Speaker 1: Rhet Qualit was just two and a half years old
Speaker 1: when he was diagnosed with leukemia. It was two thousand
Speaker 1: and Rhetina's family were living in court Madera, California. It's
Speaker 1: a little town just over the Golden Gate Bridge from
Speaker 1: San Francisco in Marin County. When ratt was first diagnosed
Speaker 1: with cancer, we lived in the hospital for eight seven nights.
Speaker 1: Like my wife and I traded every twenty four hours.
Speaker 1: I mean he was sick, Okay, he couldn't go home
Speaker 1: or anything. That's Carl Red's dad. Cormadera is the kind
Speaker 1: of place you might describe as crunchy. People shop at
Speaker 1: the farmers market, the organic and many of them also
Speaker 1: choose not to vaccinate their kids. Carl and his wife,
Speaker 1: Jody knew vaccination rates were lower there. Rhet's doctors had
Speaker 1: even warned them about it. The reason Rhet's parents were
Speaker 1: concerned about this had to do with his cancer. Chemotherapy
Speaker 1: had wiped out any immunity Red had from previous vaccines
Speaker 1: and also made him too weak to get new ones.
Speaker 1: If he caught something like the measles, he likely wouldn't
Speaker 1: be strong enough to keep receiving his cancer treatments. Carl
Speaker 1: and Jodie really started to worry about vaccination rates when
Speaker 1: Red's older sister was about to go to kindergarten, and
Speaker 1: one of the biggest fears that we had was that
Speaker 1: she might bring an illness home from school and it
Speaker 1: might get her brother sick. When it was time for
Speaker 1: my son to go to school, it was really a
Speaker 1: concern for us to understand how dangerous would it be
Speaker 1: for him to go to school, meaning how many kids
Speaker 1: in the school were unvaccinated. The answer to that question
Speaker 1: was concerning more than six percent of Marine kindergarteners went unvaccinated,
Speaker 1: about triple the state average. This was allowed thanks to
Speaker 1: a state rule that let parents exempt their kids. The
Speaker 1: Crawbett family solution at the time was to request that
Speaker 1: RHTT be in a classroom without any unvaccinated kids. The
Speaker 1: school obliged. We wanted to go to kindergarten, We wanted
Speaker 1: to go to school. We leant him to be a
Speaker 1: normal kid um, but it's important that you make sure
Speaker 1: that everybody around him is vaccinated also. But that was
Speaker 1: really all they could do. They couldn't protect him outside
Speaker 1: of school or even on the playground. Carl felt helpless.
Speaker 1: You know, we had been asking the school district and
Speaker 1: parents and everybody, you know, please vaccinate your kids. There
Speaker 1: was nothing we could really do about it. Then came January.
Speaker 1: Help Officials fear thousands may have been exposed to the
Speaker 1: measles at Disneyland and Disney California Adventure last month. Most
Speaker 1: of those who got the disease were not vaccinated against it.
Speaker 1: The measles outbreak at Disneyland has proven it's a small world,
Speaker 1: after all. Health officials now say twenty six cases in
Speaker 1: four states have been linked to visits to the park.
Speaker 1: In mid December, an outbreak of the measles that would
Speaker 1: eventually infect more than a hundred and forty people across
Speaker 1: multiple states, Mexico, and Canada have been traced back to Disneyland,
Speaker 1: the place the outbreak started. Made this news hit especially hard.
Speaker 1: There was something horrifying about the idea that you could
Speaker 1: just be sailing down the musty waters of the Pirates
Speaker 1: of the Caribbean, singing along with all those mechanical marauding
Speaker 1: pirates and contracted disease that nobody even remembered existed. When
Speaker 1: the Disneyland measles outbreak happened, I happened to be watching
Speaker 1: the story on the news, and um, I was not
Speaker 1: one of these people that would go out and like
Speaker 1: blog or or post on Facebook or you know, like
Speaker 1: get into the fray or anything. But it just was
Speaker 1: vira like it hit home. It was so personal to me.
