What are the strategic considerations behind the active spread of anti-vax theories?

It sows distrust in authority, so that those people will listen to fringe voices. These fringe voices tend to be grifters, scamming the rubes.

Politically it’s a binary issue, no room for compromise. If you’re anti-vax, you’re voting for the Republican candidate, despite what the other guy might be offering. So, this locks in votes and also plays into the long term strategy of having an uneducated underclass incapable of critical thinking. This provides cannon fodder for the politicians, and low paid drones for the fat cats.

Usually, a lot of people who are anti-vaxx are selling something as well, like books or food supplements.

Politically, if people are mistrustful of medicine, they'll be more likely to be mistrustful of government action in general.

i find the anti vax stuff is because some people genuinely believe its dangerous and was pushed too fast because of money and corporate sponsors (yet those people arent against capitalism just against when capitalism doesn't serve them)

yet a lot of the claims of myocarditis and whatever is largely unsupported by studies and currently the anti vax folks are just going waiting for a source to say theyre correct because if i want to counter antivax i show any study theyre claiming exists

they cant show studies becuase low n behold they dont exist and facebook was lying. shocker

The movement seems to be more about expanding its base than informing or protecting them. Once ensnared, followers will reliably go to the polls, and vote the way they are told to vote.

Being staunchly antivaxx is detrimental to good health at the personal level, and at the public health level.

Based on real world outcomes, the antivaxx lobby gets enough of their base to vote as directed, to offset any lost votes due to base members dying for lack of protection from vaccines.

I mean, they kill off only a small portion of their base with bad advice, but get the political results that they want. Why would they care?

It has popped up organically my whole life, presumably from a lack of trust of pharmaceutical companies and government health agencies. Some risks of certain vaccines have been overvalued by the population and spread. Then there is the inorganic spread which has value on an intranational level. "If my rival is largely antivax I'm at an advantage" etc

From my viewpoint (central Canada, urban) people do not like to be controlled and mandated. So many fought back through any means necessary. That includes denial, fear mongering and trying to discredit science and fact to avoid having to stay home, social distance, and get a needle (which many people have phobias of).

It's just another way hostile foreign governments (Chinese, Russian etc.) insert chaotic propaganda to exploit and widen divisions within democracies. Some influencers work as agents of these governments, while many more are using it as an opportunity to increase their own celebrity which in turn fattens their wallets.

It might be controversial, but I think people have legitimate reasons to not trust public health authorities. They have had to fess up in the past after years of misleading people about a number of things, from tobacco, sugar, alcohol, cannabis, … The Spanish flu is only called “Spanish” because Spain was the only country willing to acknowledge it during war time. It didn’t help also that more recently, the White House admitted to lying about the lack of need of face masks at the very beginning of the COVID pandemic, because they didn’t want people to take them away from hospital workers who needed them.

So with that, I understand why people will want to be selective about what public health guidelines they’ll choose to trust and not trus.

Add to that, that getting a vaccine shot is unpleasant. And consoling your baby after they got vaccinated is even more unpleasant. From there, you can understand the mental shortcut that some people make, choosing to ignore the proven impressive track record of vaccines to limit or even eradicate contagion of some diseases, and all of a sudden, all vaccines are a lie.

A little conspiracy theory that I made up myself is that pharmaceutical companies spread the antivax-theories themselves, to prevent the measles from going extinct like smallpox.

Personally I think there are cultures of distrust built up by the government as an authority they have to overcome.

The methods of testing and developing these vaccines are radically different than previous vaccines. And the qualifiers of who was “at risk” and would need them were basically wide open from a government messaging standpoint.

So people naturally looked at it with skepticism. It then became a political battle. And medical officials did not do themselves any favors by making certain assertions using the same authority that turned out not to be true.

For example the initial reports of the origin of the virus being from a infectious disease lab in Wuhan, China were vehemently denied and shot down. Even those with a history of more liberal stances like John Stewart were shouted down and lampooned. The reality was they had no authority or information to based their denial of those assertions and low and behold it blew up in their face. Or the claim that even having covid previously was not enough and boosters were more effective than the real antibodies (which has never really been historically true for viruses and turns out wasn’t true for covid either. ) And socially excommunicating anyone that expressed doubt only made those with doubt see that as an affirmation. That it wasn’t based on logic or reason, just emotion.

