Covid misinformation spread instantly because it recycled preexisting anti-vax claims and grift infrastructure

Evidence

The reason Plandemic, the pseudoscientific documentary that did untold early damage, was able to be churned out so quickly is precisely because it was a remix of the anti-vax movement’s preexisting claims. Many of the members of the Covid “Disinformation Dozen,” meanwhile, had their anti-vax arguments ready and waiting because they had been making them for years about altogether other vaccines, and they knew exactly how to deploy them, often to convince desperate and scared parents that they would do better to buy whatever high-priced supplement/seminar/health regime they were selling. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 665

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s work on moral panics and how preexisting grievance infrastructures get repurposed — the same ‘prequel’ logic behind the anti-vax grift applies to moral panic recycling. — connects to: Health misinformation moved from fringe to mainstream political discourse — Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall, The Misinformation Age: How False…, 53; the MOC “The Viral Refinery: How Preexisting Fringe Fears Get Smelted Into Mainstream Reality”
• SEED: Angle: ‘The Prequel Economy’ — how every sudden misinformation wave is just a remix of prior grifts that were already running, and why that makes them cheap to produce and fast to deploy.