The fact that the government pays hundreds of millions of dollars every year to people who claim they’ve been injured by vaccines could be an alarming thing to see in your Facebook News Feed, especially if you’re a parent whose pediatrician assured you that vaccination is nothing to worry about. In one case, a viral article called “Flu Vaccine Is the Most Dangerous Vaccine in the U.S. Based on Settled Cases for Injuries” points to these payments as evidence of vaccines’ danger. The post was published on a site called Health Impact News: News That Impacts Your Health That Other Media Sources May Try to Censor! and appears to have 210,000 likes on Facebook.

Read: How misinfodemics spread disease

Subsequent Googling may only make things worse. Search for Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, and one of the first results is a site that appears to be an impartial source of information: the National Vaccine Information Center. But it is a private organization unrelated to the program, and it is a favorite of the noted conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who described it as “the best-informed group trying to expose the dangers of vaccines.”

The head of the center, Barbara Loe Fisher, has appeared on Jones’s show several times. One time she made the case that vaccination had become a political tool to gain access to Americans’ DNA for nefarious purposes. “So they’re using the vaccine-monitoring system as the skeletal system for a total takeover of health care,” Jones surmised, blaming Barack Obama. “Then they’re using bioethicists to bring back eugenics and take over health care.”

The road from a quick question about the flu vaccine to certainty about state-sponsored genocide has never been shorter.

The “vaccine-hesitant” community is a unique ideological mix of anti-corporate liberalism and anti-government individualism. Over the years, the VICP has been criticized for paying too much and for paying too little.

The Vaccine Injury Compensation Program’s first payment was made in 1988, but its current operations can only be understood through the lens of decades prior. In the spring of 1970, after she had received a dose of oral polio vaccine, eight-month-old Anita Reyes stopped moving her legs. Paralysis spread upward to her waist, resulting in permanent incontinence, in the classic pattern of polio.

Her father filed suit against the maker of the vaccine, Wyeth Laboratories. Its polio vaccine at the time involved a live virus that was capable, in extremely rare cases, of causing the disease itself. A jury awarded the Reyes family $200,000 on the grounds that even though the risk of developing polio from the vaccine was known, the family had not been properly warned. Because the disease had, until the previous decade, paralyzed thousands of American children every year—it peaked in the United States in 1952 with some 21,000 paralytic cases—the known risk of the vaccine was heavily outweighed by the risk of going unvaccinated.