The End of Consequence-Free Antivax Beliefs
Conspiracists are about to get a dose of reality
Antivaxers, cranks and fantasists thrive in safe, stable societies but the days of consequence-free idiocy may be ending
Monday February 17 2025, 9.00pm GMT, The Times
Ayokel’s bulbous nose erupts grotesquely into a cow-shaped boil. Another woman, eyes popping with the effort, vomits up a miniature bull. An obese matron, her face a bloated mask of misery, sprouts little yellow horns. More cows burst surreally from arms, ears and britches.
James Gillray’s print The Cow-Pock, or the Wonderful Effects of the New Inoculation! is a savage jeer at the superstition and hysteria that greeted Edward Jenner’s pioneering application of small doses of harmless cowpox as a prophylactic against smallpox. If art really had the political power that is sometimes optimistically attributed to it then Gillray, the most vicious of the Regency satirists, would have strangled the anti-vaccination movement in its cradle.
I cannot read about modern antivaxers without recalling Gillray’s picture. The pre-modern, anti-scientific absurdity of their position was apparent in an age of stage coaches and rotten boroughs. And yet in 2025, after more than two centuries of what seemed like progress, Texas is gripped by its worst measles outbreak this century. Inevitably, the state contains some of the least vaccinated areas of America.
Ironically, it is precisely the safety and rationality of modern society that has allowed anti-vaccination beliefs to flourish. Gillray’s contemporaries feared the deaths of their children and were haunted in their drawing rooms and city streets by faces deformed by pockmarks. Modern antivaxers are exposed to no such monitory horrors. They indulge their stupidity in ignorance of real suffering; their good health guaranteed by the “herd immunity” provided by the mass of sensible citizens who do get vaccinated.
Some antivaxers owe their children’s lives to those they loathe as sheeplike conformists. But they and other 21st-century fools may not be able to rely on the protection of a sane society for much longer.
One of the less frequently noticed luxuries of the postwar liberal order was the licence to be a fool. For the better part of a century, prosperous, scientifically minded countries have tolerantly sustained an underbelly of madmen and extremists — medical sceptics, conspiracy types and anti-democratic fantasists who would quickly have come to grief in less congenial surroundings.
Try rejecting modern medicine in the Horn of Africa. Or dabbling with lunatic ideas in the Soviet Union, whose secret police were almost as unforgiving of political cranks as they were of real enemies of the state. The point is almost never appreciated by the fanatics but they owe their health and freedom to the sanity of the society they affect to despise.
Indeed, those who imagine themselves the most fearless critics of modern civilisation are often its most coddled children. America’s new antivaxer health secretary Robert F Kennedy — the amateurish, purposeless scion of a modern American aristocracy — is a perfect symbol of the decadence of the attitude. Kennedy’s carelessness is a function of his pampered insulation from anything resembling real life.
Similarly, my fashionable corner of east London (I am something of a local anomaly) bristles with casual anti-science faddists. Glow-faced trust-fund babies fritter their unearned cash on crystals, alternative remedies and “non-western” medicines, scorning the medical system that has made them among the healthiest people in the history of the world.
The roots of modern conspiracy theories and anti-scientific cults are conventionally (and correctly) attributed to those much-chronicled woes of western democracies: economic stagnation, financial inequality and political sclerosis. But an underrated factor in modern irrationality and zealotry is the West’s stability. Our society has been peaceful and healthy for so long that for many people serious disaster has become inconceivable. You can rattle the bars of the cage as fiercely as you like but you will never actually escape the comfort of the zoo.
Those ruddy, bull-necked Americans who parade around in amateur militia groups and brandish Nazi symbols do so partly because they are unable to conceive of what life would actually be like in a fascist state. Dabblers in homeopathy cannot really comprehend a society without modern medicine. The supporters of autocracy who fawn at the feet of the anti-democratic “thinker” Curtis Yarvin and cheer when Donald Trump suggests that “He who saves his country does not violate any law” have no serious understanding of what it means to live under an autocratic government.
In the prophetic and too-little-read final chapters of The End of History, the political theorist Francis Fukuyama suggests that the safety and success of modern liberal societies provides not only a licence for misbehaviour but a provocation to it. Men without any oppression to struggle against may struggle anyway “out of a certain boredom”. Fukuyama writes that “if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy”.
A version of that struggle has beguiled many pointless lives since the end of the Second World War. But as the fate of those Texan antivaxers shows, the luxury of consequence-free foolishness may be coming to an end. As the economy flounders, political crises loom, vaccination rates fall and science deniers enter government, the West is becoming a more dangerous place and its fools are less insulated from the repercussions of their own beliefs. The Texan antivaxers may only be the first to find out. The paradise of fools is coming to an end. I do not hope for an apology or recantation. I just hope they do not take the rest of us down with them.
As of today there has been a measles death of an unvaccinated child in TEXAS.