How do you argue with anti-vaxxers who believe they’re on a noble mission?

I have given up on the idea that facts alone will change a zealot’s mind, but a conversation shouldn’t be a battle for status or points.

  “My Body, My Choice” Doesn’t Meet the Demand of this Moment

In the end, “my body” is vulnerable to and caught up in yours, and my choices are shaped by and inseparable from yours. To quote the feminist philosopher Judith Butler, “the body does not belong to itself and never can.” We are social beings from birth, dependent on others, shaped by the will of others—products of the political and economic conditions of our time.

  The number of Americans who say they won't get a COVID shot hasn't budged in a year

"It's just shocking," says Hansen. "I mean, you're offering a drowning person a hand and they slap it away and they're doubting you can pull 'em to shore. It's very perplexing."

  Why Fights Over The COVID-19 Vaccine Are Everywhere On Facebook

And why it’s threatening our best hope for ending the pandemic.

 America Is Getting Unvaccinated People All Wrong

They’re not all anti-vaxxers, and treating them as such is making things worse.

 Formerly Anti-Vax Parents Are Turning Pro-Vaccine Because of the Pandemic

Anti-vaccine rhetoric may have been on the rise during the pandemic, but parents across the country who were once against vaccines have become big supporters of them. After sorting through misinformation, they struggle to understand their former community's reaction to COVID-19.

 How Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Became the Anti-vaxxer Icon of America’s Nightmares

The political scion has deployed a race-baiting “documentary” and disinformation to advance bogus theories and seed anti-vaccine sentiment.

 Millions Are Saying No to the Vaccines. What Are They Thinking?

Feelings about the vaccine are intertwined with feelings about the pandemic.

 The Anti-Vaccine Movement in 2020

The popular depiction of antivaxxers as “earthy-crunchy” doesn’t tell the whole story. Anti-vaccine sentiment is strongly associated with conspiracy thinking and protection of individual freedoms, traits that are finding a home among far-right groups.

An Anti-Vaccine Film Targeted To Black Americans Spreads False Information

The free, online film is the latest effort by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the founder of Children's Health Defense. (He's the son of the former U.S. Attorney General Robert "Bobby" Kennedy and nephew of President John F. Kennedy.) With this film, Kennedy and his allies in the anti-vaccine movement resurface and promote disproven claims about the dangers of vaccines, but it's aimed squarely at a specific demographic: Black Americans.

Anti-Vaccine Activists Use A Federal Database To Spread Fear About COVID Vaccines

Known as the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, the database includes hundreds of thousands of reports of health events that occurred minutes, hours or days after vaccination. Many of the reported events are coincidental — things that happen by chance, not caused by the shot. But when millions of people are vaccinated within a short period, the total number of these reported events can look big.

Anti-vaxxers aren’t the cause of America’s dropping vaccine rates

“There’s a tendency to focus on who is hesitant and who doesn’t want to get this vaccine,” Liz Hamel, director of public opinion and survey research at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told me. “But in almost every segment [of the population], there’s a large group of people who really want to get this vaccine or at least somewhat open to getting it.”

Coronavirus hasn’t killed the anti-vax movement

Around the world, millions of people are hoping for a vaccine to protect against Covid-19. Plenty of anti-vaxxers, though, are holding fast to their inoculation suspicions.

COVID vaccines: time to confront anti-vax aggression

Halting the spread of the coronavirus will require a high-level counteroffensive against new destructive forces.

COVID-19 anti-vaxxers use the same arguments from 135 years ago

As a historian of medicine, it’s become clear from researching the history of vaccines that those who promote anti-vaccination consistently use a standard set of strategies. Although it can be hard to see patterns of argument in the modern context, looking back at a historical instance of epidemic and misinformation provides a useful case study for revealing today’s recurring anti-vaccination strategies.

How Anti-science and Anti-vaxxers Cause Avoidable COVID Deaths

If we do not learn from the past and seize new opportunities and scientific breakthroughs, we are doomed to incur far worse disasters than might have been. Adopting an anti-science position and following the anti-vaxxer movement leads to many COVID deaths that could have been avoided.

Inside the Mind of an Anti-vaxxer

She thinks vaccine advocates should recognize that the vaccine-hesitant, like most people, want to be heard, not mocked. “It is not crazy to wonder about all these unpronounceable, scary-sounding ingredients that are in vaccines,” O’Meara told me. Their concerns should be addressed without implying, Oh, you’re just some nutball, crazy anti-vaxxer.

The Anti-Vaccine Movement Is Much Bigger Than Facebook

By accusing Facebook and other social media companies of “killing people” through what Biden said was their lax policing of vaccine misinformation, the president reduced the complex scourge of runaway vaccine hesitancy into a cartoonishly simple matter of product design: If only Facebook would hit its Quit Killing People button, America would be healed again.

The ex-Pfizer scientist who became an anti-vax hero

Late last year, a semi-retired British scientist co-authored a petition to Europe’s medicines regulator. The petitioners made a bold demand: Halt COVID-19 vaccine clinical trials. Even bolder was their argument for doing so: They speculated, without providing evidence, that the vaccines could cause infertility in women.

The Vaccine Champions in France Defying Death Threats to Convert Anti-Vaxxers

Among the French skeptics, a core of hardline anti-vaxxers has now seized on the pandemic as its line in the sand.

Too Many Americans Still Mistrust the COVID-19 Vaccines. Here's Why

The holdouts have multiple reasons for their reluctance. There are, of course, the dead-enders in the anti-vax community, for whom no vaccine is safe or acceptable. There is, too, a faction peddling conspiracy theories about the COVID-19 vaccines in particular.

Vaccine Skepticism Was Viewed as a Knowledge Problem. It’s Actually About Gut Beliefs.

Identifying those psychological traits may help health officials convince the sizable minority of Americans who don’t want a coronavirus vaccine. Simply sharing information hasn’t worked.

Why a Former Anti-Vax Influencer Got Her COVID-19 Shot

As vaccination rates slow, a Dallas woman who once garnered hundreds of thousands of social followers by expressing doubt about the safety of inoculations now says, “I trust the science.”