It didn’t take long for the Angry COVID Moms to Google and friend and follow each other, to start to think of themselves not as isolated islands of angry momness, but as part of something bigger. The start of a movement.

Burns, in Massachusetts, and Maron, in New York, connected on Twitter. Steinkamp, who’s more on Facebook than Twitter, nonetheless, started following Hamill on Twitter, who follows Murakhver (also on Twitter). It started in November 2020 with the push to open the schools. They’d swap studies out of Sweden, which refused to play by the rules, and doctors’ tweets and blog posts.

But when the schools finally opened — temporarily — they didn’t stop.

They wanted to know how this had happened, and they didn’t trust the Very Important People to do whatever was in their children’s best interest.

“The people who were supposed to be protecting our kids,” says Burns — she means the teachers’ unions, the school boards, the politicians, the white coats at the American Academy of Pediatrics, the bureaucrats at the CDC and the WHO and the FDA who oversaw the countless lockdowns and advisories — “they all abandoned their responsibility.”