Modern anti-vax activism grew from parents grieving autism diagnoses

Evidence

Not long after the diagnosis, I was at the YMCA where I used to do ninety-minute yoga classes and now found myself standing on the edge of a cavernous gym watching T. drag around large foam blocks. I struck up a conversation with a defense lawyer I knew from a different stage of life. He had dark circles under his eyes and told me that his toddler had been diagnosed with autism. The child had been fine, he said, but after they got vaccinated, they changed, withdrew, regressed. It was definitely the vaccine, he told me. He recommended that I do my own research and then we could talk. Over the next few years, this man became one of the anti-vax movement’s most prominent attorneys (and would go on, in the Covid era, to help lead the campaign against supposedly tyrannical health mandates). — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 637

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s broader Mirror World thesis — the anti-vax movement as metabolized parental grief, echoing earlier chapters’ diagonalism claims. — connects to: Personal grief over a child’s autism made a celebrity a vaccine skeptic — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 511
• QUESTION: The man is identified but never named here — Klein may be deliberately withholding identity of a public figure; worth tracking whether he recurs later in the book.