CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
Not that we have nearly enough doses to even worry about 1 in 5 million chance of experiencing side effects from the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccination, the fear surrounding an optional needle in the arm has reached fever pitch in the Northern Rivers this week.
There are many reasons why vaccine skepticism has ramped up throughout Australia over the last six months.
Firstly, there is the unbridled misinformation that pinballs around Murdoch newspapers and social media, which at the peak of the 2020 pandemic, had a good portion of the Western World convinced that COVID-19 wasn’t actually real and that face masks are a method of mind control.
Then there is the general mistrust towards the government that exists in low-socio-economic communities. Families who skirt homelessness on ten-year-long waitlists for public housing surprisingly harbour a healthy suspicion of any government programme that is able to be rolled out immediately in the name of ‘helping them’ – given the fact that government only seems to ever show a sense of urgency when it comes to policies that end up with young men being put in prison (See: NT Intervention).
Then of course there are the opportunists, bird-brain mummy influencers who are relishing in the chance to feel like they are smarter than experts for the first time in their lives, by publishing their own unprofessional medical opinions online diligently word their anti-vaxxer rhetoric to skirt around Facebook’s terms and conditions.
Words like ‘awake’ and ‘vaccine injury’ are being trotted out by earthy beige-linen-clad faux-hippies who have built enormous followings in their mid-20s with bikini photos, before briefly pivoting into Byron Bay lifestyle influencers with mason-jar-riddled kitchens, eventually ending up as a mouthpiece for the delusional anti-vaxxer movement.
This movement is not isolated to the Northern Rivers. It also exists in a number of other utopian coastal centres, such as Bondi Beach, Sydney’s Northern Beaches and tropical Far North Queensland – or basically any town that white women gravitate towards the moment they achieve upper-middle-class status.
Byron Bay and Mullumbimby does remain the heartland of this movement, however, as gentrifiers join the Hemsworths and move from the leafy suburbs of the major cities to that place that they visited for Splendour a couple years ago.
Just three years ago, immunisation rates for five year olds in the region were as low as 52 per cent, as populist trustafarians respond to optional public health directives like it’s an attack on their civil rights.
“MY FREEDOM does not end where your FEAR STARTS” says one local skeptic, Ally Stonville, a 33-year-old mother of three Aryan treasures.
“Big Pharma will not control me or my family”
“The same goes for Big Seatbelt, and Big Red and Yellow flags“
