The Updated Tools of Anti-Vaxxers – Violence, Intimidation and Stalking

 The red/blue divide on COVID vaccination rates/LA Times

“Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.”

Elie Wiesel, Romanian-born American writer, professor, political activist, Nobel laureate,

and Holocaust survivor on the scientist’s pledge to objective neutrality.

For those who believe California is all blue, all the time, remember that former GOP House Speaker Kevin McCarthy represents Bakersfield, CA and the agricultural counties in California are mostly very red. Northern California Shasta County is pretty typical, where merely rightwing is considered liberal. “The Shasta County Board of Supervisors has appointed an outspoken critic of COVID-19 vaccine mandates to be the county’s new public health officer:… Redding family physician James Mu comes 17 months after the board fired its previous public health officer, Karen Ramstrom, whom supervisors had criticized for following state mandates requiring masks and vaccinations during the pandemic.

“‘I would like to follow evidence-based policy. However, if there are medical dogma that are not good for the population in our county, then I will question and even challenge them,’ said Mu, who also opposed vaccines and masks for children, after the supervisors voted to hire him Tuesday [10/17]… Mu was one of 12 Shasta County physicians who, in February 2022, publicly signed an ‘Open Letter on COVID-19’ that decried vaccine mandates, the testing of asymptomatic people and ‘the physical, psychological, and social impacts of mask and vaccine mandates on children.’…The letter touted the benefits of natural immunity and promoted the use of ‘early treatments’ to prevent the disease.

“The letter stemmed from a public forum at Pathway Church in Redding in which those physicians promoted the use of home remedies — including vitamins and iodine nasal sprays — to prevent and treat COVID-19… There, doctors promoted the use of discredited COVID-19 treatments ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.” Los Angeles Times, October 21st. It’s not just the appointment of a doctor as a senior county health official who is at odds with the most qualified medical experts on earth; it’s a growing nationwide anti-science/anti-medical doctor trend that carries adherents who will to resort to all forms of violence and intimidation to crush such scientific and medical expert views. And scientists, especially medical experts, and their families are living in a very dangerous new world.

Writing for the LA Times on October 20th, columnist Michael Hiltzik begins his analysis of this trend noting the preface of noted vaccine expert, Peter Hotez (professor of pediatrics and molecular virology at Baylor) in his latest book, The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science: a Scientist’s Warning: “Hotez expresses gratitude to the Houston Police Department, the Texas Medical Center Police Department and the security force of the Texas Children’s Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine… These are all places where Hotez plies his profession. He thanks all those departments ‘for keeping my family and me safe during this time of aggression.’… ‘The health sector and the scientific sector don’t quite know what to do because this is a politically driven attack, coming from extremist elements of the Republican Party’…

“Online trolls have compared Hotez to Hitler and Stalin. He has been ‘doxxed’ through the publication of his email address and office phone number, and showered with email threats calling for his torture or public execution. The threats sometimes took a toll on his mental health, keeping him up in the middle of the night. Many threats were larded with antisemitism.

“Hotez is not alone. ‘I get hate mail, I get physically harassed, I’ve gotten three legitimate death threats that have had to be investigated by the FBI,’ Paul Offit, a prominent vaccine scientist in Philadelphia, recounts in ‘Shot in the Arm,’ a new documentary by Scott Hamilton Kennedy about the damage done to public health by anti-vaccine propaganda… [The] anti-vaccine and anti-science movements have incorporated physical threats into their despicable arsenals. I wrote nearly two years ago that, unable to produce scientific support for their views, they had turned to stalking and intimidation to discourage critics…

“The historical roots of the anti-science movement date back more than 100 years, Hotez writes, to when authoritarian regimes such as Stalin’s recognized that discrediting scientific experts assisted their path to personal power. Its appeal to the modern Republican Party has much to do with economics — challenging the scientific consensus on global warming, for example, allows the GOP to serve the anti-regulation interests of its Big Business patrons.

The anti-vaccine movement was in many respects a natural fit. Its invocation of shibboleths such as ‘medical freedom’ and ‘health freedom’ — coded justifications for opposition to vaccine mandates — led to its getting ‘picked up by the Republican Tea Party in Texas,’ Hotez says…

“When the affiliated anti-vaccine and far-right movements turned their firepower on the COVID-19 vaccines introduced in 2021, the consequences were dire. Hotez estimates the unnecessary toll at 200,000 American lives loss because of vaccine refusal and anti-vaccine propaganda.

“The partisan character of this outcome is manifested in a distinct divide in COVID vaccination rates between blue and red counties, with the latter having notably lower vaccination rates and higher per-capital COVID death rates. The partisanship is curious, given that Donald Trump has boasted that the development of the COVID vaccines was spurred by his own Operation Warp Speed. But COVID vaccine resistance has also been spurred by his persistent efforts to minimize the severity of the pandemic.

“Despite his own efforts and those of other science advocates, Hotez sees only minor glimmers of hope that the trend toward science skepticism can be beaten back. Medical boards have fallen woefully short in enforcing their own regulations against physicians spreading misinformation and disinformation.” The proclivity of too many Americans to follow conspiracy theories and trounce true science and medical reality is dangerous and growing. Thus, even living in counties and states which embrace such anti-science postures adds unnecessary risk to innocent residents. Anti-vax/mask-mandate Florida’s way-above-average COVID fatality numbers speak for themselves.

I’m Peter Dekom, the number of vocal anti-vax politicians and “journalists” who have received these vaccinations – like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and the entirety of Fox “News” body of anchors and hosts – illustrates the hypocrisy of those who lead the deeply dangerous antivaxxer movement seeking ad dollars and political office as their reward.