Why are antivaccinationists so at home with Libertarianism?

[SidDithers]

Fortunately, even though I hate to be left out of this party, even if for a day or two, there’s always plenty more blogging material out there. It’s even appropriate, given how recently I wrote about the politics of the antivaccine movement, and how antivaccine quackery is the quackery that knows little in the way of political boundaries, with both sides being prone to antivaccine ideas. True, the right and the left seem to come to their antivaccine ideas from different directions. For example, lefty antivaccinationists tend to come to their views from crunchy beliefs in an idealized concept of what is “natural” and in “natural healing” combined with a major distrust of big business, in particular big pharma. In contrast, righty antivaccinationists tend to come to it through the idea of “health freedom,” in which anything resembling government coercion is to be resisted and any attempt to regulate medicine is viewed with suspicion. Besides, after experiencing such an awesome lovefest from my readers due to my belated mention of my ninth blogiversary, it’s time for some Insolence again that’s likely to tick off someone at least. Orac just can’t handle such universal niceness for long. This post is likely to fix that for some, while others will pump their fists and shout, “Hell, yes!” Which are you? Let’s find out.

It all started, as it not too infrequently does, when post over at that happy home for wanderingly daft antivaccinationists, the Age of Autism caught my eye a couple of days ago. (Yes, I know it’s a bad idea to expose my neurons to such neuron-apoptosing nonsense as the regular content of AoA, but it is at times a convenient source of blog material and my neurons are hardened from years of regular exposure.) It was by a contributor of whom I had never heard before named Adriana Gamondes, entitled Libertarian Backlash against Reason Magazine’s “Corporatist,” “Pseudolibertarian” Compulsory Vaccine Campaign. In particular, Mrs. Gamondes is touting an article published at a website of which I had never heard before, Police State USA. Actually, I must just not have remembered her, because she’s definitely contributed to AoA before on several occasions. Indeed, her “work,” such as it is, rivals the looniest of the crew at AoA for sheer brain death (of both the writer and the reader, alas). She fits right in, given that according to this post from 2009 she is “the mother of twins who are currently recovering from vaccine-induced GI disorders.”

What’s interesting is this passage from Gamondes:

Age of Autism is a politically agnostic forum but not apolitical. To quote Herman Melville, “There seems no reason why serviceable truth should keep cloistered because not partisan.” There are rare exceptions to unilateral mainstream news compliance with government demands that critical views of vaccines be censored. PSUSA has done an elegant job ignoring the memo and explaining why compulsory medicine cannot be legitimately argued from a liberty position.

Except that I would argue that AoA is not exactly politically agnostic. After all, several of its members are prominent in the Canary Party, an antivaccine organization that advocates against vaccines, to the point of buying off politicians and lobbying. Fortunately, it has not had a lot of success thus far, but it keeps trying. It also has forged ties with at least one Tea Party-affiliated group in California. Heck, Mike Adams even endorsed them. In other words, AoA tends to lean right, towards the Libertarian end of the spectrum, and Gamondes’ likes rhetoric that could have been written by Mikey himself.

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2013/12/18/why-are-antivaccinationists-so-at-home-with-libertarianism/


More good stuff from Orac.

Sid

[DanTex]

1. It seems to make sense to me.

Libertarians don't believe in government regulation or control of anything, so it would make sense that they oppose compulsory vaccines. In fact, Milton Friedman was against any medical licensing, thinking that the free market would work out which surgeons were real surgeons.

[el_bryanto]

3. Well historically that's what happened - i mean quacks and medicine shows never really existed

apparently.

Bryant

[hatrack]

2. Because FREEDUMB!

Duh.