Antivax movement not necessarily rooted in politics – Daily Kos

I did a search here on DailyKos and saw relatively little about the antivax movement prior to covid. I’ve been very careful in the last 2 years not to lump all antivaxxers into a political grouping. I have no doubt that two years in, politics heavily influences people’s choices to get vaxxed or not. But at the same time I recognize the influence of a subculture that was already rooted prior to covid. It was not at all a surprise to me that plaquenil and ivermectin became the two drugs of choice for an antivax crowd wanting to battle covid. These two drugs are probably the two most common I see mentioned among communities centered around chronic illness. That the same two drugs became so controversial in the last 2 years speaks to the regular usage of those drugs among huge numbers of chronically ill people in the USA over the last couple of decades. This is why ridiculing people for using horse dewormer might have backfired. The antivax hysteria was already built-in among a subset of people from all political persuasions.

At base, these chronic illness communities have a deep distrust of for-profit medicine. Many of them have been through mainstream medical care and found it wanting. Others could not afford therapy for treatments that were not covered by insurance—if they had insurance at all. Our for-profit industry has bred this. I’ve linked an article in the Atlantic that scratches the surface of the problems with health care when it comes to chronic illness, and it treads the same ground voiced by many in the chronic illness community: www.theatlantic.com/…

Now—I have no explanation for anti-mask hysteria. That seems overtly political.

I would also note that many “functional” doctors who treat chronic illness have split around these issues. One of the most prominent Lyme Disease doctors, Richard Horowitz, have been extolling the virtues of the vaccines for a very long time—and to a community which has been vaccine hesitant for a very long time because of the disastrous lyme vaccine trials of the 1990s (many who took the vaccine in trials contracted Lyme; the vaccine itself failed). Horowitz has not only been excoriated by many of those who took his advice for a very long time (Horowitz has himself touted plaquenil and the like for treating chronic illness), but also by former medical collaborators. His retort is simple, and it has split the chronic illness community: there is nothing more similar to the syndromes many already suffer than long covid.

I think it’s helpful for us to recognize that total dismissal of the antivax movement is not likely to get us anywhere and that only the level of reasoning that Horowitz employs would have the desired impact.

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