Commentary
Last week the New York Times ran an article in which it described the apparent radicalisation of a group of parents from mainstream political persuasions to a single-issue anti-vaccine fringe.
It describes how these parents seemingly came together on social media out of a concern about the damage inflicted by lengthy school closures on their children, started to share notes and articles—“many of them misleading”—about school reopenings and the efficacy of vaccines and masks, fell “down an online rabbit hole” and a year later emerged as fully fledged members of a “destabilising new movement”—anti-mask and anti-vaccine—“narrowing their cause to a single-minded obsession over those issues.”…