The great vaccine divide

Us and them. And after all we're only ordinary men

When you imagine an antivaxxer in 2024, what kind of person do you think of? Many peoples’ minds will jump in a particular direction - towards GB News, Andrew Bridgen, the Daily Mail, Ron DeSantis and other voices on the right. Of course, these people have indeed played a significant role in the ongoing rise of vaccine scepticism, but I believe the picture is more complicated than that, and that turning healthcare into a left-right issue could be potentially very damaging for the UK.

Without underplaying the role of right-wing antivax sentiments at all, it’s also worth remembering that many significant voices in that community originally gained prominence as left-wing commentators. Long before he was a contrarian voice over COVID and other issues, Russell Brand was being promoted by socialist authors like Owen Jones as a way to engage young people with politics. Naomi Wolf worked on Bill Clinton and Al Gore’s presidential campaigns, and fought hard for the Occupy Wall Street movement. Aside from his views on vaccination, many of RFK Jr’s beliefs and endorsements are not out of line with many supporters of the US Democratic party.

Or take the Corbyn family. Before becoming one of the most prominent voices in the UK antivax movement Piers Corbyn was a squatters’ rights activist and Labour councillor. Of course, he and his brother are separate people, and there’s no responsibility for anyone to discuss their own health choices, but it was noticeable that Jeremy had to be pushed quite hard to publicly endorse the COVID vaccines.

During the 2016 Labour leadership election, the fact that Corbyn’s opponent Owen Smith had worked for Pfizer was used as an attack line against him, and prompted proposals from Corbyn that

medical research “shouldn’t be farmed out to big pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer”.

This can perhaps charitably be viewed as a “people vs profit” issue rather than a question of attacking the pharmaceutical industry per se. However it’s noticeable that it was precisely Pfizer’s financial muscle which made them a desirable partner for BioNTech in developing and distributing their COVID vaccine at scale, just as fundamental research carried out by Oxford University needed partnership with AstraZeneca to bring their product to market by the start of 2021. Given the current stratospheric cost of drug development, it’s hard to envisage how major breakthroughs could come from artisan workers’ co-operatives working alone.

Indeed, while talking about left and right, the Daily Mail couldn’t have given more full-throated support to the initial roll out of COVID vaccines than they did here (front cover of 3rd December 2020). Of course, the perception that the Mail and other right-wing newspapers are antivax is older than that, with much of it dating back to the battles following Andrew Wakefield’s infamous 1998 Lancet paper. And of course, there were indeed articles in the Mail which tried to back up Wakefield’s contentions.

But again, I believe it is wrong to paint the MMR controversy in simple left-right terms. The Lancet itself was and still is edited by Richard Horton, who has spoken out in favour of Extinction Rebellion and made interventions from the left on issues such as the 2014 Gaza war and Iraq. And while Horton refused to retract the Wakefield paper for a long time, much of the pressure against it came from Brian Deer’s work in the Sunday Times (for all that many might point out the perceived sins of the Murdoch empire), and there were pro-Wakefield articles in the Guardian too.

Indeed, other past prominent voices against MMR are identifiably anti-Conservative ones. Have I Got News For You stalwart Ian Hislop continues to edit Private Eye despite their stance on the issue. Carol Vorderman is now a prominent #GTTO voice on Twitter and Byline TV, despite her role in Just Asking Questions about MMR and autism in the past.

This is not meant to be an attempt to shift the blame for antivax sentiments entirely away from the right, because there are far too many people with those views in that community. I think it’s important to somewhat redress the balance though, and not just on grounds of historical accuracy.

The United States has seen a disastrous number of COVID deaths, considering its unprecedented financial might. It’s extremely striking that half those deaths¹ came after September 2021, a time by which good vaccine coverage of vulnerable groups should have been achieved. Further many of these post-rollout deaths are concentrated in states with Republican majorities, where jab rates were lower.

And of course, Republicans bear the largest part of the blame for this. The rise of antivax voices within the GOP has had disastrous real-life consequences. But at the same time, as with masks, there has become too much of an element of culture war to it all. For some, taking a stance on vaccines has become a way of signalling one’s political allegiances.

I believe it’s not healthy for vaccines to become liberal-coded, because it can become too tempting for people to endanger their health by kicking back against them. As Matt Taibbi wrote in July 2021:

If you want to convince people to get a vaccine, pretty much the worst way to go about it is a massive blame campaign, delivered by sneering bluenoses who have a richly deserved credibility problem with large chunks of the population.

Very few people sat down with unvaccinated people, and tried to talk to them and understand them, in the way that

Chris Arnade

did here for example. For too many liberals it was much easier to take the cheap shot and accuse people on the other side of the political fence of being stupid.

I believe that one of the reasons for the UK’s successful vaccine rollout was that the issue never got conflated with left-right politics in this way. The fact that jabs were being promoted by a Conservative government and delivered through the NHS, while advocated by trustworthy and independent public servants like Whitty, Vallance and Van-Tam, meant that there was a genuine cross-party cut-through to it all.

As we urgently need to increase levels of MMR coverage to avoid damaging measles outbreaks, I think it’s important to maintain this kind of cross-party consensus now. There’s nothing that would harm uptake more than allowing vaccine scepticism to become purely associated with the right or with the left when, as I’ve argued, it exists in pockets of both communities.

Indeed, going back to my question from the start, when we try to imagine an antivaxxer, it’s important to remember that we could be thinking about literally anyone. In 2019, the idea that some of the most prominent voices in that community would be Right Said Fred, Ian Brown and Matt Le Tissier would have seemed like some crazy exercise in 1990s nostalgia. On a fundamental level, the reason antivax messages can resonate is due to some people losing general trust in authority, which isn’t a belief restricted to any one section of the political spectrum (though perhaps more prominent on either end).

As with people like Brand and Wolf, I don’t think we should be painting views on vaccines as a story of left against right, but rather we should think about the dangers of online radicalisation and of echo chambers. Unfortunately I don’t think that’s an easy thing to tackle, because top-down fact checking efforts are likely to suffer from the same sort of scepticism as vaccine mandates, and because tools like Community Notes on Twitter can always be gamed to some extent by activists.

But at the very least, I think we should try to do better than a simplistic “oh my god, the Daily Mail” approach to the issue.

1. The UK figure is around 30% for contrast.