What the end of COVID health emergencies means for anti-vaxxers: meltdown

[marmar]

What the end of COVID health emergencies means for anti-vaxxers: meltdown
Anti-vaxxers built their identities around the pandemic — now they're losing their minds (even more)

By AMANDA MARCOTTE
Senior Writer
PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 1, 2023 5:50AM (EST)


(Salon) It's one thing to know intellectually that anti-vaccination fanatics are people completely unmoored from reality, but it's another thing to be bombarded with their delusions in a highly personal manner.

"Lucky" for me, such an opportunity was recently inflicted on me — where else? — on Twitter. For no discernible reason, a couple of weeks ago my replies started to fill up with "this u?"-style taunts. Traditionally, "this u?" receipts are about digging up some prior public statement that the target is expected to feel shame about. For instance, if a right-winger gets violently ill with COVID-19, they run the risk of pro-vaccine people hitting them with "this u?" reminders of the times they dismissed the disease as a hoax.

But what these folks kept tweeting at me, clearly believing I'd feel ashamed, was nothing embarrassing at all: an opinion column I wrote in August 2021 headlined, "It's OK to blame the unvaccinated — they are robbing the rest of us of our freedoms." None of my hecklers could explain why, exactly, I should feel bad about this. A couple of medical details are out of date, but overall, it remains a strong argument. It didn't take long to suss out, however, that the people tweeting vitriol at me were anti-vaxxers. Worse, they're people who are so caught up in their bubble of disinformation that they have convinced themselves it is self-evident that being pro-vaccine in 2021 would cause a person great remorse in 2023.

....(snip)....

In their pre-primary slapfight, Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis have grown consumed with an argument over who downplayed the virus more, with DeSantis even going so far as to prop up a fake "investigation" of the vaccines. Meanwhile, the newly empowered Speaker Kevin McCarthy says House Republicans plan more fake "investigations" of the pandemic response, led by prominent conspiracy theorists like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who regularly pushes anti-vaccine lies.

Relitigating the COVID-19 culture wars seems like an odd choice, politically, since this is all yesterday's news to most of the country. Sure, there is a debate over whether it's still a "pandemic" in some scientific sense, but in a socio-cultural sense, the emergency is over. Mask mandates and social distancing are gone and unlikely to come back, and fears of another winter onslaught have largely not manifested. The White House is winding down the pandemic emergency declaration. For most people, life is relatively normal again. In politics, it's usually considered unwise to waste energy fighting past battles.

It all makes sense, however, when one realizes that a huge chunk of the GOP base — the kind of people who donate to campaigns and vote in primaries — have constructed their entire identities around COVID-19 denialism. ............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2023/02/01/what-the-end-of-health-means-for-anti-vaxxers-meltdown/

[onecaliberal]

1. Piss wig and boot boy arguing over who killed more people with COVID is ridiculous.

Too bad we don’t have a real media in this country.

[Joe Cool]

2. Antivaxxers are mentally disturbed individuals.

Literally. Study after study has confirmed it.

For example:
https://today.duke.edu/2022/04/vaccine-resistance-comes-childhood-legacy-mistrust