Anti-vaxxers and their scary, increasingly violent threats

Last December, we reported on the threatening behavior of a group of anti-vaccine activists toward Kristina Lawson, the president of the Medical Board of California.

As Lawson recounted then, they surveilled her house, watched her children leave for school, then physically intimidated her at the garage of her business office.

That was all because she headed an agency tasked with keeping doctors from spreading misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic.

Now the group, which calls itself America's Frontline Doctors, has stepped up its campaign against Lawson, who served on the Walnut Creek City Council from 2010-2014.

The group has released a 21-minute video that depicts Lawson in Nazi regalia, a whip in her hand and swastika on her shoulder, and shows a clip of the garage confrontation validating Lawson's description.

The video implies that Lawson is comparable to dictators such as Stalin and Hitler, and describes her as the “primary suspect” in the “crime of hunting doctors who are on the front lines of critical care and scientific study.”

As she did in December, Lawson called out her accusers. “It is disturbing to be targeted by anti-science zealots and the people they seek to manipulate,” she said through a spokesman.

Since the video's release a few days earlier, she said, “I have received a constant stream of emails and voicemail messages threatening me and demanding I resign from my position. As I shared previously, I will continue to do this work even when it is hard, and notwithstanding that there is an organized effort to scare me and other dedicated public servants away from it.”

It was evident even months ago that attacks on public officials who had advocated strong anti-pandemic measures were becoming more frequent and more extreme. Since then, the attacks have become even more threatening, their imagery and rhetoric more violent.

There's talk of retribution for the offense of having advocated public health measures such as closing retail shops, restaurants, bars and schools. Consider this March 11 tweet by Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya, a signatory to the Great Barrington Declaration, a document that promoted herd immunity against the pandemic rather than lockdowns.

A “coalition of regular people,” Bhattacharya wrote, “will hold accountable the people who pushed the lockdowns to answer for the destruction they caused.”

I asked Bhattacharya to explain the nature of the accountability he thought would be appropriate, and for his reaction to the violent or retributive imagery being mustered against advocates of stringent anti-pandemic measures. He replied that he deplored “the abuse that scientists and doctors have faced for working on COVID, whatever their point of view. Accountability is not a synonym for violence.”

At the Brownstone Institute, an offshoot of the Great Barrington Declaration project, an anti-lockdown post in December by institute founder and president Jeffrey A. Tucker was headlined “Who Will Be Held Responsible for This Devastation?” and illustrated with a picture of a guillotine. I asked Tucker to comment, but received no reply.

Anti-lockdown crusaders have made common cause with the anti-vaccine lobby, campaigning not only against social distancing measures but also vaccine mandates, and calling for public trials of vaccine and social distancing advocates.

Often they invoke the Nuremberg Trials of the 1940s, equating public health officials with the Nazi officials tried for war crimes after World War II, many of whom were sentenced to death.

Last year, a group of GOP legislators in Maine called for the death penalty for Gov. Janet Mills after she announced a vaccine mandate for health care workers. One legislator compared Mills to Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz doctor who was responsible for the deaths of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people.

“These were crimes against humanity,” the lawmaker said. “And what came out of that? The Nuremberg Code. The Nuremberg Trial. Informed consent is at the top and violating that is punishable by death.”

The notion underlying this fanatical rhetoric is that the lockdowns that were imposed in the first few months of the pandemic, and that continued in many schools through the 2020-2021 academic years, were treatments worse than the disease. A corollary is that “natural immunity” — a common misnomer for what should more accurately be termed “post-infection immunity” — is a reliable path to the herd immunity that would protect the population at large from the disease.

The argument of the herd immunity advocates, including