Speaker 1: Cool Media.
Speaker 2: Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let
Speaker 2: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 2: of the week that just happened is here in one
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Speaker 3: I'm Stephen Monchelli.
Speaker 4: I'm a journalist in Dallas and an occasional Cool Zone
Speaker 4: Media contributor. You may have seen in the news lately
Speaker 4: that there's a major measles outbreak centered in Texas. It
Speaker 4: started back in January of this year in the West
Speaker 4: Texas County of Gaines, and it has since spread to
Speaker 4: at least two other states. As of this recording, Texas
Speaker 4: has reported over seven hundred cases associated with the measles outbreak.
Speaker 4: New Mexico has reported over sixty, Oklahoma has reported over fifteen,
Speaker 4: and there are other states that have also reported measles
Speaker 4: cases that may or may not be linked to this outbreak.
Speaker 4: It's the first major measles outbreak in a decade, and
Speaker 4: it's already taken three lives, two unvaccinated children, the first
Speaker 4: of such deaths in more than twenty years, and one adult.
Speaker 3: All were unvaccinated.
Speaker 4: At the root of the outbreak are low vaccination rates,
Speaker 4: which took a sharp downturn after the twenty twenty COVID
Speaker 4: nineteen pandemic as dubious vaccine skepticism and opposition to vaccines,
Speaker 4: both mandatory and in general, became a.
Speaker 3: Partisan political issue.
Speaker 4: It is no coincidence that the low vaccination rate in
Speaker 4: Gaines County, where the outbreak first began, corresponds with deep
Speaker 4: red Republican politics. Measles is a sort of canary in
Speaker 4: the coal mine. It's one of the most highly communicable
Speaker 4: diseases and consequently is among the first to appear in
Speaker 4: communities with low vaccination rates. An outbreak in Wiffornio about
Speaker 4: a decade ago was eventually stemmed when the state legislature
Speaker 4: banned vaccine exemptions for school aged children. This action spurred
Speaker 4: response and gave a shot in the arm to a
Speaker 4: nascent coalition of vaccine skeptics and outright anti vaccination groups
Speaker 4: that had previously struggled to get political traction. By twenty twenty,
Speaker 4: such groups had gained meaningful amounts of influence in red
Speaker 4: states like Texas and Oklahoma. Then came COVID nineteen, and
Speaker 4: suddenly a disparate set of groups big pharma skeptics, wellness influencers,
Speaker 4: health freedom libertarians, and conservative religious groups, to name a few,
Speaker 4: coalesced in a formidable political force under the banner of
Speaker 4: the Republican Party, whose politicization of the COVID nineteen pandemics
Speaker 4: served as a sort of ideological cement to unite them.
Speaker 4: The logical conclusion of this development is represented in the
Speaker 4: avatar of RFK Junior, a long time vaccine misinformation peddler
Speaker 4: who now sits atop the highest federal government health bureaucracy,
Speaker 4: a perch from which he continues to spread debunked anti
Speaker 4: vaccination tropes like a proverbial fox.
Speaker 3: In the henhouse.
Speaker 4: RFK Junior has repeatedly downplayed the importance of vaccines in
Speaker 4: the battle against measles, and has refused to distance himself
Speaker 4: from long debunked anti vaccination arguments such as that vaccines
Speaker 4: cause autism. His influence and the influence of the vaccine
Speaker 4: skeptic movement, of which he is a central figure, can
Speaker 4: be seen in responses from local West Texans who have
Speaker 4: opted for junk palliatives like vitamin A or measles exposure
Speaker 4: parties over vaccination. The viral spread of anti vax ideology
Speaker 4: threatens to pitch us back one hundred years in time,
Speaker 4: when thousands of children and adults either died or disabled
Speaker 4: every year from diseases like measles, polio, and smallpox. Research
Speaker 4: into the side effects of vaccines has repeatedly shown that
Speaker 4: the risks associated with vaccination are far lower than the
Speaker 4: risks of an infection, particularly for vulnerable populations like young children,
Speaker 4: the elderly, and people with suppressed immune systems. Some people
Speaker 4: genuinely cannot get vaccines, such as certain new board babies,
Speaker 4: and thus are at higher risk should an outbreak of
Speaker 4: a deadly disease occur. When ninety five percent of a
Speaker 4: population is vaccinated in an area, diseases can be entirely
Speaker 4: removed from circulation, and that's indeed what happened to smallpox
Speaker 4: and for a time measles. But the downward trend in
Speaker 4: vaccination rates, supercharged by the marriage of right wing politics
Speaker 4: with anti vaccination beliefs of all stripes, means that our
Speaker 4: collective immunity is at risk. This week, I will be
Speaker 4: your host on It Could Happen Here, as I take
Speaker 4: you through a five episode mini series called Anti vax America,
Speaker 4: three interviews with public health officials, vaccine scientists, medical professionals,
Speaker 4: and historians. I will explore the ongoing measles outbreak and
Speaker 4: how it serves as a microcosm for where we are,
Speaker 4: how we got here, and where we could go if
Speaker 4: anti vaxx beliefs continue to become mainstream in the United States.
Speaker 4: In the first episode, I will cover the origin of
Speaker 4: the measles outbreak in Texas, its deadly consequences, the varying
Speaker 4: responses from public health officials at different levels of government,
Speaker 4: and the consequence of misinformation being spread at the national
Speaker 4: and local level. In the second episode, I will unearth
Speaker 4: the deep roots of anti vaccination belief in the United States,
Speaker 4: how it's changed over time, and why it's basically become
Speaker 4: synonymous with right wing politics in our current day. In
Speaker 4: the third episode, I will explore the overlap between anti
Speaker 4: vaxx beliefs and the belief in supernatural healing and miracles
Speaker 4: that is common among a particular movement of conservative Christianity
Speaker 4: that has tied itself closely to President Donald Trump. In
Speaker 4: the fourth episode, I will untangle the twisted history of
Speaker 4: eugenics and how it's influenced public health and vaccination attitudes,
Speaker 4: as well as the historical echo of eugenics that can
Speaker 4: be found in RFK Junior Make America Healthy Again agenda.
Speaker 4: And in the last episode, I'll consider what could happen
Speaker 4: in the United States What could happen here if vaccination
Speaker 4: rates continue to plummet and vaccine skeptics like RFK Junior
Speaker 4: continue to dictate public health policy. But before we get there,
Speaker 4: a quick ad break. Gaines County, the epicenter of the
Speaker 4: West Texas outbreak, is a largely rural place home to
Speaker 4: oil field workers, farmers, ranchers, and several Mennonite communities. Politically,
Speaker 4: it's very conservative. It sits on the Texas New Mexico border,
Speaker 4: about three hundred and sixty miles west of Dallas, where
Speaker 4: I live. The largest city in the region, Lubbock, is
Speaker 4: two counties over. Lubbock is home to two hundred and
Speaker 4: sixty thousand plus people and has the largest hospitals in
Speaker 4: the area.
Speaker 3: It was at one of those hospitals.
Speaker 4: That the first child died of measles in over two decades.
Speaker 4: As the number of cases in the region began to increase,
Speaker 4: Lubbock became a central hub for both treatment and the
Speaker 4: dissemination of public health information. Weeks before RFK Junior or
Speaker 4: Texas Governor Abbott spoke on the issue, local public health
Speaker 4: officials and medical institutions were on the front lines in Lubbock.
Speaker 5: So my name is Catherine Wells, and I am the
Speaker 5: director for Lubbock Public Health and Lubbock Public Health is
Speaker 5: the city and county health department in both the city
Speaker 5: and County of Lubbock, Texas. I've been in this role
Speaker 5: for about ten years now. We're about seventy five miles
Speaker 5: from Gaines County, which is where kind of the epicenter
Speaker 5: of this measles outbreak is.
Speaker 4: Let's maybe go back all the way to the day
Speaker 4: that you know it sort of began. The first case
Speaker 4: came out in January. So can you take us a
Speaker 4: little back to that day and what was going on
Speaker 4: in your world and you know, what were you doing,
Speaker 4: and how did you hear about this first case and
Speaker 4: what your reaction was.
Speaker 5: And we'll actually need to take a couple of days
Speaker 5: kind of before the announcement. I first found out about
Speaker 5: the possibility of measles that Friday, the twenty eighth. I
Speaker 5: have all my dates messed up, but it's that Friday,
Speaker 5: before the first case was announced, one of my staff
Speaker 5: came and told me that we had two children that
Speaker 5: had been admitted to our local hospital. So we have
Speaker 5: the children's hospital for this whole region. People come, you know,
Speaker 5: over two hundred miles to come to the children's hospital
Speaker 5: in Luppock. And she mentioned that there was two children.
Speaker 5: The physician thought it might be measles that they were
Speaker 5: going to send for test. So in public health, measles
Speaker 5: is so rare that even sending somebody for testing is
Speaker 5: required to be reported to public health. That physician thought
Speaker 5: it was measles. We kind of waited over the weekend,
Speaker 5: and then that Monday and Tuesday, I started hearing some
Speaker 5: rumors that there were multiple measles cases down on the
Speaker 5: ground in Gaines County, which was interesting. People were calling
Speaker 5: and saying, you know, I heard this rumor have you
Speaker 5: heard this? And I'm like nope. And then all of
Speaker 5: a sudden, those two cases or those two cases both
Speaker 5: tested positive and then when we went and started talking
Speaker 5: to the families and learning more, we realized that those
Speaker 5: rumors about measles circulating and Gaines County was true, and
Speaker 5: there were reports of you know, multiple individuals that had
Speaker 5: been sick and measles had probably been there or at
Speaker 5: least a little bit of time. And then when we
Speaker 5: got the confirmed cases, that really just put everything into
Speaker 5: really you know, moving very quickly trying to really figure
Speaker 5: out what was going on for measles.
Speaker 4: So at that time, it was it was flu season,
Speaker 4: and so were you all was your office preparing, you know,
Speaker 4: or working on anything else at that time when you
Speaker 4: had first heard about this first testing and you know,
Speaker 4: started hearing about these rumors.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, we had increases in flu, we had
Speaker 5: increases in COVID. We actually had some birds that had
Speaker 5: died that had tested positive with the new Avian flu.
Speaker 5: You know, just that's a busy time of the year
Speaker 5: for public health with lots of different reports coming in,
Speaker 5: lots of multiple reports of pertussis, and it's not unusual
Speaker 5: that we have a physician wanting to test for measles
Speaker 5: ruling out. I mean, it happens a couple of times
Speaker 5: a year. But in my entire career, every time that happened,
Speaker 5: it had always been negative.
Speaker 6: So I was.
Speaker 5: Kind of thinking that it was one of those cases,
Speaker 5: especially that Friday afternoon, like, oh, this is just a doctor,
Speaker 5: you know, you know, just wanting to rule something out.
Speaker 5: You know, it's probably blue or something else going on
Speaker 5: with those children.
Speaker 4: And so when you had gotten that confirmation it was
Speaker 4: verified that those cases had indeed been measles. I mean,
Speaker 4: what was going through your mind at that time?
Speaker 5: I mean that was like, you know, people have always
Speaker 5: talked about we're kind of on the edge of seeing
Speaker 5: more measles outbreaks in the United States, and it was
Speaker 5: really kind of a no, no, a crap moment of Wow,
Speaker 5: this is in our backyard. Is our department you know,
Speaker 5: ready to take this on? And then also reaching out
Speaker 5: to Gaines County, which has a much smaller health department,
Speaker 5: and being like, what can we help you with? Do
Speaker 5: you guys know what you need next? You know, they
Speaker 5: don't have a communications person, so it was like my
Speaker 5: staff writing the press release for Gaines County to send
Speaker 5: out to make the notifications about the first measles cases.
Speaker 5: So it was just really what can we do to
Speaker 5: help them immediately and figure out what the next steps
Speaker 5: would be with that.
Speaker 4: So since January, cases have been on the rise, and
Speaker 4: so we're in a different place now than just two cases.
Speaker 3: Can you just tell us a little.
Speaker 4: Bit about where things are now in Lubbock and how
Speaker 4: medical authorities have responded to the outbreak.
Speaker 5: So initially, you know, all of the cases were in
Speaker 5: Gaines County. The only exposures we were seeing outside of
Speaker 5: Gaines County was when somebody was seeking medical care and
Speaker 5: was sitting in like say, a waiting room at a
Speaker 5: physician's office, and then they were exposing other individuals. But
Speaker 5: after a couple of weeks, we started seeing spread outside
Speaker 5: of Gaines County, So we were seeing more and more
Speaker 5: cases in those surrounding counties, and then we started getting
Speaker 5: cases in Lubbock, that's seventy five miles away. Over the
Speaker 5: last three weeks, really seen the cases in the Lubbock increase.
Speaker 5: You know, we originally just had a handful. Now we're
Speaker 5: up to forty one or forty two, and that number
Speaker 5: will be updated again tomorrow. So just seeing more and
Speaker 5: more spread of measles, and the concern is that public
Speaker 5: health can't necessarily trace those back to a specific case.
Speaker 5: So people that have got out to the store or
Speaker 5: gone to a public place have now contracted measles.
Speaker 4: So tell me a little bit more about you know,
Speaker 4: what efforts have taken place and what sort of initiatives
Speaker 4: have been put into place as measles have spread. You know,
Speaker 4: what does that look like from love at Public Health
Speaker 4: or any of your partners.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so ours is really the first one was getting
Speaker 5: testing set up. Originally when this started, all of our
Speaker 5: testing samples had to go to Austin, which is about
Speaker 5: a five and a half hour drive, So working with
Speaker 5: the state Health Department to get testing capability up here
Speaker 5: in Lubbock so we could quickly identify people. The next
Speaker 5: one is really about education, providing information to the physician's
Speaker 5: offices the hospitals about measles because we hadn't seen it
Speaker 5: in twenty one years here. So just think about how
Speaker 5: many physicians have been trained over the last twenty one
Speaker 5: years that never saw a measles case in their residency.
Speaker 5: So getting them to feel comfortable about what the signs
Speaker 5: and symptoms are and really making sure that we were
Speaker 5: notifying or that they were notifying Public Health and getting
Speaker 5: people tested and then doing that contact tracing, and then
Speaker 5: the other big ones vaccinations. You know, there's two ways
Speaker 5: to prevent measles. One is the vaccination that's going to
Speaker 5: protect you, and then the other one is avoiding being
Speaker 5: exposed to measles. So really getting more and more people
Speaker 5: vaccinated with pop up clinics and then running a measles
Speaker 5: vaccination clinic here at our health department.
Speaker 4: Can you tell me a little bit about what the
Speaker 4: response in particular too, You know, the vaccination clinics being
Speaker 4: set up has been. You know, I have a lot
Speaker 4: of people shown up for that. Has it drawn a
Speaker 4: lot of you know, new people that are trying to
Speaker 4: get their children vaccinated.
Speaker 5: It's a mix. I feel that our vaccination clinic here
Speaker 5: at our Health department's been pretty successful in that we're
Speaker 5: getting people every day coming in to get vaccinated, and
Speaker 5: we're seeing people that were hesitant prior, that had chosen
Speaker 5: not to vaccinate their children kind of with the idea, well,
Speaker 5: I've never seen measles or moms or rebella, so why
Speaker 5: give my child a vaccine if that doesn't exist. Now
Speaker 5: that measles are circulating in the community, they're changing, you know,
Speaker 5: that thought process and are coming forward to get vaccinated.
Speaker 5: Some of the rural clinics have been a lot harder
Speaker 5: to get people to come in. I mean they've stood
Speaker 5: up clinics and only a handful of people have come
Speaker 5: in to that clinic that day. So real mixed response.
Speaker 5: But I think is public health, it's important for us
Speaker 5: to be offering the MMR vaccine with as few barriers
Speaker 5: as possible.
Speaker 4: So you were in this position during the COVID pandemic
Speaker 4: and when that began and all throughout it, So can
Speaker 4: you tell me a little bit what it was like
Speaker 4: working in your role as a public health official at
Speaker 4: that time, and then also maybe whether things are any
Speaker 4: different today, has anything changed?
Speaker 5: I mean, I think our community did fairly well throughout COVID,
Speaker 5: given you know, everything that went on. I've always believed
Speaker 5: in just being honest and talking about what I do know,
Speaker 5: what I don't know, what the science is showing, and
Speaker 5: I think that helped our community get vaccinated and take
Speaker 5: some of the precautions during COVID. And I'm kind of
Speaker 5: taking that same you know thought process and that same
Speaker 5: you know leadership style as we're dealing with measles out
Speaker 5: here with measles. It's a challenge. I think people are
Speaker 5: paying attention to it because it's really impacting children, whereas
Speaker 5: we didn't see, you know, that same impact with COVID.
Speaker 5: It's frustrating because we know what the solution is. When
Speaker 5: COVID showed up. You know, nobody in public health and
Speaker 5: the medical community, you know, knew exactly what COVID is.
Speaker 5: With measles, we know what we're dealing with, and we
Speaker 5: also have a known solution, which is a vaccine. So
Speaker 5: it is frustrating that people are choosing not to vaccinate. Still,
Speaker 5: the other challenges is during COVID, all of our other
Speaker 5: work for public health got put on hold. Here with measles,
Speaker 5: our health Department's still expected to do all of our
Speaker 5: other jobs and respond to a measles outbreak, which is
Speaker 5: really stressful on staff.
Speaker 4: I can completely understand that in terms of some stressful things.
Speaker 4: I understand that just from doing some background research and
Speaker 4: reading up that your office or maybe even you your self,
Speaker 4: were subject to some threats or some sort of pretty
Speaker 4: extreme reactions during COVID. And is that the case? And
Speaker 4: is that still happening?
Speaker 5: Thankfully, it's not happening during COVID. We did have some
Speaker 5: very strong opinions and some threats, mostly around when the
Speaker 5: children's vaccine was released and why we were promoting that.
Speaker 5: We have not seen that with measles, which is very good.
Speaker 5: I don't want any of my staff to be threatened.
Speaker 5: I mean, you always got these random posters on people
Speaker 5: that post on social media, but they're not even individuals
Speaker 5: from our community.
Speaker 3: Got it, Okay?
Speaker 4: Well, I'm glad to hear that, genuinely, that that is
Speaker 4: a positive change. I suppose that is something that's a
Speaker 4: good difference.
Speaker 5: And also good support from our pediatricians and the medical
Speaker 5: community has been very good and outspoken about the importance
Speaker 5: of getting vaccinated, which has helped us.
Speaker 4: So where do you see things going from here? I mean,
Speaker 4: do you think we'll continue to see more cases? I
Speaker 4: know that they're on the rise, but do you think
Speaker 4: that will continue? Or do you have other concerns about
Speaker 4: potentially other outbreaks of diseases that had been kind of
Speaker 4: pushed out of circulation coming back.
Speaker 7: Yeah, all of the above.
Speaker 5: I think in Gaines County in particular, we don't have
Speaker 5: a good understanding of where we are in the epidemic,
Speaker 5: like how many vulnerable individuals in that community are still remaining,
Speaker 5: so we don't know how long that initial epicenter outbreaks
Speaker 5: going to last. We're also seeing, you know, as measles
Speaker 5: gets into a community, it is so infectious that it
Speaker 5: is going to find all of those little pockets of
Speaker 5: people that are unvaccinated. And that's what we're seeing here
Speaker 5: in Lubbott County is you know, measles taking hold and
Speaker 5: fine little pockets, and public health trying to go put
Speaker 5: out you know, little fires, trying to make sure that
Speaker 5: we've figured out who's been exposed and who's at risk.
Speaker 4: You described, you know, how this is an incredibly infectious
Speaker 4: disease and it is you know, finding all the pockets
Speaker 4: of people that are vulnerable or not vaccinated. And so
Speaker 4: I'm wondering if you can, you know, if there are
Speaker 4: any examples or specifics that you could share about how
Speaker 4: the outbreak is impacting communities or particular communities. Has it
Speaker 4: resulted in disruptions in school for children, Has it, you know,
Speaker 4: caused any other sort of notable breakdowns or sort of
Speaker 4: pauses in day to day regular activity in Lubbic.
Speaker 5: You know, those breakdowns have been more minor that a child,
Speaker 5: say that's unvaccinated's been exposed, and that's requiring that child
Speaker 5: to sit out from school. So there is that, you know,
Speaker 5: element that they're missing those important, you know, days of education.
