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SVT’s “Vaccine Warriors” reveal how debaters use vaccine criticism to pave the way for anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. But the series as a whole runs the risk of more people joining the charlatans, writes Rakel Chukri.
The documents inside “Vaccine Warriors” have been broadcast in three parts on SVT. The mother in the picture is not related to the anti-vaccination movement.
This is a cultural article. Analysis and values are the author’s.
Do you automatically become a Holocaust denier because you are critical of vaccines?
In three sections, Documents from Within has been wall-mounted both within the Swedish and international movement against vaccines. Reporters have posed as critics of vaccines and thus have been able to interview conspiracy theorists who otherwise refuse to speak to mainstream media. And it is in the third part that the woman, one of Sweden’s most prominent vaccine critics, dispels lies about what she calls “the so-called Holocaust” and “The Holocaust saga.”
She refers to New World Order, an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that claims that Jews rule the world. This is not something he often brings up in his lectures in Sweden, but he proudly says that those who question vaccines may also start to doubt other things that are in the “corridor of opinion”: the banking system, the Holocaust, the council dieters, September 11, etc.
The treacherous thing is that she apparently presents herself as a concerned mother who just wants to help other concerned parents. But in the end, he seems to agree with the life-threatening notion that vaccines are the elite’s means of fooling the masses.
She is not alone in that. In “The Vaccine Warriors” many propagandists are filmed claiming that vaccination can lead to the mass extinction of the human race or turn the majority into slow, disabled cattle that can therefore be controlled by a small elite.
When the SVT series When it was launched, many people criticized the fact that journalists had circumvented the wall. Now it is clear that the tactics were necessary to reveal the grotesque worldview that drives some of the most prominent vaccine deniers. If the final episode only gets a single eager parent to vaccinate their child, it’s worth it.
But the problem is that the series as a whole has hardly offered the best defense for vaccines. In the first two episodes, victims were given plenty of room to link certain vaccines to autism. Reporters obviously said such a connection had never been proven, but it was only briefly mentioned. The show’s interviews with researchers were also nearly fragmented. It’s a sad sign of the times that a high-profile documentary would rather pour into emotionally charged clips than delve into scientific investigation.
At worst, the first two episodes have recruited the charlatan movement more because parents on the TV couch who are concerned about the narcolepsy case (which followed the swine flu vaccine) had to deal with a long parade of other scared parents.
Documentary board therefore, you should have enlisted the help of science journalists who are adept at presenting research in an engaging and credible way. It would have been less elegant than clips of lawbreakers linking vaccines to devil worship and Jewish acquisitions, but it would have helped allay any concerns about the upcoming crown vaccination.
