This is part two in a series. For part one, go here.
Speaking to the late-night show of Australia’s anti-vaccine movement, Pearse Casey outlines his philosophy about making change.
“We need to build it from the community up and not just this top-down messaging from their Telegram feeds, thinking someone else is doing this,” he says in his thick Irish accent.
Casey’s approach contrasts with the show’s other guest, Christian Marchegiani, who organises the “Reclaim the Line” rallies for teachers and other workers against vaccination mandates. Together they show the spectrum of tactics being used to erode confidence in the children’s COVID-19 vaccination rollout in Australia.
New and existing Australian groups have seized on the rollout of children’s vaccinations as the new frontier in anti-vaccine organising. Rallies like the Reclaim the Line have functioned like real-world analogues for the group’s growing online followings on mainstream platforms like Facebook and “alt-tech” alternatives like Telegram. Both serve as recruiting grounds and an opportunity to develop a sense of community and identity among their audience.
Now these movements are trying to build this support into sustainable and organised groups. Reflecting similar changes to strategies used by extremist and conspiracy movements, in the United States, activists and organisations are increasingly focusing their efforts at the local level: targeting individual parents, school staff and councils.
Anti-vaccine influencers and groups peddle misinformation about injuries and deaths from COVID vaccines as a way of convincing parents. In January, anti-misinformation group First Draft News documented a series of unproven claims on social media about children dying after receiving their dose, these claims racking up thousands of shares despite no evidence the stories were true or that the children even exist. Groups use online and offline communications like flyers and a mobile billboard truck.
After propagating false, unproven or misleading information, these groups offer to guide parents on how to prevent their children from being vaccinated. Anti-vaccine group Reignite Democracy Australia has prepared a pseudo-legal series of letters authored by fertility awareness educator Hannah Fenner to be sent to schools that forbid their children from receiving a vaccine, COVID testing or any discussion of medical procedures relating to the virus. (It is legal for “mature minors” to consent to procedures such as a COVID vaccine without their parents’ permission).
Once parents are convinced, anti-vaccine groups hope to turn them into evangelists. Organisation Parents With Questions provides a series of videos showing psychologist and motivational speaker Lindsay Spencer-Matthews promising to help them navigate “these polarised times”. The videos teach techniques for how to speak to other parents or doctors to raise doubts about whether vaccines are necessary or safe for children.
For example, if someone asks about the risk of COVID-19 to children, Matthews recommends redirecting the question by asking: “How many children do you know who have died from COVID-19?”
In recent days, Parents With Questions has sought to formalise this role by creating a network of “local activators” who receive regular directions from the group to carry out in their area. Founder Adam Gibson claims they chose to move this model after the group’s purchase of $100,000 in billboard advertisements was rejected.
“We’re going to make activators our key strategy,” he said late last week.
A Facebook group for Parents With Questions activators has grown to more than 1300 members since halfway through December. Members from around the country post photographs of them carrying out requests like letterboxing their local area with flyers or writing letters to their personal GPs requesting that they join anonymous anti-vaxxer briefings for doctors.
Casey’s group, Safe Kids Informed Partners (SKIP Australia), teaches parents to pressure institutions like local schools and councils as a way of stopping children’s vaccinations.
In one Instagram post, Casey tells an anecdote about how attended his son’s end-of-year play despite a vaccine requirement for visitors.
“You do not get to take my memories away,” he said. “So I’m going to go to that play. That’s my choice. And the school is going to have to make their choice.”
Operating under the mistaken assumption that vaccine mandates are legally discriminatory, the organisation’s website encourages parents to submit freedom of information requests, lodge complaints to the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission or through the organisation’s internal complaints structure. In one document titled “Council Pressure Guidelines”, it even includes more than a dozen questions to ask at council meetings. According to its social media posts, members have begun using the techniques on 17 councils in NSW, Victoria and South Australia.
While running on a lot of volunteer labour and using free resources, these groups frequently call for tens of thousands of dollars in donations from their groups.
According to research by First Draft News, Christian Marchegiani’s organisation, National Education United, has raised more than $105,000 for its activities, including the Reclaim the Line rallies. (After someone who said they were a founder of the group claimed there had been “mismanagement” of the funds, the group put up a page defending its spending and listing some receipts.)
Australia’s longest-running anti-vaccine group, Australian Vaccination-Choice Network, has raised more than $300,000 for an unfiled legal challenge to the medical regulator’s approval of vaccines for 5-to-11-year-olds. SKIP Australia has fundraised nearly $14,000 of a $29,000 goal to print and send an information pack to 2300 Victorian schools. Parents With Questions requests donations starting at $5000.
Cashed up and with volunteers across the country primed for action, anti-vaccine groups are using every tactic and approach at their disposal to undermine Australia’s COVID vaccination rollout for children.
Next: the children fighting back against vaccinations...
the dude in the death-threat tank top – i wonder I he knows what he’s been injecting into his body
Hopefully it’s affected his sperm supply.
Hard to believe that any woman would let him close enough to breed.
Vaccination bad.
Steroids good.
The gene pool would be much better off if the sovcits went back to where they came from: Donald Trump Island.
What about those that aren’t anti Vax but are anti mandate? Why isnt the main difference in our current dichotomy being described as anti mandate as opposed to anti Vax.
Because if the argument is about use of force by the state versus personal responsibility, who wins that popular vote?
When it’s possible to reach herd immunity with voluntary uptake why force the issue ?The sanctity of human life is an Abrahamic value that doesn’t wholly align with theory of evolution.