Speaker 5: Our bigger impacts here have been around daycares. We had
Speaker 5: a large outbreak or large in the sense that we've
Speaker 5: had now eight children or eight individuals associated with one
Speaker 5: daycare all test positive with measles. So that's meant that
Speaker 5: you know, children have had to be sent home from daycare,
Speaker 5: which then impacts parents' ability to work and also impacts
Speaker 5: you know, you know, daycare along with you know, the
Speaker 5: number of students there children having to go home that
Speaker 5: have been exposed working a lot to get additional doses
Speaker 5: of vaccine into a daycare. So it both impacts the
Speaker 5: public health system, our healthcare system, because kids need health,
Speaker 5: but then it also impacts parents because if your child's
Speaker 5: not in daycare, a parent can't go to work. Those
Speaker 5: have been the bigger disruptions and then disruptions in our
Speaker 5: healthcare system that we're now having to do a lot
Speaker 5: of screen Like you call to make an appointment for
Speaker 5: the doctor, and it's kind of like COVID, have you
Speaker 5: been exposed to measles? Are you vaccinated? They're asking all
Speaker 5: those screening questions before people enter our healthcare facilities.
Speaker 4: In terms of sort of interactions with the state and
Speaker 4: their response to this, can you tell me a little
Speaker 4: bit more about how the State of Texas has responded
Speaker 4: and partnered with local.
Speaker 5: Authorities, so we have a good working relationship with the
Speaker 5: State of Texas. Texas has to do everything differently, so
Speaker 5: we kind of have this decentralized system where the state
Speaker 5: and locals both kind of have their own authority, very
Speaker 5: independent at the county level, but the state is offered
Speaker 5: support to us. They've helped me bring in temp nurses
Speaker 5: to be able to assist with vaccine clinics. They're paying
Speaker 5: for some additional staff answer phones, so we're getting that
Speaker 5: kind of support. And then I meet with the state
Speaker 5: regularly about what's going on in Lubbock, how Lubbock fits
Speaker 5: in the context of the rest of this outbreak, and
Speaker 5: you know, how we're going to work together to move forward.
Speaker 5: We always thought of measles as an airplane ride away,
Speaker 5: so we would see, you know, somebody travel to a
Speaker 5: foreign country, come back to the United States and maybe
Speaker 5: pass measles. To a couple of people in their household.
Speaker 5: This outbreak is not that we're seeing transmission within a community,
Speaker 5: and it's making measles more of a car ride away.
Speaker 5: And that's concerning because we have individuals that are susceptible
Speaker 5: to measles, either through too young to be vaccinated, not vaccinated,
Speaker 5: or some other immune compromised state. So just concerning that
Speaker 5: we're going to see more outbreaks spreading out into the
Speaker 5: United States, especially as we're moving into spring and summer,
Speaker 5: where people are traveling and driving through communities that we
Speaker 5: could just see kind of explode everywhere, which is my
Speaker 5: biggest fear.
Speaker 7: Yeah. Absolutely.
Speaker 4: I mean, given that vaccinations and to some degree public
Speaker 4: health in general has kind of become a politicized issue,
Speaker 4: I can only imagine that it can make it quite
Speaker 4: difficult for you to convey these messages to people and
Speaker 4: for them to understand them.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and I'm talking. I mean I've talked to many
Speaker 5: health department directors across the country, and you know, one
Speaker 5: of the values of local public health is that you know,
Speaker 5: all of us local health department directors and those staff
Speaker 5: were coming from these individuals, communities, and our goals to
Speaker 5: keep our community safe, and it really doesn't matter what's
Speaker 5: happening at the federal level. It's about your community, your connections,
Speaker 5: watching out for this diseases and then convincing your community
Speaker 5: to do the right thing. And luckily we have you know,
Speaker 5: twenty five hundred health departments across the US, and that
Speaker 5: is their goals, and hopefully people will continue to trust
Speaker 5: their local directors.
Speaker 4: That is a great point, and I'm wondering if is
Speaker 4: there anything else that you can speak to on how
Speaker 4: the distrust that is there can potentially be bridged, or
Speaker 4: you know, specific things that y'all have done to try
Speaker 4: to sort of rebuild that trust or establish that trust.
Speaker 5: I mean with us locally, it's making sure that we're
Speaker 5: talking to our local news and our local reporters and
Speaker 5: answering the phone call when a concerned parent calls, and
Speaker 5: going through the information we know, and utilizing our local
Speaker 5: physicians to tell them the story. Because I think if
Speaker 5: you can still see it at the local level, you know,
Speaker 5: people can really understand that this is a risk and
Speaker 5: really make that right choice to get the vaccine or
Speaker 5: if they've been exposed, to stay home.
Speaker 3: We'll hear more from Catherine in just a moment.
Speaker 4: But first, as we are obligated to do, here's some ads.
Speaker 4: So I do understand there's quite a bit of skepticism
Speaker 4: towards vaccination, and that's certainly going to be a subject
Speaker 4: that we're exploring in this podcast. And at least by
Speaker 4: the numbers, it shows that in places like West Texas
Speaker 4: and particularly more rural areas, even more than a place
Speaker 4: like Lubbock, that there's pretty low vaccination rates. Several counties
Speaker 4: are below the I guess what was it ninety five
Speaker 4: percent threshold that really helps bring diesls out of circulation.
Speaker 4: And so, you know, I'm kind of curious. You've been
Speaker 4: there for over a decade, do you have a sense
Speaker 4: sort of what the key drivers of vaccine hesitancy are
Speaker 4: and why so many West Texans choose not to get
Speaker 4: their children vaccinated. You already mentioned, you know, the fact
Speaker 4: that it hasn't been seen for so long, so sort
Speaker 4: of out of sight, out of mind, be But are
Speaker 4: there are there other drivers that come to mind for you?
Speaker 8: Yeah?
Speaker 5: I mean I don't think. You know, West Texas is
Speaker 5: unique from many other communities in the United States. You know,
Speaker 5: people are very much influenced by social media and some
Speaker 5: of our media outlets, and there's a lot of you know,
Speaker 5: scare tactics or misinformation around vaccines and you know, anything
Speaker 5: from autism that's been debunked so many times about vaccines
Speaker 5: causing autism, other misinformation about what's in vaccines and the
Speaker 5: risks of vaccines. I mean, every medical intervention, every medication
Speaker 5: has some type you know of risk. But vaccines have
Speaker 5: been long studied, and especially when you're looking at the
Speaker 5: MMR vaccine, we've been using this for fifty years and
Speaker 5: that's why we don't have measles cases or hadn't had
Speaker 5: measles cases. But people have really bought into a lot
Speaker 5: of that information out there, and it's really hard to
Speaker 5: combat that. I've gone and read the stories and I
Speaker 5: can see how people feel miss and pick up on this,
Speaker 5: but I just don't know from public health standpoint how
Speaker 5: we combat it right.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 4: It's a very difficult problem, the challenge that has a
Speaker 4: long history and has a lot of different factors.
Speaker 5: And things are so complex. A it's not a one
Speaker 5: for one, it's just it's been a challenge. But I
Speaker 5: think out here I always felt like we hadn't been
Speaker 5: impacted as much from some of these anti vaccine movements.
Speaker 5: I think post COVID people you know, have a mistrust
Speaker 5: in government or wanting to listen to mandates or recommendations
Speaker 5: or whatever we call them. We're just seeing that more
Speaker 5: and more, and that hesitancy, you know, to come through
Speaker 5: and trust both government, trust the medical system, or all concerns,
Speaker 5: and that all contributes to these lower vaccination rates.
Speaker 4: In a media environment rife with misinformation about vaccines and
Speaker 4: public health, Catherine's perspective is refreshing and a bit heartening.
Speaker 4: Local public health officials like her have done great work
Speaker 4: to raise the alarm around viral outbreaks, but they're up
Speaker 4: against a problem that is much bigger than what they
Speaker 4: can address on their own, and that's the widespread belief
Speaker 4: in bogus theories, be they scientific or religious, that undercut
Speaker 4: the proven science around vaccines. Much of this misinformation comes
Speaker 4: from places far from West Texas, like the anti vaccination
Speaker 4: group Children's Health Defense, which RFK Junior previously led. It
Speaker 4: is widely recognized as a major source of online vaccine misinformation,
Speaker 4: including the debunked allegation that vaccines cause autism. After the
Speaker 4: death of a six year old child of measles. In March,
Speaker 4: Children's Health Defense released a video interview with the parents
Speaker 4: who said they still would not take the vaccine and
Speaker 4: wouldn't recommend it.
Speaker 3: To other parents.
Speaker 4: Here's a clip from that interview in which the Mennonite
Speaker 4: parents speak in their Lowland German dialect.
Speaker 9: So, when you see the fairmoon ring in the crest,
Speaker 9: which is what we once stops. We want to get
Speaker 9: the truth out. What do you say to the parents
Speaker 9: that are rushing out panicking to get that and my
Speaker 9: mouth had a six months daily because they think that
Speaker 9: that child is going to die of measles.
Speaker 4: Apartment to your daughter, and.
Speaker 10: A good sign is only would be so trust me,
Speaker 10: so bad like theresign doctors with the whole town, she says,
Speaker 10: they would still say don't do the shots. There's doctors
Speaker 10: that can help with measles. They're not as bad as
Speaker 10: they're making it out to be.
Speaker 11: And also the measles are good for the body for
Speaker 11: the people because the measles are then given the what
Speaker 11: is it what can yea.
Speaker 7: And cinema conduction?
Speaker 9: But infection?
Speaker 7: Yeah, did you get infection out?
Speaker 10: And he's would immune system.
Speaker 7: Yes.
Speaker 10: They're trying to say that the measles actually helped build
Speaker 10: the immune system in the long run. If they get
Speaker 10: the measles, now.
Speaker 12: No.
Speaker 10: Chief in the long run, In the long run, the
Speaker 10: clinic sal like okay, So in the long run, he said,
Speaker 10: they wouldn't get cancer as easily and like it fights
Speaker 10: off a lot of a lot of stuff, the immunity
Speaker 10: that they get from the back from the measles.
Speaker 4: But some of what public officials like Catherine have been
Speaker 4: trying to combat is coming from other medical professionals much
Speaker 4: closer to home, such as doctor Ben Edwards, who appeared
Speaker 4: in the Children's Health Defense video and has promoted anti
Speaker 4: vaccination misinformation on his own podcast, including the recommendation to
Speaker 4: take vitamin A to treat measles, an approach that has
Speaker 4: resulted in several cases of vitamin A toxicity among children
Speaker 4: diagnosed with measles in West Texas. During their interview with
Speaker 4: Children's Health Defense, the Mennonite parents of the first child
Speaker 4: to die of measles actually said they were working with
Speaker 4: doctor Ben Edwards for their treatment. One video that went
Speaker 4: viral online showed Edwards visibly infected with measles at the time,
Speaker 4: treating patients with measles and inhabiting spaces where individuals who
Speaker 4: were not infected with measles were present, and this elicited
Speaker 4: widespread condemnation from the medical community, quite unsurprisingly. Nevertheless, it
Speaker 4: demonstrates the sort of attitude of certain medical professionals in
Speaker 4: the area who have used their platforms and their credentials
Speaker 4: to sow doubt about the importance of the vaccine, making
Speaker 4: matters worse. RFKA Junior praised doctor Edwards as a quote
Speaker 4: extra extraordinary healer just one week after Edwards was seen
Speaker 4: in that video treating patients while himself infected with measles.
Speaker 4: While anti vaccination beliefs have certainly gone viral in the
Speaker 4: aftermath of the COVID pandemic, they are by no means
Speaker 4: new Practitioners like Edwards and advocacy groups like Children's Health
Speaker 4: Defense have been peddling their snake oil for decades. But
Speaker 4: the roots of anti vaccination belief around even deeper than that.
Speaker 4: In the next episode of Anti vaxx America, I'll do
Speaker 4: a deep dive into the history of anti vaccination beliefs
Speaker 4: to understand the origins of them, how they've changed over time,
Speaker 4: and why they've become embraced in mainstream right wing politics,
Speaker 4: which is a change from the sort of bipartisan and
Speaker 4: even sometimes progressive nature of some anti vaccination skepticism. But
Speaker 4: until then, thanks for listening. I'm Stephen Monchelli for Cool
Speaker 4: Zone Media and this is Anti vax America. Welcome back
Speaker 4: to it could happen here and to episode two of
Speaker 4: Anti vax America. I'm Stephen mon and Shelley. Last episode
Speaker 4: I explored the ongoing measles outbreak that started in West
Speaker 4: Texas and has since spread to several states across the nation.
Speaker 4: A big part of that story is the underlying anti
Speaker 4: vax beliefs that are fueling a decline in vaccination rates
Speaker 4: across the country, and how the leader of our federal
Speaker 4: health bureaucracy, a arth K Junior, has helped seed, spread
Speaker 4: and embed those beliefs into policy. But behind all that
Speaker 4: is a deeper history of anti vaccination beliefs in America.
Speaker 4: And while it is undoubtedly the case that the COVID
Speaker 4: nineteen pandemic brought anti vaccination beliefs to the forefront of
Speaker 4: American politics, opposition to vaccines is not new. It's about
Speaker 4: as old as the technology itself.
Speaker 13: It actually goes back to the founding colonies and even
Speaker 13: the early eighteen hundreds when you had people kind of
Speaker 13: peddling various what they called botanicals as substitutes for mainstream medicine.
Speaker 4: That's doctor Peter Hotez. He's a doctor in Houston with
Speaker 4: a long and impressive list of credentials.
Speaker 13: I'm a pediatrician scientist. I have an MD and PhD,
Speaker 13: and I'm a professor of pediatrics and molecular Virology at
Speaker 13: Baylor College of Medicine, where I'm also co director of
Speaker 13: the Texas Children's Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, and also
Speaker 13: dean of our National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor
Speaker 13: College and Medicine. And my interest is a lifelong interest
Speaker 13: in developing new vaccines, particularly vaccines that the big pharma
Speaker 13: companies have no interest in making because they're vaccines for
Speaker 13: diseases of poverty. We've made a low cost COVID vaccine
Speaker 13: that reached technology, reached one hundred million people in India and
Speaker 13: Indonesia during the pandemic, and now vaccines for parasitic diseases
Speaker 13: that occur only among the world's poor. And that's a
Speaker 13: lifelong passion of mine.
Speaker 4: The first vaccination was created in seventeen ninety six by
Speaker 4: Edward Jenner, who was able to build on prior methods
Speaker 4: of inoculation, and he was able to create a vaccine
Speaker 4: for smallpox, one of the deadliest viruses.
Speaker 3: In human history.
Speaker 4: Within a matter of decades, vaccination had become widespread in
Speaker 4: the Western world. The United Kingdom passed the Vaccination Act
Speaker 4: of eighteen forty to provide free vaccinations to the poor,
Speaker 4: and then passed another act in eighteen fifty three that
Speaker 4: made it compulsory for infants, and another in eighteen sixty
Speaker 4: seven that extended the compulsory vaccination requirement to fourteen and
Speaker 4: added penalties for non compliance that could be cumulative over time.
Speaker 4: Resistance to these laws began in eighteen fifty three with
Speaker 4: a few riots in towns across England, and this eventually
Speaker 4: formalized into the Anti Compulsory Vaccination League, which distributed literature
Speaker 4: likening vaccination to a monster and lobbied the British government
Speaker 4: to change the laws. Their efforts actually proved successful, and
Speaker 4: a new law was passed in eighteen ninety eight to
Speaker 4: remove cumulative penalties and create an exemption for what they
Speaker 4: termed conscientious objectors, which is the first time that term
Speaker 4: had ever been used in British law. Parallel anti vaccination
Speaker 4: movement made similar strides in the United States, and one
Speaker 4: of the leaders of the British anti vaccination movement even
Speaker 4: came to the United States to help co found one
Speaker 4: of the anti vaccination leagues in America. Several states also
Speaker 4: passed compulsory vaccination laws in the United States, spurring the
Speaker 4: American anti vaccination leagues to fight in the legal courts,
Speaker 4: in the court of public opinion, and the legislatures across
Speaker 4: the country, and they successfully repealed compulsory vaccination laws in California, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Utah,
Speaker 4: West Virginia, and Wisconsin. But opposing compulsory vaccinations was only
Speaker 4: one part of the strategy of these early anti vaccine organizations.
Speaker 4: Another key plank, which may sound familiar to those of
Speaker 4: you who follow the news, was the promotion of alternative
Speaker 4: remedies such as homeopathy, which were quite popular at the
Speaker 4: time among certain sects of medicine. Now, these movements didn't
Speaker 4: neatly fall across political lines in.
Speaker 3: The way that they largely do today.
Speaker 4: Progressive and conservative anti vaccination activists were tied together by
Speaker 4: strongly held beliefs in things like quote unquote medical freedom,
Speaker 4: sometimes philosophical beliefs around freedom, their spiritual faiths, or in
Speaker 4: some instances, even anti Semitic conspiracy theories. Consider Eugene carl During,
Speaker 4: a philosopher and aomus, considered one of the founding fathers
Speaker 4: of German anti Semitism, who argued that Jewish doctors were
Speaker 4: behind a conspiracy to drum up business for themselves by
Speaker 4: promoting vaccination to healthy people. These are all tropes that
Speaker 4: live on to this day and that someone like doctor
Speaker 4: Hotez knows.
Speaker 3: All too well, and.
Speaker 4: Because of his advocacy of vaccines, he's often been a
Speaker 4: target of it.
Speaker 13: I'm a scientist, the vaccine scientists, the Jewish vaccine scientists.
Speaker 13: So they've got me doing this in secret with George
Speaker 13: Soros or one of the rothschilds that I'm doing it
Speaker 13: at the World Economic Forum in Davos. I haven't even
Speaker 13: invited the Davos.
Speaker 4: While some of the progressive strain of the historic anti
Speaker 4: vaccination movement has lived on in the stereotypical hippie naturalist
Speaker 4: lifestyle culture that is popular in parts of the Northwest,
Speaker 4: that strain is long in fringe and is kind of
Speaker 4: extinct at this point. It had its heyday after the
Speaker 4: sixties and seventies, when a lot of alternative therapies and
Speaker 4: medicines were being promoted and embraced in the West. Most
Speaker 4: of the anti vaxxors of that variety today have largely
Speaker 4: been drawn towards more right winging values and have been
Speaker 4: subsumed by the sort of politics that defines the larger
Speaker 4: Make America Healthy Again agenda. The way doctor Hotess sees it,
Speaker 4: there's a direct line between these old anti vaccine movements
Speaker 4: and the modern day Maha movement, which combines anti vaccine
Speaker 4: beliefs with alternative medicine and libertarian mindsets around health freedom
Speaker 4: into a sort of single bundle of sticks.
Speaker 13: There's an older thread that goes back to colonial times,
Speaker 13: and it has to do with libertarian concepts of what's
Speaker 13: sometimes called health freedom medical freedom. Hey, you can't tell
Speaker 13: us what to do about our kids, and now we
Speaker 13: see that today, right, you know, And this is coming
Speaker 13: partly out of the health and wellness and influencer industry,
Speaker 13: and that's why you get you know, ivermectin, which does
Speaker 13: absolutely nothing for covid or hydroxychloroquin nothing for covid or
Speaker 13: when you heard mister Kennedy talk about vitamin A or
Speaker 13: as a preventative, or budesini as steroid which does nothing,
Speaker 13: or clarithromycin and antibiotic does nothing.
Speaker 3: Whatever.
Speaker 13: You know, they can buy in bulk and then sell
Speaker 13: at a profit. That's you know, that's that's a lot
Speaker 13: of the wellness and influencer industry. And so what you
Speaker 13: have now is that converging thread around that and libertarian politics.
Speaker 13: And that's what you saw. I think, after you know,
Speaker 13: we were started to debunk the false links between vaccines
Speaker 13: and autism, they needed a new thing. And and this
Speaker 13: is when you saw here in Texas, this rise in
Speaker 13: parents requesting vaccine exemptions around the banner of health freedom,
Speaker 13: medical freedom. And here's where it became really tough to
Speaker 13: talk about because it got adopted by the Republican Tea
Speaker 13: Party in Texas. And so anti vaccine groups started getting
Speaker 13: pack money, political action committee money to lobby the or
Speaker 13: educate the state legislature about health freedom, medical freedom, and
Speaker 13: even provide money for candidates to run on anti vaccine platforms.