Speaker 1: And I was reading this story on MPR and I
Speaker 1: went on and I responded to a news story like
Speaker 1: in one of the comments and I just wrote, I'm
Speaker 1: just blown away by the fact that my kid is
Speaker 1: not allowed to take peanut butter to school because a
Speaker 1: few kids have an allergy, but yet they don't have
Speaker 1: to be vaccinated for measles and my kid has cancer.
Speaker 1: After making that comment, a reporter reached out to Carl,
Speaker 1: and then more reporters and more. Pretty soon, Rhett was
Speaker 1: appearing regularly in local news. I spoke with Rhett recently
Speaker 1: about that time. My parents told me that the fart
Speaker 1: from my story than I would be able to help
Speaker 1: making difference, and talking to the press was a way
Speaker 1: to do that. At the same time, state lawmakers were
Speaker 1: mobilizing to craft legislation that would do away with personal
Speaker 1: belief exemptions from vaccines and hopefully prevent future outbreaks. Soon
Speaker 1: Rhett and the legislators would join forces. He would become
Speaker 1: the face of this bill. He's only in first grade,
Speaker 1: but seven year old Rhet Crowd made sure, he said
Speaker 1: to clear message to lawmakers considering a bill that would
Speaker 1: require children to be vaccinated before they attend public school.
Speaker 1: Thank you for making sure that's kids like me don't
Speaker 1: don't get stay at school is a leukemia. A few
Speaker 1: months after the Disney outbreak, Rhet was cancer free and
Speaker 1: he finally got his MMR vaccine, but by then they
Speaker 1: were all in on the crusade. Carl says that the
Speaker 1: Disneyland outbreak helped to galvanize people to come out and
Speaker 1: support vaccination. It was a tipping point. Was definitely the
Speaker 1: Disneyland measles outbreak. Without question. The school where my kid
Speaker 1: goes to. When that Disneyland thing happened and we were
Speaker 1: on the news and things like that, everybody went and
Speaker 1: got vaccinated. They didn't need the law. And I say
Speaker 1: everybody enough. But it wasn't one sided. For all of
Speaker 1: the support that the Crowd family received, there was also
Speaker 1: a backlash. The anti vaxtors came out. I mean I remember,
Speaker 1: I mean they threatened us, They threatened my kid. They
Speaker 1: I mean they they told lies, the misinformation, They all
Speaker 1: sorts of stuff right, and and it was scary. If
Speaker 1: there was one moment in time where became clear that
Speaker 1: vaccine skeptics were no longer just some irrelevant fringe group
Speaker 1: of crunching or in moms, this was it. California is
Speaker 1: pushed to tamp down the number of people who weren't
Speaker 1: vaccine their kids. Caused vaccine skeptics to mobilize, and in
Speaker 1: order to grow, they would need to appeal to a
Speaker 1: broader audience. Their messaging at this time changed to go
Speaker 1: beyond just vaccine safety. Suddenly they were talking about choice
Speaker 1: and freedom and democracy. And this shift would bring in
Speaker 1: other groups who were worried about things like government overreach.
Speaker 1: And one new technological innovation would allow this message to
Speaker 1: spread to people who had never before considered the safety
Speaker 1: of vaccines. That tool was social media. It would foreshadow
Speaker 1: what we're living through now, a moment it in which
Speaker 1: millions of Americans feel they do not trust the government
Speaker 1: when it comes to public health. I'm bloomberg, youth health
Speaker 1: reporter Kristin V. Brown from the Prognosis podcast. This is
Speaker 1: doubt when the Disneyland outbreak happened, I realized that, you know,
Speaker 1: right here in the US, we have some serious public
Speaker 1: health issues as well. Maya Majunder is a health informatics
Speaker 1: researcher at Boston Children's Hospital. This is a fancy way
Speaker 1: of saying that Maya is a math person, and at
Speaker 1: the time of the Disneyland outbreak, she was a grad
Speaker 1: student at m I T. She focused on studying emerging
Speaker 1: infectious diseases around the world. The news of what had
Speaker 1: happened at Disneyland was sort of a call to action
Speaker 1: for her. I wanted to dig into the outbreak because
Speaker 1: it might offer clues to a mystery. Measles was declared
Speaker 1: eliminated from the US in two thousand by the World
Speaker 1: Health Organization. They thanked vaccinations for successful eradication, but there
Speaker 1: were more than six hundred cases. So how was it
Speaker 1: that suddenly this disease was making a comeback. That's what
Speaker 1: may I wanted to find out. Now, let me back
Speaker 1: up here for a second and say that the overwhelming
Speaker 1: majority of Americans vaccinate their kids. The CDC says that
Speaker 1: which is the last year that their state of for
Speaker 1: more than ninety person of kids got their MMR shot,
Speaker 1: polio shot, Cappatitis B shot, and chickenpox shot. Even Andrew
Speaker 1: fields infamous MMR study didn't impact national vaccination rates all
Speaker 1: that much. But as Maya and her team began to
Speaker 1: crack into the numbers, they started to see that national
Speaker 1: and statewide data obscured what was really happening with vaccination rates.
