Marco Arturo's brilliant 2-minute movie about the anti-vaccine movement starts with the 12-year-old promising to show all the evidence supporting the link between autism and vaccination, after which he holds up a succession of blank pages.
The video was modestly successful, and makes its points well. It also generated a lot of butthurt anti-vaxxers, who responded by swarming the kid on message boards, generating conspiracy theories about the child and his parents, denigrating him because he was Mexican, and revealing his personal information so that he could be harassed at home and his parents could be harassed at work.
The anti-vaxxers decided to take a different tactic. One popular anti-vaxx blogger is Levi Quackenboss, ironically not her real name. I say ironically because she decided to dig up everything she could find about Marco and post his parents’ names, hometown, and place of employment, and then concoct a conspiracy theory about how he’s a pawn of his parents and his government. Oh, and the antivaxxers didn’t forget to throw in a bunch of racism about the fact that he’s Mexican, claiming that he can’t possibly be intelligent and interested in science because Mexicans are all uneducated savages.And of course, then there are the common slurs and threats of violence. They call Marco an “ignorant dick,” a “pretentious little shit,” and a “moron,” and say they want to “punt him in the jugular” and “throat punch him.”
They’ve also tried to come at Marco on his Facebook page. One anti-vaxxer challenges Marco to get 1,000 vaccines in one day if he thinks they’re so safe. Marco responded with a challenge of his own, for the anti-vaxxer to eat 10,000 apples in two hours if apples are so safe, or drink 1,000 liters of water, or take 3,000 Tylenol pills, or a billion slices of vegan cheese. Holy shit, mic drop. Basically, the anti-vaxxers are fighting a 12-year old and they’re losing, even though they’re fighting dirty.
Anti-vaxxers Dox a Child Critic
[Rebecca Watson/Skepchick]
