An Army of Damaged Minds

 

They've been around for years. Some of them might be your neighbours, colleagues perhaps even friends. However it took a pandemic to bring many of them out of the closet and in their thousands. We tend to know them as anti-vaxxers but they're so much more. And they've made common cause with Canada's radical right, Bernier's mob and some of O'Toole's also.

Queens University prof and MD, Ashleigh Stewart, did a deep dive into the online world of this cult to discover that it feeds on disinformation and hate. She warns that the radical fringe now has money and political clout that we ignore at our peril.

A common refrain of those opposed to vaccines is that immunizations are harmful to people’s health and an infringement on human rights. Any kind of science proving the efficacy of any vaccine is often denied.

In 2021, those health concerns have mutated into a widespread belief among the most staunchly anti-vaccine that if you receive a COVID-19 vaccine dose, you will almost certainly die.

The latter is a baseless conspiracy theory. But tens of thousands of Canadians believe it’s true and have created social media channels to promote it.

[She] joined anti vaccine and anti-mandate groups on Telegram and Facebook, witnessing them transform from meeting places for the unvaccinated to a virtual confluence of hatred and disinformation — where [she] observed, for instance, calls for medical experts to be hanged and people comparing mass vaccination to genocide.

Alongside organizing countrywide anti-vaccine rallies, tens of thousands of Canadians are sharing fake news stories around rising stillbirth numbers, deaths caused by the COVID-19 vaccine and baseless theories of an impending social credit system that begins with QR codes.

The COVID-19 “infodemic” — the spread of misinformation alongside the spread of a virus — has been described as one of the greatest threats to overcoming the pandemic. But it’s also nothing new; false narratives swirled around the polio vaccine in the 1950s, too. The major difference in 2021, is that we have social media.

While social media giants such as Facebook and Twitter say they are doing their best to stamp out COVID-19 misinformation, such groups continue to hide in plain sight. All they’ve done is gotten more creative with their names; searches for “anti vaccine Canada” won’t turn up any results, but plug in synonyms for “freedom” or “unity” and “Canada” and you’ll find plenty.

Many share links to petitions challenging vaccine mandates, links to fake news stories about exaggerated vaccine side effects, and despite the inherent distrust of the mainstream media, links to news articles in the mainstream media. Information is shared about public venues — gyms and restaurants, mostly — not enforcing vaccine mandates. Channels of businesses against mandates exist with thousands of subscribers.

I was surprised when I visited the facebook page of a woman, a friend of a friend, to find she was asking her friends where she could find a gym that would allow the anti-vax crowd to visit. Two quickly replied about a facility that would open "after hours" (like some speak easy) two nights a week. Others chimed in, warning her to delete the post before it came to the attention of the authorities. 

A month ago, "Canada Unity," a Facebook group regularly sharing anti-vaccine posts and misinformation, had 32,000 members. It now has 40,500. Vaccine Choice Canada on Telegram grew by 1,000 members to 15,773, and Unvaxxed Canada, while having only 750 members, has spawned at least 15 separate regional groups.

By-and-large, this is not the realm of the vaccine-hesitant. This is thousands of people hell-bent on telling you that the virus does not exist, the vaccine is a bioweapon designed to kill, and the unvaccinated are the only ones “awake” to mass genocide.

A World of Their Own.

A new lexicon fuels emotion. People aren’t just unvaccinated anymore, they’re “unstabbed,” “unjabbed,” and the Harry Potter-esque, “pure bloods.”

The vaccine is a “death shot,” “death jab,” “suicide pill” (despite the vaccine being an injection), “quackzeen,” “clot shot,” “witches brew,” “frankenjab.” The pandemic becomes “plandemic.”

Coupled with pseudoscientific content from non-experts, anti-vaxxers have created an alternative world.

Lies, lies, atop lies.

People claim variants are being released by governments on cue. There are parallels drawn between Nazi Germany and Canada; Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Adolf Hitler; concentration camps and isolation facilities.

In recent weeks, baseless claims that stillbirths were “exploding” across Canada found a foothold on Telegram. An unverified article claimed there had been 86 stillbirths in six months at an unspecified hospital in Waterloo, Ont. and 13 in an unspecified 24-hour period at a Vancouver hospital.

We debunked that theory very quickly, simply by requesting official statistics. Data from the Better Outcomes Registry & Network (BORN), Ontario’s perinatal, newborn and child registry, shows there were between 12 and 15 stillbirths in the entire Waterloo region between January and June 2021.

...Another conspiracy theory insists the recent devastating floods in B.C. were planned as a distraction tactic as vaccinations ramped up. There’s a listicle of people who have had a leg amputated after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine, hosted on a vaccine misinformation website. There’s a list of hundreds of professional soccer players who have recently died, or collapsed while playing, with unverified claims they were all vaccinated. There’s a paper on Pfizer’s “global war to abuse and attempt to murder as many children as possible with their deadly COVID-19 injections.”

Things get extremely meta one day when one person asks: “What if this channel is for nothing more than tracking and documenting the unvaxxed in order to pinpoint their relative locations?”

Queen's University assistant professor and family doctor Michelle Cohen says the anti-vaccine movement is "laundering" false information through some right-wing politicians and former medical professionals to legitimize "whatever lies they want."

"It's giving a kind of a legitimizing gloss to the political movement," she says.

"They're so completely within their echo chambers of their own media, that they're just within this little universe, and it doesn't really matter what criticism they get from the outside. But then in the meantime, these echo chambers are just proliferating."

Cohen says that despite the anti-vaccine movement representing a small portion of society, its ideologies are seeping into right-wing politics.

"This feels like it's gone from being just like, 'Oh, this is just in the alternative world. And this is just a conspiracy theory, we can kind of ignore it,' to 'This has pulled growing political power.'"