Speaker 1: On a smaller scale. Using a whole lot of fancy maths,
Speaker 1: Maya's group was able to show the vaccination rates among
Speaker 1: the people who were exposed to the measles in the
Speaker 1: Disneyland outbreak were way lower than national averages might suggest.
Speaker 1: The vaccination rates in the communities affected by the Disneyland
Speaker 1: outbreak were likely in the ballpark of fifty. Maya would
Speaker 1: keep on with this kind of research. Years later. Her
Speaker 1: team would collect county level vaccination rates from forty three
Speaker 1: states for school year the year of the Disneyland outbreak,
Speaker 1: and they found that while some counties had really high
Speaker 1: rates of vaccination and others rates were super low, almost
Speaker 1: half of the counties they looked at had vaccination rates
Speaker 1: below I think that was really eye opening for us.
Speaker 1: We had certainly many suspicions that this was the case,
Speaker 1: but it was really I think I opening to be
Speaker 1: able to see it visualized in a map, just how
Speaker 1: diverse the vaccination rates were at the county level across
Speaker 1: the United States. If you're in a community that has
Speaker 1: a vaccination rate for something like MMR at less than
Speaker 1: and you're an at risk kid like Rhett, that is
Speaker 1: a very scary scenario. Might seem like a lot. It's
Speaker 1: still the vast majority of kids. But this comes back
Speaker 1: to an idea that we've discussed earlier in this series.
Speaker 1: Vaccines take public trust and co operation in order to work.
Speaker 1: Exactly how many people need to be vaccinated in order
Speaker 1: for a particular vaccine to work depends on how contagious
Speaker 1: of virus is and how effective a vaccine is in
Speaker 1: preventing it. Take the MMR vaccine, perhaps the most controversial
Speaker 1: vaccine before the pandemic. The MMR is actually highly effective
Speaker 1: at preventing measles, mumps, and rebella, but measles is also
Speaker 1: extremely contagious, So for the MMR to prevent the spread
Speaker 1: of measles, it requires more than ninety five of kids
Speaker 1: to be vaccinated against it. But once you look at
Speaker 1: the numbers, then there's the question of why people aren't
Speaker 1: vaccinating their kids, and this can get complicated. It's not
Speaker 1: just because of social media or conspiracy theories or all
Speaker 1: of the confusing ingredients that are in vaccines. In fact,
Speaker 1: it might not really be about any of those things
Speaker 1: at all. Individual beliefs about vaccines are often rooted in
Speaker 1: a person's identity and worldview. For example, the vaccine for HPV,
Speaker 1: which was introduced to the US in two thousand six,
Speaker 1: quickly became extremely controversial, in part because it's a vaccine
Speaker 1: to prevent a sexually transmitted disease that is given to
Speaker 1: preteen girls. Religious communities were among those that objected to
Speaker 1: it because they didn't want young women to see it
Speaker 1: as a licensed to go have sex. Even outside of
Speaker 1: those groups, many parents felt that way it was just
Speaker 1: uncomfortable to sexualize their preteen daughters. One of the things
Speaker 1: that I've discovered over the years is that there are
Speaker 1: lots of different reasons for vaccine hesitancy, and they usually
Speaker 1: emerge in different ways in different populations, and vaccine hesitancy
Speaker 1: for different diseases looks different. At the time of the
Speaker 1: Disneyland outbreak, there was a whole lot of other things
Speaker 1: going on in our culture that might lead someone to
Speaker 1: question vaccines. Clean living was becoming a thing, and people
Speaker 1: were paying a lot of attention to everything they put
Speaker 1: in their bodies. Third wave feminism was encouraging moms to
Speaker 1: take back power and how they chose to raise their kids.
