Head of Polish anti-vaccine movement quits after accusation of misappropriating donations – Notes From Poland

Poland’s most prominent anti-vaccine activist, Justyna Socha, has resigned as head of the organisation she founded and has led for over a decade amid accusations that she misappropriated around half a million zloty of donations it collected.

Socha – who has also served as a parliamentary assistant to far-right MP Grzegorz Braun – says she is the victim of “absurd slanders” by two fellow members of the Polish Association of Knowledge about Vaccinations (widely known as STOP NOP).

That organisation has played a leading role in stoking growing anti-vaccine sentiment in Poland over the last decade by promoting unfounded claims about vaccines causing harm.

In 2010, just 3,437 parents in Poland refused compulsory vaccinations for their children; by 2019, that had risen to 48,609, an increase of over 1,300%. The refusal rate rose even further in 2020, noted UNICEF last year, resulting in Poland “already losing population immunity” against measles.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Socha and her organisation also led anti-lockdown and anti-vaccine protests. Polling has shown Poles to be particularly reluctant to vaccinate against the virus. Only around 57% of Poland’s population are fully vaccinated compared to a figure of 73% across the EU as a whole.

Earlier this year, prosecutors in the city of Poznań initiated an investigation into the suspected misappropriation of at least 470,000 zloty (€100,000) from public collections organised by STOP NOP, reported the Gazeta Wyborcza daily.

Socha herself had been reported to prosecutors on suspicion of committing the alleged crime by a former MP, Zbigniew Nowak, who said that many of the collections had gone directly to Socha’s personal bank account rather than her organisation’s.

Socha denied the accusations at the time, saying “the system is attacking” her. However, yesterday, Socha announced that she had resigned as head of STOP NOP – a position she has held since 2011 – due to “absurd slanders against me from two members of the association”.

She did not rule out standing again for the organisation’s leadership in a future election, but also posted a link to a crowdfunding campaign to help her “continue my social activities and legal assistance for the victims” of vaccination.

In response, STOP NOP’s board issued its own statement calling Socha’s claims “untruthful” and saying that she had been unable to account for money from public collections. “Rebuilding public trust [in it] had been severely limited by a lack of financial transparency and the whole fundraising [process].”

As well as becoming the face of Poland’s antivax movement, Socha has also served as a parliamentary assistant to Braun, one of the leaders of the far-right Confederation (Konfederacja). Braun and his party have also been prominent in anti-lockdown and anti-vaccine protests.

In 2019, Socha was successfully sued for defamation by a doctor, Paweł Grzesiowski, whom she had falsely accused of having links to pharmaceutical companies. The same year, Poland’s commission for patients’ rights accused her of “extremely harmful” false claims about vaccines.

, https://notesfrompoland.com/2019/11/01/doctor-who-criticised-vaccines-banned-from-practising-medicine-for-a-year/

Main image credit: Dawid Zuchowicz / Agencja Gazeta

Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.