11 January 2021. Anti-vaxxers | History

Understanding anti-vaxxers | The economic history of Britain: landowning aristocracy and dysfunctional politics

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#1: Understanding anti-vaxxers

I’m intrigued by the anti-vaxxing movement, partly because I’m completely out of sympathy with everything they stand for. But when groups are willing to break the law and court widespread public disapproval in pursuit of their objectives, we should at least try to understand them.

It turns out that there are a couple of recent papers on this exact subject.

The first, by Matthew Hornsey, looks at anti-vaxxing beliefs in multiple countries in the context of other belief systems. (This research was done before the pandemic). This probably won’t come as a surprise, but anti-vaxxers also index high against conspiracy theories in general.

(Correlations between conspiracy endorsement and anti-vaccination attitudes in 25 regions. Source: Hornsey, https://doi.org/10.1042/bio_2021_162.)

As the author says:

Some years ago, my colleagues and I asked people around the world the extent to which they believed four world-famous conspiracies. For example, to what extent did they believe Princess Diana was murdered? To what extent did they believe the USA knew 9/11 was going to happen and allowed it to happen anyway? We then crunched those scores together, and correlated them with anti-vaccination attitudes. The results... were stunning. In many countries – particularly those in the West – you could predict with a degree of certainty how vaccine-hesitant someone was by simply knowing whether they thought Princess Diana was murdered, or 9/11 was an inside job.

But although the research predates the pandemic, it is borne out by anti-vaxxer websites:

Examination of antivaxx websites make it clear why this is: they believe that vested interests among elites have participated in an orchestrated campaign to exaggerate the benefits of medical interventions and to minimize their dangers.... But much more mainstream is the theory that profit motives have corrupted Big Pharma to the point where they would knowingly inflict damage on the public, and knowingly pay off politicians and regulators to maintain the lie.

A second piece of research by Staci Benoit and Rachel Mauldin, conducted during the pandemic, explores the interaction between levels of knowledge, strength of belief, and social media use and attitudes vaccination. It’s a statistically dense analysis, but in effect prior knowledge and belief scores shape the way that your opinion is framed by social media posts:

One of the most interesting takeaways from the data analysis is how vaccine posts have influenced opinions. Those who reported that after seeing vaccine posts they now think vaccines are worse have significantly lower knowledge and belief scores. The opposite is true for those who reported more positive opinions since seeing posts, their scores were significantly higher.

But on Facebook there are lower levels of knowledge and more negatively skewed beliefs.

All the same: this is fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t really answer the question of why such groups should be so much more willing than the mainstream to engage with conspiracy theories. Correlation isn’t causation.

The third article addresses this—the full article, by Rochelle Anne Burgess and others, was published in The Lancet in December 2020, just as vaccines started to be rolled out. The authors are based internationally—UK, Australian, India—and take an international perspective. Although they make a distinction between committed anti-vaxxers and those with medical concerns about the vaccines, the point that sits behind their research is a wider one:

COVID-19 vaccines arrive as the social contract between some governments and their populations is being eroded and when many people, especially those in vulnerable groups, have little confidence that their government will protect them. In the UK, for example, a parliamentary report highlighted that more than 60% of Black people do not believe that their health is protected by the National Health Service to the same extent as White people.

This seems to me to get closer to an explanation of the anti-vaxxing protests. In brief: vaccination is based on a principle of social solidarity, but the same organisations that are asking for that social solidarity have spent the past few decades breaking it apart:

The widespread impacts of the pandemic have illuminated the structural violence embedded in society. Now these communities are being asked to trust the same structures that have contributed to their experiences of discrimination, abuse, trauma, and marginalisation in order to access vaccines and to benefit the wider population.

A commentary on the article by Sophie Mylan and Charlotte Hardman, published in The Lancet last March, takes this argument a little further. They suggest that the anti-vaxxing movement can be thought of as a ‘cult’, while acknowledging the pejorative language involved:

Just as cults are grouped together as sinister, bad, or wrong, the discourse surrounding anti-vaxxers in both academic and popular circles can be dismissive and derogatory. The pejorative label and negative attitudes towards cults promote an us-and-them viewpoint, creating martyrs and extending the length of time that members hold the new beliefs, thus encouraging further involvement in the movement and radicalisation.

Dealing with anti-vaxxing groups, therefore requires understanding their belief systems in such a way that they don’t become further marginalised:

We suggest a more inclusive approach, where the same inquisitive dialogue and contextual understanding that was suggested for vaccine hesitancy should be extended to members of the anti-vax movement.

#2: 200 years of Britain’s economic history

Diane Coyle has a crisp review of Duncan Weldon’s recent book at her Enlightened Economist blog. The book, Two Hundred Years of Muddling Through, is a well-told economic history of Britain since the Industrial Revolution.

War, of course, played its part in this story, through the growth of the tax base, the franchise, and the role of the state, especially in the 20th century. But there’s a particularly British element to this:

(T)he long shadow of the landowning aristocracy and our dysfunctional politics, giving us a uniquely warped political economy with a ruling class running the entire country as if it were a colony.

That might be a decent explanation of Britain’s current political crisis, founded as it is on an over-centralised government and financial system and a flimsy set of constitutional arrangements. Coyle points towards a recent article by Tom McTague in The Atlantic that has more on this.

She also notes the role of the British Treasury—a vast bulwark in the heart of government against any kind of progressive economic change, or come to that any kind of effective industrial strategy, for at least a hundred years.

In the period after the second world war, for example, the Treasury baulked ministers who wished to invest in industrial sectors in which the Americans “did not clearly dominate”, which is, she observes, the subject of a PhD dissertation by Tom Kelsey. It wasn’t that nothing happened; but that, in the style of the British sitcom Yes Minister, it happened in such a way that it was sure to fail.

As she asks:

(I)s there a long-view history of the Treasury looking at how it has preserved a largely consistent culture and worldview over centuries? Today’s fiscal hair shirtism inside that building is wholly consistent with the decision to go back on the Gold Standard, for example.

Coyle’s an authority on this kind of material, and the book comes recommended. It sounds as if it is the sort of book that might be paired with David Edgerton’s 20th century history, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation.

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