Marin County, a community north of America’s most poorly run city, was once a bastion of vaccine-hesitancy paranoia. Fever dreams about corporate schemes, immunization-induced autism, and the ills of Western medicine were pervasive among residents of the affluent progressive enclave just a few years ago. Now, the county has one of the highest Covid-vaccination rates in the nation.
How did this happen? The answer shouldn’t surprise anyone. As the New York Times put it:
And as the nation has grown more polarized, Marin residents are less comfortable wearing the “anti-vax” label increasingly associated with conservatives.
Putting aside the lunacy of choosing whether or not to inject something into your body based on fear of being mistaken for a member of the wrong political tribe, a unique product of our hyperpartisan reality, this trend should concern everyone on the right. Some conservatives now champion a cause once confined to West Coast elites and considered a fringe, left-wing phenomenon subject to mockery and derision.
The efficacy of the Covid shot has been thoroughly vindicated. Study after study has proven it is the most effective way to prevent serious complications from the virus. The jab is ultimately what ended the pandemic and the disastrous, draconian mitigation measures that came with it. The victims of vaccine trutherism have primarily been people on the right who have bought into this ludicrous conspiracy theory at their own peril.
Anti-vaccine conservatives did the Left a favor by taking up the mantle. They are wrong to have done so.