PerspectiveItalians Decided to Fight a Conspiracy Theory. Here's What Happened Next.

Alongside the flat-earthers, 9/11 truthers and Obama birthers, the anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists have always had a special distinction: They can do immediate and specific damage in a way that the others can’t. Birtherism surely increased Americans’ distrust of politics, though in ways that are hard to pin down. By contrast, when anti-vaxxers persuade parents not to vaccinate children, the result can be sickness and even death.

How, then, to push back against them? Does sympathy with parents who are spooked by vaccines help to bring them around, or is it better to be tough? Anne Applebaum writes in the Washington Post that over the past few years, both of these tactics have been tried in Italy, a country where, starting in about 2012, vaccination rates plunged. In 2015, Italy had one of the lowest rates of vaccination against measles in Europe. At 85 percent, the rate was lower than India. In 2017, Italy suffered a predictably large outbreak of measles, with more than 5,000 cases and four deaths.

It’s not hard to work out how this happened. Italians have famously low levels of trust in their government, and a tradition of medical hoaxes. On top of that, the issue became politicized: Italy’s Five Star Movement — a “non-party” party, founded by a comedian and formed on the Internet — spent a long time nodding and winking to anti-vaxxers . Unsurprisingly, a movement founded on hatred of “the establishment” was also suspicious of the medical establishment . In both Italy and the United States, the arguments behind the campaign are the same: the fear (derived from a now-discredited scientific paper) that the most common childhood vaccines cause autism; the belief that vaccines are a rip-off perpetrated by Big Pharma; the conviction that the dangers of vaccines have been deliberately concealed.