COVID-19|POLITICS|MEMOIR
My Friend the Anti-Vaxxer
In defense of vaccines
I recently lost a friend of mine to anti-vaccine propaganda. For most of her life, Cayla had been a pretty staunch Democrat. She loved music and concerts, had a distaste for the police, and loathed Trump with a fiery passion. But once she moved to Florida, those views of hers began to shift.
Once the pandemic had arrived, those beliefs that Cayla held had been supplanted almost entirely by anti-mask and anti-vaccine propaganda. As months continued to pass and the lockdown continued to extend, it only grew worse. After a couple of months, it got to the point where nearly the only presence that she had on social media was to “let the people know they’re being lied to by the government.”
As a life-long skeptic of government and authority myself, it’s not something that I could fully blame her for. I could see how everybody suddenly staying indoors and demonizing each other over their vaccination status was far too great of a transition for many to make proper sense of.
And when the government has lied in the past about these sorts of important health issues, as with the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, it has only managed to heighten some of the cynicism that people have had around these vaccines.
