Lyme disease has a long, storied history in alternative medicine and anti-vax communities. I would not be surprised if many of the people seeking the vaccine early were in those communities and entered with a distrust of vaccines, but thought the risk of Lyme disease outweighed their perceived risk of the vaccine. Once they got the vaccine they fixated on it as the source of their problems.

This exact pattern has been playing out with the COVID vaccine and the HPV vaccine. There are communities who are convinced that every medical problem they had since receiving the HPV vaccine is due to the vaccine, even though they’re all having different health problems that also occur in the overall population.