Why is the anti-vaccine movement growing?
Every movement consists of a highly motivated 1% but also a 90% that joins only because they are disgruntled with the status quo.
The anti-vaccine movement has been gaining strength for 20 or 30 years. It's an offshoot of the wider movement against science and expertise. It borrows energy from populist movements that attack the concept of a civil service. It borrows populist logic to undermine the idea of elite knowledge and peer review. At the extreme, it implies that scientific conclusions should be put up for a democratic vote.
The anti-vaccine movement is greatly helped by the real failures of the medical system, in particular the misogyny of the system that often dismisses the concerns of women, especially older women. A middle aged woman with vague neurological pain will be treated badly, and that's been true for decades, a reality that creates a desperate market that grifters and con artists can then target: "Oh, your doctor doesn't listen to your complaints? Well, I am selling this rare herb which will solve all of your problems."
The anti-vaccine movement also overlaps with vaguely religious movements such as QAnon, and also older New Age spiritual movements. Although Christian Science, as a sect, has largely faded, it's ideas have become widespread, especially the idea that "God can never be sick therefore when we are one with God we can never be sick, therefore all illness is a measure of our distance from God, and therefore the cure is to pray."
Other crucial institutions have been failing us. In some areas of research there has been a “replication crisis.” The concern is that scientists, desperate to get funding, have been exaggerating the results of their experiments so they can get enough funding to continue their research. Here the various problems have been building for decades. Funding for science has been largely stagnant since the 1970s, even though the public’s hunger for big medical breakthroughs is enormous.
The anti-vaccine movement takes advantage of specific institutional failures to bring all institutional authority into doubt. They say, “This one research project was proven to be a fraud, therefore all research projects are probably fraudulent.” They benefit when all research is doubted, because only then can their obviously fraudulent research have a hope of being listened to.
In short, there are a dozen different factors that are all building to make the anti-vaccine movement larger and larger. That these various factors reinforce each other is why it is so difficult to fight back against the anti-vaccine movement, at least for now.
Some look to the political system for answers. Is that appropriate? Many people feel that President Biden could do more to fight against the rising tide of anti-vaccine sentiment. Is that true? Biden could certainly run public service announcements that remind people of the science, and that might get a few people to go get their vaccine booster, but the deeper problem is the number of people who are starting to doubt all of the institutional voices of authority, including those who oversee scientific medical research.
It seems pointless to focus on any one President. These problems existed before Biden and they will exist after Biden. In the early to mid 20th Century the USA lead the world in creating new forms of institutions that helped establish modern ideas about research, reliability, professionalism, and also, crucially, collegiality among researchers, with an aim towards the sharing of knowledge. In other words, teamwork, done on a national and even international scale. But since the 1980s there has been a backlash: we no longer create new forms of institutions, instead the institutions that were built up during the 20th Century have been under attack.
What should we do? Most movements have a highly motivated 1% that who are religiously or ideologically motivated. There is no point reasoning with them, they are committed to a particular world view, and they will not change. But why and where do these people get followers? 90% of the anti-vaccine movement shows up only because they’ve been disappointed elsewhere. The bulk of this movement consists of women who’ve been mistreated by the medical establishment.
So if you were looking for a single thing we could do to defeat the anti-vaccine movement, the most effective strategy would be to reduce the level of misogyny that exists in the medical industry. If women felt like their medical concerns were taken seriously by the medical establishment, then the anti-vaccine movement would fade substantially.
And it just so happens that reducing misogyny in the medical industry is something we should want to do for other reasons.
How to reduce misogyny in the medical industry? That is a huge subject and I’ll write about that at a later time, but I would say that more than half the battle is simply realizing how important this issue is. The misogyny in the medical industry doesn’t just hurt women, it hurts everyone. The harm done seeps out and poisons other aspects of American life, the anti-vaccine movement being a good example.