Speaker 4: But before we explore the contemporary anti vaccination movement further,
Speaker 4: we have to return to history, and before we do that,
Speaker 4: we're obligated to take a quick ad break. Anti vaccine
Speaker 4: movements appeared to be gaining steam in the late eighteen
Speaker 4: hundreds and early nineteen hundreds, but their progress largely halted
Speaker 4: when a nineteen oh five US Supreme Court ruling upheld
Speaker 4: the authority of states to pass and enforce compulsory vaccination laws.
Speaker 14: They continued.
Speaker 4: Spread of viruses like smallpox, the deadly Spanish flu pandemic,
Speaker 4: and the outbreak of World War II all spurred advancements
Speaker 4: in vaccination research and programs to ensure widespread vaccination, and
Speaker 4: as this science continued to advance, more and more states
Speaker 4: began to mandate vaccines for public school attendance, as did
Speaker 4: employers for their workers. By nineteen sixty three, twenty states
Speaker 4: require children to be vaccinated before going to school, and
Speaker 4: by nineteen eighty, every state in the nation had a
Speaker 4: similar law on the books, And as the decades went on,
Speaker 4: the incident's rates of several diseases dramatically plummeted. By nineteen eighty,
Speaker 4: smallpox had been eradicated, but along the way there were
Speaker 4: things done in the name of medical science that would
Speaker 4: undercut the great strides made during that period of time,
Speaker 4: things that ultimately showed the seeds for some of today's
Speaker 4: vaccination skepticism.
Speaker 15: I think it's important to understand that not all suspicion
Speaker 15: regarding medicine and doctors research, that not all of this
Speaker 15: resistance is totally irrational.
Speaker 14: It's based on experience.
Speaker 4: That's doctor Michael Phillips, who you may recognize from prior
Speaker 4: episodes if it could happen here. He's a historian of race, eugenics,
Speaker 4: and right wing politics in Texas.
Speaker 15: Going back to the time of slavery, enslaved men and
Speaker 15: women were often the unwilling, involuntary subjects of medical experiments.
Speaker 15: We have, for instance, a a man named Marion Simms,
Speaker 15: and they actually put a statue up of him in
Speaker 15: Central Park in New York that's been taken down since.
Speaker 15: Who was credited as the father of gynecology.
Speaker 14: There was a.
Speaker 15: Problem in that era before the discovery of germ theory,
Speaker 15: where whenever women would give birth and there would be
Speaker 15: vaginal tears, doctors would often sew up the wounds and
Speaker 15: then there'd be an infection and the woman would die
Speaker 15: or get seriously ill or infertile, and the infertility and
Speaker 15: death of slaves meant a loss of property. So enslavers
Speaker 15: we're very concerned about this issue. Marion Simms at some
Speaker 15: point discovers that if you use silver thread, silver sutures
Speaker 15: when you operate on women who have had these vaginal terrors,
Speaker 15: that the infection doesn't happen. Now, he wanted to prove this,
Speaker 15: He wanted to perfect his technique, so he did it
Speaker 15: on enslaved women.
Speaker 4: During the COVID nineteen pandemic, Black Americans lagged behind whites
Speaker 4: in terms of vaccination rates. According to a systemic literature
Speaker 4: review on the determinants of vaccine hesitancy among Black Americans,
Speaker 4: vaccine hasnency in Black communities is rooted in a troubling
Speaker 4: history of unethical medical experiments, and it persists to this
Speaker 4: day due to how this group of the population still
Speaker 4: experiences discrimination, racism, mistreatment, and overall health iniquity.
Speaker 15: The most famous case of the medical abuse of marginalized people,
Speaker 15: and it's really entered the folk culture to the point
Speaker 15: that when I was teaching American history classes at a
Speaker 15: community college, all the students had heard about this particular
Speaker 15: atrocity and it was called the Tuskegee experiment. What actually
Speaker 15: happened is that African American men who got sexually transmitted
Speaker 15: diseases would go to this medical clinic that had been established,
Speaker 15: and the doctors with this grant wanted to see what
Speaker 15: the trajectory of syphilis would be if it was untreated.
Speaker 15: So these were people who already had STDs and they
Speaker 15: were given a placebo. They were given basically a sugar
Speaker 15: pill rather than penicillin or any other ameliative care. And
Speaker 15: the doctor's mission in their minds was that's find out
Speaker 15: if syphilis progresses in the same way with African American
Speaker 15: men as it does with white men. And so they
Speaker 15: wanted to see because they knew that syphilis will untreated
Speaker 15: eventually attack the central nervous systimuli, seizures, blindness, any number
Speaker 15: of terrible side effects. So they would go to the doctor,
Speaker 15: they would get the placebo, and syphilis will go into remission,
Speaker 15: and so the patient wouldn't have the benefit of medical
Speaker 15: knowledge about how syphilis progresses, would think the pill made
Speaker 15: it better, and then they would ask them to return
Speaker 15: and the doctor would come and then he'd record the
Speaker 15: damage that was happening to the patient's body as the
Speaker 15: disease progressed. And this went on until the nineteen sixties,
Speaker 15: and they published results with no professional repercussions.
Speaker 9: You know.
Speaker 15: And one thing they proved is that syphilis attacks black
Speaker 15: people the same way it does white people. If you
Speaker 15: leave it untreated, the same symptoms developed. The nervous systems
Speaker 15: of black and white people are the same. But they
Speaker 15: publish these results in ACCLAIM Medical Journal, and the backlash
Speaker 15: was not immediate.
Speaker 14: Eventually, you know, it became a scandal.
Speaker 15: So that really did strike a chord in the Black
Speaker 15: community that I think to this day we've seen skepticism
Speaker 15: about white medicine. And again there's valid historical reasons.
Speaker 4: RFK Junior and the anti vaccination movement have seized on
Speaker 4: this particular historical atrocity, so doubt about vaccines among Black Americans.
Speaker 4: More generally, Children's Health Defense, the anti VAXX group previously
Speaker 4: led by RFK Junior, invoked the Tuskegee Syphilist study in
Speaker 4: an anti vaccine film called medical Racism the New Apartheid.
Speaker 4: But before we talk a bit more about Children's Health
Speaker 4: Defense and the more recent history of the anti vaccination movement,
Speaker 4: we've got it to another ad break. Black Americans aren't
Speaker 4: the only population group that organizations like Children's Health Defense
Speaker 4: have targeted in recent years. For decades, the anti vax
Speaker 4: movement has sought to recruit the parents of autistic children
Speaker 4: to their cause by way of the argument that vaccines
Speaker 4: directly cause autism. Incidentally, one such parent of an autistic
Speaker 4: child is doctor Hotes, whose twenty thirteen book Vaccines did
Speaker 4: Not Cause Rachel's Autism directly targets RFK Junior's long held
Speaker 4: belief about the link between autism and vaccines.
Speaker 13: It actually came about after a year of discussions with
Speaker 13: Robert F. Kennedy Junior explaining tim the evidence showing vaccines
Speaker 13: don't cause autism and finally decide to write it all
Speaker 13: up in a book. And it's about my daughter. So
Speaker 13: you know, I wear two hats as a vaccine scientist,
Speaker 13: but also wound up going up against anti vaccine groups
Speaker 13: because I do have a daughter with autism and intellectual
Speaker 13: disabilities and now she's an adult. And essentially there's two
Speaker 13: major threads in the book other than telling the story
Speaker 13: about Rachel and our family, and one is the overwhelming
Speaker 13: evidence showing there's no link between vaccines and autism, and
Speaker 13: even within that, there's a lot of subcategories because what
Speaker 13: happens is anti vaccine groups keeps switching up the concern
Speaker 13: about a specific vaccine, and when it gets debunked and
Speaker 13: they just switch it up to something else. I call
Speaker 13: it biomedical whack a mole or moving the goalposts of
Speaker 13: The original assertion came out of the late nineteen nineties
Speaker 13: of the false claims that it was the MMR vaccine
Speaker 13: the measles, mumps rubella vaccine, and that was actually published
Speaker 13: in a biomedical journal called The Lancet in the UK.
Speaker 13: The paper was retracted eventually because it was known to
Speaker 13: be false, and also the scientific community responded with large
Speaker 13: epidemiologic studies showing that kids who got the MMR vaccine
Speaker 13: were no more likely to acquire autism than kids who didn't,
Speaker 13: and similarly, kids on the autism spectrum were no more
Speaker 13: likely to have gotten MMR the kids not on the
Speaker 13: autism spectrum. That should have been the end of it,
Speaker 13: but then our friend Robert F. Kennedy Junior came on
Speaker 13: the scene in two thousand and five and wrote an
Speaker 13: article in Rolling Stone magazine claiming, okay, if it's not MMR,
Speaker 13: it must be the thimerosol preservative that's in vaccine, and
Speaker 13: that was also retracted and thoroughly debunked through large epidemiologic studies,
Speaker 13: even nonhuman primate studies. And it switched up again to
Speaker 13: spacing vaccines too close together. We have to green our
Speaker 13: vaccine ecosystem. And you saw celebrities like Jenny McCarthy, your husband,
Speaker 13: Jim Carrey walking around in green T shirts. It was
Speaker 13: all phony boloni and that was debunked, and then it
Speaker 13: was alum in vaccine. So it became this kind of
Speaker 13: exhaust exercise and each time we were able to successfully
Speaker 13: refute it.
Speaker 4: Founded in two thousand and seven, Children's Health Defense represented
Speaker 4: a formalization of late twentieth century anti vaccination resistance. Not
Speaker 4: unlike the anti vaccination leagues of the late nineteenth and
Speaker 4: early twentieth century, Children's Health Defense pedals dubious cures like
Speaker 4: homeopathy and promotes conspiratorial narratives like the Great Reset, which
Speaker 4: claims that billionaire Bill Gates and others have used the
Speaker 4: COVID nineteen pandemic as part of a plan to make
Speaker 4: America a Marxist. The idea that vaccines cause autism is
Speaker 4: a part of a larger claim that vaccines can cause
Speaker 4: injuries among those who receive them, and that our understanding
Speaker 4: of these injuries is far less than what the science shows.
Speaker 4: This notion gained traction in the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties,
Speaker 4: when controversy erupted regarding the DPT vaccine for diphtheria, pertussis,
Speaker 4: and tetanus. A sensational film called DPT Vaccine Roulette drew
Speaker 4: an erroneous link between the vaccine and illnesses of some
Speaker 4: children who received it. Two parents of children who received
Speaker 4: the vaccine formed the National Vaccine Information Center, which exists
Speaker 4: to this day and was a major source of COVID
Speaker 4: nineteen misinformation. The controversy around the DPT vaccine led to
Speaker 4: lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers, leading many of those manufacturers to
Speaker 4: stop producing the vaccine by the end of nineteen eighty five.
Speaker 4: Because of this, Congress passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury
Speaker 4: Act in nineteen eighty six, establishing a no fault system
Speaker 4: to alleviate pressure on vaccine manufacturers and provide an avenue
Speaker 4: for victims of a vaccine injury to be compensated. As
Speaker 4: doctor Hotez describes it, a lot of this is overblown. Yes,
Speaker 4: there are individuals who can have reactions two vaccines that
Speaker 4: can cause issues, but the studies around DPT and the
Speaker 4: notions that it caused these illnesses that these parents were
Speaker 4: concerned about, it actually showed that there was no connection. Nevertheless,
Speaker 4: it is a reality that some people may face some
Speaker 4: sort of complications, and we can't dismiss that. But when
Speaker 4: we stack it up against the side effects of disease
Speaker 4: and one of those being death, well it's a pretty
Speaker 4: easy comparison to make.
Speaker 13: Yeah, it's going to be so important to keep up,
Speaker 13: you know, the education about vaccines. And one of the
Speaker 13: things that I've done has been preparing these infographics, which
Speaker 13: I initially did with a guy named Bill Marsh at
Speaker 13: the New York Times. Is this brilliant guy who does
Speaker 13: all these cool graphics for the New York Times, and
Speaker 13: he had this really interesting idea that we published in
Speaker 13: The New York Times in twenty twenty where you create
Speaker 13: a box representing ten thousand kids and two boxes aligned
Speaker 13: side to side. One box is what happens if ten
Speaker 13: thousand kids get save, for instance, the MMR vaccine versus
Speaker 13: is the other box. Ten thousand kids getting measles and
Speaker 13: you know, the ones getting the MMR vaccine. You see
Speaker 13: these tiny little pin pricks of very rare side effects
Speaker 13: like allergic reaction or febril seizures, one in three thousand,
Speaker 13: that sort of thing. So maybe there's a tiny little
Speaker 13: pin prick representing you know, three year thirty kids as
Speaker 13: opposed to measles, which you know twenty percent of kids
Speaker 13: hospitalized and measles deaths, and these are large red and
Speaker 13: black boxes. I think those kinds of things are helpful
Speaker 13: because I think one of the problems is the anti
Speaker 13: vaccine guys. What they'll do is they will exaggerate the
Speaker 13: frequency of rare, rare side effects and in simultaneously downplay
Speaker 13: the severity of the illness. And we even heard that
Speaker 13: before the two deaths. You know, you heard all this
Speaker 13: rhetorical measles is just like a benign illness. And now
Speaker 13: we've got two deaths right here in Texas of nice
Speaker 13: school age kids that never had to lose their lives
Speaker 13: because the parents were taken in by the disinformation machine.
Speaker 4: The contemporary rise of anti vaccine rhetoric in the US
Speaker 4: can also be tied to the political climate of the
Speaker 4: early twenty first century. Figures like Congressman Ron Paul, for example,
Speaker 4: have capitalized on the growing sentiment that government should not
Speaker 4: interfere with individual medical decisions. With increasing distrust in government,
Speaker 4: particularly during the Bush administration, vaccine hesitancy began to align
Speaker 4: with broader libertarian and some conservative ideologies. The idea that
Speaker 4: the government should not mandate personal medical choices further gain
Speaker 4: traction with the election of President Barack Obama in two
Speaker 4: thousand and eight, adding fuel to the anti vaccination fire,
Speaker 4: and the anti vact movement began to dovetail with the
Speaker 4: booming alternative health and wellness industry that excused Western medicine
Speaker 4: in favor of natural medicines and holistic approaches, and often
Speaker 4: this includes some sort of spiritual element. This convergence is
Speaker 4: crystallized in modern figures like Vo Hare, also known as
Speaker 4: the food Babe, who is a conservative wellness influencer. She's
Speaker 4: aligned herself with RFK Junior's Maha agenda and promotes the
Speaker 4: standard goop like fair but with a right wing edge.
Speaker 4: The American food industry, for example, or Big Pharma for example,
Speaker 4: are poisoning us, but also you shouldn't get the flu vaccine.
Speaker 4: Despite the best efforts of scientists like doctor Hotes to
Speaker 4: debunk he claims that motivate the modern anti vaccination movement,
Speaker 4: it has only gathered steam in the last few decades.
Speaker 4: In recent years, a number of states have passed new
Speaker 4: laws allowing for personal exemptions from vaccines, and because of
Speaker 4: doctor Hotes's public involvement, he's had a front row seat
Speaker 4: as anti vaccination beliefs have become part and parcel of
Speaker 4: Republican politics.
Speaker 13: And it was a physician scientist. The last thing I
Speaker 13: want to talk about is politics, right. I mean, I
Speaker 13: feel that every American is a right to their political views.
Speaker 13: That's embedded in our history and our constitution. But how
Speaker 13: do you say, don't adopt this stuff because it's going
Speaker 13: to be so detrimental. But that's what happened with the
Speaker 13: formation of anti vaccine groups in the twenty tens. In Texas.
Speaker 13: You started to get these steep rise in parents requesting
Speaker 13: non medical exemptions that their kids could get out of
Speaker 13: being vaccinated for school. And it was particularly strong in
Speaker 13: the same places where people were refusing COVID vaccine years later,
Speaker 13: especially in conservative rural areas. Of West Texas, East Texas.
Speaker 13: The vaccination rates continue to be strong in our cities
Speaker 13: of the Texas Triangle, Dallas, where you are, in Houston
Speaker 13: where I am, and San Antonio and Austin. But you know,
Speaker 13: in the more conservative rural areas of West Texas East Texas,
Speaker 13: that's where you saw big declines in kids getting vaccines.
Speaker 13: And once you go below a certain threshold, roughly below
Speaker 13: ninety percent, and bam that you start to see break
Speaker 13: through childhood infections. And usually the first one you see
Speaker 13: is measles. You can ultimately get all of them, but
Speaker 13: measles is the first one you see because it's so
Speaker 13: highly transmissible.
Speaker 3: But Texas is not alone.
Speaker 4: Well, Immunization rates certainly have limited in Republican states faster
Speaker 4: than they have in Democratic states. Immunization rates have fallen
Speaker 4: in most states since the pandemic. But there was another
Speaker 4: event over half a decade before social distancing and vaccination
Speaker 4: cards became household concepts that also informed the Republican Party's
Speaker 4: embrace of anti vaccine politics. This was a particular viral
Speaker 4: outbreak of measles in California, one that ultimately spurred policy
Speaker 4: changes that reverberated across the country.
Speaker 13: It started happening in the twenty tens and really ramped
Speaker 13: up after there was a large measles epidemic in California
Speaker 13: of all places, on twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen, and the
Speaker 13: California legislatures shut down vaccine exemptions. They said, Okay, from
Speaker 13: now on, you want to send you kids to school,
Speaker 13: the kids have to be vaccinated. And I supported that.
Speaker 13: That solved the measles problem, but then it produced this
Speaker 13: health freedom backlash in states like Texas, also Oklahoma, and
Speaker 13: very much a red state phenomenon read being Republican, blue
Speaker 13: being a Democrat, and that's where you saw these this
Speaker 13: Rizon vaccine exemptions. You started getting anti vaccine groups forming.
Speaker 13: They were getting pack money, political Action committee money, and
Speaker 13: I saw that as really dangerous because now rather than
Speaker 13: being sort of small, underfunded groups, they now had the
Speaker 13: backing of a major political party and everything that goes
Speaker 13: along with it in terms of influence and PAC money,
Speaker 13: and this gives them a lot of bandwidth and a
Speaker 13: lot of political clout, and it's so self defeating, but
Speaker 13: there you are. And so now we're at the point
Speaker 13: in Texas where we have over one hundred thousand non
Speaker 13: medical exemption requests of various sorts. So that's a lot
Speaker 13: of kids. And this doesn't say anything about the homeschooled
Speaker 13: kids in Texas. I'm told that we may have as
Speaker 13: many as seven hundred thousand homeschooled kids, but you might
Speaker 13: want to document that. And I don't think we have
Speaker 13: any idea of the percentage of those kids that are
Speaker 13: not getting their vaccines because they're homeschools.
Speaker 4: Private schools in Texas have significantly lower vaccination rates on average,
Speaker 4: and the numbers among homeschoolers, while not precisely known, are
Speaker 4: likely just as bad, if not worse. Texas just passed
Speaker 4: the largest school privatization scheme in the nation, through which
Speaker 4: parents will be subsidized by the state to send their
Speaker 4: kids to private schools or to homeschool them, meaning vaccination
Speaker 4: rates among school aged children will likely continue to fall.
Speaker 4: The prevalence of homeschooling among left leaning, crunchy alternative types
Speaker 4: has also contributed to the shift towards right wing politics,
Speaker 4: as the homeschool movement has deliberately tried to recruit those
Speaker 4: families and pushed them towards right wing politics. The complete
Speaker 4: partisan politicization of vaccinations has made communicating the risks of
Speaker 4: low vaccination rates far more difficult for people like doctor Hotez.
Speaker 13: How do you thread that needle and say, look, everybody
Speaker 13: has a right to their political views. I'm not going
Speaker 13: there with you that you're right as an American citizen,
Speaker 13: but don't adopt the anti vaccine stuff because it's so
Speaker 13: dangerous for your health and the health of your loved ones,
Speaker 13: the health of your kids. But it's a tough needle
Speaker 13: to thread, and as a result, I, you know, will often,
Speaker 13: even though I try to bend over backwards explaining I
Speaker 13: don't care about your politics, for their convenient purposes, I'm
Speaker 13: treated as a political figure and portrayed as a cartoon
Speaker 13: villain or you know, a scientist and white coat plotting
Speaker 13: nefarious things. You know, they have this crazy concept out
Speaker 13: there they call plandemic. Now that it's not a pandemic,
Speaker 13: it's a plandemic that somehow I've been involved with, or
Speaker 13: that I'm profiting from vaccines and secretly working for or
Speaker 13: pharma companies even though it's the opposite right and make
Speaker 13: load cost vaccines that actually showed me could bypass the
Speaker 13: big pharma companies and and some of it gets outright absurd.
