Prior to 2020, if you didn't trust vaccines, there was an alarming likelihood you also bought organic food and supplements and lived in a large US coastal area. During much of the 2010s, California had more kids whose parents refused to vaccinate them than the rest of the entire US combined.
Writing in Daily Beast, Louis Anslow lays the blame for concern about the COVID-19 vaccine squarely at their feet, even if corporate journalists have scrambled to sweep their undermining of science under the rug and claim it's all Republicans.
The left, he says, engaged in populism and 'freedom of choice' rhetoric about biotechnology, including vaccines, and in overwhelming numbers, unlike the relative few on the right. He ridicules Prince Charles, who claimed GMO corn “will be guaranteed to cause the biggest disaster environmentally of all time” for wanting to be first to get a vaccine created using a...GMO. And Oprah. And every other rich person who believed in anti-GMO nonsense because they could afford organic food and the 65,000 Non-GMO Project placebos the company sells stickers for, and they caved the first time something happened they could not spend their way around.
How can such a chronic disinformation campaign, funded by $2 billion in annual revenue environmental groups, from Greenpeace to Natural Resources Defense Council, not sway people against science? Instead of blatantly opposing vaccines to such an extent we had to pass a law to stop it after Whooping Cough(!) roared back to life here, Californians now claim they don't work and everyone will need to wear masks indefinitely - despite science and even California virologists saying that's wrong. The EU, which is even more against science than California, wanted to make companies financially liable for any vague, undefined "side effects." Why would any company let it be sold there? They relented when Russia had the only company willing to do it - because they knew Russia would never pay.
A few on the left are sticking to their guns. Wacky organic industry front group US Right To Know will cover anything lawyers pay them to cover, from scaremongering 5G phones to food to medicine, so they are no surprise remaining anti-vaxxers. But even The Guardian, which accepted only climate change as real science for the past 20 years, is on the vaccine bandwagon now - and never ever linking to their old articles undermining science.
Which means they are unlikely to accept any responsibility. They can claim they are just 'reporting the controversy' the way weasels always do.
