As you might've read here, last Tuesday I got a COVID-19 vaccination down at Dodger Stadium. Yesterday, vaccinations there were delayed for close to an hour by a group of anti-vaxxers and COVID-deniers who blocked traffic, imploring people to throw away their needless (they believe) masks and/or not kill themselves with a poisonous (they believe) vaccination.
None of the news accounts I read made it clear if all the anti-vaxxers were also COVID-deniers or vice-versa or if this was an amalgam of two groups with slightly-related beliefs. Seems to me it's possible to believe that the vaccination is safe but that it's a cure for no known disease…or to believe The Pandemic is legit but that the vaccination is poison. I suppose the latter group would believe that, yes, COVID-19 could kill you but the alleged vaccine is more likely to kill you. Or something like that.
And I would guess that there were a lot of people who believe both; that there is no real Pandemic — it's all a hoax — and that the two vaccines are dangerous. Maybe they think whoever arranged the hoax — which seems to have fooled like 98% of the doctors and medical personnel in the world — is an excuse to shoot people full of these drugs that will kill them or make them all Bill Gates's mind slaves or something.
If you're dumb enough to believe one nutty conspiracy theory, you're dumb enough to believe the other. And maybe also that Anderson Cooper eats babies.
What I'm wondering is if they convinced a single person of either belief. Did anyone who'd arrived to get Moderna pumped into their veins see these protesters, listen to them or read their leaflets and say, "Turn the car around, Albert. I think these people are right!"? We can assume they pissed-off and inconvenienced a lot of people and I'm not saying that's without some value when you have a cause…but did they stop one single person from getting the vaccine? I'd be surprised.