Speaker 13: I mean, there's this whole thread on the Internet that
Speaker 13: says that I'm not even a real person, that I'm
Speaker 13: I'm actually being played by Jack Black, and that he's
Speaker 13: paid for by the CIA, and and it's got these amazing,
Speaker 13: you know, forensic analysis of close ups of my teeth
Speaker 13: with Jack Black's teeth and all this profiles and things.
Speaker 13: I mean, the funny thing is the said thing is
Speaker 13: the crazier the conspiracy the faster it seems to travel.
Speaker 4: These sorts of conspiracy theories would be laughable if they
Speaker 4: did not have deadly consequences. And unfortunately, this sort of
Speaker 4: public health focused conspiracism is not new. In the late
Speaker 4: eighteen hundred, several Canadian doctors, such as Alexander Milton Ross,
Speaker 4: insisted that vaccines were the true danger, not smallpox. Others
Speaker 4: argued that British doctors were promoting vaccinations to poison the
Speaker 4: French Canadian community due to nationalistic conflicts. If you were
Speaker 4: not in a coma during the COVID nineteen pandemic, these
Speaker 4: ideas should sound familiar, and in nineteen twenty, at the
Speaker 4: tail end of the deadly Spanish flu pandemic that killed
Speaker 4: somewhere between seventeen and fifty million people worldwide. The Commissioner
Speaker 4: of Public Health in Seattle, doctor Hiram Reid, was dealing
Speaker 4: with the nasty outbreak of smallpox the year prior. The
Speaker 4: Washington state legislature, facing pressure from anti vaccination activists, allowed
Speaker 4: for students to avoid vaccination requirements if their parents objected,
Speaker 4: effectively ending mandatory vaccination. Hiram, frustrated with the ongoing resistance
Speaker 4: to his attempts to vaccinate the public in Seattle, vented
Speaker 4: in a nineteen twenty annual health report quote, the number
Speaker 4: of unvaccinated persons in this city is large, the city
Speaker 4: being a hotbed for anti vaccination, Christian Science and various
Speaker 4: anti medical cults, and it is difficult to enforce vaccination really,
Speaker 4: wrote for those who are unfamiliar. Christian Science is an
Speaker 4: offshoot of Christianity that was formed in eighteen seventy nine
Speaker 4: in New England and by nineteen thirty six was the
Speaker 4: fastest growing religion in the nation. Christian scientists typically avoid
Speaker 4: medical care and rely instead on their belief in the
Speaker 4: healing power of prayer. On the next episode of Anti
Speaker 4: Vaxxs America, I'll explore the intersection of conservative Christianity, its
Speaker 4: belief in spiritual healing miracles, anti vaccination beliefs, and vaccination hesitancy.
Speaker 4: We'll talk about how a very influential strain of conservative
Speaker 4: Christianity that is highly political and has tied itself with
Speaker 4: Donald Trump is also influencing people's attitudes about vaccination. Until then,
Speaker 4: I'm Stephen Mamicelli and this is Anti vaxx America for
Speaker 4: COOLS Media.
Speaker 3: Thanks for listening.
Speaker 4: I'm Stephen Manicelli. I'm a journalist in Dallas and an
Speaker 4: occasional contributor to Cool Zone Media. And this is episode
Speaker 4: three of Anti VAXs America, a special five parts series
Speaker 4: exploring anti vaccination beliefs in the United States through the
Speaker 4: lens of the West Texas measles outbreak that has since
Speaker 4: spread to several other states in the nation and claimed
Speaker 4: three lives. One of those lives was the daughter of
Speaker 4: a man named Peter, a member of a Mennonite community
Speaker 4: in West Texas. For Peter, the death of his child
Speaker 4: was basically God's will. He did an interview in which
Speaker 4: he discrib that if it's God's plan, you know, that
Speaker 4: is basically what he has to accept, but he also
Speaker 4: continued to oppose vaccines, and his wife said that they
Speaker 4: wouldn't recommend them to other parents. Now, Mennonites have been
Speaker 4: singled out in a lot of the coverage about this
Speaker 4: Measle's outbreak, given that the outbreak has centered in their
Speaker 4: community in West Texas, and there's been a lot of
Speaker 4: pushback with regard to the idea that Mennonites broadly speaking
Speaker 4: are opposed to vaccinations. There's nothing explicit in their theology
Speaker 4: or worldview that opposes vaccinations on principle. But these are
Speaker 4: individuals who hold strongly held beliefs regarding their religion, regarding
Speaker 4: their theology, and what they believe is right for them
Speaker 4: to do for their families and for their communities. It's
Speaker 4: not merely a few sectarian Mennonite communities in the United
Speaker 4: States that are hesitant to vaccinate their children in this way.
Speaker 4: It's actually a much bigger problem among what we could call,
Speaker 4: you know, some people might say mainstream evangelical Christians. Others
Speaker 4: might specifically refer to it as non denominational charismatic Christianity.
Speaker 4: But no matter which way you cut it, there is
Speaker 4: a clear and observable relationship between conservative Christianity and anti
Speaker 4: vaccination beliefs. Now, as a journalist in Texas, I've done
Speaker 4: my fair share of reporting on conservative Christianity, particularly the
Speaker 4: highly politicized strains of it that are popular in the
Speaker 4: Lone Star State and in North Texas where I live.
Speaker 4: I didn't grow up in one of these communities. I'm
Speaker 4: an outsider. So to help me unpack how conservative Christianity
Speaker 4: became so intertwined with this sort of anti vaccination movement,
Speaker 4: I brought in a special guest with whom you may
Speaker 4: be familiar.
Speaker 6: Hi, I'm Garrison Davis. I write about politics, extremism, and
Speaker 6: how much fun it is to be in the twenty
Speaker 6: first century for cool zone Media.
Speaker 4: So, you know, in terms of what I hope to
Speaker 4: hear from you, I mean, let's let's go back to
Speaker 4: your upbringing. Tell me a little bit about the community
Speaker 4: you grew up in and the sort of religious system
Speaker 4: that you were brought up in.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 6: So, I grew up in a non denominational evangelical community
Speaker 6: that was largely at least on like the leadership side
Speaker 6: was transplanted from Texas to a well, not a small town,
Speaker 6: because it's actually the biggest town in the province, but
Speaker 6: a relatively medium sized city, I guess in Saskatchewan. Definitely
Speaker 6: an interesting mix of like Canadian customs matched with the
Speaker 6: whole Texas vibe, but definitely the type of like Bible belts,
Speaker 6: post fire and brimstone Christianity that came out of Texas
Speaker 6: was like the dominant form of Christianity, which was like
Speaker 6: preached from the pulpit and like influenced all other life
Speaker 6: voices beyond just your Sunday morning service or your Saturday
Speaker 6: night service, or your Wednesday night service or your Tuesday
Speaker 6: morning service, etc.
Speaker 4: So let's dig a little bit more into the character
Speaker 4: of it. So you know, in Texas, we've got you know,
Speaker 4: a wide variety of congregations and sub sets and non
Speaker 4: denominational Christianity is absolutely the fastest growing flavor of Christianity,
Speaker 4: not just in Texas but in the United States.
Speaker 3: There's some good research about this.
Speaker 4: And some people describe it as evangelical, some people describe
Speaker 4: it as charismatic. Sometimes both of those descriptions are accurate.
Speaker 4: There could be some differences between these types of churches.
Speaker 4: Some of them are focused a lot on like things
Speaker 4: like prosperity, gospel. Others hu maybe towards more Southern Baptist
Speaker 4: esque style of preaching and theology, and some really lean
Speaker 4: into maybe more like Pentecostal style belief in miracles and
Speaker 4: supernatural power of God to directly intervene in people's lives
Speaker 4: and things like that. So, you know, how would you
Speaker 4: characterize your church and the community that you were part of, Like,
Speaker 4: you know, was it was it common for people to
Speaker 4: talk about spiritual healing or sort of those miraculous interventions totally?
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, no, it was. It was kind of like
Speaker 6: a Christian chili. We certainly had some prosperity gospel elements.
Speaker 6: You had some like Southern Baptist elements certainly when it
Speaker 6: comes to like social views. But yeah, no, like the
Speaker 6: spirit healing aspect to huge, huge people will get like
Speaker 6: healed during services, people would like faint and pass out.
Speaker 6: They would like bring in preachers from the states who
Speaker 6: would go go on these big like tours where you're
Speaker 6: you know, both trying to like recruit people and then
Speaker 6: also like offer these like miraculous healing services during these
Speaker 6: like you know, five hour long sermons. So yeah, certainly
Speaker 6: a Pentecostal element was pretty dominant combined with like you know,
Speaker 6: focus on the family type stuff, some Southern Baptist stuff.
Speaker 4: That makes sense. I mean that tracks with what I
Speaker 4: expected and the sort of things that I see around here.
Speaker 4: Maybe you're familiar with Kenneth Copeland.
Speaker 6: Kenneth Copeland is how do I try this? So the
Speaker 6: main pastor of the church I was from is the
Speaker 6: uncle of a pastor in Oklahoma who used to run
Speaker 6: a church called Church on the Move, and he is
Speaker 6: very close personal friends with Kenneth Copeland. And I think
Speaker 6: I've seen Copeland a few times in person, like dinners
Speaker 6: and stuff. He was a pretty regular figure, I believe
Speaker 6: preached at the church a few times I was younger,
Speaker 6: but I know my dad's met him through works. My
Speaker 6: dad worked for the church. And yeah, so no, very
Speaker 6: very Kenneth Copeland vibes.
Speaker 4: Well, that makes sense because Kenneth Copeland, you know, he's
Speaker 4: not only the wealthiest pastor in the United States, but
Speaker 4: he's one of the most influential as well, and definitely
Speaker 4: in North Texas where his home base is. He's got
Speaker 4: a big church in you know, Terran County, and I've
Speaker 4: been to his annual convention, which is a special time,
Speaker 4: So you know, I totally understand the vibe that you're
Speaker 4: talking about. Then it also illustrates the vast reach of
Speaker 4: someone like Kenneth Copeland for it to be all the
Speaker 4: way up in Saskatchewan.
Speaker 6: And like the interconnectedness I mean, because like the pastor
Speaker 6: of my old church is American, born in Texas, is
Speaker 6: currently in America because he's in hiding from Canadian authorities
Speaker 6: related to a series of court cases and criminal complaints
Speaker 6: about abuse in this church. So he's currently he's currently
Speaker 6: fled and is in hiding somewhere in the US, hiding
Speaker 6: from his Majesty's Royal court.
Speaker 3: Incredible.
Speaker 6: Yes, he's also my step grandfather.
Speaker 4: I'll get back to my conversation with Gahre here shortly,
Speaker 4: but first.
Speaker 3: An ad break.
Speaker 4: So before we go any further, we need to talk
Speaker 4: a little bit more about Kenneth Copeland. So he's the
Speaker 4: wealthiest and one of the most influential pastors in the
Speaker 4: United States, perhaps the world, but he's also a highly
Speaker 4: political one. He's affiliated with the charismatic Christian movement, which
Speaker 4: is one of the fastest growing, if not the fastest
Speaker 4: growing Christian movements in the United States, and early on
Speaker 4: he lent his support to Donald Trump in Donald Trump's
Speaker 4: first campaign in twenty sixteen. Three years before that, in
Speaker 4: twenty thirteen, the church led by his daughter Terry, which
Speaker 4: is called Eagle Mountain International, was at the center of
Speaker 4: a measles outbreak. At the time, the church and its
Speaker 4: leaders were criticized for preaching against vaccinations, and even as
Speaker 4: they set up vaccine clinics at the back of the
Speaker 4: church when things got really bad, they continued to speak
Speaker 4: out against vaccinations in this way and implying to their
Speaker 4: flock that they need to place their faith not in medicine,
Speaker 4: but in prayer and in God. And when the COVID
Speaker 4: nineteen pandemic was first kicking off in America, Kenneth Copeland
Speaker 4: spoke of the disease as a sort of tool of Satan,
Speaker 4: but he actually called for vaccinations.
Speaker 3: Interestingly enough, I execute judgment on you, COVID nineteen.
Speaker 7: I execute judgment.
Speaker 4: On you, Satan, you destroyer, you killer, you get out,
Speaker 4: you point break coper, you get confiscations.
Speaker 3: I demand judgment on you.
Speaker 7: I didn't mod smen de man a vaccination of common media.
Speaker 4: Yes, But Copeland's belief in spiritual healing and his ties
Speaker 4: to the Trump administration seemingly led him to quickly turned
Speaker 4: to his old antics. He preached that COVID would be
Speaker 4: over soon because God would destroy it.
Speaker 7: OVID nineteen.
Speaker 9: I'm good.
Speaker 4: On you, on you, you.
Speaker 2: Are destroying forever and you will never be back.
Speaker 16: Thank you are God, let it happen.
Speaker 4: Over the course of many sermons, Copeland compared the virus
Speaker 4: to the flu. He suggested people who attended his services
Speaker 4: could be healed in person, and asserted that the president's
Speaker 4: opponents had quote opened the door for the pandemic with
Speaker 4: their quote displays of hate against him. Later that with
Speaker 4: the pandemic fully raging across America, Copeland still held his
Speaker 4: annual conference in Fort Worth, Texas. In August of twenty twenty,
Speaker 4: a television news report showed that no one at the
Speaker 4: conference was wearing a mask, and in September twenty twenty one,
Speaker 4: Copeland begged his viewers to help him fund the purchase
Speaker 4: of a new private jet that would allow him to
Speaker 4: avoid travel restrictions that were still in place around COVID
Speaker 4: nineteen and requiring vaccinations. He compared those vaccination requirements for
Speaker 4: flying to the satanic quote mark of the beasts. By
Speaker 4: the time that I attended Copeland's annual convention in twenty
Speaker 4: twenty three, he had embraced the likes of Mike Lindell,
Speaker 4: the election conspiracist who has promoted junkiers for COVID while
Speaker 4: sewing doubts without vaccines. So you know, I didn't grow
Speaker 4: up in one of these communities. I had been to
Speaker 4: some megachurch sermons and services in the past. I knew
Speaker 4: people who went to places like Gateway Church, which is
Speaker 4: a huge one here in North Texas, very politically involved
Speaker 4: in there. Founding pastor was just implicated in you know, child.
Speaker 6: Sex abuse, many such cases.
Speaker 4: Many such cases, And as an outsider, in my mind,
Speaker 4: I directly link sort of belief in spiritual healing with
Speaker 4: vaccine hesitancy. Yeah, because you know, there's there's this sense
Speaker 4: that will, if God can heal you, why would you
Speaker 4: need to rely on something like a vaccine. But also
Speaker 4: that you know, you need to place your faith in
Speaker 4: God more than man or the government.
Speaker 6: It is more that thing. It's that by electing to
Speaker 6: get a vaccine, that demonstrates that you do not have
Speaker 6: faith in God like it's it's it's it's more so
Speaker 6: like a larger theological issue beyond just like you know,
Speaker 6: we don't we don't trust the science like I trust
Speaker 6: God more than the science. It's that like even electing
Speaker 6: to do that demonstrates this deeper, like more core belief
Speaker 6: that you do not have the faith in God that
Speaker 6: is adequate in order to like take care of you,
Speaker 6: your body and whatever He may have planned for you.
Speaker 6: Perhaps that includes getting measles and you'll you'll work through
Speaker 6: that maybe or not, you know, as we're seeing now
Speaker 6: in Texas a lot. But yeah, like it's it's not
Speaker 6: just about like medical skepticism, science skepticism. It is this
Speaker 6: deeper aspect that that more relates to someone's like individual
Speaker 6: relationship and faith in God.
Speaker 4: So when you were growing up, I mean, did you
Speaker 4: pick up at all on this sort of skepticism with
Speaker 4: regard to not, you know, I guess modern science broadly,
Speaker 4: but also medical interventions totally?
Speaker 6: Totally? Yeah, No, I mean like literally this the school
Speaker 6: that I went to, which was which was a part
Speaker 6: of this church like I was. I was, I was
Speaker 6: taught from like an American creationist curriculum for like the
Speaker 6: first I guess like seven grades called ACE. There was
Speaker 6: big Ace conferences that like the teachers and my dad
Speaker 6: would travel to the States for every year. But yeah,
Speaker 6: like this stuff is literally like taught to all the
Speaker 6: kids because in order to go to this church, you
Speaker 6: have to also send your kids to the school. You
Speaker 6: are raised in this and like you have no choice
Speaker 6: in the matter, and that that just becomes like what
Speaker 6: is real? Like that just is reality? Like it's it's
Speaker 6: not it's not that there's like an alternative to that.
Speaker 6: It's like like a nine year old kid, like that
Speaker 6: just is what the world is. So like what you're
Speaker 6: reading those textbooks that just is truth. It's very isolated environments,
Speaker 6: like you're you you aren't really fully aware that there's
Speaker 6: like an alternative to that, and if there is, it's
Speaker 6: like what's the word? We didn't even use words like
Speaker 6: like like atheist. I think secular was was maybe the word.
Speaker 6: That was maybe the word that they use. Like you
Speaker 6: can't you can't like listen to like secular music or
Speaker 6: like be aware of like you know, likee like secular
Speaker 6: culture because that's satanic or it can lead you away
Speaker 6: from God or it's a distraction from God. You know
Speaker 6: that that sort of thing. But no, like yeah, it's
Speaker 6: this is built in and like, yeah, you know, very
Speaker 6: basic creationist stuff like answers in genesis being like the
Speaker 6: highest basting of science, which is like a fake science
Speaker 6: website touted by creationists and evangelicals. But this also extends
Speaker 6: to medical science as well. The same way you believe
Speaker 6: they are to six thousand years old, you maybe also
Speaker 6: don't believe in like cancer treatment, right.
Speaker 4: So to the extent that you can recall if you know,
Speaker 4: or you know, if you're willing to share, do you
Speaker 4: recall if you were vaccinated as a child?
Speaker 6: I was not. No, The first time I got vaccinated
Speaker 6: was as an older teenager when I gained medical autonomy
Speaker 6: and I was like, hey, I should probably get vaccinated.
Speaker 6: Huh okay, Because both like unplugging from these takes time.
Speaker 6: Like I think my family got away from this community
Speaker 6: when I was like eleven or twelve, but because I'm
Speaker 6: like the oldest of all my siblings, this was the
Speaker 6: most like baked into me more so than my other siblings.
Speaker 6: So like, even if you like get away from this physically,
Speaker 6: you still have to like mentally detalked. You have to
Speaker 6: realize that you were kind of in a cult, and
Speaker 6: then you have to like deep yourself, and that like
Speaker 6: takes years. So like I didn't like fully disconnect from
Speaker 6: this style of Christianity and like, you know, Christianity in
Speaker 6: general intil like a few years after. So by the
Speaker 6: time I was like a you know, middle to older
Speaker 6: teenager is when I started to like sort this type
Speaker 6: of stuff out, and uh eventually got caught up on
Speaker 6: those vaccines. Luckily I never got chicken pox, although people
Speaker 6: did throw chicken pox parties when I was a kid,
Speaker 6: which I can recall the concept of, especially if like
Speaker 6: a baby or a toddler or even like you know,
Speaker 6: like a like like like a ten year old has
Speaker 6: chicken pox. No one else's of course is vaccinated for
Speaker 6: this in this whole community. So if someone has chicken pox,
Speaker 6: you will not just isolate them, You will actually encourage
Speaker 6: other people to like hang out and play together with
Speaker 6: the express intent of getting sick yourself as a form
Speaker 6: of like natural immunization. And I think I was offered
Speaker 6: to go to one of these chicken pox parties quote unquote,
Speaker 6: I think as like a ten year old or something declined.
Speaker 4: Wow, I mean, good on you for at least having
Speaker 4: that wherewithal so and you know, Saskatchewan and Canada are
Speaker 4: different than the United States and Texas. And medical exemptions,
Speaker 4: exemptions of conscience or religious medical exemptions are a big thing.
