A fringe anti-vaccine movement took advantage of the Covid-19 pandemic to bring conspiracy theories to a much wider audience, propelling dangerous misinformation about life-saving jabs that still endures five years later, experts warn.
Vaccine scepticism was around long before Covid but the pandemic “served as an accelerant, helping to turn a niche movement into a more powerful force,” according to a 2023 paper in The Lancet journal. Also read | 5 things we know and still don’t know about COVID, 5 years after it appeared
The pandemic also marked a change in strategy by anti-vaxxers, who previously targeted parents because children routinely received the most jabs.
But when next-generation vaccines were developed in record time to help bring Covid under…