toxic elements that are added to immunisations. You would think that if you wanted to write ‘authoratively’ about the subject, you would have known this. Another major factor you don’t seem to know is that according to reports in the last year – all western drugs except for the ones labelled ‘bikini medicine’ are tested on male rats only. So every woman taking any drug other than one specifically for breast or cervical/ovary areas, are taking drugs that have not been tested for efficacy/ correct dosage, etc for women – why? because it is too difficult to get positive results (read more costly) when female hormones are involved, so woman are taking drugs that have not been designed or tested for their systems. And if you were thinking you were knowledgeable enough about this subject you would also mention that less than 37% of western ‘medicine’ is actually deemed more safe than toxic. The rest – the majority – is deemed more toxic than safe to use and have unreliable data to back up their efficacy. Understand that medicine is a private business that is focused on profits, not on healing. They are in the business of managing bad health, not preventing bad health. They do nothing to prevent, they don’t even understand the stages of illness that can be reversed before the final chronic stages are reached. Scientists only exist through funding and grants and would be ousted if they don’t follow the path of research deemed acceptable, so there is no openess of enquiry it is a controlled business. But you would surely know this because you are writing a published article about it, right?

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