Speaker 1: By this point, misinformation about vaccines had also gone mainstream
Speaker 1: and even become trendy. Former Playboy Bunny Jenny McCarthy wrote
Speaker 1: a book blaming the MMR vaccine for her son's autism
Speaker 1: and quickly became the celebrity face of the movement. She
Speaker 1: pushed vaccine misinformation on talk shows and magazine spreads. She
Speaker 1: even appeared ringside with the w w E to promote
Speaker 1: an organization that falsely claimed vaccines cause autism. Together, the
Speaker 1: tag team of w w E and Generation Rescue Can
Speaker 1: and Will lay the SmackDown on a his happen what.
Speaker 1: There was now a sizeable body of scientific research debunking
Speaker 1: the connection between vaccines and autism, but that didn't seem
Speaker 1: to matter. More and more people were questioning the safety
Speaker 1: of vaccines. Maya's research into the outbreak helped confirm what
Speaker 1: people had already suspected. Vaccination rates were dropping among some
Speaker 1: groups of people, and now it was clear that this
Speaker 1: could pose a real threat to public health. This threat
Speaker 1: is what moved Rhet and his family to take the
Speaker 1: stage and lobby for this new bill to ban exemptions
Speaker 1: in California. And this would kick things up a notch.
Speaker 1: There's been a lot of changes to um the anti
Speaker 1: vaccine scene, at least since I started almost eight years ago.
Speaker 1: We're saying more groups organizing around issues of civil liberties
Speaker 1: and the idea of vaccines as issues of freedom or
Speaker 1: vaccine choice. This is Amelia Jamison and I am a
Speaker 1: doctoral student at Johns Hopkins University where I study online
Speaker 1: health misinformation and how it can be used to exacerbate
Speaker 1: social divides. Amelia has been studying health misinformation for a
Speaker 1: long time. She started out as an anthropology student at
Speaker 1: the University of Maryland Center for Health Equity doing field
Speaker 1: research on vaccine hesitancy, a lot of it focused on
Speaker 1: the African American community. There's a big moment in my
Speaker 1: career where I feel like I realized the imports of
Speaker 1: online misincussion, and that was after the election, when we
Speaker 1: were scouring a data set about a Russian Twitter troll.
Speaker 1: Trolls and we were able to find a failed campaign
Speaker 1: where they had tried to use vaccines as a wedge
Speaker 1: issue to polarize Americans on this issue. Amilia says that
Speaker 1: these trends first started cropping up after the Disneyland measles outbreak,
Speaker 1: and this is where we really saw this coalescence around
Speaker 1: the idea of vaccination as a civil liberties issue. I
Speaker 1: spent I read thousands of tweets over the trajectory of
Speaker 1: the Disneyland measles outbreak. Never published this stuff, but I
Speaker 1: think we try to figure out what was happening and
Speaker 1: what kind of discussions are happening, And so I think
Speaker 1: Disneyland is really important because it drew a lot of
Speaker 1: attention to this issue that had kind of fallen lay low.
Speaker 1: Amilia says, this moment actually drew out a lot of
Speaker 1: public support for vaccines, but the other side of the
Speaker 1: argument gained momentum. To the antivaxers kind of felt endangered
Speaker 1: or imperiled, and then they started to mobilize and help
Speaker 1: organize themselves in ways that they could pro test this bill.
