Should People Be Arrested for Calling Anti-Vaxxers... Anti-Vaxxers?
Last Weekend, Reform UK Platformed a Vaccine Conspiracist. By Midweek, He Wanted Arrests Over the Word “Anti-Vaxxer.”
I feel like it would be fair to say that Aseem Malhotra has had quite a week. Just last weekend, he was a special guest at Reform’s Grievance Fest Conference, lining up with the who’s who of people very keen on getting people all worked up - by Wednesday of this week, he was on the Twitter demanding an answer on whether it was time to start arresting people for using the term “anti-vaxxer.” That is quite the journey - from a star appearance at the party of “free speech1” to pretty overt speech policing in a matter of just a few days.
Even for 2025 I feel that to be a little brisk.
At said Reform event, Malhotra suggested that vaccines may have been a “significant factor” to the cancers in the Royal Family, citing a line from an oncologist, which has subsequently been comprehensively and loudly rubbished by, well, other oncologists. Reform got mildly scrutinised2, very briefly flirted the idea of having a spine by saying this is not the party’s stance, then instantly defaulted to their go-to-safety-blanket when pushed by Ed Balls:
“Do you not believe in free speech, in sharing ideas, some of them are sensible, some of them are completely daft?”
If you saw the video of the exchange, you’ll have seen Tice sweating out the phrase like a man trapped in a lift with a faulty deodorant.
But there’s a part of this saga that makes me as a healthcare strategist who would deeply love to have a conversation about vaccines and healthier populations somewhat… anxious.
The party that has spent the last year (or five years if you include their time as the Brexit Party, which I do) marketing themselves as the nation’s “truth telling” alternative handed a massive platform to a doctor pushing a theory that has zero credible clinical backing - and did so to a room that has been primed to distrust institutions, experts, regulators and, from the looks of things, basic arithmetic.
If Reform UK had any sort of interest in public health more than the constant need for culture-war-engagement, they would have instantly followed this up a clear campaign of messaging after having Malhotra on-stage, urging their supporters to get the flu jab this autumn, check their children’s routine vaccinations are up to date and to treat viral misinformation like viral infections - quickly, and with the appropriate antidote.
Instead, we got a lot of “free speech” and “bringing the debate into the light” nonsense and the distinct whiff of something opportunistic. It is unacceptable, irresponsible and above all, dangerous.
And then came Malhotra’s post this week:
This from the doctor who had just been lionised by a party that is very insistent that words must never be policed3. Let’s set aside the weapons-grade irony here, and focus on the claim being made.
The term “Anti-Vaxxer” is not an epithet that’s used to bully the innocent4. It is a descriptor, a highly accurate one, for people who reject vaccines, actively spread doubt and misinformation about them or campaign against their use - and Merriam Webster agrees:
anti-vaxxer
an·ti-vax·xer ˌan-tē-ˈvak-sər
: a person who opposes the use of some or all vaccines, regulations mandating vaccination, or usually both
If you find yourself agitating against seatbelts, I am going to call you “anti-seatbelt”, and if you have a lifelong crusade against boilers, yes, I’m going to call you “anti-boiler.” Language, and people who use it, which is most by my count, is allowed to describe things.
Calling someone an anti-vaxxer is just not remotely abuse. Abuse is a slur about who you are - “anti-vaxxer” is a label about what you advocate. This means that there really is an easy solution for someone who gets offended by being called an “anti-vaxxer” - stop advocating against vaccines.
Terribly simple.
I will pause here to note two things:
Point one - there is a vast gulf of difference between someone who is an “anti-vaxxer”, and someone who is (usually for very understandable reasons), vaccine hesitant. The former actively campaigns against public health measures and deserves debunking and no small measure of contempt, the latter deserves patience, compassionate conversations and honest answers about legitimate concerns5. Hesitancy, as a rule, responds to evidence and dialogue, while anti-vaccine activism thrives on conspiracy and mistrust.
Point two, and this is specifically to the “but calling me an anti-vaxxer is hateful!” crowd who have overtaken my Twitter comments section over the past few days:
I do not care what you do or not do with your own arm - I do, however, care about what you do to other people’s heads. If you choose not to vaccinate, have at it, that’s fully between you and your GP and I fully support your decision to not vaccinate yourself. But, when you use a platform to push claims, misinformation and narratives that reduce the uptake for everyone else, then you stop being a private citizen with concerns and you become a public health risk. That is why the “anti-vaxxer:” label exists.
