Anti-Vaxxers Are Cozying Up to the Far Right Online

They’re anti-science and conspiratorial. Together, they’re building a right-wing populist, measle-stricken future.

Often, sometimes multiple times a day, users in an anti-vaccination Facebook group post a link to a 2017 article about vaccine laws in Sweden.

“Nice!” one group member captioned the article last week.

“Amazing,” “interesting,” wrote two people who shared the article in the 150,000-member group on the same late January day.

The article wasn’t from a medical news source, though, or even another anti-vaccine group. It came from a white supremacist website, Red Ice.

The anti-vaxxer movement, comprised of people who falsely believe vaccines are dangerous, is ascendant. In 2019, the World Health Organization named “vaccine hesitancy” one of the top 10 threats to global health, the first time it made the list. The movement is credited with contributing to ongoing measles outbreaks worldwide, including an outbreak of approximately 70 people in Washington state. But that’s not all it’s spreading. Like other conspiracy movements, the anti-vaxxer movement has rubbed shoulders with the far right.

New studies reveal vaccine skepticism to be a strong predictor for populist politics in Europe, where many populist candidates run on a hard-right line. And fringe media outlets are seizing on the sympathy from the anti-vax movement, pushing even more extreme conspiracy theories under the guise of vaccine skepticism.


https://www.thedailybeast.com/anti-vaxxers-are-cozying-up-to-the-far-right-online?ref=home

Anti vaxxers are an odd bunch.  They are one group that is about as likely to be comprised of hard leftys as a hard righty.  At least here in the US.

Maddog wrote:Anti vaxxers are an odd bunch.  They are one group that is about as likely to be comprised of hard leftys as a hard righty.  At least here in the US.

Personally I think its all down to trust and those who least trust. Are more than likley to buy into not one, but countless conspiracies. Where they refuse to accept the reality of many a situtaion and allow themselves to be led to believe something far more outlandish on issues.

This is not to say some conspiracies have not turned out to be true, but the number is very low to say the least.

So again to me, those who have least trust in society and Governemnt are found on the Far Right and Far left. So I dont think the article is getting to the core of why people buy into said conspiracies. I think it also has much to do with how people have so much information at their finger tips, but wrongly think they know more than experts do. The more society has become educated, the more, they generally and wrongly think they know better than others. On things they actually know very little about.

These same people never actually look at their beliefs from a scientific methodology, through a prisim of skeptism. They only look at the one side of the argument that first their beliefs.