IT ALL started when my friends Jenny and Jon took their five-year-old twins, Polly and Freddie, to see the Robin Hood pantomime at the Milton Keynes Theatre in the week before Christmas.

They thought hard about the dangers of Covid, they even asked my advice, but they had both had two jabs and a booster and they guessed the theatre would be encouraging masks and social spacing.

On balance they thought the cultural benefits to the twins outweighed the risks. Who doesn’t love a pantomime?

At the end of the day the visit proved a complete disaster. The twins came home traumatised and in tears. It was neither Covid nor the Pantomime dame that did the terrorising but 100 or so anti-vax protesters who invaded the theatre and frightened the life out of Freddie and his sister Polly and all the other children, with shouted threats about death and dying. 

That same week the anti-vaxxers came even closer to me with a poster stuck to a telegraph pole at the end of our street. It came from a group that called itself White Rose. That name hooked me.

I knew about a previous group that had used that White Rose name. It was a Catholic anti-fascist group that fought against the Nazis in Germany.

In 1943 its leader Sophie Scholl and her brother Hans were executed by guillotine for handing out anti-Nazi leaflets.

I was disgusted to discover that this modern-day White Rose had borrowed its present-day name from those proud anti-fascist heroes of history, for today’s White Rose are a far cry from their earlier namesakes.

White Rose now is a group of Catholic fundamentalists with some extreme right-wing and anti-Jewish views to back up their anti-vax stupidity.

The poster was entitled “End the Covid Fraud and Global Genocide Now,” and claimed the vaccine is killing people: “The covid fraud is causing a global genocide.”

The group claims that the death records have been falsified to exaggerate the impact of the disease, and that the vaccine is experimental and is in fact a gene-modifying injection — causing more adverse reactions and deaths than all other vaccines put together.

Today’s White Rose goes on to say that the “genocide” is being perpetrated against white Christians. This is an echo of French racist novelist and politician Renaud Camus’ great replacement theory (GRT), which claims that immigration to largely white countries, combined with a falling white birth rate, is a form of genocide that is replacing a white population with people of another “inferior” culture and colour.

White Rose and the other similar anti-vax groups warn about all sorts of people they accuse of supporting a vaccination policy.

As well as doctors, scientists and health workers they hate feminists, human rights lawyers, liberals, Marxists and, I guess, Morning Star columnists.

These and many others on the left are accused of being collaborators with the immigrants and ethnic minority people that White Rose sees as an occupying power.

They have the disgusting arrogance to describe themselves as the modern-day equivalents of Sophie Scholl. They claim: “Like the White Rose in Germany that resisted the Nazi regime, we encourage people to resist the covid tyranny. We do not want any more lockdowns and demand an end to all restrictions.”

I think a more accurate parallel is with those racist members of Yorkshire Cricket Club. Many YCC members complained that when Azeem Rafiq complained about the racist abuse he got in the dressing room and all around the club they told him it was because he did not share the club’s “White Rose values.”

Let’s take a look at some other leading anti-vaxxers. The latest tactic seems to be booking PCR tests or actual vaccination slots and then failing to show up, wasting NHS staff and volunteers’ time and blocking the service for those who really want the vaccine.

Andrew Wakefield is a British anti-vaccine activist and discredited academic who was struck off the medical register for his involvement in a fraudulent anti-vax article he published in the medical magazine The Lancet.

Wakefield claimed that the mumps, measles, rubella (MMR) vaccine caused autism in children. His evidence was based on a 1998 study that falsely claimed a link between the MMR injection and autism.

The massive publicity his claim caused started a sharp decline in vaccination uptake, leading to a number of outbreaks of measles around the world. Some children died of measles.

After he was struck off as a doctor, Wakefield became very rich selling thousands of books and making public appearances putting forward his fraudulent and nonsensical anti-vax views.

He now lives in the United States where he is a frequent speaker at pro-Trump and anti-vax rallies. He has divorced his British wife Carmel and now lives in Florida in luxury with ex-model and film star Elle Macpherson.

Macpherson boasts of having a previous affair with Donald Trump and now sells a bottled health elixir containing turmeric, mushrooms, barley grass and horseshit — sorry, that should be horsetail — extract. It is just a hundred quid a bottle if you are interested.

Wakefield wasn’t the first to attack vaccinations. Ever since Edward Jenner started his battle against smallpox he was attacked. No surprise really, it is a little counter-intuitive to inject a healthy child with the pus from a blister of somebody suffering from cowpox, but as Jenner discovered, it works.

Let’s look at a few more anti-vaxxers. Here is another one who has been struck off, this time a nurse. Kate Shemirani is a conspiracy theorist to be seen at many anti-vax actions both here and across the Atlantic.

