GoFundMe Bans Anti-Vaxxers Who Raise Money to Spread Misinformation

Starting this with a few disclaimers:<p>1) I unequivocally believe all anti-vaxxers are wrong, 2) I absolutely support efforts to fight their misinformation, 3) I don&#x27;t even necessarily think it was a bad decision by gofundme to do this;<p>Now, what I&#x27;d like to question is the effectiveness of taking down those campaigns. My points:<p>1) I doubt that an average user scrolling through gofundme would see and decide to support such a campaign, I&#x27;d imagine most of the funding comes from the links being directly shared<p>2) The above makes me think such campaigns will simply move to a GoFundMe competitor and be equally (un?)successful, effectively nullifying any changes<p>3) Gives more attention + victim points to anti vaxxers<p>4) If their discourse is further pushed out of mainstream platforms, does it actually reduce the spread of their ideas or just limit their exposure to counter-arguments and public condemnation?<p>Edit: formatting

This misinformation is literally killing people. A private company fighting that is absolutely something to celebrate; GoFundMe gets my full support here.

The anti-vaxx delusion is a contagious viral illness of the brain that enables the spread of biological viruses that do physical harm. This is not a free speech issue, it&#x27;s a public health issue.

The one question &#x27;pro-vaxxers&#x27; can&#x27;t answer is: If vaccines work, why would someone fear non-vaccinated people?<p>Isn&#x27;t that just taking &#x27;anti-vaxxers&#x27; out of the gene pool?<p>I say this as someone who isn&#x27;t anti-vaccine <i>per se</i> but only anti-unsafe-vaccines. And the safety of vaccines is very much in question today, which you wouldn&#x27;t know if you only read and believe the mainstream media.

I&#x27;ll stop being anti-vax when the corporations that manufacture vaccines can be held for legal liability. You do know they lobbied congress in the 1980&#x27;s for legal immunity right? Would you actually drive a car who&#x27;s parent company had legal immunity against any manufacturing defects? Probably not... Either way, the insert that comes with every vaccine bottle is a great resource. If you&#x27;re too lazy to dig up the inserts on the FDA or CDC website there is a nice website that correlates many of them here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vaccine.guide&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vaccine.guide&#x2F;</a> Its a huge money making machine that cannot be sued for medical malpractice. That should raise anyone&#x27;s flag. To say vaccines are 100% safe means you are either ill-informed or you don&#x27;t have kids and therefore don&#x27;t care.<p>I highly doubt gofundme had a personal conviction over this issue. This is a company that is being influenced by an outside source. That should be concerning.

What bothers me about the ban is that anti-vaxxers - at least the ones I&#x27;ve read - are not Luddites.<p>I&#x27;ve never heard an anti-vaxxer say things such as &quot;It&#x27;s God&#x27;s (or Gaia&#x27;s) Will that Johnny died of measles.&quot;<p>They believe, wrongly in my opinion, that vaccines cause other medical problems serious enough to justify not using vaccines. To me, that&#x27;s legitimate dissent.<p>Given the stakes, maybe GoFundMe did the right thing.<p>But what&#x27;s an acceptable threshold of risk?<p>Because, for various reasons, anti-vaxxing has become a political problem as well as a health problem. Maybe more so.<p>The political aspect - i.e. GoFundMe being vulnerable to political charges of endangering the public - is probably what drove GoFundMe to institute the ban.<p>Which leaves other politically charged uses of GoFundMe vulnerable.

I get that anti-vaxers are considered dangerous. Equally dangerous is the revolving door between the CDC and vaccination companies which prevent correct levels of scrutinization when batches of vaccinations or specific vaccines are deemed unsafe. Without this comfortable level of accountability, vaccine companies can move forward indefinitely without supplying realistic testing which could prevent detrimental affects that very rarely occur, but can happen. Furthermore, sending bad batches of vaccines downstream to poorer countries should be illegal. Certainly things like this have happened historically.<p>Additionally, the way the government has cozied up to vaccination companies to prevent nearly any lawsuit from taking place related to vaccines seems ridiculous. Vaccines do represent a public good, and as such some protection seems appropriate, but to make it seem like the best possible thing we could ever do to protect populations? I think that&#x27;s a touch overreaching.<p>People should use vaccines, absolutely. However, vaccine tech has not progressed much in 50 years and part of this may be attributed to the protection of vaccine companies.

I don&#x27;t think this is a free speech issue. What&#x27;s the difference between promoting a scientific falsehood that puts public health at grave risk and yelling &quot;fire&quot; in a crowded theater other than the proximity of damage done?

It&#x27;s weird how much the anti-vaxxers have become the whipping boys of the current US. Is it because they&#x27;ve got both the smell of dirty hippies and also anti-science religious conservatives and also annoying soccer moms so everyone can love to hate them?<p>Not giving your kid vaccinations is stupid. But on the scale of &quot;ways you can mess up your kid,&quot; it&#x27;s pretty mild. In terms of the amount of harm that non-vaccinated kids do to everyone else, it&#x27;s extremely near zero. Almost certainly, if you drive a car more than a few times a year, you&#x27;re endangering those around you more than any anti-vaxxer is.<p>And if you actually want to convince anti-vaxxers to change their ways, this is clearly not the right way to do it. Pouring hate on people feels (scarily) good in a lot of ways, but it doesn&#x27;t change the minds of the people you&#x27;re demonizing. Is there any clearer demonstration of this than the complete persistence of anti-vaxxing sentiment in the face of steadily increasing screams of protest over the last 5 years?

This will inevitably lead to 1984 style censorship. The next 5 things censored en mass will all be &quot;objectionable&quot;, but then finally something good, normal or simply against the orthodoxy of the day will be censored that no average person would object to.<p>But then it will be too late, because everyone supported censoring ideas they simply didn&#x27;t like being spread.<p>Then it will be against the law to object to anything that is official censored.