Speaker 4: And there's actually a bill in the state House right
Speaker 4: now to expand that sort of thing with regard to vaccines.
Speaker 4: I mean, was that something that was going on up there?
Speaker 4: I mean, was just because were you in a private school,
Speaker 4: you were kind of outside of any sort of regime
Speaker 4: of accountability.
Speaker 6: Yeah, we were in the private school, and I know
Speaker 6: people who worked in the private school did like lobbying
Speaker 6: in the province to like keep their medical freedom, you know,
Speaker 6: intact to make sure the state does not interfere. Though
Speaker 6: I do remember when my family moved to the States,
Speaker 6: throughout the immigration process, we had to fill out a
Speaker 6: lot of those like religious exemption forms because you're supposed
Speaker 6: to get vaccinated and make sure you're not carrying like
Speaker 6: tuberculosis when you immigrate to a new country. But even
Speaker 6: even for those, there is like religious exemptions that if
Speaker 6: you have enough money you can pay.
Speaker 4: For When was this like roughly timeline when you know,
Speaker 4: when you were a child, when you're in private school?
Speaker 3: Is the broad range?
Speaker 6: This is, this is like the knots, right, this is
Speaker 6: the early two thousands. Yeah, I mean, like I'm in
Speaker 6: my early twenties now.
Speaker 4: Vaccine has intency has clearly been a part of certain
Speaker 4: conservative Christian congregations for some time.
Speaker 6: Something I remember happening kind of because of like what
Speaker 6: my parents were involved with at the time is you know,
Speaker 6: there's on one side, this whole like theological side of
Speaker 6: like not wanting to do vaccines or like unnecessary medical
Speaker 6: procedures because of your faith in God. But on the
Speaker 6: other hand, kind of around like twenty ten, and like
Speaker 6: you know, a few years before and after, we started
Speaker 6: to really see kind of that aspect along with like
Speaker 6: the hippie mom Facebook group aspect kind of collide, right,
Speaker 6: and like this healthy you know, like organic natural like
Speaker 6: hippie mom thing used to be more associated with like
Speaker 6: you know, people on the left, especially in the nineties,
Speaker 6: and you started to see these two kind of poles
Speaker 6: converge around twenty ten. Because this is like what happened
Speaker 6: with like my two parents at the time, where like
Speaker 6: my dad was more in the theological side than my
Speaker 6: mom was kind of more on like the the kind
Speaker 6: of like crunchy side of things, and these things like
Speaker 6: combined this new breed of evangelical Christianity that you see
Speaker 6: is like very popular right now with like the tradwife
Speaker 6: angle combined with like you know, crunchy like naturalistic organic
Speaker 6: stuff that used to be left wing and is now
Speaker 6: like very very right wing. You had a very very
Speaker 6: like conservative like family values coded which which did not
Speaker 6: really used to be the case as much, and that's
Speaker 6: kind of like strengthened the anti vacs hold on this
Speaker 6: like section of the population.
Speaker 4: So, I mean, this is incredible. You were part of
Speaker 4: a church that basically had connections to Texas by way
Speaker 4: of Kenneth Copeland, and you had mentioned, you know, kind
Speaker 4: of having a crunchy, more maybe left leaning mom. How
Speaker 4: apparent in retrospect was sort of the political nature of
Speaker 4: your church was it? Was it particularly political? You had
Speaker 4: mentioned lobbying, but you know, lobbying isn't necessarily partisan.
Speaker 6: They preached, like Glenn Beck from the pulpit, like very
Speaker 6: very conservative, openly conservative like that is like the Christian
Speaker 6: godly correct path. I guess like this is where it's
Speaker 6: tied in a bit more with some of like the
Speaker 6: some of like the Southern Baptist these type stuff right
Speaker 6: where you have like anti gay conversion therapy like camps
Speaker 6: that they can send people to like you No, like
Speaker 6: this is very very like Bill O'Reilly, very very Glen
Speaker 6: Beck like that was that was the moment, right, this
Speaker 6: is this is two thousand and eight. The Antichrist has
Speaker 6: just been elected president of the United States, possibly literally
Speaker 6: and even though they're up in Canada, this is still
Speaker 6: like concern number one on the like the transnational like
Speaker 6: Christian Christian world. So no, like extremely openly conservative to
Speaker 6: the point where it is it is being preached alongside
Speaker 6: the words of Jesus and Paul.
Speaker 4: You had a front row seat to sort of a
Speaker 4: shifting ground because you know, Southern Baptist Christian Christianity is
Speaker 4: kind of declining and it has I think has been
Speaker 4: supplanted by this quote unquote non denominational, totally set of networks.
Speaker 4: You know, there's a there's a term that some scholars
Speaker 4: use independent network Christianity where the leaders of the churches,
Speaker 4: they are non denominational, they're not a part of a hierarchy.
Speaker 4: They answer to no higher power other than God, you know,
Speaker 4: so their interpretation of God is basically the rule or
Speaker 4: or it is the authority.
Speaker 6: It's like a post Billy Graham era. Yeah, like networked churches,
Speaker 6: but are not part of like a coherent structure. They're
Speaker 6: kind of like terrorist cells. Essentially, they offer a very
Speaker 6: similarly to like a cell network of terrorists. I'm trying
Speaker 6: to remember what the with like the most wild faith
Speaker 6: healings I've seen are the thing I think people were
Speaker 6: faith healed the most for is probably back pain. A
Speaker 6: lot of back pain gets faith yield. Of course, there
Speaker 6: might be the odd person who's able to claim that,
Speaker 6: like you know, a faith healing cured their cancer, who
Speaker 6: then probably died three years later of cancer. But you
Speaker 6: also get faith held for a bunch of like smaller ailments,
Speaker 6: right and so. And someone will walk up to you,
Speaker 6: put hands on you. You might start convulsing like this
Speaker 6: like psychosomatic thing. Sometimes you'll pass out. A lot of
Speaker 6: people pass out. It becomes like this performative thing, like subconsciously.
Speaker 6: I remember there was there was people they were stationed
Speaker 6: where people would pass out with with little I think
Speaker 6: they're called modesty blankets, so that when they pass out,
Speaker 6: maybe your shirt will come up a little bit and
Speaker 6: someone will see a little bit of tummy you can
Speaker 6: walk over and put the blanket over as you're recovering
Speaker 6: from your from your healing session. All this is happening
Speaker 6: during like essentially like an acoustic concert. So it creates
Speaker 6: a very peculiar vibe of people kind of poorly play
Speaker 6: musical instruments as other people like walk through like an
Speaker 6: auditorium and just start like passing out, and you just
Speaker 6: get this pile of bodies, and as as a ten
Speaker 6: year old, do you think this is totally normal and fine?
Speaker 6: And then you later realize why you're into so much
Speaker 6: weird shit. Oops.
Speaker 4: Something I also covered in a previous episode in this
Speaker 4: series was a quote from the Seattle Public Health commissioner
Speaker 4: during a smallpox outbreak in the early nineteen hundreds. He
Speaker 4: called Seattle hotbed for anti vaccination and Christian science and
Speaker 4: various anti medical cults. So you know, we are kind
Speaker 4: of truly like reliving a period of history.
Speaker 6: I hate it when times of flat circle. This sucks.
Speaker 3: Why should I live in history?
Speaker 15: Huh?
Speaker 8: I don't want to know anything anymore.
Speaker 4: If this is a world where nothing is solved. If
Speaker 4: someone once told me time is a flat circle.
Speaker 14: Everything we've ever done or will do, we're gonna do
Speaker 14: over and over and over again.
Speaker 6: Lone Star Man fucking Lone Star Texas. The one thing
Speaker 6: I remembered through not being vaccinated as a kid, something
Speaker 6: I did develop, and this was like behaviorally ingrained is
Speaker 6: a paralyzing fear of rust because you don't have because
Speaker 6: you don't have the teton is shot. So even though
Speaker 6: we're told God, will you know, keep us safe and healthy,
Speaker 6: we are also taught you have to stay like ten
Speaker 6: feet away from like rust. If you see rust on anything, like,
Speaker 6: you have to be on high alert because even though
Speaker 6: God should protect you, he might not if you get
Speaker 6: a rusty nail, like poking your finger. So rust is
Speaker 6: still something I'm like really afraid of despite being vaccinated now,
Speaker 6: just because this was ingrained so young, which just kind
Speaker 6: of shows the kind of like a paradoxical thought press
Speaker 6: behind some of this sort of thing where it's okay
Speaker 6: if your kids aren't vaccinated, but you also have to
Speaker 6: teach them to like never get close to anything rusty
Speaker 6: because that could send them to the hospital.
Speaker 3: We'll return to my conversation with Gehre after a short
Speaker 3: ad break.
Speaker 4: So what was it like moving out of this science
Speaker 4: skeptic religious community.
Speaker 6: It's funny because when I moved away from this like
Speaker 6: conservative community in Canada, we moved to Portland, Oregon, which
Speaker 6: has its own anti vaccination problem, but from like the
Speaker 6: other side. So I was still around a whole bunch
Speaker 6: of people and kids who aren't vaccinated, who where there
Speaker 6: is frequent measles outbreaks. But it's it's it is more
Speaker 6: for that like crunchy hippie thing that then is kind
Speaker 6: of you know, converged with this evangelical side. But at
Speaker 6: that time it's interesting going from you know, one of
Speaker 6: these worlds to another. And in some ways the medical
Speaker 6: reality did not change that drastically.
Speaker 4: Right, But I'm wondering if you agree on this. My
Speaker 4: sense is that that form of anti vaccination belief, the
Speaker 4: sort of hippie crunchy stuff, it's dying. It's not only dying, yeah,
Speaker 4: it has not spread. It has not been turned into
Speaker 4: like a program that is far reaching.
Speaker 6: Those types of people have either evolved in their beliefs
Speaker 6: and have and have caught up with like consensus scientific understandings,
Speaker 6: or have married, you know, far right Christian husbands and
Speaker 6: have just gone full conservative like they have split in twine.
Speaker 6: You are much less likely to now find, you know,
Speaker 6: someone who would describe themselves as like liberal or like leftist,
Speaker 6: who would hold these beliefs if they're like, you know,
Speaker 6: like a forty year old mom with like you know,
Speaker 6: braids or beads in her hair like that. That's that
Speaker 6: is definitely less less likely to have that person beholding
Speaker 6: like anti vax beliefs now than it was twenty ten
Speaker 6: years ago.
Speaker 4: You just gave me the beautiful idea of making sure
Speaker 4: I include an audio clip of the anti vax rasta
Speaker 4: Christian guy whose videos have been going viral.
Speaker 3: Have you seen these at all?
Speaker 10: No?
Speaker 4: Oh, man, you're gonna love.
Speaker 12: This dilation objectively.
Speaker 7: Projectively and.
Speaker 12: Ojectively jectivity.
Speaker 6: Oh that's good.
Speaker 4: It really does encapsulate this sort of you know, the
Speaker 4: quote unquote conspirituality.
Speaker 6: Even the way like Russell Brand has moved the past
Speaker 6: ten years. Right, it's a pretty clear example of this
Speaker 6: thing we've been talking about. Yes, how he's now this
Speaker 6: weird Jesus guy who can't stop raping?
Speaker 14: Not good?
Speaker 4: Yeah, it is so fascinating that now, yeah, like Maha
Speaker 4: is appealing to that that sort of like orphaned set
Speaker 4: of people that you're describing who have less of a
Speaker 4: political home.
Speaker 14: Yeah.
Speaker 6: RFK Junior is similarly to Russell brand as like a
Speaker 6: prime example of someone who used to be more of
Speaker 6: like a you know, left wing environmental lawyer who is
Speaker 6: now Trump's anti autism take away red number forty anti
Speaker 6: vax dude. And you know, another thing about growing up
Speaker 6: in these communities is like beyond vaccine hesitancy or anti
Speaker 6: vax beliefs, is also this like anti psychological beliefs, like
Speaker 6: like like therapy or like or like psychoanalysis or like
Speaker 6: mental diagnosis are framed the same way, like you shouldn't
Speaker 6: need real therapy. You can talk to like a Christian
Speaker 6: counselor and you can pray and that should be all
Speaker 6: you really need. You don't need to go to like
Speaker 6: a therapist or a psychologist. Like that delayed my understanding
Speaker 6: of like being autistic by like maybe fifteen years, which
Speaker 6: you know didn't serve younger gear very well in trying
Speaker 6: to unpack like social interactions as a as like a
Speaker 6: teenager or even like a preteen, because like I, you know,
Speaker 6: wasn't even aware of like the concept of like what
Speaker 6: autism actually is until so much later.
Speaker 4: So you're saying that childhood vaccinations didn't cause your autism.
Speaker 6: No, because I was never vaccinated as a kid, and
Speaker 6: yet here I am.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I saw a nice little sign recently that it fooled
Speaker 4: me because I read it too quickly. But it said
Speaker 4: childhood vaccinations cause adulthood.
Speaker 6: That's right, they sure to.
Speaker 4: Gair's experience is not unique. There are countless children who
Speaker 4: are raised in religious communities that keew medical interventions in
Speaker 4: favor of their faith and in the power of God
Speaker 4: to heal them. These communities seek exemptions from vaccination requirements
Speaker 4: on either religious grounds or on the grounds of what
Speaker 4: they call medical freedom. Consider the children who attend Mercy
Speaker 4: Culture Preparatory, a private Christian school in Fort Worth. After
Speaker 4: the Musles outbreak became national news or a port in
Speaker 4: the Dallas Morning News highlighted that the school had the
Speaker 4: lowest vaccination rate out of any private school in the
Speaker 4: state of Texas. And unlike the Copelands, who at the
Speaker 4: very least have facilitated vaccinations among their flock even as
Speaker 4: they've given contradictory messages from the pulpit, the leader of
Speaker 4: Mercy Culture was unapologetically thrilled at the news.
Speaker 7: Hey, guys, quick video.
Speaker 8: I just walked into an empty prep board meeting and
Speaker 8: there was these balloons in a surprise gift.
Speaker 7: I'm like, what's this going out? And I just found out.
Speaker 3: I'm a little behind in the news. I'm a little
Speaker 3: slow getting old, but I just.
Speaker 8: Found out we are the number one school in Texas
Speaker 8: for least vaccinations. And I guess the news got a
Speaker 8: hold of it and they were trying to spin it
Speaker 8: like it was some awful thing. But I just want
Speaker 8: to congratulate all of the family members of MC Prep
Speaker 8: that embrace freedom of health and they're not allowing government
Speaker 8: or science projects to affect how you live and lead
Speaker 8: your life. I know the tire world was shut down
Speaker 8: with insanity and people were fired from their job for
Speaker 8: forced vaccinations, and freedom is something that we take seriously,
Speaker 8: religious freedom, freedom of our health. And so shout out
Speaker 8: to MC Prep for being the least vaccinated.
Speaker 4: School in Texas.
Speaker 8: We'll take it, or as Bercy culture say, we celebrate it,
Speaker 8: we'll put it on the board.
Speaker 4: State Representative Nate Shatzlin, who is also a pastor at
Speaker 4: the church and who has been a featured guest at
Speaker 4: Kenneth Copland's annual convention spread a similar message in his
Speaker 4: own video that celebrated the news of low vaccination rates
Speaker 4: in their private school.
Speaker 3: Hey, what's going on? This is state revenue?
Speaker 7: Shats on?
Speaker 16: I'm standing in front of our Texas state capital and
Speaker 16: I was alerted on x from a ex post from
Speaker 16: Bud Kennedy. Now you probably don't know who Bud Kennedy is,
Speaker 16: but he is a reporter for the Star Telegram in
Speaker 16: Fort Worth, Texas. Now Star Telegrams losing followers by the thousands.
Speaker 3: It's crazy.
Speaker 16: However, he attacks Christians give churches more than almost anyone
Speaker 16: else I know. And this post said that Russell Culture Preparatory, which.
Speaker 4: Is a private school in my district.
Speaker 16: Also happens to be where I send my kids to school.
Speaker 16: He said they are the least vaccinated school in the
Speaker 16: States of Texas.
Speaker 8: Now, I was.
Speaker 4: Incredibly concerned for a couple of different reasons.
Speaker 3: I was concerned that number one for just finding out.
Speaker 16: About this, because the second concern is why haven't we
Speaker 16: celebrated this sooner? Look, I am so excited to say
Speaker 16: that Mercy Culture Prep is celebrating medical freedom where we
Speaker 16: honor the wishes of moms and dads over any type
Speaker 16: of health official like Rachel Levine or so called public
Speaker 16: health expert like blood Unity.
Speaker 4: This brazen lack of concern about the risks of the
Speaker 4: spread of measles, which has already killed multiple children, is
Speaker 4: concerning for many reasons. One of them is that it
Speaker 4: implicitly asserts that it's better for people to be unvaccinated.
Speaker 4: Another is that it effectively disregards the risks that vulnerable
Speaker 4: people face when diseases like measles spread unchecked. And when
Speaker 4: infused with this hardened belief that God can miraculously heal
Speaker 4: them and also that God makes no mistakes, it can
Speaker 4: lead some people like Peter, the Mennonite father of the
Speaker 4: first child to die from measles in over two decades,
Speaker 4: to believe that getting measles can actually make their communities stronger.
Speaker 4: This is basically survival of the fittest style quasi eugenic
Speaker 4: thinking with the veneer of religion. In the next episode,
Speaker 4: we will explore why anti VAXX beliefs and the policies
Speaker 4: now being pushed by the leading vaccine denial or RFGA
Speaker 4: Junior are effectively eugenic in nature and now the twisted
Speaker 4: history of eugenics and racist public health abuses in the
Speaker 4: United States has unfortunately buttressed the viral anti vax ideology
Speaker 4: we are dealing with today. Thanks for listening to episode
Speaker 4: three of Anti vax America for It Could Happen Here.
Speaker 4: Until next time, I'm Steven Monicelli.
Speaker 3: Thanks for listening.
Speaker 4: I'm Stephen Monicelli, a journalist in Dallas and an occasional
Speaker 4: contributor to Cool Zone Media. And welcome to episode four
Speaker 4: of Anti vax America, a special five part mini series
Speaker 4: for It Could Happen Here exploring the measles outbreak as
Speaker 4: a microcosm for where we are now, how we got here,
Speaker 4: and where we could be going. Today's episode we'll focus
Speaker 4: on the twisted history of eugenics as it relates to
Speaker 4: vaccinations and how the current MAHA agenda, as pushed by
Speaker 4: RFK Junior, is a sort of echo of eugenic beliefs
Speaker 4: of the past. Vaccination hesitancy historically has been framed by
Speaker 4: opponents to vaccines as a matter of medical freedom, about
Speaker 4: the ability to decide what one wants to do with
Speaker 4: their own body. It's an argument that we've discussed can
Speaker 4: appeal to crunchy granola types and religious zellets.
Speaker 3: Alike.
Speaker 4: But there's also a darker side to this rhetoric that
Speaker 4: reveals an embrace of eugenic ideas among anti vax advocates
Speaker 4: who prefer quote unquote herd immunity approaches to outbreaks, which
Speaker 4: subordinate the interests of older people, those with disabilities, and
Speaker 4: members of minority communities to those who choose not to
Speaker 4: be vaccinated. On this episode of Anti vax America, we
Speaker 4: will dive into the overlapping histories of eugenic thinking and
Speaker 4: anti vaccination beliefs to untangle this mess. As we previously
Speaker 4: discussed in episode two, vaccinations took off in the eighteen hundred,
Speaker 4: shortly after the creation of the first smallpox vaccine in
Speaker 4: seventeen ninety six, and so did anti vaccination rhetoric and movements.
Speaker 4: In parallel, there were a lot of scientific developments going on.
Speaker 4: The eighteen hundreds were a heady time in Western science.
