From Respectful Insolence:

On “reasonable” apologists for the antivaccine movement

I realize that I sound like the proverbial broken record (and that many of the younger people reading this might not even know what that reference means), but I’ve been at this a long time. I was countering quackery and antivaccine pseudoscience on Usenet back in the 1990s into the early 2000s and then have been blogging about it since 2004. I like to think that two decades of combatting antivaccine misinformation have given me some perspective, which is why I sometimes get so frustrated with so many “reasonable” doctors, scientists, and pundits who, before the pandemic, had paid scant, if any attention to the antivaccine movement, and are shocked—shocked, I say!—to discover the conspiracy theories and violent rhetoric that I’ve been documenting for nearly two decades. Some of them who had paid a little attention would sometimes even periodically castigate me for being a “frenzied, self-righteous zealot” who supposedly couldn’t tell the difference between vaccine-hesitant parents and antivaxxers, never mind the number of times I’ve discussed exactly that difference.

The complaints by these oh-so-“reasonable” people continue, a year and a half into the pandemic. What brought this to my attention is the reaction to an op-ed article in the New York Times by Tara Haelle published yesterday and entitled This Is the Moment the Anti-Vaccine Movement Has Been Waiting For. I’ll start with a brief (for me) discussion of the article, and then move on to some reactions on social media that, whether the people expressing such annoyance at Haelle’s message know it or not, follow a tired, well-worn playbook for apologists for the antivaccine movement. It’s a sentiment that has long annoyed me in that it’s apparently based, above all, on the apologist’s desire to be “reasonable” and bend over backwards to consider “both perspectives.”

(more, particularly on the antivaccine movement looking for their “marketing moment,” and finding it in Covid-19, conservatives, and libertarians)