Monetising abuse: What I learned from anti-vaxxers

My piece about vaccines went viral overnight and turned readers as far as Italy towards the jab. The flip side was an avalanche of online abuse - mainly from men.

A nice place to write a book.

I moved to Golden Bay about ten years ago after having been offered a friend’s cottage just outside Farewell Spit for the summer. I was planning on writing a book about Albert Einstein and his little known friendship with the kiwi physicist Ernest Rutherford - both Nobel laureates in their own right. Rutherford, from Brightwater just outside Nelson, would often come on long nature walks to Farewell Spit with his father as a young man and when the Nobel committee once asked him where he garnered his inspiration from, he said it was from these walks in the Kahurangi National Park. Having grown up in both Munich and Berlin, in Einstein’s surroundings, I thought it would be good to get into the same environment and head space that Rutherford had found himself in back then, to write my opus. 

As with so many people who come to Golden Bay, I fell in love with the area. Three months turned into one year, then three. To wind the clock back even further, as mentioned previously, I was among the first people in the world to gain a Masters of Science degree in Immunology and Infectious Diseases from Imperial College London in 2001, back then one of the top science institutions in the world. I spent hours in a negative biocontainment laboratory researching the world’s first vaccine for HIV. I went on to work for a small biotech company in Colorado founded by Michael Bevilaqua, a literal messiah of the immunology world, and specialised in global immunology and vaccine developments. After a brief stint at the world’s largest pharmaceutical company where I worked in oncology, I decided to call it all quits, pack my bags, become economically frugal, visit Rutherford’s old stomping ground in Golden Bay and quietly write my book.

Not so Golden, Bay

Never in a million years did any of us scientists in the vaccination field ever think this pandemic would happen. At the start of last year’s lock down I was extremely paranoid, bleaching everything I brought back from the supermarket, wearing surgical gloves and masks everywhere, and constantly fearing Covid. Knowing how contagious this virus was, every little pinch in the back of my throat had me scrambling online for symptoms of the disease. This time around, having had both immunisations, I feel fine and relaxed, still a bit apprehensive about what’s in store for us but not fearing for my own life anymore.  

My worry is not so much about the virus any more, but the people around me here in Golden Bay. I have been shocked by the amount of dissidence in my local community - not only the blatant anti-vaxers, but also the amount of people sitting on the proverbial fence. The mandates and subsequent job losses have ramped things up. So I decided to put my background as an immunologist to good use and penned a piece called “To vaxx or not to vaxx? Is this really the question” to help people understand how our immune system works, how the virus multiplies and why vaccines were important. When I published it on my Substack here, it became fairly popular with my small network of dedicated fans, friends and families.

After I posted it in a Facebook group that I’ve mentioned previously here, called Rabbit Hole Resistance (RHR,) run by some dedicated and concerned citizens who are trying to help convince loved ones to embrace immunisation and common sense, the article really took off.

What happened  from there was incredible and humbling in so many ways. I guess I went viral about a virus - oh  the irony! My usually quiet niche of writing was getting a huge influx of subscribers; people were writing me emails and sharing my article all over the show on Instagram stories and Tiktok even, which blew my mind.

I’m currently averaging a subscriber a minute and it is not holding back. I assume many of you reading this right now, will have found me because of that exact article. So I just wanted to say thank you, especially to all of the paying subscribers, amazing, it really means a lot!

From Italy, with love

On an even more bizarre side note, an old childhood friend of mine was visiting his parents in a small town in Rovereto in northern Italy recently. He told me he had come across a woman selling ice cream in the village square and after they got talking about Covid and vaccinations, out of the blue, this woman said she had just read an article by a New Zealander which had convinced her husband to go and get the jab. After asking the name of the writer, my friend dropped his ice cream out of disbelief. I have had several people write to me that they have decided to get vaccinated based on what I had written in this piece.

So not only was I humbled, I was also immensely proud of the fact that a little bit of knowledge and the right use of words  could have these real life repercussions. 

Perhaps rather embarrassingly too, I have had several romantic propositions as well, which is absolutely madness for me. Oh be calm, fragile ego, I have to remind myself on a daily, no, hourly basis.

Of course these repercussions were not all positive.

