I live in a liberal area in Texas (a state where 45% of voters reliably vote blue, I’d like to add). As my friends and I all started to have children, some of them chose not to vaccinate their kids. Rationales given related to a lack of understanding of the severity of a disease like measles, a general distrust of the medical establishment and pharmaceutical industry, and a belief in “natural” remedies. This was a point of contention in our friendship and we had to just drop the conversation entirely. We basically kept our son away from them until he was 6 months and got his MMR, then started hanging out again.

Here we are, 6-7 years later, and with everything happening in the news and the outbreak in West Texas, they’ve all decided to vaccinate their children over the past 3 weeks. I was proud of them, it can be hard to admit to making a mistake like this.

I’m in San Diego and in the circles I run in anti vaccine sentiment is criticized ruthlessly and without hesitancy. Not saying that is the case all over the city, but everytime it gets brought up its immediately met with disdain. This is both at work and socially.

As others are also noting here, the antivax movement is not all one monolithic concept - and especially people that would get all the childhood vaccines for their kids may not get the COVID ones, or oddly enough DO get those, but somehow are also against all vaccines at the same time as well? So I don’t even know: it’s like it appears more popular in theory than in actual practice?

I wonder if people get the vaccines for their kids out of love, but then out of fear don’t want to admit that in order to avoid standing out against their local crowd.

Im in a major city. I don’t actually know anyone who is antivax in any real way, EXCEPT, for a doctor of all things. OOf.

If you want to know how popular it is in a particular area, just watch the heat map of measles infections in the United States over the next year.

Keep in mind that states are not homogeneous, so there will be hot spots. For example the outbreak started in a religious sect in West Texas.

The general anti-vax movement? It exists, but seems to be in the minority. Anti-COVID vaccine is pretty strong, though.

I live in the second least vaxinated state…

I’m sure it exists but I haven’t met any. So either I’m lucky or it’s pretty small.

I live near a military community and the anti vax component seems to be larger than you would expect. All of the family members that are in the military are vaccinated due to requirements but their family is most likely not vaccinated. At the very least they don’t get their children vaccinated. Especially after COVID there’s been an increase in distrust of all vaccines.

You think you’re gonna get a useful assessment from people enlightened enough to be on Lemmy? Seems doubtful to me…