Vaccine conspiracies can be harmful enough, but it is intolerable when anti vax activism tips into intimidation

Barely a week goes by in which a politician, journalist or other public figure is not threatened.

One optimistic way of looking at such threats is that very few of them come to anything.

Some people who issue intimidating or abusive messages are misfits or delinquents and of little harm to anyone but themselves.

They are it seems emboldened by the world of social media, in which you can say vile things about other people from behind a cloak of anonymity. Rather like anonymous graffiti that was once the only outlet for abusive but cowardly (often immature) folk.

But it would be wrong to be complacent. In recent years two MPs have been murdered — Jo Cox and now Sir David Amess — and two others almost so, Nigel Jones and Stephen Timms. Such attacks have remained rare since Irish republican terrorists stopped murdering MPs in the 1990s.

The world views of those who are abusive towards public figures are many. Anti-vaccine activists have been implicated in obsessive verbal behaviour in recent months. Journalists who work for the media group that owns this newspaper are among those who have been approached by anti vaxxers.

There is nothing to prevent someone having a principled, even a strong, objection to vaccines. Henry McDonald writes powerfully, opposite, in defence of the right of people to preach, and of protestors to criticise their preaching.

Anti-vaxxers however do tip into harmful conspiracy theories, among them the belief that Andrew Wakefield was not a fraudster (he was deservedly struck off the medical register for his dishonesty in suggesting an MMR jab-autism link).

There are serious debates to be had over, for example, the cost-benefit ratio of vaccinating children for Covid. There were fair concerns about side effects from some Covid jabs.

But it is nonsense to talk of vaccines as if they are some global plot. And it is intolerable when those who believe such distortions intimidate public figures such as reporters or the Stormont minister Nichola Mallon.

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