Speaker 1: The way vaccinations were talked about on social media also
Speaker 1: started to change. We followed uh different Facebook pages and
Speaker 1: a lot of them had different names, like Michigan for
Speaker 1: Vaccine Choice or California for Vaccine Choice, and so each
Speaker 1: at the state level. I think vaccine choice became this
Speaker 1: new talking point or away to reframe this conversation away
Speaker 1: from a facts based is this real? Is not real?
Speaker 1: Especially because there was, in my view, increasing evidence that
Speaker 1: vaccines don't cause out to them, so that older idea
Speaker 1: had shifted. The target expanded beyond arguing about the safety
Speaker 1: of vaccines to questioning whether vaccine laws infringed on people's
Speaker 1: personal liberties. It was a harder point to argue against.
Speaker 1: It began to change the profile of when anti vaxxter
Speaker 1: looked like it wasn't just Marin Moms anymore. It's hard
Speaker 1: to really measure how many anti vaxxers there are out there,
Speaker 1: but most experts would tell you that their numbers are
Speaker 1: still pretty small. Keep in mind, when I use the
Speaker 1: phrase anti vax are, I'm referring specifically to activists who
Speaker 1: are making a concerted effort to spread misinformation about vaccines.
Speaker 1: But even though their numbers are small, they're very loud,
Speaker 1: and their messaging reaches people who are maybe just a
Speaker 1: little bit skeptical of vaccines or distrusting of doctors or
Speaker 1: the government, and these people are where the problem is.
Speaker 1: The numbers of these people in the middle appear to
Speaker 1: be large and growing. Often they are also primed by
Speaker 1: other points of view to believe in conspiracy theories. Public
Speaker 1: health officials and the small numbers of extreme hardcore anti
Speaker 1: vaxxers are basically locked in a battle to win these
Speaker 1: people over. And these people don't ever need to refer
Speaker 1: to themselves as anti vaxxers for that battle to be lost.
Speaker 1: All they need to do is decide to not vaccinate
Speaker 1: their kids or not to vaccinate themselves against COVID nineteen.
Speaker 1: Amelia says, one big reason why this movement has continued
Speaker 1: to grow is that it has strong leadership. There's this
Speaker 1: idea that anti vaccs are all these parents and they're
Speaker 1: like mothers with children. But I think it's important to
Speaker 1: recognize that there are these there's leaders in this or
Speaker 1: a movement, and some of them represent organizations that have
Speaker 1: been pretty active for quite some time actually, and they're
Speaker 1: very influential, things like the Actually I don't want to
Speaker 1: say their names because I don't want to controw Okay,
Speaker 1: Amelia doesn't want to name names, but I will. Which
Speaker 1: is getting at here is that a large amount of
Speaker 1: vaccine misinformation is actually spread by a small number of people.
Speaker 1: One study Amelia did in nineteen found that more than
Speaker 1: half of Facebook advertisement and spreading misinformation about vaccines were
Speaker 1: funded by just two anti vaccine groups, including one lead
Speaker 1: by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Yes that Kennedy. These messages
Speaker 1: seemed like they were homegrown, grassroots social media posts, but
Speaker 1: in reality they were carefully orchestrated advertising campaigns. The people
Speaker 1: behind these posts were well organized and heavily funded, and
Speaker 1: also just really savvy. I think the one strategy was
Speaker 1: really understanding their audience and their audiences needs, so they're
Speaker 1: able to craft a message that's appealing, but then also
Speaker 1: use online tools such as targeted advertising to reach that
Speaker 1: audience really effectively, so that with a few hundred dollars
Speaker 1: you could transform and advertisement into thousands of impressions, which
Speaker 1: means you're reaching people who want to see your cause,
Speaker 1: and then you can link them to off platform websites
Speaker 1: that you've created. Um, we see people using this just
Speaker 1: to share more information, but also to fundraise or to
Speaker 1: sell products or promote events, so after they see that ad,
Speaker 1: they can be led to a variety of different sites
Speaker 1: for variety of means. Amelia found the efforts by Facebook
Speaker 1: to crack down on vaccine misinformation sometimes backfired. Pro vaccine
Speaker 1: content would more often get taken down the way social
Speaker 1: networks approach This has changed since the study, especially amid
Speaker 1: the pandemic, and we'll get to that in the next episode.
