Not long after the diagnosis, I was at the YMCA where I used to do ninety-minute yoga classes and now found myself standing on the edge of a cavernous gym watching T. drag around large foam blocks. I struck up a conversation with a defense lawyer I knew from a different stage of life. He had dark circles under his eyes and told me that his toddler had been diagnosed with autism. The child had been fine, he said, but after they got vaccinated, they changed, withdrew, regressed. It was definitely the vaccine, he told me. He recommended that I do my own research and then we could talk. Over the next few years, this man became one of the anti-vax movement's most prominent attorneys (and would go on, in the Covid era, to help lead the campaign against supposedly tyrannical health mandates).

XREF: Plausibly connects to narratives about how personal loss fuels conspiracy movements and single-issue activism.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 637