And here’s the thing. Even if their messaging was altruistic there have been vaccines in the past that made clearance and then were recalled after testing because of side effects not found in testing. So there’s a history there. And the companies creating these vaccines have a history of covering up bad effects if it hits their bottoms line, such as the J&J aspiring or the talcum powder/baby power recalls. And that’s not to mention the history of testing on underserved communities that weren’t fully disclosed (ie:tuskeegee).

So yeha, it would make sense that there’s some new virus we have never seen and suddenly some miracle cure comes out within weeks, and there’s a huge media blitz for everyone, even those in good health witb relatively little risk factors, HAVE to get it. There was no nuance and again, while the push may have been altruistic the history shows there little that will help when the side effects emerge. And “just trust us we’re scientists” isnt enough.

Look at what happened with 9/11 cleanup crews. They have huge rates of cancer and such for cleaning those buildings up and now none of them can get treatment or even recognized that it’s a cause. Another thing Mr. Stewart goes nuts on.

So the doubt of the claims, to me, was and still is justified.

I actually got perma-banned from a subreddit for expressing my opinions on this.

Most people get downright hostile about anti-vax ideology. However I think there is some cause for concern there. Keep in mind just getting an injection regardless of what's in it carries some risk. I don't see any economic or political motivation behind anti-vax ideology other than a legitimate concern for public safety. No doubt there's economic motivation for pro-vax ideology.

Some may take anti-vax ideology to an extreme, but then some may be too trusting of the system. There are wide opinions about many of the systems we live under, not just vaccination. I'm less trusting of all the systems that make up our society more than I've ever been. There's a number of reasons I feel that way. The main reason is I simply don't trust our leaders and institutions to make public safety a priority. I mean how many times do they have to demonstrate this before the average person gets the memo.

One thing I haven't seen mentioned here yet is that at least in America, we have had a historic problem with minority groups (especially Black people) and distrust of the medical field in general that's pretty freaking justified. This study speaks about it in depth. but here's some relevant points from the abstract:

Given that the virus has hit the Black community the hardest, I am concerned now that vaccine hesitancy may perpetuate the health disparities that we are currently seeing in the numbers of infections and deaths taking place. Most studies, for instance, at this point, have found that Blacks as a community have the highest levels of individuals who state they will never get the vaccine or are not sure if they will get the vaccine, Fig. Fig.11 [7, 8]. Many studies have noted that Black people cite distrust in the government and in the medical profession. Black people cite our nation’s history of racism in medical research and in medical care as key reasons for their hesitancy [9, 10].

For some people it is a real, deep distrust in the government. Like I said though, it's justified. You don't have to look far to see examples of what they're talking about. J. Marion Sims was hailed as a medical hero for developing new surgical techniques, but he practiced and developed them on non consenting black slave women and immigrant Irish women. That's by far from the worst though, if you've never read of it, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study is fucking horrifying.

The Public Health Service started the study in 1932 in collaboration with Tuskegee University (then the Tuskegee Institute), a historically Black college in Alabama. In the study, investigators enrolled a total of 600 impoverished African-American sharecroppers from Macon County, Alabama.[6] Of these men, 399 had latent syphilis, with a control group of 201 men who were not infected.[5] As an incentive for participation in the study, the men were promised free medical care. While the men were provided with both medical and mental care that they otherwise would not have received,[7] they were deceived by the PHS, who never informed them of their syphilis diagnosis[6][8][9][10][11] and provided disguised placebos, ineffective methods, and diagnostic procedures as treatment for "bad blood".[12]

The men were initially told that the experiment was only going to last six months, but it was extended to 40 years.[5] After funding for treatment was lost, the study was continued without informing the men that they would never be treated. None of the infected men were treated with penicillin despite the fact that, by 1947, the antibiotic was widely available and had become the standard treatment for syphilis.[13]

The study continued, under numerous Public Health Service supervisors, until 1972, when a leak to the press resulted in its termination on November 16 of that year.[14] By then, 28 patients had died directly from syphilis, 100 died from complications related to syphilis, 40 of the patients' wives were infected with syphilis, and 19 children were born with congenital syphilis.[15]

This study kept uneducated, rural black people from receiving adequate care for their known Syphilis infections for TWENTY FIVE YEARS after we knew about how to treat the disease. People were infected. Children were infected. People died from this study.

For background, I'm very pro-vaccine, so much so that I wanted to study biomedical sciences and immunology. But I think it's extremely important to realize the sociological backgrounds as to why some people distrust the system and are suspicious of "free medical care" especially when sponsored by the government. The first study I linked talks about it, and I definitely agree that there is SO much work to be done in the US around trust in public health institutions.