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Often, sometimes several times a day, users of a Facebook anti-vaccination group publish a link to a 2017 article on vaccine laws in Sweden.
"Nice!", A member of the group subtitled the article last week.
"Incredible", "interesting," wrote two people who shared the article in the group of 150,000 members the same day, late January.
The article does not come from a medical information source, or even from another anti-vaccine group. It came from a white supremacist website, Red Ice.
The anti-vaxxer movement, made up of people who mistakenly believe that vaccines are dangerous, is upward. In 2019, the World Health Organization ranked "vaccine hesitancy" among the top 10 threats to global health, the first time that it was on the list. The move is believed to have contributed to the ongoing measles epidemics worldwide, including about 70 people in the state of Washington. But that's not all that is spreading. Like other conspiracy movements, the anti-vaxxer movement rubbed shoulders with the far right.
New studies reveal that vaccine skepticism is a powerful predictor of populist politics in Europe, where many populist candidates are extremely straightforward. And the marginalized media profit from the sympathy of the anti-vax movement, pushing even more extreme conspiracy theories under cover of vaccine skepticism.
The White supremacist website Red Ice has published at least 100 articles and radio clips denouncing vaccines in recent years. Links to these articles appear regularly in closed anti-vaxxer Facebook groups, some of which have more than 150,000 members. Unlike Facebook pages, which any user can read, these closed groups can be hotbeds of political activity and harassment, in which members coordinate their attacks against doctors and activists who support vaccination. guardian reported.
Right-wing news sites can find a serious audience in these very active conspiracy communities. A 2017 article in Red Ice has toured several major anti-vax groups, sometimes accumulating over 1,000 "likes". Although the article skews the right wing (he praises an excerpt from Tucker Carlson's show) and alarmist (vaccines "can seriously harm your child"), it's not a white supremacist. But if anti-vaxxers chose to explore the rest of the site, they would find a white supremacist swamp, filled with anti-immigrant and Islamophobic anxieties.
Most anti-vaxxers are not white supremacists, far from it. But the overlap can send well-intentioned parents into the rabbit's burrow. Right-wing extremist groups often engage in "entreanism", a tactic of inculcating extremist ideology into a sympathetic dominant group and then slowly radicalizing its members. The tactic works well in groups such as the anti-vax community.
On their surface, anti-vax claims take advantage of populist grievances with bipartisan support; In the United States, where health care can be very expensive, vaccines are sometimes seen as an extension of well-funded pharmaceutical companies. But the world of conservative-style conspiracy sites is pushing claims further. Red Ice, Infowars and their peers rely on the mistrust of pharmaceutical companies to claim that vaccines are part of a global domination ploy devised by a gloomy global elite. As these claims generally claim, conspiracy theory becomes anti-Semitic, with white supremacists interpreting "elite" as meaning the Jewish people.
When the anti-vax spreads in the margins of the Internet, it mingles with other theories of far right conspiracy.
Natural News, a far-right conspiracy site with 2.9 million "likes" on Facebook, is one of the major sources of anti-vaxxer content, according to L & # 39; Atlantic. A recent anti-abortion article on Natural News accuses the "political left in America" of advocating for child murder and warns that government teams of "vaccine enforcement officers" are on the cusp to start vaccinating children under the threat of firearms. In a Facebook group of 10,000 members for those who believe that some people (usually blondes or redheads) constitute a superior race unrelated to the rest of humanity, members have presented a series of arguments against vaccination, especially the fact that vaccinations are a miscegenation. .
But the input techniques are not entirely to blame for the right of the anti-vax move. Two recent studies suggest that anti-vaxxers tend to have a world view consistent with right-wing populism.
A study conducted in March by Australian researchers used a theory that verifies five traits, including respect for a person's "purity" and respect for authority. Anti-vax parents tested a lot the belief in purity (defined by researchers as "a horror of impurity of the body") and little respect for authority.
Conservatives generally attach great importance to respect for purity and authority, while liberals score lower. But populist movements, including Donald Trump's presidential campaign, borrow some of the anti-authoritarian terms of the left, portraying themselves as anti-elites. On Facebook, anti-vaxxers could rage against the authority of pharmaceutical companies or vaccination policies in schools, but Trump is a less common target. (Trump also encouraged anti-vax conspiracies, falsely claim in 2014 that vaccines cause autism.)
"The idea of forcing one to give up one's freedom for the benefit of the collective is not based on American values, but rather on communism."
– Kelly Townsend, Republican anti-vaxxer in Arizona
Other conservatives have labeled their anti-vax positions as anti-authoritarian by claiming that vaccinations were communist. "The idea that we force someone to give up his freedom for the sake of the collective is not based on American but communist values," writes Kelly Townsend, a Republican anti-vaxxer of the House of America. 39, state of Arizona, in a post posted Thursday on Facebook.
The trend is even clearer in Europe, where a study published in February in the European Journal of Public Health suggests "a link between the rise of political populism and hesitation about vaccines".
The study revealed an overlap of measles epidemics in France, Greece and Italy and the rise of populist parties in these regions. In all three cases, over 15% of respondents said they did not believe that vaccines are effective. (Immunization programs are most effective when at least 95% of the population is vaccinated.)
"It seems likely that scientific populism is motivated by sentiments similar to those of political populism – that is, a deep distrust of elites and experts by marginalized and marginalized segments of the population." , wrote the author of the study. guardian. An investigation conducted in December 2018 by the guardian found a similar overlap between populist votes and anti-vaxxers in the United States and Poland.
In Ireland, the merger of anti-vaxxer plot and right-wing populism parades the streets. Participants in the "Yellow Vest" event in Dublin in January chanted anti-immigrant slogans while protesting against vaccines, Newspaper reported. The Yellow Vests, originally a French protest movement backed by left and right populists, adopted a more conspiratorial tone on the far right, the Canadian and British Yellow Vests using the movement for promote anti-immigrant rhetoric and QAnon conspiracy theory. . Members of right-wing extremist groups participated in the Canadian and British demonstrations.
Some Facebook groups of the Irish movement Yellow Vest were "dominated by marginal conspiracy theories and shared denials from dubious sources of information," including false health claims about fluoride, Newspaper reported.
Some of these health claims are related to the Awareness Act, a conspiracy site that is currently pushing the fictional claim about blondes and redheads belonging to a race of masters unrelated to the rest of humanity.
Finally, all of this – the conspiracy theories, the skepticism of an invisible authority, right-wing populism – unites. On Natural News, the American anti-vaxxer site that has nearly 3 million likes, an article says the government will start forcibly vaccinating children against the will of their parents.
The article, which challenges the gun laws, has spent the last two days at the top of the Natural News site with a provocative title:
"A serious question: when will the first defenders of vaccines be shot by parents who will defend their children against the criminal assault of forced vaccinations?"
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