Every day, the correspondents’ club describes how the same news story is illustrated in other countries.
Friday October 6, in Paris, around ten members of an anti-vaccine group appeared in court. They are on trial for online harassment of two deputies and a doctor. In 2023, in the United States, anti-vaccine movements are not only far-right, while in Germany, they are reconverting.
In the United States, an anti-vaccine Kennedy!
Before the pandemic, in 2019, the country was already seeing the highest number of measles cases in almost 30 years, due to unvaccinated communities in parts of the states of New York, California and Oregon. And this trend has accentuated with Covid: political opposition has developed. We have clearly seen Republican states, particularly rural ones, position themselves against federal measures such as wearing masks or confinement. This was particularly the case in Florida, where Governor Ron DeSantis posed as a defender of freedoms and took decisions contrary to the anti-Covid measures imposed by Washington. His office recently advised healthy residents not to take the most recent booster. And it is one of the axes of his campaign for the Republican nomination with a view to next year’s presidential election. He repeats without evidence that the vaccine is neither safe nor effective.
There is even a Democratic candidate for the White House who is openly anti-vaccine. We don’t talk about it much because he’s far behind in the polls, but he’s a Kennedy! It was Robert Kennedy Junior, the nephew of JFK and the son of Bob Kennedy, who served as Secretary of Justice. He is so far down in the opinion polls that Joe Biden has chosen not to even talk about him.
In Germany, anti-vaccines have changed their fight
Anti-vaccines were particularly virulent in Germany during the pandemic. Skepticism about vaccines is long-standing in Germany, where vaccination of children is not compulsory. Germany still has one of the highest rates of unvaccinated people in the European Union. 18.5 million Germans, or more than 22% of the population.
Today, calm has returned around the anti-vaccines, but the extremists of yesterday have not yet demobilized. Instead, they changed fights. In the opinion of political scientists who follow the movement, it is the same internet platforms, the same extremists, who are mobilizing today against arms deliveries to Ukraine, or against sanctions against Putin’s Russia. Platforms close to the far-right AfD party.