We still haven’t a definitive answer on the origin of the outbreak.
Because it has become clear that ‘anti-mandate’ is the rallying cry for anti-vaxxers who want to seem moderate. Everyone knows that. It is the ‘I’m not racist but’ cry of the anti vax movement. So either have the courage of your convictions, stop hiding behind weasel words and phrases, and say what you are, or shut up.
Did the outbreak of COVID involve any criminal act? Don’t know.
Are there any suspects? Yes
Do they have form? Yes.
100 years history of corrupt business practices which includes corrupting government, false marketing, and peddling drugs of addiction for profit.
Do the suspect have motive? Yes
What and why?
Recently, one industry player was handed a class action payout of 12 billion USD for sociopathic business practices associated with just one drug. This industry considers being sued for unethical and illegal actions as a legitimate recurring business cost.
The industry considers itself as needing a more stable, less contentious product line than drugs of addiction.
Does/did the suspect have opportunity?
Yes.
The report in pandemic origin is still in stage: obfuscation. No one will ever know about the opportunity.
Does the suspect have the resources?
Yes.
The suspects are part of a very small group globally, with access to all resources to launch a pandemic that fulfills all basic requirements of a successful ongoing business plan. The virus has to be targeted at vulnerable people so as not to wipe out the end customer base but be sufficiently scary enough to warrant a vaccine rollout for bread and butter income. Mandated rollouts are the cream that never runs out.
Anyway.
There are not enough eye rolls for this stupidity. Please. Go back to your Qanon forums.
So sky news, murdoch press, Qanon. Go on accuse me of having a telegram account (I don’t). why don’t you tell me to go back to my pizza shop pedo ring? Is that too offensive for even you?
Do you often have imaginary conversations? Maybe you should get that seen to.
You have no evidence to support any of your claims. The onus is on the person making a claim to provide evidence to support that claim. If you are willing to believe claims without evidence, you are likely to make some very poor decisions.
You mean no evidence, apart from 100 years of documented abuse of process by Big Pharma. And I would call the public record of the US justice system a reliable source. Who do you think was behind Prohibition? Tylenol? Oxycontin?
Big Pharma has abused process, and has also created drugs that have saved millions of lives. You have no evidence for your specific claims. You are just extrapolating from the fact Big Pharma has sometimes done the wrong thing, to therefore it is doing the wrong thing in relation to the Covid pandemic. That’s not evidence for your claims, whether from the point of view of science, the law, or logic.
The old Oz saying “ya not wrong” is applicable but it does not, necessarily, mean “You are correct.”
Too complex a concept for tiny minds, like VJ.
You are obviously full of admiration for your own mind Phryne, but I am not seeing a lot of evidence from your writings. But I grant that you make a fair bit more sense than Mr Campoven…
What about those that aren’t anti Vax but are anti mandate? Why isnt the main difference in our current dichotomy being described as anti mandate as opposed to anti Vax.
Perhaps it’s because the anti-vaxxers are determined to muddy the waters in their efforts to undermine public health measures.
The ‘anti-mandate but not anti-vaccination’ position seems reasonable (one can enthusiastically embrace vaccination for oneself while accepting others shouldn’t be compelled), although I haven’t heard any persuasive arguments to support it in a situation where others’ rights to good health may be threatened. It’s being used as a cover by anti-vax groups, many of which seem to belong to the anti-everything/conspiracy-theory/Qanon-swallowing penumbra. Even now, while covid vaccination is NOT mandatory, those groups seem bent on turning people and their children against vaccines per se, not just the mandatoriness which hasn’t at this stage been proclaimed. Why, Billy?
It’s called encouraging personal responsibility so that we act as mature adults that don’t need to be treated like children and not just be told what to do, but coerced to do it. In Queensland, we have mandatory vax if you want to have a life outside the home. Clever not to look like a mandate, but try going out without a vax passport.
This isn’t the spanish flu. Influenza kills but the jabs are voluntary. Now it’s not just the double jab, it’s regular boosters. It’s the antipanic messaging at the start of the pandemic to lock up your frail and infirm, everone else won’t die, just get sick.
this whole process, especially the demonisation, is straight out of the prohibition playbook from the 1920s.
Thing is, even if it was the Spanish flu, people like you would still oppose sensible public health measures. You’re not clever, you’re not being a rebel, you’re just a boor and a bore who doesn’t care how many people get hurt as long as your ‘rights’ are upheld. It’s a shame we have to share the same space as you.
Scum.
As always, so measured, well considered & polite.
I agree with you VJ. Anti-vax groups are fighting for the “right” to infect others with a deadly disease, that’s all there is to it. No sense of social solidarity, no care for vulnerable groups who are more likely to die from covid, just pure selfishness. What word is there for them other than ‘scum’?
Oxygen thieves?
Is this ‘deadly disease’ the one which needs tests to show infection in the absence of symptoms such as the common one of feeling crook?
Some cricket player last week put it well – he had to miss the 4th Test after a positive PCR despite having no symptoms and not even being in the least off-colour .
BTW, spouse & I (mid 70s) had boosters yesterday, the better half had Phizzer and I had A/Z so we might be a good test case of efficacy.
Meanwhile our major inland city (largest in NSW beyond the Sandstone Wall) is grinding to a halt, duopoly shelves depleted and the population restive & harried by debt, their kids running wild & untutored.
…. Can Covid read?
Possibly not but probably more betterly than the anti-vaxx brigade, which appears to subsist on memes & performative posturing.