[jcranmer]

> I’d be more curious as to how anti-vaccine agendas ever became a thing. With a lot of these things like climate change, there are clear economic forces which will pour “tobacco is healthy” amounts of money into pushing whatever makes them money. But then you have something like antivaxing which quite literally benefits nobody, because even the people who don’t want to put themselves at risk by getting vaccinated still sort of do so by collectively bringing back terrible diseases through their destruction of the herd immunity… but who could possibly gain anything from spreading this nonsense? “Yay, polio and the measles are back!!!”. Then you have the more harmless stuff like flat-earthers which also don’t really have any obvious driving force. But at least it’s harmless and sort of funny.

The motivation for anti-vaccine--and flat-earthers, for what it's worth--is basically the same thing as Q-Anon. It's all primarily based on feeding on peoples' feeling of a conspiracy against them. It's not being pro-measles, it's thinking that the vaccine is a cover for the government trying to collect your DNA or euthanize your children or something, and there are all too many grifters who are willing to ride the wave of such thinking and flog their own products on top of that. Don't use the government's cure for COVID, buy my COVID cure for only $50! And I'm not the government or an evil megacorporation, so you know I'm trustworthy.

> But at least it’s harmless and sort of funny.

It's... not really harmless. There's a path from the flat earth stuff to the January 6 riot.