The alarming rise of the anti-vaxxers

If you passed Trafalgar Square on Saturday, you probably heard it: a 2,000-strong army of former medics, army veterans and breastfeeding mothers chanting “we don’t need no vaccinations” to the tune of Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall.

The lyrics talk of needing no education and for the 30 or so protesters eventually arrested by riot police, that’s exactly how they saw it. “It’s not a protest, it’s an educational event,” was the message from speaker Kate Shemirani, an ex-NHS nurse recently suspended for spreading false theories about the virus, vaccines and the 5G network. Wearing a St George’s flag face-covering, she addressed a sea of mostly unmasked protesters, some with bloodied heads, others carrying placards calling coronavirus a “scam” and vaccines “poison in a syringe”. Discredited anti-vax doctor Andrew Wakefield (now going out with model Elle Macpherson) made a virtual speech from the US.

One of the people supporting (some of) their sentiments from home was Alex Cobb. The 24-year-old admits his vaccine scepticism is probably going to start to get in the way of his social life. Yes, it means he can’t go to football training. Yes, it means he’ll miss out on clubbing at Christmas. But none of that is enough to change his staunch position: he still won’t be joining his friends in taking a Covid-19 vaccine, if and when one is developed. “They keep asking: ‘Why wouldn’t you just do it?’” he sighs. “But it’s not usual to pump something into your body.”

The sales development manager, furloughed from his office job in Charing Cross, insists he’s not an anti-vaxxer, but “vaccine cautious”. His grandfather died in a care home over lockdown, so he understands the urgency for a way out of the crisis, but he needs more evidence than a green-light from the Government. His mother, a teacher, would take a vaccine “straight away” if that happened, but he prefers to err on the side of caution. He would rather wait years to study the science behind it properly, even if it means spending the next 12 months in lockdown.

Cobb’s reasons for rejecting a new vaccine are multi-faceted — health; and mistrust of politicians (“how do we know the Government isn’t just trying to make their data [on handling the pandemic] look good?” he says) — but his central argument is the most well-trodden among coronavirus vaccine sceptics: a concern over speed. The anti-vax movement began in earnest in 1998, when British doctor Wakefield wrongly linked the MMR vaccine to autism. Last year, the World Health Organisation named vaccine hesitancy as one of the top 10 global health threats. Now, focus on a Covid vaccine has sparked new debates.

If successful, the Covid-19 vaccine would be the fastest to be developed in history, but Cobb and many others are sceptical given vaccines typically take 10 to 15 years before approval. Medic Els Torreele, former executive director at Médecins Sans Frontières, recently published an article in the British Medical Journal warning that the rush to create a Covid-19 vaccine could do more harm than good. While she is traditionally a proponent of vaccines, she’s worried “the bar is being lowered because there’s such a panic and a pressure,” she tells me over the phone from Geneva.

Like the thousands who attended anti-vaccine marches in Trafalgar Square at the weekend, Cobb is “alarmed” to read news of a race between more than 200 global Covid-19 vaccine candidates in development. US President Donald Trump, a vaccine sceptic, is now using a promise of a jab by the end of the year to lure voters, while scientists from Oxford university and AstraZenica say their goal is to succeed by the end of 2020 or early 2021.

Scientists say it’s the greatest global effort that’s ever been put into a vaccine and predict they’d need at least 70 to 90 per cent of the population to take it to stop the spread of Covid. So scepticism like Cobb and Torreele’s poses a “big problem”, says Dr Heidi Larson, director of the Vaccine Confidence Project at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She nearly lost her husband, a leading virus hunter, to Covid and has been hard at work exploring how vaccine rumours start.

Larson realises Cobb and Torreele are at the moderate end of the scepticism spectrum. They might be a small minority, but they are a loud one, says Larson’s co-director Dr Pauline Paterson, who is concerned by the link her studies have found between anti-vaccination sentiments and higher-risk categories such as people from BAME backgrounds and lower income households. Why the scepticism? Paterson cites reasons including political polarisation, a trend for being “natural”, and government mistrust.

Social media also means that anyone can be an expert now, she says, so “concerns can spread globally in a minute” – a new study this week found engagement with anti-vaccine posts on UK Facebook pages trebled between July and August. In July, Kanye West called a Covid vaccine “the mark of the beast”, citing a popular conspiracy theory that it’s a method of microchipping the population; while sites like Twitter are awash with false theories. Among the extreme: that Bill Gates is using the Covid vaccine to implant microchips into people, that vaccine tests have left women infertile, and that “at least 50 million Americans would die, probably from the first dose” of the vaccine itself — a claim made in an interview with discredited US medical researcher Judy Mikovits.

