Someday soon, when dispassionate observers write about the pandemic, the biggest question will be why so many people fought to remain unprotected from the deadly virus. Rational explanations don’t work. Why would parents insist on their children’s “right” to catch the virus? Why would state governors and legislatures oppose life-saving mandates?
Here is an analysis of COVID death rates.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It turns out that those right wing areas are finding a cure for stupidity – and demanding that the rest of us pick up the tab for what they refuse to do.
We could go back in history and find other examples of people like the antivaccine and antimask crowd.
There were the Inquisitions that had their origins in the early organized persecution of non-Catholic Christian religions in Europe. In 1184 Pope Lucius III sent bishops to southern France to track down heretics called Catharism. These efforts continued into the 14th Century. If it wasn’t for dangerous lunatics similar to the MAGA mob of antivaccine and antimask people, the inquisitions would have probably flopped.
Similar hate-filled lunatics also were behind the infamous Salem witch trials that began during the spring of 1692, after a group of young girls in Salem Village, Massachusetts, claimed to be possessed by the devil and accused several local women of witchcraft.
Then there was McCarthyism. Without the same kind of irrational support based on hatred and ignorance, there would have never been the Red Scare.
And what about what happened to Japanese Americans during World War II?
I’m sure we could create a much longer list than this brief example of how dangerous hate-filled emotional mobs can be.