LewRockwell By Davis Taylor
In pre-COVID-19 America, it was widely accepted that being unvaccinated increased others’ risks of infectious disease. Americans were propagandized into holding this notion and it caused widespread animus toward the unvaccinated. Disparaging “anti-vaxxers” was a national past-time.
Vaccine freedom advocates worked tirelessly to prove that the unvaccinated posed no risk to society, providing evidence of this via articles, internet shows, informational materials, and other means. In a sense, they were playing defense, arguing that the unvaccinated weren’t guilty of being dangerous. In discussing the harm from vaccines, they generally focused on harm to the direct recipients of them, in the form of adverse reactions.
All along, the vaccine freedom advocates could have easily flipped the prevailing narrative on its head and gone on the offensive, arguing that the use of vaccines, and thereby action on the part of the vaccinated, was the true culprit in increasing societal risks from infectious agents. This is because, unbeknownst to most Americans, even prior to COVID-19 vaccines, evidence existed that certain vaccines used in the U.S. have negative effects that extend to beyond the vaccinees, having societal impact. These include, among others, strain resistance (e.g., vaccination for whooping cough, vaccination for measles); strain replacement with more dangerous strains (e.g., vaccination for HPV); increases in the incidence of one disease by vaccinating for another one (e.g., vaccination for chickenpox negatively affecting shingles); shedding (e.g., vaccination for chickenpox); shifts in the pattern of infection to a more dangerous one (e.g., vaccination for measles); and interference with natural herd immunity (e.g., vaccination for measles).
The vaccine freedom movement likely steered away from going on the offensive in the manner described above due to concerns that doing so would be mischaracterized as advocating for the prohibition of vaccines and would play into the “anti-vaxxer” rhetoric.
