This is a kinda memory-holish thing I keep coming back to, or at least something suggestive of propaganda priming afoot which no one seems to refer to.
Long before January 2020, I want to say at least as far back as 2018, the rage among the bien pensants of reddit was the existence of antivaxxers. It was intense, wide-ranging and sustained. "Antivaxxer" was thrown around like "racist" or "homophobe" and anti-antivaxxer histrionics polluted every sub and, at one point, most threads.
It always seemed forced to me. Not that it wasn't pursued with extreme zeal, but that the zeal was fixed around a strategic instrument, like a campaign of one sort or another. At the time I suspected that this anti-antivaxxer as a political identity phenomenon was Democrats in pursuit of their Bush-era 'antiscience Christian' kulturkamph, attempting to re-tool it for an era in which kicking at Christians is clearly kicking down at a defeated opponent. I'm sure for many it was. It could also have been a flex from Big Pharma. Years before, Big Pharma rolled out it's genital warts vaccine, seeking a nationwide windfall of public school money, with an astroturf campaign which warned parents not to be like those Christians who'd rather their daughters die of cervical cancer than protect them from an STD.
In any case, it'd be interesting to see when and how the great anti-antivaxxer scare of 201n got started and when it petered out. I use the custom time span filter on google and it kicks back stuff from two months ago. If anyone has any informed guesses or familiarity with the phenomenon, please discuss.