If you’d prefer something a bit gentler, I’ll rotate in “vaccine-averse”. If you continue to insist that microchips have been injected into someone’s child and that royal turbo cancer is a thing, I reserve the right to go with “pro-plague” or “tiny-coffin-enthusiast”.
I have many colleagues who have actual, nuanced questions about vaccines - questions around dosing, timing, prioritisation and post-marketing surveillance without sliding straight into a cesspit of conspiracy. Generally they’re called clinicians and they actually have an understanding of what they’re asking.
Which leades me neatly back to our clinician of the moment.
Malhotra is not a man with a proverbial tin-foil hat Tweeting his way through the day from a shed in the back garden while his wife wonders where things went so awry. He’s a pre-eminent cardiologist being platformed by a political party as an expert and medical sage. His position, and that platform, carries incredible responsibility, and that responsibility is shared by Reform - as are the downstream impacts.
Because what has been achieved with this unholy alliance between Malhotra and Reform is a laundering of fringe views straight into what is, whether we like it or not, becoming mainstream politics. You simply cannot insist that you’re the grown-ups in the room, or a group of people to be trusted, and then hand a lectern to a man advancing hypotheses that will, inevitably, lower vaccine uptake and increase winter morbidity.
Free speech is not a mystical shield you can hide behind here, it’s a principle that must co-exist with standards about what should and should not be said. Universities can host speakers and still maintain academic quality, broadcasters can platform debate and still fact-check as they go and political parties can invite provocative voices and still have lines against statements that are, demonstrably, injurious to public health. If Reform genuinely wants to be taken seriously as a party of governance instead of just grievance, it has to now prove that it understands the difference here.
The saddest thing here is that Malhotra’s arc is so unnecessary. The man did real, useful, very valuable work on sugar reduction. He became a well-known and trusted doctor in media circles. Then, unfortunately, after tragedy struck, he started publicly arguing that mRNA vaccines were to blame, and made the move from cautious scepticism to sweeping assertion. This part of the story is very human - grief so often seeks a culprit - but it’s also the moment where responsible institutions should step in and say:
“Here are the standards. Here is the evidence. Here’s where we disagree. Here’s why we disagree.”
Instead, Farage and co handed him a platform then acted terribly shocked when he used it.
The post calling to arrest people who say “anti-vaxxer” is the logical endpoint of that narrative arc for Malhotra. When the evidence stubbornly refuses to support your claim, you try to move the fight to the language used. You redefine criticism as abuse, scepticism as persecution and any sort of pushback or scrutiny as censorship. It’s the most performative of victimhoods as strategy, and it works because it feels incredibly righteous.
But - it is the complete opposite of free speech.
If Reform really believes in the principle, as we’re constantly told they do, they will come out and defend people’s right to call out anti-vaccine misinformation. They will do so robustly. They will defend frontline scientists and clinicians who spend evenings and weekends mythbusting in comments sections. They’ll empower parents who push back when their kids’ school WhatsApp group turns into a virology Reddit led by that weird mom with the crystals. That’s free speech. Arresting your critics, not so much.
On top of this, they’ll bring in responsible messaging around vaccination - focusing on truth, not sensationalism.
Sadly, I don’t have particularly high hopes that Reform will come through and do the public health housekeeping, so please allow me:
If you are eligible for a flu vaccine this autumn, please, get it. It massively reduces your chances of ending up in an A&E corridor6.
If your child has for any reason missed an MMR appointment, rebook it - absolutely no one will judge you.
If you’re in a high-risk group for COVID and offered a booster, please take it.
All of this is mind-numbingly unglamorous and yet gloriously, relentlessly effective.
I know there will be reply-guys along shortly to spam me with graphs that look like they were made with MS Paint, URLs that lead me to sites that have come straight out of the late 90s and quotes from Telegram chats hosted by their cousin’s wife’s barber. Save those. If credible signs were to emerge from high-quality, peer-reviewed studies and regulators change course, I’ll give that attention and maybe even change my mind - because that’s how science works.
Until then, please don’t confuse social-media virality with scientific validity. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and all I’m seeing are events passes and lapel mics.
To finish off this now well past normal-length rant, I’ll repeat:
Get your flu jab.
Check your child’s red book.
Don’t spread misinformation.
And if a political party tries to convince you that the brave, truth-telling thing is to ignore the boring science and believe the charismatic man with the microphone and spotlight, ask them why the wards always get busier and kids get sicker when their “truth” takes off.
