A movement with a distorted sense of individual rights that would seek to hamper vaccination in the midst of a global health crisis is reactionary to the core and hostile to human life itself. The dangerous rise of the anti-vax far-right is a symptom of a sickness in this society that we will still be confronting well after the last wave of the pandemic has finally receded.
  • @WhiskeyJuliet
    0•2 years ago

    When Jonas Salk made the Polio vaccine, conservatives whined that it hadn’t been tested and couldn’t be safe. So many people talked on every platform they had to decry the vaccine as “unsafe”, to the point that Salk had to make the statement “It is safe, and you can’t get safer than safe.”

    And they were lying back then too. The Cutter incident involved a defective polio vaccine rollout from Cutter Labortories that resulted in 200,000 children being infected with live polio. Around 40,000 children would develop polio, with hundreds being permanently injured from it and some even dying from it.

    Turns out the people working in government and scientific labs are, in fact, people, and therefore fallible. Blindly trusting them is a mistake. Trust is earned, and our government bureaucracy has done nothing to earn anyone’s trust in a very long time.

    Sixty-six years later, and conservatives still shout the same thing, this hasn’t been a “rise”. It’s been an awakening for those who didn’t realize the American right has always been anti-vax.

    I’m old enough to remember a year ago, when multiple Democrats were saying the vaccine could not be trusted because Trump was endorsing it and, God forbid, even rushing it into production.

    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-biden/democrat-biden-warns-against-rushing-out-coronavirus-vaccine-says-trump-cannot-be-trusted-idUSKBN2671NW

    “Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden on Wednesday rejected President Donald Trump’s charge that he is spreading fear about the safety of a potential coronavirus vaccine, urging Trump to defer to scientists and not rush its rollout.”

    https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/05/kamala-harris-trump-coronavirus-vaccine-409320

    “Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris said she wouldn’t take President Donald Trump’s word on the reliability of any coronavirus vaccine released before the election.”

    I never realized what anti-vaxxers our glorious President and Vice President are. No wonder more people have allegedly died of Covid in 2021 than in 2020.