Will Carless

And that's what happened with Brandy.

Yes, I think people like Brandy who've had these kind of direct experiences, they have a sort of a ripple effect across the kind of crunchy mom universe.

So what you have is you have sort of a relatively small number of people who think they've been impacted by vaccines, but their stories are very influential and very moving for kind of the broader community.

And so you have people, you know, April and Brandy are a good example.

Brandy has a direct or says she has a direct experience

link to problems with vaccines.

April doesn't, but April has kind of come along and has believes in a lot of this stuff, mainly because of Brandy's own experiences, even though they're not her own experiences.

And so I think that that speaks to the larger community of crunchy moms, where a lot of these people might not have direct connections to this, but they read the stories.

They see stories like Brandy's, they hear testimony from these people and they think, oh, I don't even want to have anything to do with that.

And so they become skeptical

about vaccines themselves.

So when you cover extremism,

and you cover extremist movements, there's a lot of stuff that's very easy to dismiss, right?

Because it's just kind of nonsense, like on the face of it, you know, like racism is nonsense.

Like white supremacy is nonsense.

Like you're able to look at it.

The problem is with the anti-vax movement and the vaccine skepticism movement is that there's kind of a kernel of truth

in a lot of the things that these people believe.

The study of vaccine safety, for example, is a very complex, very nuanced world, and it's not simple, it's not cut and dry.

And so the people who are pushing vaccine skepticism are able to point at the sort of anomalies and the questions in the study of vaccine safety, for example, and that draws people in.