Antivaxx, antihumanism and violence: from ignorance to mass murder. QUT Centre for Justice
Channel: Anthony Collins
Date: 02/12/2021

Antivaxxing, antihumanism, and violence: 
from ignorance to mass murder.
Anthony Collins

Invited seminar at the Queensland University of Technology Centre for Justice

This presentation is part of an ongoing series reframing the concept of violence in relation to social justice. It analyses the resurgence of anti-vaccination movements in the early years of the Covid19 pandemic. After considering the traditional framing of these movements as problems public health and scientific communication, this critical analysis goes on to map the social and technological conditions structuring antivaxx world views and identities, locating them within the recent history of neoliberalism, libertarianism, and individualised communication technologies. Critiquing the popular accounts of antivaxx positions as ignorance or personal failing, this analysis instead shows antivaxx as a system of discursively constructed world views and subject positions whose effectiveness rests on the ways in which they are embedded in existing systems of meaning. This leads us a way from conceptualising antivaxxers as objects of righteous moral indignation, and the social reflexes that this framing triggers. Instead it highlights that antivaxx is worse than this moralistic framing recognises, and is in fact a historically emergent form of mass murder. The problem, as with all structural violence, is that it is mass murder without an intentional evil agent, without a legalistic mens rea, and the vectors of violence do not originate in the minds of antivax individuals, but rather that they need to tracked back to even more problematic systems of power and injustice.