Pox populi: Anti-vaxx, anti-politics

Abstract

This article explores the political meaning of the interconnected anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown protest movements that have emerged in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. A range of academics and commentators have argued that such protests should be understood in terms of a dangerous resurgence of far-right populism, one that is fuelled by misinformation and extremist ideologies. This article tests such a framing by engaging with recent scholarship on the ‘anti-political’ – the theorisation of the growing inability for political action to occur other than in opposition to the political system itself. Against the conventional reading of the protests as fundamentally political, this article looks at recent anthropological work on ‘conspirituality’ in order to investigate how the aesthetic and performative dimensions of such protests may be key to understanding contemporary anti-vaccine thought and action.