The lethal triumph of the anti-vaxxers

Trump and the assault on reason

This is the story of two men: Donald Trump, who you will know all too well, and the online influencer Maajid Nawaz, who I knew – at least, I thought I did.

Between them they provide a grotesque example of “audience capture”. They show how easy it is for politicians and propagandists to please their supporters by telling them what they want to hear – in this instance, that vaccines are part of a sinister plot by the elite to poison and control them.

The anti-vaxx movement that both men championed has triumphed. Its victory came when Trump appointed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as his Health Secretary. The evolutionary dead-end of a once-noble clan, Kennedy spent most of his adult life failing to understand medical science. He endorsed the claim from the disgraced British researcher Andrew Wakefield that vaccines caused autism. Already, on Kennedy’s watch, a measles outbreak is spreading. And God help America if there is another pandemic.

The modern world has seen nothing like this. Nature reports that the US is in danger of losing herd immunity to measles, pertussis and rubella. Meanwhile, the President and his Health Secretary encourage voters to put their own lives and the lives of others at risk by not vaccinating themselves and their children.

What makes the triumph of unreason so bizarre is that it will not be college-educated American liberals who suffer and die, but the very people who voted for Trump.

Let’s take a breath and savour the moment. Much of politics consists of the political class forcing its views on the masses. In this instance, however, the paranoid fear that vaccines induce has risen up from below. His supporters have insisted that Trump do his best to kill them.

It is easy to forget that one of the few good things about Donald Trump’s first term was that he presided over the “Operation Warp Speed” vaccine rollout during the covid pandemic. As late as May 2021, Trump was boasting that it was “one of the greatest miracles of the ages.”

Four years on, however, such was the pressure from his conspiratorial base that Trump had to embrace Kennedy’s barking quackery.

The grim victory of the anti-vaxx movement shows how new communication technologies are bringing us unprecedented social ills.

I understand why readers are wary of such sweeping statements. I imagine you flinching at buzzwords like “audience capture” and resisting the sensational claim that we have never seen anything like this before.

Haven’t politicians and propagandists always told people what they want to hear? Who can beat the 19^th-century French radical politician Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin? He saw a crowd charging to the barricades in Paris and cried: "There go the people. I must follow them. For I am their leader."

In any case, all of us react to the signals of those around us, and adjust our behaviour accordingly. The whole of the business world is based on giving customers what they want, after all.

The historically-minded may want to add that there is nothing new about anti-vaccine conspiracy theories. In 1853, the UK became the first country to order the vaccination of children. There were riots as protestors claimed vaccines poisoned patients and threatened civil liberties.

Andrew Wakefield himself was not a creature of the internet age. His fraudulent study, which claimed that the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine caused autism, was published in 1998 by the supposedly reputable medical journal, the Lancet and taken up by the mainstream media of the old Fleet Street. People have always resisted the notion that the authorities can inject mysterious substances into their bodies.

What is novel about today’s world is not the existence of quackery and paranoia but their success.

The protests against vaccinations in the 19^th and 20^th centuries never convinced governments to change policy. They pushed on with vaccination and saved countless millions of lives.

Today online groups can mobilise so many supporters that pandering to them is now a winning business and political proposition.

The grim story of my former friend Maajid Nawaz shows why the movement succeeded.

I admired him hugely once.