How new are vaccine conspiracy theories — and how worried should we be about them? – ABC Religion & Ethics
The English physician Edward Jenner demonstrated that a child could be inoculated from smallpox by using lymph from a cowpox blister in 1798, and there was immediate opposition to the practice. Riots broke out in a number of British cities during the 1832 epidemic, and the Anti Vaccination League formed soon after mandatory vaccination for infants was introduced in 1853. At a demonstration in Leicester in March 1885, some 100,000 demonstrators burned an effigy of Jenner.
Similar disturbances in the United States led to a Supreme Court hearing in 1905, and there were widespread protests against masks during the 1912 flu epidemic. In the mid-1970s, there were claims that the Diphtheria, Tetanus, and Pertussis (DTP) vaccine caused neurological conditions. Lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers during the next ten years caused a spike in the price of the vaccine, vaccination rates dropped, and incidence of pertussis (Whooping Cough) was 10 to 100 times higher than in countries where there was no anti-DTP movement.
In 1998, The Lancet published a paper by Andrew Wakefield and twelve co-authors arguing for a connection between the Measles, Mumps, and Rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism. After a series of exposés in the Sunday Times throughout 2007 showed serious flaws in the research methodology of the paper, and that Wakefield had been paid to produce evidence for a class action lawsuit against vaccine manufacturers, The Lancet withdrew the paper in 2010, and Wakefield was struck off. This was too late to prevent an 8 per cent drop in MMR vaccination between 1996 and 2002 after the idea was popularised by celebrities like the American model, actress and presenter, Jenny McCarthy. (This narrative has continued to circulate within conspiritual circles, the official discreditation being taken as evidence of a cover-up — just as we now see in the resurgence of Satanic Ritual Abuse theories that were prevalent between the 1970s and 1990s in the PizzaGate conspiracy and among groups like QAnon.)
So if “antivax” conspiracy theories are nothing new, historically speaking (even if we didn’t call them that at the time), why do so many media commentators think that we are living in a “golden age of conspiracy theories”?
This is terrifying, threatening. We’re seeing the growth of something that’s melding conspiracy theory, with extremism, paranoia, grift and manipulation. There’s a deadly sickness now in the west, a rejection of sense, decency, logic, honesty. This is the start of something awful https://t.co/poSETdMmAW
— NeilMackay (@NeilMackay)
July 25, 2021
The received wisdom has it that this is being caused by the Internet, which is supposed to enable a far more efficient spread of disinformation, and create “bubbles” in which we are only presented with sources that support our existing biases. There are doubtless serious issues with social media, but the common notion idea that social media platforms are the prime driver of conspiracy theories is usually exaggerated. Vaccine conspiracy theories were widespread long before social media, and while social media can produce “bubbles”, this was already the case in traditional or mainstream media. And so, in the UK, readers of the Daily Mail or the Sun will hardly ever read the same material as readers of the Guardian or the Independent.
Yet COVID lockdowns created an online pivot during which people were suddenly looking to the Internet for more of their news, entertainment, and opportunities for socialisation. Journalists were also forced to source their stories online, even though there was little happening beyond the endless churn of infection figures and changing restrictions. So social media debates and controversies became a bigger source of stories — and it’s very easy to search Twitter for a few extreme examples to illustrate a story and provoke outrage, and clicks.
The audience for traditional media — by which I mean predominantly newspapers and television news — has been in decline for decades, and disinterested investigative journalism has been a victim of shrinking revenues. On top of this, these media organisations are owned by far fewer people than even a few decades ago. According to UNESCO, this concentration of media ownership means a smaller range of opinion being presented. It is not even controversial to point out the massive political influence of the Murdoch empire — it was openly acknowledged that the Murdoch papers’ embrace of Tony Blair was instrumental in UK Labour’s victory in 1997, and in the United States, the role of Fox News in the spread of right-leaning conspiracies can hardly be overstated.
But the biggest reason we are giving so much attention to COVID conspiracy theories may simply be because COVID vaccination matters, on an existential level, to almost everyone. Few may have cared about the contents of Hunter Biden’s emails, to take a recent example, but we certainly care about a relative dying of COVID-19. Issues which threaten our bodies, or those of our family, trigger emotional reactions that heighten our defensive responses. This, in turn, can provoke a search for alternative explanations, and for people to blame, which often leads into conspiracy theories (as we have seen with the recent interest in “conspirituality” among yoga and wellness influencers).
It is not therefore surprising that most of the conspiracy theories which have crossed into mainstream media are those in which our bodies are seen as under attack – just think of Pizzagate, Satanic Ritual Abuse, Genetically modified organisms (GMOs), 5G, and the history of “antivax” protests I’ve outlined above. Which means, ironically, that subscribing to conspiracy theories about COVID-19, and feeling under threat from these conspiracy theories, come from very similar impulses — to protect ourselves and our loved ones. COVID-19 has increased the perceived threat of “antivax” ideas as much as it has increased their popularity.
So the fact that conspiracy theories are a lot more visible right now doesn’t necessarily mean that we are entering an “age of unreason”. Indeed, approaching the issue in that way risks increasing already polarised positions. Rather than further alienating people who are primarily concerned for their health and that of their family, approaches that sympathetically engage emotions and concerns over the wellbeing of the vulnerable are more likely to be effective. After all, there is nothing new about vaccine conspiracy theories.
What is new is the fact that, at a time when vaccines have made our lives much safer, and efficacy and safety are higher than ever before, attacks on vaccine science, combined with elaborate narratives of cover-ups and conspiracies, have come to play a central role in our collective experiences of the pandemic. And that is likely to continue for some time.
David G. Robertson is Lecturer in Religious Studies at the Open University, co-founder of the Religious Studies Project, and co-editor of the journal Implicit Religion. He is the author of Gnosticism and the History of Religions and UFOs, the New Age and Conspiracy Theories: Millennial Conspiracism, and co-editor of After World Religions: Reconstructing Religious Studies and the Handbook of Conspiracy Theories and Contemporary Religion.
This piece is part of a series arising from the (Con)spirituality, Science and COVID-19 Colloquium, convened by Deakin University and Western Sydney University in March 2021 in the course of the (Con)spirituality in Australia project. This project was funded by the International Research Network for the Study of Science and Belief in Society, based at the University of Birmingham and funded by the Templeton Religion Trust.
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