I used to think one of the biggest reasons there’s so many antivaxx people is that, because they’re so effective, people no longer have the fear of seeing their children in an iron lung, struggling to breathe.

Yes, I think that's absolutely right. The antivaxxers are people who didn't experience what it was like before vaccines.

Then Covid respirators happened and antivaxx fucks somehow got worse

I think part of it is that the effects of Covid were hidden from the public. The hospitals didn't let anyone in to see the rows of beds with people on respirators, so the public didn't see that on the news. They showed the refrigerated trucks but not the bodies in the trucks. So in the "pics or it didn't happen" timeline we're in, people didn't believe it was that bad. Even the aftereffects of long covid are barely recognized or mentioned. The whole thing has been bizarre.

In olden times, everyone saw the dead bodies openly carried off on carts, or saw piles of them buried in mass graves. Their relatives died right there in front of them, not hidden away in a hospital where they themselves weren't allowed to enter. Before, everyone directly experienced the crisis and suffering it caused. This time, the ugly reality was hidden from most of us other than the direct caregivers.

Side note: during the Vietnam war, reporters and camera crews were there and it was all shown on TV, the bodies, the wounded, the chaos. But the powers that be learned lessons from the horrified reaction of the public: do not show your failures on TV; keep your population in the dark. And we never saw our war casualties on TV again. Cameras were there, but we were shown nothing but scripted "reality TV", if anything at all.

They followed the same script with Covid. This is supposed to be the information age but we're more in the dark than ever. Real information is either not provided or is buried in misinformation. Remember the Florida whistleblower who leaked how the State was skewing their covid statistics and was quickly arrested and smeared?