Return of the Anti-Vaxers

To those who think vaccines are harmful, covid-19 is just another conspiracy

-  PAUL GALLANT

THE WOMAN who organized Vancouver’s antilockdown protests in April wasn’t worried about catching covid-19 from the small group that attended. That’s because Susan Standfield doesn’t think the virus is deadly for the average person. She holds this belief despite the fact that, by the day of her third protest, more than 150,000 people had died of the disease worldwide, eighty-six of them in British Columbia.

She says it’s a fabricated pandemic “that’s really orchestrated, in large part, by the pharmaceutical industry. The money that’s going to be made off this corona vaccine is going to be unbelievable.” Indeed, more than 200 vaccine candidates are now in development, produced by labs all over the world at a cost of billions of dollars. A fifty-two-year-old mother of two unvaccinated children, ages seven and nine, Standfield describes herself as a human rights activist and content producer. Her husband works in hotel finance. She says her family is struggling financially, which she blames on the government’s lockdown measures. A graduate of Queen’s University, where she studied political science, she’s been researching vaccines and Big Pharma for about two-and-a-half years and doesn’t trust any of the companies, much less any vaccine they produce, to protect people’s health.