Speaker 1: But for a long time, these groups were very good innovating.
Speaker 1: Whatever restrictions social networks put in place to stop them,
Speaker 1: misinformation ran rampant. It was hard to tell sometimes what
Speaker 1: was true. Amelia says. The other thing is that these powerful,
Speaker 1: well funded anti vaccine groups, we'll just change their messaging
Speaker 1: if it runs into roadblocks. And I think it's also
Speaker 1: interesting to realize that as we move towards fact checking
Speaker 1: as a way to limit this kind of information of
Speaker 1: freedom of a vaccine freedom or vaccine choice argument is
Speaker 1: less able to be fact checked, right, it kind of
Speaker 1: escapes that realm because it's not about facts. It's more
Speaker 1: about a belief or an opinion. It's not just that
Speaker 1: they changed their messaging. These groups have also co opted
Speaker 1: the language of other social movements. And then like in
Speaker 1: that way, you can also position yourself in this trajectory
Speaker 1: of other great um civil rights battles throughout history, like
Speaker 1: women's liberation or um civil rights. So so you can
Speaker 1: see some of that rhetoric actually reappearing. You could see
Speaker 1: this happen in real time in the aftermath of the
Speaker 1: Disneyland measles outbreak. The bill Rett had supported was making
Speaker 1: its way through the California legislature. At that time. A
Speaker 1: pair of researchers found that Twitter hashtag organizers were publishing
Speaker 1: nightly trends and tips videos on YouTube containing instructions on
Speaker 1: what to tweet to advance the cause. But soon the
Speaker 1: bill was advancing out of committee and becoming that much
Speaker 1: closer to being passed. When that happened, the researchers found
Speaker 1: that the more pseudoscience the messaging was suddenly changing. It
Speaker 1: was becoming more about health freedom and choice. As the
Speaker 1: messaging coming from these highly organized anti vaccine groups shifted
Speaker 1: and broadened, other groups also belonged onto the issue. So
Speaker 1: add together one part well funded anti vaccine group, one
Speaker 1: part homegrown concerned from parents, and a chorus of outrage
Speaker 1: from anti government sympathizers and you get a giant, confusing
Speaker 1: info dump, which is exactly the point. In general. I
Speaker 1: just feel like the anti vactors haven't really learned how
Speaker 1: to leverage online tools to reach this audience that is receptive,
Speaker 1: and they're doing it much more efficiently than some of
Speaker 1: the people who are working for public health. And this
Speaker 1: messaging can be really compelling. It is easy to fall
Speaker 1: for it. Amilia says at times in her research, she's
Speaker 1: even found herself confused by all the misinformation, like I've
Speaker 1: looked at a lot of it, and it's pretty effective.
Speaker 1: Like that, I've sometimes they're like, oh wow, I didn't
Speaker 1: know this, and I go down my own grabbit hole
Speaker 1: trying to figure out, like what's true, what's not? Where
Speaker 1: did this evidence come from. I'll admit, while working on
Speaker 1: this podcast, I have a time has found myself in
Speaker 1: that situation too. One night, I got so caught up
Speaker 1: reading about the chickenpox vaccine that I completely burned my
Speaker 1: dinner on the stove. But at the end of the day,
Speaker 1: Amelia and I both start from a place of trust
Speaker 1: in vaccines and medicine and science, but mistrust of romant
Speaker 1: and drug companies is just so widespread at this point,
Speaker 1: and if that's the place you're starting from, you're probably
Speaker 1: more receptive to ideas that anti vaccine groups are pushing.