Speaker 4: There was Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, which was
Speaker 4: presented in Darwin's eighteen fifty nine book on the Origin
Speaker 4: of Species. Five years later, sociologist Herbert Spencer mixed concepts
Speaker 4: from Thomas Malthus, the economists who proposed that population growth
Speaker 4: withul outpaced food production, with Darwin's theory to coin the
Speaker 4: term survival of the fittest and apply it to industrial capitalism,
Speaker 4: with the end conclusion that basically those who were on
Speaker 4: top were deserving of all of the privileges that they have,
Speaker 4: and that those at the bottom were also deserving of
Speaker 4: their position in society. In eighteen eighty three, Darwin's cousin
Speaker 4: Francis Galton, coined to term eugenics in his book Inquiries
Speaker 4: into Human Fertility. In its developments, the book proposed to give,
Speaker 4: to quote, more suitable races a better chance of prevailing
Speaker 4: speedily over the less suitable. To understand a bit more
Speaker 4: about Galton's thinking, I spoke with doctor Michael Phillips, who
Speaker 4: we heard from in a previous episode.
Speaker 15: Galton was in despair that all those improvements in delivery
Speaker 15: of healthcare, medical care itself, nutrition, all the humanitarian efforts
Speaker 15: to improve the workplace, eliminate child labor, improve factories so
Speaker 15: people don't get blown up, etc. What that was doing
Speaker 15: was it was allowing the unfit, you know, the people
Speaker 15: he saw as inferior, to survive past childhood, to survive
Speaker 15: into adulthood. They have longer healthier lives. And if they
Speaker 15: live a longer lifespan and they're healthier during that span,
Speaker 15: they're going to have more children. And he believed that
Speaker 15: because they are less gifted with intelligence, you know, because
Speaker 15: you know, he said history is driven by genius. And
Speaker 15: he actually did the first major study on intelligence where
Speaker 15: he traced the family histories of what he said were
Speaker 15: the gifted men. And he claimed all of this was
Speaker 15: biological inheritance, you know, everything was biology. And not only that,
Speaker 15: but all traits, all traits, were biological work ethic, honesty,
Speaker 15: fidelity to your partner, alcoholism, every single trait a human
Speaker 15: might have he tied to biology. And he said that
Speaker 15: the people with the worst traits that it's called dysgenic
Speaker 15: people who were dishenic, people had the worst traits, were
Speaker 15: now producing large families. And because they were less intelligent,
Speaker 15: they gave into their sexual urges more often. They didn't
Speaker 15: plan families based on their economic circumstances. They were impulsive,
Speaker 15: while we have eight children, let's have sex, and you
Speaker 15: know if we have a ninth child, well we have
Speaker 15: a ninth child. And that meant that those families were
Speaker 15: growing exponentially. But the fit who plan their families more carefully,
Speaker 15: and you know, the partners are busier. Job creators is
Speaker 15: innovators and science and education. The women want to have
Speaker 15: a life outside of the home.
Speaker 14: That they were less fertile, they were having fewer children.
Speaker 15: And of course what the result would be is you
Speaker 15: have the unfit out numbering the fit, and that leads
Speaker 15: to catastrophe society falls upon.
Speaker 4: These sorts of ideas are represented in the satirical two
Speaker 4: thousand and six film Idiocracy, which plays out a future
Speaker 4: in which stupid people outbreed smart people and society consequently devolves.
Speaker 1: As the twenty first century began, human evolution was at
Speaker 1: a turning point. Natural selection, the process by which the strongest,
Speaker 1: the smartest, the fastest reproduced in greater numbers than the rest,
Speaker 1: A process which had once favored the noblest traits of
Speaker 1: man now began to favor different traits. Most science fiction
Speaker 1: of the day predicted a future that was more civilized
Speaker 1: and more intelligent, but as time went on, things seemed
Speaker 1: to be heading in the opposite direction, a dumbing down.
Speaker 1: How did this happen? Evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence.
Speaker 1: With no natural predators to thin the herd, it began
Speaker 1: to simply reward those who reproduced the most and left
Speaker 1: the intelligent to become an dangered species.
Speaker 4: Having kids is such an important decision.
Speaker 8: We're just waiting for the right time.
Speaker 5: It's not something you want to rush into.
Speaker 6: Obviously, no way.
Speaker 7: Shit, I'm putting it again.
Speaker 16: To mean, damn kids, thought you was on the pills
Speaker 16: and shit, No, must have been Brittany.
Speaker 4: Well certainly meant in jest. The fundamental principle of idiocracy
Speaker 4: demonstrates the staying power of Galton's eugenic ideas, which became
Speaker 4: highly influential in the twentieth century. Within two decades of
Speaker 4: the release of his book coining the term eugenics, eugenic
Speaker 4: thinking was widespread among white Anglo Saxon leaders of the West.
Speaker 4: But before we hear more about that from doctor Michael Phillips,
Speaker 4: a quick ad.
Speaker 15: Break two biggest eugenicists in the early twentieth century. They
Speaker 15: were best selling authors Madison Grant, who was a friend
Speaker 15: of Theodore Roosevelt's, and Walthorpe Stoddard. Stoddard in particular warned
Speaker 15: that this was fueling radical politics, that the unfit essentially
Speaker 15: were demanding the riches created by the geniuses in the world,
Speaker 15: and they were expropriating the wealth they created, and they
Speaker 15: were they were just milking the fit for every advance,
Speaker 15: and that as that became more difficult, that would breed
Speaker 15: revolution and sodder. In particular thought there was a link
Speaker 15: to communist revolution. As advancements in sanitation and modern medicine
Speaker 15: continued in parallel with the spread of leftist thought, eugenicists
Speaker 15: were consumed with nightmares of a Malthusian crisis and were
Speaker 15: increasingly worried about their position in society. Something in their
Speaker 15: minds had to be done to stem the growing tide
Speaker 15: of unfit masses. Because natural selection in the minds of
Speaker 15: the genesis had basically been suspended the force sterilizations were
Speaker 15: the substitute for that. Eugenicists were in despair about vaccines,
Speaker 15: but there was an organized campaign to ban them on
Speaker 15: eugenics reasons, because I think they knew politically that would
Speaker 15: be unpopular, because there were enough people who realize they
Speaker 15: could see the benefits as vaccinations became more common.
Speaker 4: In other words, some early genesists were both supportive of
Speaker 4: things like for sterilization, but were also opposed to vaccinations
Speaker 4: because they believed that vaccinations would allow the weak and
Speaker 4: unfit to survive, prosper and multiply. But not all eugenicists
Speaker 4: were inherently opposed to vaccinations. The Nazi regime, which exterminated
Speaker 4: millions of Jews and other people deemed undesirable, also embraced
Speaker 4: widespread vaccination against diseases like typhus, even if they actually
Speaker 4: rolled back mandatory vaccination laws that had been put in
Speaker 4: place prior to the rise of the Nazis. Nevertheless, the
Speaker 4: relationship between eugenic thinking and anti vax beliefs goes deep,
Speaker 4: and it reveals it helpful heuristic for thinking about eugenics. So,
Speaker 4: on the one hand, there's a sort of active or
Speaker 4: hard eugenics, in which medical authorities or the state forcefully
Speaker 4: sterilize and exterminate people who are deemed unfit. And then
Speaker 4: on the other hand, there's a sort of passive or
Speaker 4: soft eugenics, in which potentially preventable deaths are written off
Speaker 4: as a product of a process in which the fittest
Speaker 4: survive and go on to improve the overall gene pool. Now,
Speaker 4: before we go any further, it is important to note
Speaker 4: that eugenics has been morally and scientifically discredited so thoroughly
Speaker 4: that it shouldn't even be necessary to mention it. But unfortunately,
Speaker 4: eugenicis thinking is in resurgence. President Donald Trump himself, I
Speaker 4: said there are a lot of bad genes in our
Speaker 4: country right now, and that immigrants are poisoning the blood
Speaker 4: of our country.
Speaker 15: That's been an ongoing thing with immigration debates ever since
Speaker 15: the late nineteenth century, this idea that certain groups of
Speaker 15: immigrants are disease carriers, and that has particularly been aimed
Speaker 15: at Mexican immigrants.
Speaker 14: That's been an ongoing thing.
Speaker 15: And during COVID, Greg Gabbott, who's the governor of Texas,
Speaker 15: was saying it was Mexican immigrants, undocumented immigrants, who were
Speaker 15: bringing COVID to Texas. At one point he made that accusation,
Speaker 15: and it's exactly like what they were saying. We had
Speaker 15: in Texas during this period this panic about immigration, late
Speaker 15: nineteenth early twenties century. Galveston, a medical doctor who was
Speaker 15: inspecting people coming into the Port of Galveston who were
Speaker 15: Jewish immigrants, and he was rejecting them because he saying
Speaker 15: they're carrying infectious eye diseases, tuberculosis, all of that, and
Speaker 15: Jewish civil Rights scripts had to intervene to stop that.
Speaker 4: Racism, anti Semitism, and eugenics historically have gone hand in hand,
Speaker 4: but it hasn't been since the early nineteen hundreds that
Speaker 4: people who hold such beliefs also hold so much power
Speaker 4: in the state. RFK Junior, a longtime anti vaccination activist
Speaker 4: and now head of the United States Department of Health
Speaker 4: and Human Services, said in twenty twenty three that COVID
Speaker 4: was quote ethnically targeted to spare Ashkenazi, Jews and Chinese people. Now,
Speaker 4: his make America Healthy Again agenda is absolutely dripping with
Speaker 4: soft eugenic thinking. And to unravel all that, I spoke
Speaker 4: with doctor David Gorski, a doctor who regularly writes in
Speaker 4: a blog called Science Based Medicine.
Speaker 7: My name is David Gorsky. I'm a professor of surgery
Speaker 7: and oncology at Mayne State University in Detroit.
Speaker 4: So, doctor Gorski, you're also a bit of a writer,
Speaker 4: and you keep a pretty regular blog in chi Opine
Speaker 4: on a number of things, and recently you've written a
Speaker 4: couple blog posts about the measles outbreak, the anti vaccination movement.
Speaker 4: RFK Juniors Make America Healthy again an agenda, and you
Speaker 4: know what folks over at the Conspiratuality podcast called soft eugenics,
Speaker 4: or perhaps what we could also think of as a
Speaker 4: sort of social Darwinist logic or sort of passive eugenics.
Speaker 7: You know, a couple of months ago, when I first
Speaker 7: came across the episode of Conspiratuality, which was called MAHA's
Speaker 7: soft Eugenics, like a kind of like a light bulb
Speaker 7: went off in my brain in that it sort of
Speaker 7: helped me crystallize things that I had been thinking of
Speaker 7: about the anti vaccine movement, but not so much the
Speaker 7: rest of Maha, which, you know, let's face it, a
Speaker 7: mishmash of you know, anti vaccine beliefs, you know, appeals
Speaker 7: to nature, anti pharma, a lot of quackery mixed in
Speaker 7: with some you know, semi reasonable stuff like you know, yeah, sure, diet, exercise,
Speaker 7: it's good for you. I think Measles really epitomizes what
Speaker 7: they called the quote unquote soft eugenics, which was basically,
Speaker 7: instead of you know, like actively trying to kill children
Speaker 7: or people that you know whose genes you don't want
Speaker 7: passed on, you're basically letting nature do it. And you
Speaker 7: hear this a lot when they talk about For example,
Speaker 7: one of the most common arguments you'll hear from anti
Speaker 7: vaxers about measles is that, you know, if someone gets
Speaker 7: really sick from measles or dies of measles, they must
Speaker 7: have had something wrong with them, They must not have
Speaker 7: been healthy. Like that, Measles is harmless if you are healthy.
Speaker 7: And of course, you know, there's a whole lot of
Speaker 7: appeal to virtu you as far as health goes. In
Speaker 7: other words, there's this this belief system that's kind of
Speaker 7: embedded in Maha, and it's been around for ages and
Speaker 7: ages in the alternative medicine crowd, that you know, you
Speaker 7: have basically total control over your health. In other words,
Speaker 7: if you do the right things, eat the right diet,
Speaker 7: you know, take the right supplements, you know, do the
Speaker 7: exercise appropriately, you know, you can keep yourself healthy. And
Speaker 7: it's even as good as vaccines or better to prevent
Speaker 7: vaccine preventable diseases, infectious diseases. Right.
Speaker 4: So, I think that's a great way to understand the
Speaker 4: differences here. You know, we're not talking about the hard
Speaker 4: active eugenics of the past, which was epitomized by the
Speaker 4: Nazi regime and their quote unquote final solution.
Speaker 7: And also, you know, you're in the good old us
Speaker 7: of AGA.
Speaker 4: Years ago, right you know, or even you know, in
Speaker 4: the lingering sterilization regimes that continued up until you know,
Speaker 4: the later twentieth century, which we're you know, sort of
Speaker 4: originally rooted in this idea that we should be calling
Speaker 4: people out of the reproductive pool who have these undesirable
Speaker 4: traits or are you know, considered to be unfit in
Speaker 4: some way.
Speaker 3: So that's not what we're talking about.
Speaker 4: We're talking about this more let nature take its course,
Speaker 4: survival of the fittest type mindset. I don't know if
Speaker 4: it's a resurgence or it's just continuing to gain in popularity.
Speaker 4: There's a recent conference, it's been one of two conferences
Speaker 4: that have happened in Austin, Texas where a lot of
Speaker 4: these quote unquote liberal eugenicists also met up with people
Speaker 4: who are in the pro natalist movement. And then there's
Speaker 4: this overlap with people who are kind of dabbling in
Speaker 4: race science or trying to resuscitate old ideas that are
Speaker 4: basically you know, eugenic in nature with regard to some people,
Speaker 4: you know, being smarter by genetic basis.
Speaker 7: I mean there's a lot of that around too, and
Speaker 7: that's not soft eugenics, that's like straight up eugenic.
Speaker 4: Right, And so there's a continuum, you could say, there's
Speaker 4: this spectrum, and you know, these things are not disconnected,
Speaker 4: but they also can be understood as somewhat discrete phenomenon
Speaker 4: or ideologies or belief systems. And so you did write
Speaker 4: a little bit about one specific document that you know,
Speaker 4: I hadn't been particularly familiar with, called the Great Barrington Declaration.
Speaker 3: Can you talk about that?
Speaker 7: Okay, So I can't believe it's like four and a
Speaker 7: half years ago now, but way back in early October
Speaker 7: of twenty twenty three, scientists were brought together by a
Speaker 7: far right wing, you know, activist named Jeffrey Tucker, who
Speaker 7: was associated with a right wing thing tank at the
Speaker 7: time called the American Institute for Economic Research. The idea
Speaker 7: behind the document was, you know, all of these measures
Speaker 7: to control COVID are like destroying the economy. So what
Speaker 7: we should really do, supposedly based on science but not really,
Speaker 7: as I'll get into, is to let the virus spread
Speaker 7: among quote unquote young and healthy, you know, those who
Speaker 7: are not at high risk, so not the elderly, not
Speaker 7: those with pre existing conditions that make them high risk
Speaker 7: for severe disease complications and death from COVID. Just let
Speaker 7: it spread to reach what they call, you know, quote
Speaker 7: unquote natural herd immunity heard immunity for those not familiar
Speaker 7: with it, is when a pathogen is so prevalent in
Speaker 7: the population and that so many people have developed what
Speaker 7: they call natural immunity, but the more appropriate term is
Speaker 7: post infection immunity. You know, immunity after having been infected
Speaker 7: to the point where you know a sufficient proportion of
Speaker 7: the population is immune and the virus doesn't spread much
Speaker 7: like if you have a sufficient proportion of the population
Speaker 7: vaccinated the virus, you know, you might get sporadic cases
Speaker 7: in small outbreaks, but it just can't spread further. If
Speaker 7: you don't know much about infectious diseases, including COVID, it
Speaker 7: sounds like not unreasonable given that there wasn't a vaccine
Speaker 7: back then. The other part of it is what they
Speaker 7: call quote unquote focus protection. So the idea is supposedly
Speaker 7: that you could protect those at high risk while letting
Speaker 7: the virus circulate, which are pretty incompatible because how are
Speaker 7: you going to you know, how are you going to
Speaker 7: keep these high risk people from coming into contact with
Speaker 7: people who could have the virus, unless you like quarantine
Speaker 7: them all or something like that, which again would be
Speaker 7: impractical because you know, it's what twenty percent of the
Speaker 7: population at least. The other problem with this idea is
Speaker 7: for there to be natural herd immunity. I hate that term,
Speaker 7: but I'll use it just because it's what they use.
Speaker 7: A couple of conditions are necessary. First, post infection immunity
Speaker 7: has to be life long or at least very long lasting.
Speaker 7: The second is, in other words, that the virus can't
Speaker 7: be mutating to avoid immunity, which we all know now
Speaker 7: and even new then that coronaviruses are very good at doing.
Speaker 7: So that it was expected that you know, new variants
Speaker 7: would come up and they could evade even post infection
Speaker 7: immunity in terms of like influenza. That's why the flu
Speaker 7: vaccine has to be updated, you know, every year, because
Speaker 7: the strains mutate, and the rise of the delta wave,
Speaker 7: the omicron wave, et cetera kind of showed that people
Speaker 7: getting infected again and again that you know, post infection
Speaker 7: immunity for COVID was not long lasting, so basically maybe
Speaker 7: Barrington Declaration was, you know, giving up more than anything
Speaker 7: else in order to let people make money again. And
Speaker 7: it never would have worked because even back then, we
Speaker 7: had every reason to expect that post infection immunity after
Speaker 7: COVID infection would not be long lasting, and that the
Speaker 7: virus would mutate and you know, come up with new
Speaker 7: strains that could bypass pre existing immunity from previous infections. However,
Speaker 7: this idea was very influential, and in fact, the Great
Speaker 7: Barrington Declaration was kind of late in the game because
Speaker 7: the idea of just letting the virus spread to achieve
Speaker 7: natural herd immunity was being pushed as early as March
Speaker 7: and April in twenty twenty. And one of the writers
Speaker 7: are the scientists who wrote the Great Barrington Declaration is
Speaker 7: now our director of the NIH, doctor J. Bodichario. The
Speaker 7: other was doctor Senatragupta in England. And then there was
Speaker 7: of course Martin Cauldorf, who I now hear is involved
Speaker 7: in the autism you know vaccine study that RFK Junior
Speaker 7: is supposedly organizing. So basically, you know, these these the
Speaker 7: idea behind the Great Barrington Declaration, far from being censored
Speaker 7: and canceled, et cetera, actually found purchase at the highest
Speaker 7: levels of government in the US and the UK, the
Speaker 7: Boris Johnson government and Donald Trump administration both. You know,
Speaker 7: listen to these scientists and I mean Great Barrington Declaration
Speaker 7: writers you know, actually got to meet with Trump at
Speaker 7: one point, I believe in July, and it was unfortunately
Speaker 7: very influential and discouraged stronger public health measures. I did
Speaker 7: call this idea eugenicist at the time, although maybe you
Speaker 7: can argue if it's soft eugenics or social Darwinist. I mean,
Speaker 7: maybe more social Darwinists, given that, oh well, it's kind
Speaker 7: of like screw the old people who will die of this,
Speaker 7: you know, seem to be part of the attitude behind it.
Speaker 7: You know, we throw up this focused protection kind of
Speaker 7: as an afterthought, you know, where the main idea is
Speaker 7: just to you know, let the virus spread and most
Speaker 7: people will be okay. And this is the same sort
Speaker 7: of idea that we that I heard again and again
Speaker 7: years and years before with the measles, you know, and
Speaker 7: in fact, if you go back to twenty fifteen, which
Speaker 7: was you know, after the Disneyland measles outbreak, and during
Speaker 7: the holidays of twenty fourteen that you know took part.
Speaker 7: In the early part of twenty fifteen, you would see
Speaker 7: a lot of anti vaccine activists going on and on
Speaker 7: about how if you just keep yourself healthy, measles is
Speaker 7: not a danger, that natural immunity to measles is far
Speaker 7: greater than vaccine induced immunity. What they always fail to
Speaker 7: mention is that the price of getting post infection immunity
Speaker 7: can be besides just being sick. Could it involve the
Speaker 7: risk of you know, complications, neurologic damage, or even.
