this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2024
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Andrew Fucking Wakefield can never suffer enough for everything he’s responsible for
At this point, he was a symptom. He was pushing a narrative those people already wanted to hear. They'd likely still be the way they are. They'd have found their excuse somewhere. And by now, anyone not immediately, loudly, aggressively pushing back on the bullshit narrative are bad actors with ill intentions
He was doing it to make money. I don't think it's sufficient to call him a symptom. I'd argue he was one step away from bringing it to the mainstream. (That celebrity was responsible for making it mainstream imo)
What I mean is that whether he existed or not, something was bound to mainstream the antivax movement
I think I disagree that we would've had mainstream anti-vax even without Andrew Wakefield (and Jenny McCarthy).
That's like saying we'd have Microsoft without Bill Gates. Sure, we don't need Gates now to have Microsoft, and it feels like an inevitability in hindsight. But he was such a major player that moved MS forward that things would be very different without him.
He's all of one half of one sentence in the main wiki article on the centuries-old antivax movement, shared with a 1980's similar scare.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_hesitancy
I think we have age bias -- it was the story of our time so we as more weight to it. There are so many true and false stories of vaccines for centuries.
I think a better analogy is you're trying to say without Bill Gates, personal computing wouldn't exist, when it was already moving in that direction, and Hell, I'm pretty sure apple and Microsoft build their idea on an operating system that was created by xerox first.
Great points.
Didn't Jenny McCarthy leverage Andrew Wakefield's research for her position, though? Because I feel like that's when it started becoming "mainstream".
I'd say it was during the pandemic that it went crazy though. Actually mainstream, where parents stopped asking each other "Where do you take your baby for their boosters?", and started asking "So are you choosing to vaccine your baby?"...
She absolutely did, but she isn't even a footnote. People having kids today might not even know who she is.
If you look at data, vaccination support was lower in 2008 than it got in 2014 when it dipped again due to Wakefield. He is blamed for specific incidences, like measles outbreaks at the time. But a bigger dip happened in 2019 with the bullshit nationalism messaging (don't let the government tell you what to do)
https://data.unicef.org/topic/child-health/immunization/