My inbox starts resembling a sewage treatment plant

For the last couple of days, I have been inundated with the “freedom” fighter anti-vax brigade who have launched a nasty tirade against not only my publication here on Substack, but also on my email inbox and personal Facebook page. It feels like an avalanche of raw sewage and at times even a bit like the scope of a sniper rifle has been set on you. At first I kindly engaged and tried to reason and rationalise with them. Nope, this didn’t work.

They get emboldened by people who reply and they come back with even more viciously belligerent rhetoric. One troll even used the word “temerity” which really stumped me as it is a great word. I wish I could say these trolls were morons, but they obviously aren’t. I can say without a shadow of a doubt that 99 percent of them were men.

Angry, angry men. 

Some of them had done a bit of homework and not all of them sounded batshit insane. The more rational ones tried to get me to reveal how much money the Gates Foundation was paying me (I wish!), or which government I was a cover agent for. The less rational ones inferred a lot more sinister stuff about my character. One particularly frightening individual kept on pretending that he had known me growing up in Munich and insinuating all sorts of weird stuff. The Nazi comparison seems to be a staple for these guys on a mission. I would ban them and block their email address from Substack only to find them re-appear under another alias, back at insulting me and accusing me of covering up for the cabal. 

Hello, and welcome to the argument clinic

After 24 hours of patiently dealing with these internet trolls, cleaning up after their online messes like a public janitor, I decided to take care of my own mental health and make all of the comments on my articles here, for paid subscribers only. David Farrier of Webworm taught me that this was a thing.

Now people can abuse me, but they’ll have to pay me first, just like that brilliant Argument Clinic sketch from Monty Python’s Flying Circus:

“I’d like to have an argument, please!”         

Despite the backlash, I’m overjoyed that my article managed to be successful in convincing some sceptics and fence-sitters out there, but there is still a lot of work to be done. The other day I went to the open air market here in Golden Bay and was one of only a handful of people wearing masks. Those donning masks were being ostracised and made fun of. The number of people in the local supermarket not wearing masks is also high. It’s like a daily ritual to see people act like spoiled little brats when told to put on masks or leave the store. Encountering these rebels with a terrible cause, with their self-appointed entitlements is very disheartening. 

However, there are a lot of great Kiwis doing amazing mahi around this area. I have joined FACT (Fight Against Conspiracy Theories) Aotearoa led by some of the RHR advocates. Their work in combating false information and conspiracy theories has been brilliant - leading them to being awarded the top prize at the NZ Skeptics award.

So there is hope.

Why are men so hostile?

From an anthropological angle though, it must be reiterated, why is it that these internet trolls and those putting out antivax propaganda, are nearly exclusively men? Well it turns out that these studies have been conducted and it has been proven empirically that men are a lot more likely to engage in online abuse than women, to troll people for the mere sake of trolling them, and guess what the reasoning is?

Yes you guessed right, men are for more likely to be narcissists than women, it’s a biological reality, unfortunately. And the psychological anomaly behind bullying and trolling is narcissism, there’s no two ways about it.

And why is it that the compliments received about good writing come mostly from women? Are men more likely to fall for anything and let the world know their disappointment, whilst women rationalise what they observe and make better judgements? They may just also be more kind, generous and compassionate than their opposite part.

Perhaps yes, maybe we should look into legislating testosterone?

Just an idea.  

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Afterthought:

Jacinda Ardern really is a saint

Lastly, I just wanted to add how absolutely incredible the government has acted in this pandemic.

We locked down fast and hard, kept the virus out for a year, whilst 5 million people’s lives perished globally and then waited long enough for the global biochemical wizardry to create an effective vaccine against this virus, to which the bulk of the country is now immunised - and just in time for this thing to ravish through our communities.

For those people who bag and throw dirt on Jacinda, criticising her for “lack of leadership” just try not to forget how many lives she has already saved.

Count yourself lucky that you are not living in an anti-vax Mecca like Golden Bay, where our immunisation rate lies just on par with Austria, at under 65%, and let’s not forget what’s happening over there now. With the strictest vaccine mandate worldwide and a lockdown for all unvaccinated people. Oh how lucky to be a kiwi, right?

I’ve actually suggested to Jacinda, that we do the same here in our little community of hippies, anti-establishment shamans and soap avoiders. She has yet to get back to me on that.

I wait with baited breath.

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Thank you very much.

Mauri Ora.

“It takes generosity to discover the whole through others. If you realize you are only a violin, you can open yourself up to the world by playing your role in the concert.”

The legend himself, Jacques Yves Cousteau.