She was struck off after a fitness-to-practise panel determined she was no longer a safe or effective nurse because she had “actively discouraged people from wearing masks, adhering to social distancing, and taking vaccinations.”

At a Trafalgar Square anti-vax rally she told her supporters the government “will be able to look at every aspect of what’s going on in our brains” and “not only can they pick it up, they can download into us.”

Shemirani was one of the organisers of the many anti-vax events last year.

Among those she invited to speak was Robin Tilbrook, leader of the hard-right English Democrats party. Many of that party’s members are ex-members of the fascist British National Party. 

Shemirani has used social media and her speeches at demos to openly support conspiracy theories that place prominent Jews such as George Soros at the centre of a small but powerful global elite who have exploited the pandemic for their own ends.

She also attended pro-Trump events in the US where she picked up on many of the ideas of the QAnon movement — which uses unfounded fears over issues such as paedophilia, devil worship and medicine to promote wild conspiracy theories.

Trump supporters and the QAnon movement trot out the line promoted in the forged publication The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. 

This notorious booklet, long proved to be a tsarist forgery, claims Jews are out to rule the world and along the way murder and eat non-Jewish babies.

This and similar racist nonsense is still trotted out by speakers at anti-vax events and in anti-vax social media and publications.

Another popular anti-Jewish conspiracy declares that a group of mainly Jewish men calling themselves The Committee of 300 or The Olympians actually secretly rules the world. 

Apparently British aristocrats set up the group in 1727 to organise politics, commerce, banking, media and the military all across the globe, or at least the British empire, that was pretty much the same thing.   

One of Shemirani’s strongest allies is Mark Steele, a well-known conspiracy theorist from Gateshead. Steele is best-known for his videos alleging that 5G, WiFi and other communication networks are part of a central weapon system.

Steele describes himself as a “weapons expert,” claiming to have worked on secret projects for the Ministry of Defence. We do know that in 1993, Steele was convicted shooting a teenage girl when he was working as a pub bouncer. He was sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment. The victim was left with serious disabilities. 

In 2019, Steele was photographed with a member of the English Defence League, a well-known racist and Islamophobic group.

Some other anti-vaxxers are more difficult to track down. They use aliases or just a single first name. One is Kelly — she says she is a mobile tanner but seems to spend most of the time on social media pushing her anti-vax and other conspiracy views. 

There are scores of Kellys to be found on Facebook, Twitter and many other internet platforms.

Another well-known anti-vax man is Piers Corbyn. It was Corbyn who led the invasion at the Milton Keynes panto that so terrified Polly and Freddie. 

If the stories on social media are to be believed, Corbyn has become very rich from his anti-vax and other conspiracy activities.

Last, but certainly not least, is David Icke. I haven’t got room to include all of Icke’s wacky views. As well as preaching against vaccines, he reckons we are being governed by lizard people from another planet. 

You have to believe him as he is son of the Godhead. Like his mate Piers, he has also become rich from selling conspiracy books to anyone gullible enough to buy them. 

One anti-vax group that needs keeping an eye on is the 200-plus group of military veterans called Veterans 4 Freedom. 

On social media it has published a fantasy that is also a threat and describes a violent insurrection in which vaccination centres are shut down and their staff attacked and injured.

The anti-vax movement has become a magnet for all sorts of people engaged in anti-truth and anti-science politics, and this makes it an open target to existing racist and ultra-right organisations.
 
Take a look at those supporting an anti-vax event. There will be ex-soldiers; young mothers conned by the idea that their children will be used as guinea pigs; Christian fundamentalists; and habitual addicts of conspiracy theories who come along as members of the Piers Corbyn and David Icke fan clubs. 

These anti-vaxxers are, in short, what the psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich described in the 1930s as “people in trouble” — the raw material of fascism. 

No wonder the organised racist and fascist groups have seen anti-vaxxers as easy pickings. They have latched on to their concerns and begun to recruit them.

Though most anti-vaxxers claim to be peaceful, recent street activities have involved intimidation of the media, public death threats and attempts to physically impede healthcare professionals.

By setting themselves up as the victims of genocide, the anti-vaxxers give themselves permission to threaten violence. 

It is the same kind of street violence that we have seen from the Nazis in 1930s Germany, from Mosley’s Blackshirts in Britain, and generations of racist and fascist groups right up until the present day.

In my political lifetime I have battled against Mosley’s Union Movement; the Empire Loyalists; the British National Party (BNP); the Greater Britain Movement; the White Defence League; the National Front; the England First Party; Britain First and a few dozen more, all with their individual would be Fuehrers, many of them changing parties and organisations over and over. 

Now the racists and fascists are trying hard again. Now they have discovered fresh fields to harvest among gullible anti-vaxxers. The battle against the ultra-right and all they stand for has never been more important and it’s a battle closely linked to support for vaccination.