Mikovits, a former lab technician at America’s National Cancer Institute, has become something of a Twitter celebrity since her viral conspiracy documentary Plandemic falsely claimed vaccines don’t work and masks “activate” the virus. The video was removed from Facebook and YouTube, but not before being widely shared on various social media platforms by Mikovits’s 184,000-strong following.

Across the Atlantic, London’s anti-vax-activist-in-chief might not have a documentary, but certainly has a Twitter presence to rival Mikovits’s. More than 37,000 people follow Piers Corbyn, brother of the former Labour leader, who was instrumental in organising Saturday’s protests. Suspended NHS nurse Shemirani, 54, is also a ringleader — more than 24,000 people now follow her. The mother-of-four was suspended from practising for 18 months in July after sharing false theories about the virus, vaccines and the 5G network. She continues to run a “natural” nursing practice from her home in Sussex.

“They’re not arguments, they’re facts,” Shemirani scolds me as I ask her to list her reasons for resisting a vaccine. She lists her objections impatiently: that “no vaccine has ever been proven safe or effective”, that “no two vaccines have ever been tested together for their efficacy”.

Besides, “there is no pandemic”, she adds, using her go-to “pandemic scamdemic” slogan. She doesn’t know anyone who’s had the virus and believes no one has died of Covid-19: “they died after testing positive and having comorbidities”. What about those who didn’t have underlying health conditions? “Show me the evidence!” she retaliates. “Have you seen their blood results? Have you seen their scans?”

A glance at Shemirani’s Twitter reveals the extent of her government mistrust. Despite 35 years working as a registered nurse, she calls the NHS, her former employer, “the new Auschwitz” for carrying out recognised medical vaccinations and believes a small elite of “globalists” are using the pandemic to control the masses — common arguments among the anti-vax community.

“Vaccination is a very intrusive form of medication and inherently dangerous,” agrees Nigel Utton, 56, a headteacher-turned-osteopath who hasn’t vaccinated any of his three children and will be speaking at this weekend’s rally in Trafalgar Square. He thinks searching for a vaccine is “fruitless” given that the coronavirus crisis “just looks like a bad flu season” – a sentiment echoed by Simon Dolan, the millionnaire businessman leading the UK’s battle against the lockdown restrictions via his campaign group Keep Britain Free.

Lara Crabb, 33, and Louise Creffield, 34, agree — neither have had any vaccinations and they don’t believe Covid-19 is serious risk enough to warrant the risk of a vaccine. Crabb, from Shepherd’s Bush, believes “vitamins and a healthy lifestyle” are the most effective preventative, while Creffield, founder of 2,000-strong Facebook campaign group Save Our Rights UK, says she and her four children have cut out junk food and refined sugar and never get the flu or bugs anyway.

But alongside long-time anti-vaxxers like Crabb and Creffield, the pandemic has birthed a new wave of vaccine refuseniks. Alex Berenson, former New York Times reporter and the face of the anti-mask brigade in the US, says he’s always vaccinated but “Covid has made me think I should at least look at the anti-vax case”, while Imperial College maths student Marwan Riach, 21, a speaker at July’s anti-mask protests in Islington, says he’s wary of a vaccine. He will only consider taking it if Cabinet members and world leaders take it first.

Berenson and Riach represent an overlap between the anti-mask and anti-vax movements, but the reality is not always so clear-cut. Cobb, a friend of Riach’s, says he’s happy to wear a mask if he can see how it’ll help other people, but is more wary of a vaccine because of the side-effects. Medya Gungor, 25, who’s also pro-mask, agrees. First, her youth and lack of underlying health conditions means catching Covid isn’t an “immediate concern”, but mostly, it’s the newness that bothers her. “Vaping, for example, could have lasting implications we don’t know about,” she says. “We’re still learning as we go and so far a lot of the pandemic forecasts have been wrong.”

Even among the vaccine resistant army, there is division among the ranks. Extremists at Saturday’s protest carried placards with emotive messages such as “do you love your children?” while others worry such “conspiracy theorists” distract from more moderate arguments. Cobb says he would never have attended the rally for fear of spreading the virus, but the “nuts” also put him off. For him and his fellow sceptics, they don’t want to be labelled as “anti-vaxxers”. “I’m just anti-stupid,” said one Keep Britain Free supporter on Twitter, while others prefer “vaccine cautious”, “risk aware” and the newly adopted anti-mask slogan “pro-choice”.

“Everybody should have the choice to take a vaccine,” says Creffield, admitting she would consider taking it if she was at serious risk of Covid-19 or had comorbidities. For her, it’s a case of weighing up: she’s seen how some vaccines like Swine Flu have had side-effects so believes she’d be more at risk by taking a vaccine than not. It’s the same for her children. “Why would I vaccinate them when they’re at such low risk of the virus or effects of the virus?” she asks. “I’ll take my chances.”

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