Conspiracy theories in political-economic context: lessons from parents with vaccine and other pharmaceutical concerns

ABSTRACT Profit-boosting manipulation and subterfuge is axiomatic to late-stage US capitalism, even in healthcare. I demonstrate how acknowledgements of this can overextend into ‘false beliefs’ using data from Southern Californian parents who vaccinate selectively and those treating intractable paediatric epilepsy with cannabis; and I explore appropriate responses. Both groups’ discourses referenced corporations’ self-interested duplicity, such as in sham invitations for patient engagement. Parents also pointed to contemporary measures of good health and citizenship moored to the US political economy’s expectation for independent, self-responsible, ‘productive’ adulthood (ableism). Rejecting normative and epistemological relativism yet attending in good faith to parents’ experiences and concerns, I recommend a Utilitarian approach to spurious claims – one that leverages culture’s potential fluidity while accounting for the ideological and material matrices of such claims’ emergence. Although unorthodox views with empirically verifiable underpinnings always deserve consideration, those unmoored to scientifically assessable reality can and should be challenged, with cultural sensitivity, in proportion to the degree to which their promulgation could underwrite harm. Moreover, interventions must bring the deep critiques that conspirational worries encapsulate to the attention of those with power to address them. If a community’s real concerns are taken seriously, discrete scientifically-untethered claims may be more easily relinquished.