The Anti-Vax Movement and the Medical Freedom Hustle

In December 2021, Francis Collins, the outgoing head of the $45 billion federal National Institutes of Health declared himself utterly flummoxed. “I never imagined,” the walrus-whiskered Collins told PBS, “a year ago…that we would still have 60 million people” resisting vaccines.

Fifteen months later, no one is surprised about widespread refusal of vaccines—even those vaccines, like measles, that the American public universally embraced 20 years ago. As vaccination rates decline, the vaccine resistance movement, once the butt of jokes, has become a major rallying point for conservative movement politics.

At the grassroots level, vaccine resistance attracts new recruits and reinvigorates true believers even as it promotes a broadly unpopular, and dangerous, political agenda. Across the country, thousands of true believers flock to churches hosting the ReAwaken America Tour, where anti-vax entrepreneur Clay Clark and retired three-star Army Gen. Michael Flynn weave together an apocalyptic culture-war fable that enlists evangelical Christians as a righteous saving remnant, defending God against stolen elections and genocidal vaccination campaigns. And at the top of the party, rising star Ron DeSantis pads his presumptive presidential run with anti-vax rhetoric assailing the “biomedical security state,” while his biggest rival, Donald J. Trump (who oversaw the creation of the vaccines and had earlier promoted them) insults DeSantis as someone who “loved the vaccines.”

How did we get here?

In reality, Francis Collins shouldn’t have been surprised. The anti-vaccine train now hurtling across the deranged landscape of our Covid-battered republic first eased out of the station decades ago. Propelling it forward was an unlikely alliance between two fringe groups: the New Age–minded merchants of bizarre unscientific medical treatments, and libertarian lobbyists. Back then—in the early aughts—the worst thing about being in the anti-vaccine movement was that there was no longer an anti-vaccine movement to speak of.

Sure, every time a new vaccine was rolled out, it sparked fresh public fears, but the problem was the dang things kept working. Over decades, the vaccines racked up victory after victory—polio, smallpox, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, all wiped out by successful public vaccination campaigns. In the 1950s, roughly a third of Americans were vaccine hesitant. But now? The anti-vaxxers watched glumly as the most recent childhood vaccination campaign, pushing measles, mumps, and rubella shots, achieved a 97 percent coverage rate, which resulted in zero cases of measles in the Untied States in the year 2000.

Without any serious financial resources behind the anti-vaccine message, about the only people still refusing vaccines were owners of composting toilets, a sprinkling of parents who kinda-sorta heard they caused autism, and fringe members of minority religious groups like the Amish. The chief problem was that the anti-vax movement relied on tired old arguments. People simply didn’t think vaccines were unsafe, or bad for the environment, or sacrilegious. But then something wonderful happened for the scattered and dispirited anti-vax activists—a call to arms at a West Coast alternative health conference.


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