“Anti-vaxxers want to kill your babies,” screamed the ‘Fleet Street Fox’ in a September 2021 opinion piece for the Mirror. “These people are terrorists” she added, as if baby killing alone was insufficient to evoke searing hatred against a minority of people whose real crime was merely opting out of a medical treatment – a right codified after the Nuremberg trials to prevent a repeat of the crimes committed by Nazi doctors in World War II German concentration camps.
Such headlines arguably constitute the crime of incitement to violence. After all, if there was a gang of baby killers on the loose, many might justifiably regard it as their civic duty to halt them at all costs. And history teaches us that vigilantism can be highly imaginative and resourceful once the fire has been lit.
Giving an academic veneer to the kind of wild-eyed claims made by the Fleet Street Fox, a January 2021 study by Miguel et al concluded that people who eschewed compliance with Covid containment measures were more likely to display “lower levels of empathy and higher levels of callousness, deceitfulness, and risk-taking”.
Is there any truth in this? Prompted by a desire to foster genuine understanding between different sides of the Covid camp, a new study led by Dr. Raminder Mulla digs into this question. “Looking Into Their Eyes“, a riposte to the slogan deployed in the Government Covid safety campaign, asks dissidents of lockdown, mask, and vaccine mandate narratives to express their motivations, feelings, and thoughts in their own words.
The Fleet Street Fox will be disappointed with the study’s findings. Unsurprisingly, the authors discovered that this vilified group are anything but baby killers or terrorists. Crucially, they did not evince the stereotypical tropes about ‘anti-vaxxers’ that have been propagated in the mainstream and social media.
Read More: Looking into their Eyes: Covid Narrative Dissidents in Their Own Words
