What bothers me most about anti-vaxxers isn’t skepticism itself—it’s that their entire argument depends on the existence of a massive, coordinated global scientific conspiracy. Vaccines aren’t developed, tested, or used in some isolated bubble controlled by one government or one corporation. They’re researched, scrutinized, and administered across every continent, in wildly different political systems, cultures, and economic conditions. If there were anything even remotely resembling what anti-vaxxers claim—widespread harm being knowingly covered up—you would see scientists, doctors, and researchers around the world speaking out loudly and often. But they aren’t a monolith, and that simply isn’t happening.
Here’s why that matters. Scientists don’t all think alike, vote alike, worship alike, or answer to the same institutions. Many of them actively disagree with one another for a living. Careers are made by challenging existing conclusions, not obediently going along with them. If someone could credibly prove that vaccines were broadly dangerous or fraudulent, it would be the scientific equivalent of winning the lottery: prestige, recognition, and a place in history. The idea that every scientist—across rival nations, competing universities, private companies, public health agencies, and nonprofit research institutions—would all choose silence and to go along with the vast conspiracy over that kind of breakthrough is totally absurd.
This conspiracy framing also shows a deep misunderstanding of what people in science actually value. Science is built on transparency, replication, peer review, and skepticism. Researchers expect their work to be challenged. Studies are poked at, reanalyzed, criticized, and repeated by independent teams all over the world. You don’t just publish a paper and everyone shrugs and accepts it forever. If vaccines were fundamentally unsafe in the way anti-vaxxers claim, those flaws would surface in data, in hospitals, in mortality statistics, and in follow-up studies—especially over decades of use. Instead, what we see is the opposite: overwhelming consistency across countries and time.
To believe the anti-vax narrative, you have to believe that scientists in democratic countries and authoritarian regimes, in capitalist economies and socialized healthcare systems, all somehow agreed to lie in the exact same way for the exact same reasons—without leaks, without whistleblowers, without credible documentation—while simultaneously competing with one another for funding, reputation, and influence. That’s not skepticism; that’s fantasy.
Ironically, anti-vaxxers often frame themselves as “questioning authority,” but what they’re really doing is replacing a complex, evidence-based global process with a far simpler story that feels emotionally satisfying. A shadowy “they” is easier to believe than the reality that science is messy, imperfect, and yet still self-correcting over time. The conspiracy narrative doesn’t reflect critical thinking—it reflects a refusal to engage with how science actually operates in the real world.
In the end, the idea collapses under its own weight. You don’t need to believe science is perfect to recognize that a worldwide, airtight conspiracy among millions of independent scientists is not just unlikely—it’s impossible.
But I encounter people so certain about all this and they have completely closed their minds to the facts and are totally indifferent to the real scientific achievements that have saved so many lives over history. I see it every day as just the new normal in our local society everywhere…there’s the dangerous ones who frustrate me to no end like the “Moms For Liberty” member who keeps running for my town’s school board even though her kids are home schooled and her educational background is perhaps training peers to cut hair. But then I get some hope from the doctors online like Dr. Jessica Knurick, PhD RD (I urge everyone to hear her out, she’s credible) who is debunking these radicalized pseudoscience people and snake oil swindlers with exceptional content. But it’s always just these two extremes keeping us divided and not listening to each other and I’m getting so exhausted by that.
My generation and the ones adjacent to me have really bungled our responsibility to live in a civilized society with the amazing technology and science we’ve been given. We’re truly just failing horribly. I really hope future generations turn this all around, because I’ve lost faith in mine.