Speaker 4: Death right And so in a way, there's a sort
Speaker 4: of moralization around health in that, you know, it's something
Speaker 4: that individuals have to be personally responsible for, and as
Speaker 4: you said, if they succumbed to an illness like measles,
Speaker 4: it is sort of an indication that maybe they were
Speaker 4: unfit in some way or unhealthy, And his dovetails with
Speaker 4: something you also wrote about RFK Junior's recent speech in
Speaker 4: which he talked about autism and described it as a
Speaker 4: tsunami and likened it to an epidemic. He claimed that
Speaker 4: the increasing statistical prevalence of autism is due to environmental
Speaker 4: risk factors and is something that is sort of induced
Speaker 4: by human behavior, as opposed to that statistical prevalence being
Speaker 4: a result of improvements and diagnostic tools that more accurately
Speaker 4: measure a phenomenon. And he also portrayed autistic people as
Speaker 4: a sort of burden on society in you know, or
Speaker 4: people who will never be able to do things like
Speaker 4: fall in love or get a job, despite the fact
Speaker 4: that there are countless examples of people with autism or
Speaker 4: under the umbrella of what we call autism, doing exactly
Speaker 4: those things. And there's this undercurrent of rhetoric that you
Speaker 4: sort of describe it as an echo of something. I
Speaker 4: hadn't heard this term before, but I'm familiar with the
Speaker 4: idea of it, or rather the way in which it
Speaker 4: was deployed, the idea of quote unquote useless eaters. And so,
Speaker 4: can you just walk us through sort of what your
Speaker 4: reaction to RFK Junior's speech was in you know, how
Speaker 4: you made that connection.
Speaker 7: Well, look at what the very first thing he said
Speaker 7: about people with severe autism. Okay, what did he say?
Speaker 7: He said, they'll never pay taxes, they'll never have a job.
Speaker 7: And then oh, they'll never go on a date, they'll
Speaker 7: never play baseball. You know, it's what are the first
Speaker 7: two things he mentions paying taxes and having a job.
Speaker 7: This is straight up useless eaters rhetoric and useless eaters
Speaker 7: was basically a term that the Nazis used, you know,
Speaker 7: for people with you know, severe you know, neurologic conditions
Speaker 7: or diseases that made it such that they would require
Speaker 7: lifetime care and would never contribute to society. So that
Speaker 7: was the echo. I think that echo was pretty clear
Speaker 7: describing them that way. Now, the other interesting thing about
Speaker 7: the eugenics angle, there's a very strong denial of what
Speaker 7: we know thus far about autism, which is that it's
Speaker 7: like roughly eighty percent genetic. You know, you can argue
Speaker 7: over the exact figures, but it's predominantly genetic. I think
Speaker 7: there's little doubt about that. So parents who have an
Speaker 7: autistic child, they often blame themselves or they think, way,
Speaker 7: if it's genetic, that means it must be me and
Speaker 7: or my partner, you know, which if you're thinking in
Speaker 7: terms of the whole health is virtue thing, you know,
Speaker 7: if there is something about you that is not changeable,
Speaker 7: mainly your genetics, and that you know, no amount of
Speaker 7: exercise or you know, living right is going to change.
Speaker 7: It's easy to fall into denial of that and seek
Speaker 7: to blame something else. So there's that, And you know,
Speaker 7: one of the things I'm kind of afraid of is
Speaker 7: that if it becomes undeniable, you know, if they keep
Speaker 7: doing all this stuff and failing to find, you know,
Speaker 7: any real evidence that an external exposure is causing autism,
Speaker 7: and they're forced to reckon with autism being primarily but
Speaker 7: not exclusively, but primarily genetic, where does that lead you
Speaker 7: in terms of what do you do about autism? And
Speaker 7: my mind has gone in some fairly dark directions thinking
Speaker 7: about that, right.
Speaker 4: Right, And there's little discussion of what autistic people think
Speaker 4: or want.
Speaker 7: No, it doesn't matter to them at all. Really, In fact,
Speaker 7: they're almost entirely dismissive of what autistic people themselves think exactly.
Speaker 4: And there's also a total disregard for the value of
Speaker 4: difference and the contributions that people who are autistic have
Speaker 4: made to society that perhaps they might even correlate with
Speaker 4: the fact that they're autistic. So there's this total erasure
Speaker 4: of not only what an entire group of people actually
Speaker 4: want for themselves as advocates for themselves, but also their value,
Speaker 4: you know, not just as a group of people, but
Speaker 4: as individuals as well.
Speaker 7: To add to that, let's go back to around two
Speaker 7: thousand and seven, two thousand and eight, when Jenny McCarthy
Speaker 7: was the face of the anti vaccine movement. So like
Speaker 7: one of the things she said after, you know, supposedly
Speaker 7: after her son Evan got vaccinated, was that quote unquote,
Speaker 7: the light went out of his eyes. And then you
Speaker 7: hear this a lot when parents realize their children are
Speaker 7: showing the signs of you know, the early signs of autism.
Speaker 7: Is it like they there's language about how their child
Speaker 7: was stolen from them? In other words, is if this
Speaker 7: autistic child is not their child, rather their idealized version
Speaker 7: of what their child should be is their real child
Speaker 7: or their quote unquote normal child. This is some really
Speaker 7: ancient stuff in that, you know, I don't know if
Speaker 7: you there's the whole idea of the changeling myth, in
Speaker 7: which you know, the idea being, you know, children with
Speaker 7: mental illness, you know, have been taken over or their changelings,
Speaker 7: they are no longer what they were before it's almost
Speaker 7: as if they are no long longer human. I mean,
Speaker 7: the dehumanization that you hear from the anti vaccine movement
Speaker 7: about autism has long been horrific, and it's just that
Speaker 7: up until now, most people have not heard that rhetoric,
Speaker 7: and now they're hearing it from a high government official,
Speaker 7: and it is becoming federal health policy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that is certainly a new development. Is something we've.
Speaker 4: Discussed on previous episodes is the deeper history of anti
Speaker 4: vaccination belief or hesitancy that goes deep in American history.
Speaker 4: You know, for almost as long as vaccines have ever existed,
Speaker 4: it has rarely ever been enshrined in law and policy.
Speaker 3: In the way that it is now being done.
Speaker 4: And so we've talked about one of these people, high
Speaker 4: level government officials, RFK Junior, whose statements have drawn your
Speaker 4: attention and elicited your concern.
Speaker 3: But he's not the only one.
Speaker 4: So you also write about oprah adjacent television personality, doctor
Speaker 4: men at Oz.
Speaker 7: Yeah, well, doctor Oz actually sort of surprised me a
Speaker 7: little bit, but then in retrospect not really. So I'm
Speaker 7: surprised there wasn't more commentary about this. But when he
Speaker 7: gave his brief little acceptance speech after having been confirmed
Speaker 7: as the Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services,
Speaker 7: which is the part of HHS that administers you know, Medicare, Medicaid,
Speaker 7: Affordable Care Act. It's like really important, you know, huge programs.
Speaker 7: When he said, basically, it is your patriotic duty to
Speaker 7: take care of yourself, you know it, to be healthy.
Speaker 7: And then he goes, oh, and it feels better as well.
Speaker 7: But he said, it's your patriotic duty to take care
Speaker 7: of yourself and be healthy because then you you know,
Speaker 7: draw less. I'm paraphrasing because I don't remember exactly what
Speaker 7: he said, but because you pull less from the pool,
Speaker 7: you know, which interestingly echoes exactly almost exactly, other than
Speaker 7: the patriotic duty part what RFK Junior said. When Bernie
Speaker 7: Sanders asked if healthcare was a human right, as you recall,
Speaker 7: RFKA Junior did his best not to answer, you know,
Speaker 7: he dodged and weaved around the question, and then he
Speaker 7: brought up the example of a someone who smokes cigarettes
Speaker 7: for decades and then develops lung cancer and is now
Speaker 7: drawing from the pool. He was like, very you know,
Speaker 7: emphasized drawing from the pool as if that person does
Speaker 7: not deserve healthcare basically because an addiction gave you cancer.
Speaker 7: Because you know, what he neglects to mention is just
Speaker 7: how addictives, you know, tobacco and nicotine are. And as
Speaker 7: a former addict himself, you know, I found that striking.
Speaker 7: But coming back to the whole patriotic duty thing, you know,
Speaker 7: the whole idea is, again, health is virtue. You control
Speaker 7: your health, and if you don't do the right things
Speaker 7: and become ill, that you're somehow less worthy of healthcare.
Speaker 16: Right.
Speaker 4: And there's an interesting thread there in that some eugenesis thinkers,
Speaker 4: at least American ones, were somewhat concerned about, you know,
Speaker 4: the idea that vaccinations could prevent the weak or the
Speaker 4: unfit from being called naturally.
Speaker 7: Oh yes, definitely. Yeah, So there is some.
Speaker 4: Linkage here, even if these are somewhat discrete ideas. And
Speaker 4: you know, you also quoted something from a doctor Oz
Speaker 4: speech back in twenty thirteen. You pulled a video that
Speaker 4: had been resurfaced in recent years, and Oz said people
Speaker 4: don't have a right to health if they're uninsured. And
Speaker 4: so it's not like what he's saying is kind of
Speaker 4: new for him. He's been saying things like this for
Speaker 4: a while. And the idea that, you know, there's this
Speaker 4: national body that we all have a duty to sort
Speaker 4: of be healthy cells of is something that there's a
Speaker 4: long history of that sort of thinking and policy.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yes, the whole I mean, I couldn't help but
Speaker 7: think of Nazis and.
Speaker 15: The whole.
Speaker 7: Crick aside.
Speaker 4: For those who don't know, the Nazi idea of the
Speaker 4: vulcan has a few elements to it. Not only does
Speaker 4: it relate to racial and cultural homogeneity, but it also
Speaker 4: conceives of the nation as a sort of body composed
Speaker 4: of cells, one that must be cleansed of unfit or unhealthy.
Speaker 3: Cells in order to become perfect.
Speaker 4: In other words, a dutiful number of the Vulcan would
Speaker 4: prioritize their health as a sort of patriotic or nationalistic duty,
Speaker 4: and would participate in eugenic programs to eliminate the unfit.
Speaker 7: You know, I'm not saying this is straight up Nazi
Speaker 7: or anything like that. It's just that these sorts of
Speaker 7: themes have echoed through you know, not just eugenicist movements,
Speaker 7: but nationalist and authoritarian movement.
Speaker 3: And there's this concerning development.
Speaker 4: RFK Junior has proposed basically creating like a national database
Speaker 4: or registry of people with autism and if it's not
Speaker 4: just autism, maybe other disorders like ADHD. And if you
Speaker 4: read reports that interview people with autism or similar disorders,
Speaker 4: they are very concerned by this for the reasons that
Speaker 4: you just described. So the creation of this database could
Speaker 4: be framed as a way to improve our ability to
Speaker 4: understand this hypothetical linkage that they are so doggedly stuck
Speaker 4: on between autism and vaccines. But I think those who
Speaker 4: know their history could easily imagine such a tool being
Speaker 4: used for other more nefarious purposes, because similar policies were
Speaker 4: passed in Germany in the nineteen thirties to sort of,
Speaker 4: you know, identify these people and categorize them and then
Speaker 4: eventually do what they did with them. So, you know,
Speaker 4: for all those sorts of reasons, and you know also
Speaker 4: the fact that we're living at a time in which
Speaker 4: American citizens and legal residents are being sent to a
Speaker 4: foreign prison colony as is certainly you know something that
Speaker 4: I think people are picking up on and maybe making
Speaker 4: connections with.
Speaker 7: As you mentioned a lot of autistic people don't want
Speaker 7: to be on this database, and as a result, I've
Speaker 7: read reports in the news of parents are asking that
Speaker 7: their child not be given a diagnosis of autism so
Speaker 7: that they don't end up in the database, which could
Speaker 7: artificially cause, you know, the prevalence of autism to level
Speaker 7: off and start to decline, at which point RFK declares victory.
Speaker 4: We'll hear a bit more from doctor Gorski after a
Speaker 4: quick ad break. There's a recent proposal out of rfk's
Speaker 4: HHS that intends to provide placebo vaccines during testing for
Speaker 4: all quote unquote new vaccines.
Speaker 7: So the idea is, the vaccines in the childhood schedule
Speaker 7: have quote unquote never been tested against placebo control. Although
Speaker 7: ironically it's funny I did. I read an article the
Speaker 7: other day where they did admit that the COVID vaccine
Speaker 7: for children was indeed tested against a placebo control. I'm
Speaker 7: kind of surprised they conceded that, but I guess sometimes
Speaker 7: they have to concede reality. But here's the idea. So
Speaker 7: it's true that some of the vaccines have not been
Speaker 7: tested against the strict saline placebo control that they want,
Speaker 7: but there are a number of reasons for that. The
Speaker 7: primary reason is ethics. So let's go back. So, if
Speaker 7: you have a new vaccine that is for a disease
Speaker 7: that has never had an approved vaccine before, yes, it's
Speaker 7: tested against a placebo control. This has been the case
Speaker 7: for a very long time. However, if you have a
Speaker 7: new vaccine for a disease that already has a vaccine
Speaker 7: that's been approved as safe and effective and is the
Speaker 7: standard of care, it is completely unethical to do a
Speaker 7: randomized study where you know one third to half of
Speaker 7: the participants will be randomized to a group that does
Speaker 7: not get the standard of care treatment as in, you know,
Speaker 7: the vaccine or the standard of care preventative. In that case,
Speaker 7: the only ethical way to test the new vaccine against
Speaker 7: the disease for which there's already a vaccine is to
Speaker 7: test it against an existing vaccine and then make sure
Speaker 7: that it is at least not inferior or preferably better. So,
Speaker 7: if you trace back the lineage of all the vaccines
Speaker 7: on the childhood vaccine schedule, if you go back to
Speaker 7: the first vaccine against the disease that was approved, it
Speaker 7: was tested against you know, placebo when it was a
Speaker 7: new vaccine against a disease that didn't have a vaccine.
Speaker 4: I'm wondering if you agree with this, but it does
Speaker 4: sound like this proposal if it were to be implemented
Speaker 4: in a way that involves vaccines for existing diseases that
Speaker 4: have already been treated with vaccines, If there were placebos
Speaker 4: introduced into this testing, and you know, like you said,
Speaker 4: there's a random percentage of people that were given a placebo.
Speaker 4: I mean to me, it recalls like a soft version
Speaker 4: of a Tuskegee experiment.
Speaker 7: Yeah. I've been meaning to make that that analogy, but
Speaker 7: you beat me to it.
Speaker 4: As we discussed in a prior episode in this series,
Speaker 4: the Tuskegee Syphlist Study was a horrifically unethical, racist and
Speaker 4: eugenic experiment that helped seed a long standing distrust of
Speaker 4: vaccines and medical authorities, particularly among minority communities in the
Speaker 4: United States, and it straddled the intersection of hard and
Speaker 4: soft eugenics. While it was not a forced sterilization program,
Speaker 4: the intent of the experiment was to test the eugenic
Speaker 4: hypothesis that racial groups were differently susceptible to infectious diseases,
Speaker 4: and that's because they basically believed that black people had
Speaker 4: different nervous systems than white people and that they were
Speaker 4: not the same. And they also allowed black men who
Speaker 4: could have otherwise been treated for syphilis, which there were
Speaker 4: treatments for it at the time, to instead suffer and
Speaker 4: die after being given placebo treatments without their knowledge. Children's
Speaker 4: health defense while under the leadership of RFK, Junior invoked
Speaker 4: the Tuskegee syphilist experiment in a recent anti vaccine film
Speaker 4: that they specifically promoted to Black Americans to encourage vaccine skepticism,
Speaker 4: and now the former leader of that organization is proposing
Speaker 4: an approach to vaccines that is eerily reminiscent of the
Speaker 4: sordid Tuskegee experiment. In the post COVID world, vaccination rates
Speaker 4: are on the decline, and anti vaccination beliefs are spreading
Speaker 4: in tandem with eugenesis thinking. The rhetoric of the leaders
Speaker 4: of our top health bureaucracies recall chilling episodes in recent history,
Speaker 4: ones that we would rather not repeat. But because we
Speaker 4: have history as a guide, it is not impossible for
Speaker 4: us to imagine what could happen if things continue to
Speaker 4: trend in the direction we are already headed, so on
Speaker 4: the next episode of Anti vax America, I'll explore some
Speaker 4: of the worst case scenarios that could unfold if the
Speaker 4: proponents of the Maha agenda get their way. I'm Stephen Monchelli.
Speaker 3: Until next time.
Speaker 4: Welcome to the final episode of Anti vax America, a
Speaker 4: special mini series from it could happen here. I'm your host,
Speaker 4: Stephen Monachelli, a journalist in Dallas and sometimes contributor to
Speaker 4: Cool Zone Media. Over the past episodes, we've explored the
Speaker 4: origins of the current measles outbreak, the historical roots of
Speaker 4: the anti vaccination movement, the overlap between vaccine hesitancy and
Speaker 4: conservative Christianity that upholds a strong belief in spiritual healing,
Speaker 4: and the eugenic implications of contemporary anti vaxx ideology and
Speaker 4: the MAHA movement. In this episode, we'll explore the future.
Speaker 4: Could the United States see a massive return of viral outbreaks,
Speaker 4: How would a nationwide collapse and vaccination rates impact our
Speaker 4: public health? And what are we to make of the
Speaker 4: rise of alt medicine and whether that could continue to
Speaker 4: spread if people like RFK Junior elevate these hucksters into
Speaker 4: national figures. These are not just academic questions. If vaccination
Speaker 4: rates continue to decline, we could see the return of
Speaker 4: diseases like polio, which had been eradicated in the United
Speaker 4: States for decades. In recent years, there have been cases
Speaker 4: of polio found in waste water and one confirmed case
Speaker 4: of a man with polio in an unvaccinated.
Speaker 3: Community in New York.
Speaker 4: An expert warned that these isolated incidents could spread into
Speaker 4: larger outbreaks, and these concerns are well founded, particularly given
Speaker 4: that RFK Junior has said as recently as twenty twenty
Speaker 4: three that early batches of polio vaccines caused cancer, something
Speaker 4: that has never been demonstrated in the research. Vaccination is
Speaker 4: the most effective tool we have to prevent the spread
Speaker 4: of communicable, deadly diseases. Without widespread vaccination, we face the
Speaker 4: very real possibility of devastating public health crises, and the
Speaker 4: resurgence of diseases like measles in polio and smallpox and
Speaker 4: more would put our most vulnerable populations at risk, especially
Speaker 4: the elderly, the immunal compromised, and others who cannot be vaccinated.
Speaker 4: We don't have a crystal ball that will allow us
Speaker 4: to see into the future, but as the anti vaccination
Speaker 4: movement grows, it is clear that the risk of large
Speaker 4: scale outbreaks is increasing, and if we don't correct the
Speaker 4: course soon, we could see a public health disaster unlike
Speaker 4: any we've seen in recent history, perhaps even worse than COVID,
Speaker 4: which took more than one point one million American lives.
Speaker 4: In this episode, we will explore what could happen here
Speaker 4: in the United States if the anti vaccination movement continues
Speaker 4: to get their way. As I conducted interviews with medical
Speaker 4: doctors and public health experts featured in this series, I
Speaker 4: asked them all the same question, where do you see
Speaker 4: this going? Each had their own answer, and all of
Speaker 4: their answers pointed in the same direction. Here's Catherine Wells,
Speaker 4: the head of public health in Lubbock, the largest county
Speaker 4: in West Texas where the measles out break began.
Speaker 5: I do worry that, you know, we are going to
Speaker 5: see other vaccine preventable diseases. You know, measles is the
Speaker 5: most highly infectious. But for all of those people that
Speaker 5: are becoming infected with measles, you know they'll be immune,
Speaker 5: but that doesn't mean they're immune from mumps and rubella.
Speaker 5: And other vaccine preventable diseases that could easily enter a
Speaker 5: community with lower vaccination rates, and those can come next.
Speaker 5: So I mean that is concerning.
Speaker 4: Measles is sort of like a canary in the coal
Speaker 4: mine when it comes to vaccination rates. It's the first
Speaker 4: sign of a collapsing system. Here's doctor Peter Hotez, the
Speaker 4: vaccine scientists in Houston.
