Fear of disability powered the anti-vax infrastructure that fed the Covid misinformation era

Evidence

This is a key feature of the topography in the map of right now. Terror of having an autistic child, and of disability more generally, is part of what led us here. To quote the late free-market economist Milton Friedman, an old nemesis from my Shock Doctrine days, “the ideas” were “lying around,” ready for the right shock—so, too, were the digital informational pathways to carry those ideas far and wide. It was all at the ready: the skilled communicators; the gauzy appeals to the “natural”; the dodgy techniques to inflate self-reported, unverified claims of injuries and deaths from vaccines; the conspiracies about Big Pharma and Big Government colluding to wage war on otherwise healthy bodies; the quack cures involving bleach. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 664

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The Milton Friedman ‘ideas lying around ready for a shock’ device applied to the anti-vax infrastructure is a dense synthesis: it posits that the Covid misinformation storm was pre-built by years of autism fearmongering, with all the components (communicators, aesthetics, inflating tactics, conspiracies, quack cures) already stockpiled.
• XREF: connects to: Postwar vaccine-driven disease declines turned public fear toward pollution-linked cancers. — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 255