Rapid Fire Mythbusting
Unfortunately, because there’s a new “anti-vax” conspiracy theory spreading around, many of the old ones have also started jumping up, which means that I also feel like I need to do a quick detour into some rapid mythbusting:
COVID Vaccines Causes Cancer
No. There has been zero (null, nada) robust evidence that mRNA vaccines cause cancer - royal or otherwise. If an outcome like this were actually true, you’d see a consistent pattern coming through in multiple registries, countries and time (as they have not) - and we’d have plausible methods that would survive per review and publication. We don’t have any of that. What we do have is a brand new, horrifying cottage industry of “turbo-cancer” anecdotes presented everywhere from ring-lit loos and conference halls on livestream, which always evaporates on contact with proper epidemiology.
Children receive “80 Shots”
No. They do not. The UK’s routine schedule runs to roughly eighteen or so vaccinations, some injected, some not, across childhood and adolescence, (with the exact number determined by year of birth and specific risk groups) many of them being combination vaccinations that protect against multiple disease in one injection.
The COVID Vaccine is Not a Vaccine
This is not clever wordplay or the gotcha of all gotchas - it’s just… wrong. Vaccines, by definition, are products that prime the immune system to recognise pathogens so your body can prep itself to prevent severe disease. Which is exactly what COVID vaccines do. And no, they’re not magic shields (and I took umbrage with politicians saying that vaccines are 100% effective). The goal of a vaccine is to reduce the risk of severe illness, hospitalisation and death. Which the COVID Vaccine did. At scale. Repeatedly. Across multiple datasets. If the naming convention engriefs7 you that much, take it up with immunology as a discipline.
People Were Forced “At Gunpoint” to Get Vaccinated
That meme is just that - a meme. Were there workplace vaccination policies, travel restrictions and clinical risk frameworks in health and care settings during an actual outbreak of a pandemic that has, to date, conservatively caused 7.1m deaths? Yes. Of course there bloody were. Were those identical to the literal force being described? No. Words mean things.
The COVID Vaccine Causes Infertility
No. It simply does not. Pretty much all the research outcomes to date have discredited concerns regarding COVID vaccines, and studies have repeatedly shown no negative effect on sperm levels or quality in men after receiving vaccines. This all stems from a verifiably false claim that vaccine antibodies would attack a placental protein called syncitin-1, but researchers from Yale compared the spike proteins in the mRNA vaccines to the placental proteins and found zero notable similarity between them. If this were true and vaccines were the cause of infertility, we would have seen it in the billions of people that have had the vaccine. We haven’t.
Vaccines Contain Dangerous Ingredients
This is the very well known “FORMALDEHYDE AND MERCURY WILL POISON YOU” you myth that still gets shouted in comment sections. Yes, the names sound terrifying (who doesn’t get a shudder down their spine at the mention of aluminium), except that the chemicals usually marked as lethal are found naturally in our bodies, the food we eat and everywhere in the environment around us. The amounts in vaccines are incredibly small and will not harm your body. You ingest more formaldehyde from eating a damned pear for goodness sake.
Vaccine Causes Autism
The ultimate Zombie myth that refuses to die, courtesy of Dr Andrew Wakefield - a man who has been dunked so comprehensively and repeatedly I’m surprised he still shows his face in public. There has never been evidence to link vaccination and autism. The study that Dr Wakefield wrote was poorly designed and was discredited in proving any sort of association all the way back in 19988, while hundreds of actual, repeatable and robust studies have since then confirmed that there is no risk of autism from vaccination. Wakefield lost his medical licence and is known to have acted fraudulently, and yet this myth, which should have been buried and gone long ago, has been resurrected more times than a C-Grade soap opera diva and keeps shambling back into view.
Reform UK is patently not the party of “free speech” - they’re the party of “we really, really want to say any old nonsense without getting any pushback or scrutiny.”
They really did not like this.
Unless it’s around questions about Farage’s house purchases, in which case they’re met by “how dare you!”
It’s also not very new, the first use of it being recorded in the early 1800s to describe, at the time, a resistance to the smallpox vaccine. I wish we had moved on from then, but sadly…
Being convinced that Bill Gates has put nano-chips in your blood stream or that you’ll turn into a giant talking magnet are not in any way or form “legitimate concerns.” Stop it.
Something I’ve personally experienced the one year I skipped mine and the very bad flu I had ended up exacerbating the Asthma that I’ve had since childhood.
I know that this is not a real world, please don’t get engriefed by me.
I’m very annoyed that the autism myth has survived and thrived since then, but Backstreet Boys didn’t. For shame.
Cyber crime …. That’s a juicy rich dish
Engriefed should be a word.
I shall, once more, be getting my Flu and COVID vaccines (assuming one is offered), probably one in each arm, this year at the earliest opportunity 👍