Speaker 13: You know, with the formation of anti vaccine groups in
Speaker 13: the twenty tens in Texas, you started to get these
Speaker 13: steep rides and parents requesting non medical exemptions that their
Speaker 13: kids could get out of being vaccinated for school. And
Speaker 13: it was particularly strong in the same places where people
Speaker 13: were refusing COVID vaccine. Years later, especially in conservative rural
Speaker 13: areas of West Texas East Texas, the vaccination rates continue
Speaker 13: to be strong in our cities of the Texas Triangle,
Speaker 13: Dallas where you are, in Houston where I am, and
Speaker 13: San Antonio and Austin. But you know, in the more
Speaker 13: conservative rural areas of West Texas East Texas, that's where
Speaker 13: you saw big declines in kids getting vaccines. And once
Speaker 13: you go below a certain threshold, roughly below ninety percent,
Speaker 13: and bam, that you start to see break through childhood infections,
Speaker 13: and usually the first one you see is measles. You
Speaker 13: can ultimately get all of them, but measles is the
Speaker 13: first one you see because it's so highly transmissible. It's
Speaker 13: the most transmissible virus we know about. So measles is
Speaker 13: kind of the whatever you want to call it, the
Speaker 13: early biomarker of a problem with your vaccination system. And unfortunately,
Speaker 13: it's just tearing through West Texas in the Panhandle, and
Speaker 13: now it's in four states, all more or less in
Speaker 13: the Great Plains area of the country. Right it's the
Speaker 13: Panhandle in West Texas at the southern end of the
Speaker 13: Plain's been into joining areas in Mexico, then going up
Speaker 13: into Oklahoma and now Kansas. And in my worry is
Speaker 13: that this is a very large probably much larger than
Speaker 13: is actually being reported. I mean, I don't see this
Speaker 13: thing wearing down anytime soon. And I'm worried about really
Speaker 13: prolonged measles epidemic to the point where we could even
Speaker 13: lose measles elimination status in the US if it goes
Speaker 13: on a full year. Between twenty twenty three and twenty
Speaker 13: twenty four, we've had a fourfold rise in measles epidemics outbreaks.
Speaker 13: We've had a sixfold rise in whooping cough for Tessa's cases.
Speaker 13: We've had polio up here in the wastewater in New
Speaker 13: York State, already trending in the wrong direction even before
Speaker 13: this current administration because of all the anti vaccine sentiment
Speaker 13: rhetoric out there. Now you throw on top of it
Speaker 13: efforts to actively dismantle our vaccine ecosystem, and I can
Speaker 13: only imagine what's going to happen. I really worry about
Speaker 13: the widespread return of all these childhood illnesses, just like
Speaker 13: we're seeing now with measles. I mean, we're looking at
Speaker 13: the potential of sustained transmission going on for months and
Speaker 13: months to the point where we could lose our measles
Speaker 13: elimination status, and then it goes on from there. Because
Speaker 13: measles is the most highly transmissible I worry about the
Speaker 13: same with whooping cough ptossis. I worry about even potentially
Speaker 13: polio returning, and not only in the US, because you know,
Speaker 13: as we both know, the US is very good at
Speaker 13: exporting its culture. We export our music, we export our movies.
Speaker 13: I worry about exporting this stuff, and I worry about
Speaker 13: the impact on Latin American countries, on low and middle
Speaker 13: income countries in Asia and Africa, and in Europe as well.
Speaker 13: So a complete unraveling of our vaccine ecosystem and global
Speaker 13: goals and that really gives me a lot of pause
Speaker 13: for concern.
Speaker 3: And on that note, a quick ad break.
Speaker 4: It's probably safe to assume that the majority, if not
Speaker 4: the entirety, of the audience of this show grew up
Speaker 4: in a time when vaccinations were widely embraced and considered beneficial.
Speaker 4: That also means that most of us have never lived
Speaker 4: during a time when children and adults were regularly disabled
Speaker 4: or killed by diseases like smallpox or polio. In the
Speaker 4: twentieth century, three hundred million people were killed by smallpox
Speaker 4: in the nineteen forties and nineteen fifties. Polio killed nearly
Speaker 4: half a million people world wide annually and paralyzed hundreds
Speaker 4: of thousands, but both of those diseases were effectively eradicated
Speaker 4: decades ago. The last person living in an iron lung,
Speaker 4: the medical device that keeps people who were paralyzed from
Speaker 4: polio alive, died in March of twenty twenty four, and
Speaker 4: even measles which is considered a relatively less dangerous illness,
Speaker 4: was routinely deadly before vaccination was widespread. There was a
Speaker 4: time when thousands of Americans died from the disease every year.
Speaker 4: All that was due to the creation of vaccine policy
Speaker 4: and infrastructure over time. But now RFK Junior and the
Speaker 4: MAHA movement threatened to tear all that down and send
Speaker 4: us back in time. Here's doctor David Gorsky.
Speaker 7: I'll start with vaccines, and then I'll try to move
Speaker 7: more to MAHA. So the vaccines. What I think we're
Speaker 7: seeing is the systematic, intentional dismantling of federal vaccine infrastructure
Speaker 7: and policy, this whole call for placebo controlled trials. If
Speaker 7: they define new vaccines as any new vaccine, it will
Speaker 7: mean that there will be no new vaccines approve until
Speaker 7: it's changed, which would at the earliest be after Trump
Speaker 7: is out of office. If they define it as just
Speaker 7: new vaccines for diseases that don't have vaccines, it might
Speaker 7: be less of an issue either way, though, contrary to
Speaker 7: what they claim they want to do, which is, you know,
Speaker 7: increase public confidence in vaccines, it will almost certainly have
Speaker 7: the opposite effect. I recently wrote I think, yeah, it was.
Speaker 7: Last week's post, I wrote about a study that modeled
Speaker 7: what would happen with certain percentage declines in vaccine uptake
Speaker 7: for four different vaccines, including the measles vaccine, of course,
Speaker 7: and it estimated, you know, some pretty catastrophic numbers if,
Speaker 7: for instance, vaccine uptake declined even ten percent or fifty
Speaker 7: percent over the next twenty five years, you know, millions
Speaker 7: of cases, thousands of deaths, you know, in other words,
Speaker 7: going back to basically the way it was before the
Speaker 7: measles vaccine was licensed in the early nineteen sixties. You know,
Speaker 7: you sure you can complain that, you know, the model
Speaker 7: was somewhat simplistic, but if anything, I think it was
Speaker 7: probably conservative because they used a lot of conservative assumptions.
Speaker 7: We could well be heading for that sort of future,
Speaker 7: although it takes a while for things to change, even
Speaker 7: with this sort of radical action that RFK Junior is taking,
Speaker 7: and likely we would not see the worst effects really
Speaker 7: take off until after Trump's out of office, assuming he
Speaker 7: leaves office in twenty twenty nine, so you know, it'll
Speaker 7: be left to his successors to deal with the mess.
Speaker 7: And it's always easier to destroy than it is to
Speaker 7: rebuild out. Obviously. Now the interesting counterpoint to you know,
Speaker 7: maha saying, oh, we must increase the gold standard science
Speaker 7: applied to vaccines and make the standards for approval and
Speaker 7: licensure you know, much more stringent. The exact opposite is
Speaker 7: what they're talking about. For things like stem cell therapies,
Speaker 7: you know, they're on the vast majority of which are
Speaker 7: unproven and often very expensive. A lot of other you know,
Speaker 7: wellness treatments and that sort of a thing. So we
Speaker 7: could be seeing a lot less novel pharmaceuticals and vaccines
Speaker 7: being approved because the anti pharma you know, suspicion will
Speaker 7: be such that the bar for approval will be higher,
Speaker 7: arguably too high. I realized that in the past I
Speaker 7: once argued that that maybe our bar for approving some
Speaker 7: drugs was too low, but that was more based on
Speaker 7: the various accelerated approval programs that had come into being
Speaker 7: in the years before that, where I thought that perhaps
Speaker 7: the follow allow up after the initial accelerated approval was
Speaker 7: not adequate. At the same time, it could become more
Speaker 7: and more like the Wild West when it comes to
Speaker 7: everything else. We could very well have the equivalent of
Speaker 7: you know, the traveling snake oil salesmen going across you know,
Speaker 7: the planes in their cart, you know, selling There are
Speaker 7: various lineaments. I'm not exactly sure what that would look like.
Speaker 7: I do know that, for instance, it's already pretty much
Speaker 7: like that for a lot of quote unquote stem cell
Speaker 7: therapies that have never really been demonstrated to be effective
Speaker 7: and safe, and you know, the same randomized clinical controlled
Speaker 7: trials that they demand, you know, for vaccines. One thing
Speaker 7: I have little doubt of is that public health is
Speaker 7: going to be degraded significantly over the next four years.
Speaker 7: And how we recover from that, I don't know. I'm
Speaker 7: struggling with the of what can be done to resist
Speaker 7: it or slow it down that you know, the entire
Speaker 7: Republican Party doesn't seem to want to put any sort
Speaker 7: of checks on this administration.
Speaker 3: Mm hmmm.
Speaker 4: And you know, if we were to have some other
Speaker 4: sort of major pandemic, either a new virus that breaks
Speaker 4: through or a return of some disease that was once
Speaker 4: out of circulation, there's no real guarantee that deaths or
Speaker 4: widespread illness or disability as a result of those possible
Speaker 4: events will even spur a reaction in a way that
Speaker 4: would set us on a path back towards confidence in
Speaker 4: public health and vaccination. You know, the outcome of COVID was,
Speaker 4: you know, it's it's quite clear that COVID was sort
Speaker 4: of an accelerant for a lot of the anti vaccination
Speaker 4: beliefs that had long been incubating. And you know, our
Speaker 4: public discourse and broad distrust of public health entities in general.
Speaker 4: And you know, like you said, you know, Trump's successor
Speaker 4: will be left to clean up whatever mess is made.
Speaker 4: And it's possible that Trump's successor could be someone like JD. Van's, Yes,
Speaker 4: it could, or someone who shares this affinity for you know,
Speaker 4: quasi eugenic statements or beliefs, or this general disregard for
Speaker 4: the consequences of a sort of social Diarwinist approach to
Speaker 4: public health. And so, you know, we don't want to
Speaker 4: overstate the risks and be doomsayers. But on the other hand,
Speaker 4: there's this real potential for the return of you know,
Speaker 4: God forbid something like polio or a breakthrough Avian flu.
Speaker 7: You just reminded me polio was one of the diseases
Speaker 7: modeled in that study, and the results was coming back
Speaker 7: and hundreds or even thousands of cases of paralytic polio.
Speaker 4: Right, and we live now in a time in which
Speaker 4: it's always been the majority of people who have never
Speaker 4: had someone in their family who was in an iron lung.
Speaker 4: But we live in a time now where like the
Speaker 4: historical memory of that is somewhat lost, because it's not
Speaker 4: even in the popular consciousness. It's not something that is featured,
Speaker 4: you know in media. You know, used to read books
Speaker 4: or watch films or even in television. You know, there
Speaker 4: would be examples of something like that, someone who had
Speaker 4: been impacted by polio and whether they were left disabled,
Speaker 4: you know, and had less use of their limbs, or
Speaker 4: you know, if they ended up in an iron lung.
Speaker 4: You know, that was something at least people were aware
Speaker 4: of the risk. And it's it's kind of parallel to
Speaker 4: something another public health official I spoke with talked about
Speaker 4: how there's you know, been like two decades of doctors
Speaker 4: who went through their residencies never even seeing a case
Speaker 4: of measles, and so now we're having to sort of
Speaker 4: re educate not just our doctors, but really the whole population.
Speaker 4: And that's a massive undertaking. We'll hear a bit more
Speaker 4: from Doctor Gorsky right after the sad Break.
Speaker 10: You know.
Speaker 7: One of the things that anti vaxers like to do
Speaker 7: is to try to claim that, oh, back before the vaccine,
Speaker 7: people didn't think measles was a big deal. And they
Speaker 7: will point to that famous episode of The Brady Bunch
Speaker 7: that I don't know if you ever heard of, where
Speaker 7: all the kids got the measles, and it was played
Speaker 7: mainly for laughs, you know, like they're all happy about
Speaker 7: being home from school and they're not very sick. They
Speaker 7: just have little thoughts painted all over them because I
Speaker 7: guess that's how they showed them having the measles.
Speaker 6: Boy, this is a life, isn't it. Yeah, if you
Speaker 6: have to get sick, she can't beat the measles, that's right.
Speaker 16: No medicine insider out like shots on me don't even
Speaker 16: mention shots.
Speaker 7: Yeah, measls.
Speaker 6: Metals.
Speaker 15: Well, all the kids have now had the measo so
Speaker 15: far than years ago. Looks like the Brady's are finished
Speaker 15: with amazing.
Speaker 7: There was also an episode of The Flintstones that, believe
Speaker 7: it or not, they've played the measles for laughs, And
Speaker 7: there was an episode of The Donna Reid Show from
Speaker 7: the fifties, they would point like those and go, oh,
Speaker 7: they didn't consider measles a big deal. Well, if you
Speaker 7: read the actual medical and public health literature, you know
Speaker 7: they did. And you know, there were hundreds of thousands
Speaker 7: of confirmed cases a year, maybe millions of cases a year,
Speaker 7: and at least averaging about four or five hundred deaths
Speaker 7: a year, which doesn't sound like a lot, but in
Speaker 7: anything having to do with children, that's a lot of
Speaker 7: death because we don't expect children to die. Children should
Speaker 7: not die. They usually you know, it's not like elderly
Speaker 7: people where you know, it's expected that that's when you know,
Speaker 7: the body starts giving out and people are reaching the
Speaker 7: end of their lives. Children's death rates should be Oh
Speaker 7: that's why. That's why we look at you know, childhood cancer,
Speaker 7: and there was such an effort made, you know, over
Speaker 7: from like the fifties on to try to decrease the
Speaker 7: rate of death from childhood cancer. And you know the
Speaker 7: results have been pretty spectacular. About eighty five percent of
Speaker 7: children with you know, cancer live, which you know before
Speaker 7: it was you know, a pretty small number. And the
Speaker 7: funny thing is the number of childhood cancers is very
Speaker 7: small compared to a lot of other things that cause death.
Speaker 7: We viewed it as sufficiently important to try to do
Speaker 7: something about it. At least we did the question of
Speaker 7: whether we will continue to because you know, anti chemotherapy
Speaker 7: and various cancer nonsense tends to go right along with
Speaker 7: MAHA and the other thing.
Speaker 11: You know.
Speaker 7: For instance, when RFK Junior made his one of his
Speaker 7: statements that was was it in early March I believe,
Speaker 7: or it was in March sometime about you know, where
Speaker 7: everyone was like, oh, he said, the MMR works and
Speaker 7: is the best way to stop the spread of measles. Yes,
Speaker 7: but you know, instead of the traditional messaging that you
Speaker 7: would come out of the CDC, which would be, you know,
Speaker 7: get vaccinated. You know, MMR is the best way to
Speaker 7: put a stop to this. Please please, parents, get your
Speaker 7: kids vaccinated. Instead, what he sort of said is, yes,
Speaker 7: the vaccine, you know, vaccination is good, you know, the
Speaker 7: best way to stop the outbreak. But then he buries
Speaker 7: it instead of baffling with bullshit, it's more like burying
Speaker 7: it in bullshit. He talks about, you know, vitamin A
Speaker 7: supposedly to treat measles. He talks about how children die
Speaker 7: with measles, rather than of measles, which should sound very
Speaker 7: familiar because they pulled the same rhetoric out for COVID,
Speaker 7: and the idea being that only the children who were
Speaker 7: already sick were harmed by measles, and that you know,
Speaker 7: your middle class, healthy children are not in any danger.
Speaker 7: You know. One way to look at the anti vaccine movement,
Speaker 7: besides the eugenesis undertones, sometimes not even undertones, one way
Speaker 7: to look at it is as a purity cult. You
Speaker 7: may remember the whole pure blood thing from a few
Speaker 7: years ago, like those that were not vaccinated refusing to
Speaker 7: mingle with those who are. Who are you know whose
Speaker 7: blood has somehow been contaminated by the vaccine. It's the
Speaker 7: same as all. And think of how much of alternative
Speaker 7: medicine involves quote unquote detoxification. I like to call it
Speaker 7: ritual purification because it's like more of a religious concept
Speaker 7: than it is actually a medical concept. And look at
Speaker 7: how treatment of quote unquote vaccine injury involves something like
Speaker 7: elation therapy to pull the evil heavy metals that are
Speaker 7: supposedly causing autism out of you. So the idea that
Speaker 7: you have control of your health if you only make
Speaker 7: your terrain in your body hostile to microbes through your
Speaker 7: superior lifestyle. The one example of this that I like
Speaker 7: to point out, and the best retort to it that
Speaker 7: I like to point out, comes from about two thousand
Speaker 7: and nine. If I recall, right, it was Bill Maher
Speaker 7: on his HBO show and Bob Costas was the guest,
Speaker 7: and he was going on about how, you know, this
Speaker 7: was around the time of the EAH one N one
Speaker 7: flu pandemic, and he was going you knowing, he was
Speaker 7: going on about how he didn't need the flu vaccine
Speaker 7: because you know, his terrain was so hostile to the flu,
Speaker 7: because you know, of his superior lifestyle. Caused me to
Speaker 7: roll my eyes. But and that if he were on
Speaker 7: an airplane with people coughing with the flu, he would
Speaker 7: not get the flu. What did Pastas say to him?
Speaker 7: I love I love this retort? He said, Oh, come on, superman.
Speaker 4: Bob Costas could have easily used a different word in
Speaker 4: his retort given the eugen tendencies of the modern anti
Speaker 4: vaccination movement, and the word I have in mind is
Speaker 4: uber mensch.
Speaker 3: But I digress.
Speaker 4: If the uber mensch of the anti VAXX movement, like
Speaker 4: RFK get what they want. We will live in a
Speaker 4: world where preventable communicable diseases run rampant, the deaths of
Speaker 4: children are justified as either a part of God's plan
Speaker 4: or a survival of the fittest. Herd immunity strategy where
Speaker 4: snake oil and beef tallow salesmen are heralded above doctors
Speaker 4: and scientists, and where only the strongest will survive at
Speaker 4: the expense of the week. Diseases long thought defeated could
Speaker 4: return in Our ability to address new viruses will be
Speaker 4: diminished if RFK Junior successfully dismantles what remains of our
Speaker 4: public health bureaucracy, and he's doing it as a steady clip.
Speaker 4: In other words, the future may end up looking a
Speaker 4: lot like the past, more than it already does.
Speaker 3: And that's terrifying.
Speaker 4: The last time deadly pandemics, religious fervor, and resistance to
Speaker 4: medical science and eugenic policies all coincided historically with global
Speaker 4: trade breakdowns, things did not work out so well for
Speaker 4: anyone involved. And unfortunately, if I've taken one thing away
Speaker 4: from my exploration of anti VAXs America, it's that things
Speaker 4: will likely have to get worse before they get better.
Speaker 4: It's really hard to get people unstuck from their beliefs.
Speaker 4: Despite more than one million Americans dying of COVID, the
Speaker 4: reaction to pandemic restrictions, combined with the anti vaccination movements
Speaker 4: convincing misinformation around vaccines, radicalized many people against vaccines and
Speaker 4: public health measures in general. Before I recorded this final statement,
Speaker 4: the Texas State House voted to advance a bill that
Speaker 4: will expand the ability for parents to seek exemptions for
Speaker 4: trial vaccination requirements for school. And this is happening as
Speaker 4: a measles outbreak is ongoing, and things aren't looking good,
Speaker 4: But there is at least one sliver of hope that
Speaker 4: I've found. As my conversation with Gear illustrates, it's possible
Speaker 4: for people who grow up in communities where vaccinations are
Speaker 4: avoided or where there is no belief in them to
Speaker 4: get out of those communities and to get themselves vaccinated.
Speaker 4: And as my conversation with Catherine Wells illustrated, it is
Speaker 4: also possible for people who have been hesitant to get
Speaker 4: their children vaccinated for something like measles to be spurred
Speaker 4: into action given reporting around an outbreak. But the question
Speaker 4: that ultimately remains is whether enough people will have their
Speaker 4: minds changed and embrace what the science tells us we
Speaker 4: should do. Given doctor Gorskey's astute observation that the anti
Speaker 4: vaccine movement is someone like a purity cult and Gear's
Speaker 4: comment that escaping their anti VACS upbringing was sort of
Speaker 4: like escaping a cult, unfortunately, I think we will have
Speaker 4: to temper our expectations for how quickly we can extricate
Speaker 4: our nation from this deep dark place that.
Speaker 3: I call anti vax America. I'm Stephen Monicelli. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 2: Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
Speaker 2: from now until the heat death of the universe.
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