My mother and my grandmother were nurses. They had zero patience for the anti-vaxx thing. My grandmother especially would get very heated when talking about it. Probably because she was old enough to have seen some shit. My mother was a boomer, so she had things in her memory, too, but my grandmother looked like she wanted to throttle anti-vaxxers when she’d talk about this (at the time) relatively new way to be an idiot.

I think the anti-vaccine buffoonery started to slip in during Gen X parents, especially the younger ones, just a bit, but really really seems to have taken off with Gen Y and younger.

I remember listening to skeptic podcasts a lot in mid-00s and early teens, and I remember the common refrain was that vaccines are basically victims of their own SUCCESS. The ignorant and scientifically incurious look around, and see not too many diseases. They hear anecdotes of the unvaxxed, or they themselves didn’t get vaxxed, and didn’t get sick. Thanks to herd immunity, really, but they think vaccines are not really needed, that “Big Pharma” is racking up huge megabucks for vaccines (lol), etc…this kind of thing is only really possible in generations where they have no first-hand experience or don’t believe what their parents/grandparents tell them about horrific outcomes of diseases that are largely preventable via vaccines.