“I just remember being very scared.”
That’s how Lydia, a 39-year-old mother of three in Canada, describes feeling when she was pregnant in 2008 with her daughter and had questions about vaccinating. She worried it might cause more harm than good.
“I remember feeling some trepidation and saying to my husband, ‘We can’t undo this once we do it,’ ” she says. NPR is not using Lydia’s full name because she’s worried about backlash from a community she once believed in — people opposed to vaccines.
The record-speed development of the COVID-19 vaccine has some asking questions about it as well as about the safety of all vaccines. It’s something that’s taken root and grown because there’s a natural incubator inside the broader movement opposed to vaccines.
Lydia says she is concerned about where the movement is going and the changes she’s seen in the current political environment. She says things have changed a lot.
“When I started, it was very motivated by moms wanting to be natural and hippie-like, whatever you want to call it,” she says. “And now it’s been totally infiltrated by right-wingers that it’s a constitutional, health freedom movement. And, you know, a lot of them believe in conspiracy theories and flat Earth. It’s scary.”
The experience also created a conversation between Lydia and her daughter, now 12, about being able to understand and admit when you might be wrong.
“I definitely use it as, like, a lesson [to] make sure you have all the information, even if it’s information that makes you uncomfortable. And ask yourself, before you share anything: Is this true?”
