Anti-vax origins of "vaxxed"

The world* is talking about getting vaccinated, and saying "vaxxed" to do so. Here are the first five Google News results for "vaxxed":

• "Free Joints for Vaxxed People in DC Today"

• "Please Go Get Vaxxed So We Can Hang Out Again"

• "The New York Post spent weeks fearmongering about vaccines. Now it’s telling them to ‘GET VAXXED’"

• "Get vaxxed and ready"

• "Vaxxed, waxed and ready to kick off Shot Girl Summer in L.A.? Here are 5 expert tips"

That last one hints at my initial curiosity: vaxxed, waxed – isn’t it odd we put two xs in vaxxed? We don’t for waxed or vexed or fixed, or any other word ending in -x – except, interestingly, another newly coined, highly politicized word, doxxed.

The subjective experience of living in 2021 reveals the popular preference for vaxxed over vaxed – see the headlines above, social media, etc. Google Trends shows similarly.

Google Ngrams starts to complicate and flesh out tale. Vaxed, the spelling of choice in the 1918 pandemic, predominates usage until 2016, when Vaxxed, capitalized, takes over. Interestingly, lower-case vaxxed makes a single appearance in Google’s 1800-2019 English corpus.

The capitalized Vaxxed makes reference to 2016 pseudoscience documentary Vaxxed, about the imagined ties between vaccines and autism – the early core of the anti-vac movement.

Five years later, a world dependent on vaccines is talking about the doses in a flurry, and has appropriated the conspiracist orthography: vaxxed.

So what’s going on? Are there non-anti-vax origins to the spelling? Is there a linguistic rationale for the double x? Given the double x‘s other appearance in recent and charged doxxed, are we observing a change in orthographical norms (perhaps toward duplicate letters, broadly, or a changed pronunciation/conceptualization of x) or is there simply a provocative appearance to xx, encouraging its use in provocative words?

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*Particularly the portion of the world with patent-protected exclusive access to vaccines.