Speaker 1: And I think one of the big arguments for the
Speaker 1: anti vaxus community is they're like, I've done my research,
Speaker 1: I'm an informed consumer, And they have spent a long time,
Speaker 1: probably more than the average person, looking at information and
Speaker 1: research about vaccines. Because it's true, vaccine side effects do happen,
Speaker 1: some of them are pretty severe. It's just that on
Speaker 1: the whole, we believe that vaccines are safe and effective
Speaker 1: and it's best that everybody gets vaccinated. But I think
Speaker 1: it's really challenging to combat that and be like the
Speaker 1: information like, because you've taken this upon yourself to do
Speaker 1: this research, and it's I think it's really hard to
Speaker 1: tell people like, no, don't do that, just trust in
Speaker 1: whatever we tell you to do. Amelia remembers back in
Speaker 1: November she went to an anti vaccine rally on the
Speaker 1: Mall in Washington and it was cold, and there was
Speaker 1: just a bunch of moms there with their kids, and
Speaker 1: there was just a whole day's panels. Weren't the speakers,
Speaker 1: and they were up there talking about different things but
Speaker 1: if you walk through the crowd, there were a lot
Speaker 1: of people who had made t shirts or posters about
Speaker 1: their vaccine injured child, And I think that's where you
Speaker 1: start to see the human face of this movement. Amelia
Speaker 1: says that as someone who spends our time researching Internet misinformation,
Speaker 1: this human side isn't something she gets to see. It
Speaker 1: really her home for her. So there really are people
Speaker 1: who are struggling with something and they're looking for answers,
Speaker 1: and they're not finding them through traditional sources, and this
Speaker 1: is a community that's giving them answers. Okay, so I've
Speaker 1: got a big, fat disclaimer for you here. We've made
Speaker 1: what some people might view as a sort of controversial decision.
Speaker 1: There's a big question about how to report on this
Speaker 1: stuff without accidentally spreading misinformation. I cannot stress enough that
Speaker 1: these ideas are sticky. Talking about them at all does
Speaker 1: risk sending someone else down the rabbit hole. And as
Speaker 1: we have discussed in this series, the media has played
Speaker 1: a big role in the past in spreading misinformation about vaccines.
Speaker 1: But it also seemed hard to discuss how people come
Speaker 1: to hold their beliefs about vaccines without talking to those
Speaker 1: people about what they think what follows is not an
Speaker 1: endorsement of those beliefs. I cannot say this enough. Vaccines
Speaker 1: are overwhelmingly safe. This isn't even a point of debate.
Speaker 1: There is no debate. What this is is a recognition
Speaker 1: that this is a confusing topic. I'll also say that
Speaker 1: it was really tough to get people who are truly
Speaker 1: against vaccines to talk to me. There is a real
Speaker 1: sense among this group of people that they have been
Speaker 1: shamed and mocked by the press. But a group of
Speaker 1: parents in New Jersey, one dad and a bunch of
Speaker 1: moms were nice enough to chat with me. It was
Speaker 1: striking to me how similar a lot of their stories were.
Speaker 1: Now we're going to hear from just one of those moms.
Speaker 1: I have four fool. Let me start. I have four children.
Speaker 1: So for me, it started out when I had my
Speaker 1: first and it took us a long time to have
Speaker 1: our first um and you know, suddenly I was looking
Speaker 1: at his first year of life. He was getting twenty
Speaker 1: six vaccines. She means twenty six doses of different vaccines here,
Speaker 1: which to me was like, that is insane. This is
Speaker 1: Kristin McNair. Until recently she lived in New Jersey, and
Speaker 1: actually used to be a brand strategist for pharmaceutical companies,
Speaker 1: but now she's studying to be a nurse in North Carolina.
Speaker 1: She told me she's really fascinated by the human body,
Speaker 1: and in particular, the immune system. And she immediately brought
Speaker 1: up a point you hear from parents both in the
Speaker 1: anti vaccine community and sometimes outside of it. It was
Speaker 1: the sheer number of vaccines that first made Kristen do
Speaker 1: a double take. So I went back and I said,
Speaker 1: I'm a healthy person. I didn't have all of these vaccines.
Speaker 1: Why is it now that my children are required to
Speaker 1: have so many more vaccines than than they used to?
