How Damar Hamlin's collapse fueled anti-vaccine conspiracy theories

PO1 William "Chip" Nagel
..."Exporting American anti-vaccine rhetoric
While Hamlin's collapse and Wahl's death played out in U.S. social media circles, anti-vaccine falsehoods have been spreading rapidly around the world, said Peter Hotez, a pediatrician and vaccine scientist at Baylor College of Medicine.

"The U.S. is good at exporting its culture. We export music. We export our movies. We're now exporting this," says Hotez. He's watching American rhetoric around "medical freedom" take hold in Canada, Western Europe and beyond.

"You're starting to see the anti-vaccine lobby attack the introduction of new malaria vaccines on the African continent, using the same kind of phony baloney arguments," he says.

Hotez is particularly concerned with the evolution of anti-vax narratives once used to sell books and nutritional supplements becoming part of a broader political platform that attracts far right groups like the Proud Boys and portrays scientists like himself as "enemies of the state." He reserves some criticism for his own biomedical community's insistence on not doing more to confront vaccine conspiracism head on in the early 2000s.

"The Department of Health Human Services, for years, would keep saying to me: 'Peter, we're not going to talk about this because you'll give it oxygen," says Hotez. He believes that unofficial policy had an enabling effect, and helped lead to our current moment, when virtually any visible health scare or death can be weaponized by anti-vax activists.

"This is an entire anti-science political ecosystem now, and it's very frightening and very destructive.""