Speaker 1: But it was really important for me to understand the
Speaker 1: why behind it. UM. I have a really awesome pediatrician
Speaker 1: and we talked things through and I said, well, what
Speaker 1: are the ones that are required? Why are the ones
Speaker 1: are not? Do I have to do it on your schedule? Um?
Speaker 1: And he wanted to know where I was coming from. Why,
Speaker 1: And I said, you know what, putting so many things
Speaker 1: into my child's body doesn't make a ton of sense
Speaker 1: to me. That aren't necessary. Um. And if they aren't
Speaker 1: necessarily explained to me, why for Kristen this is where
Speaker 1: the doubts started. In the past few decades, the number
Speaker 1: of vaccines that kids get basically tripled. When I was
Speaker 1: a kid, you definitely didn't get a chicken pox back scene,
Speaker 1: You just got the chickenpox. Parents had parties to expose
Speaker 1: their kids to the chicken pox intentionally so they could
Speaker 1: just get it over with already. Originally, vaccines were intended
Speaker 1: as a way to treat epidemics like smallpox. It was
Speaker 1: only over time that they became a regular part of
Speaker 1: public health programming and gradually grew to include diseases that
Speaker 1: are less deadly. Nowadays, kids get vaccines for illnesses that
Speaker 1: don't really seem that serious to people. But it's important
Speaker 1: to remember that even the chickenpox does kill some people,
Speaker 1: it can also cause serious complications like shingles later in life.
Speaker 1: But I heard similar stories like this from a lot
Speaker 1: of the moms I talked to. The number of vaccines
Speaker 1: gave them pause. A lot of researchers I've talked to
Speaker 1: in reporting this podcast also mentioned this that hesitancy has
Speaker 1: grown as a vaccine schedule for kids also has and
Speaker 1: those changes have occurred alongside other trends in our society.
Speaker 1: Like fucking preservatives and food and questioning medical advice more generally,
Speaker 1: I mean, we all google what our doctor tells us
Speaker 1: to get a second opinion. Christen says our first pediatrician
Speaker 1: was unwilling to have conversations about vaccination with her. This
Speaker 1: is another common theme. She had questions and she felt
Speaker 1: like she couldn't get answers to them. In vaccine skeptic
Speaker 1: Facebook groups, often parents inquire about pediatricians that won't force
Speaker 1: vaccines on them. This is a tough balancing act for doctors.
Speaker 1: You want to steer your parents towards the best decision possible,
Speaker 1: but not totally ice them out. Kristen asked people in
Speaker 1: a mom's Facebook group if they knew of any doctors
Speaker 1: who would be willing to hear her concerns. She eventually
Speaker 1: found one, so we would have those conversations. I had
Speaker 1: a child that had allergies, so that created issues also,
Speaker 1: So ultimately, what I ended up do mean was saying, Okay,
Speaker 1: these are not vaccines that I'm willing to give my
Speaker 1: child for this reason, A, B and C. And then
Speaker 1: with these vaccines, let's talk it through m M R Nisle,
Speaker 1: Moms and Rebella it's three vaccines in one I wasn't
Speaker 1: comfortable with that. Kristen was actually different from the rest
Speaker 1: of the New Jersey parents I talked to, and that
Speaker 1: she was willing to give her kids some vaccines. One
Speaker 1: pair and I talked to actually moved from New York
Speaker 1: to New Jersey, which has more relaxed laws, partly in
Speaker 1: order to avoid vaccinating their kid. Kristen talked with her
Speaker 1: doctor about a few concerns. She says she was worried
Speaker 1: about mercury in the MMR vaccine, even though it doesn't
Speaker 1: contain mercury, and she was conflicted on whether it seemed
Speaker 1: like there was some kind of link between the MMR
Speaker 1: and autism. She told me then when she was pregnant
Speaker 1: with our first child, she remembers those conversations circulating and
Speaker 1: I remember watching very specific a video and this is
Speaker 1: when I was doing my research, you know, thirteen years
Speaker 1: ago now of a woman who are twins, and you know,
Speaker 1: you watched those twins developing up until the age of
Speaker 1: two two and a half, and they both went and
Speaker 1: got the vaccine on the same day, and you see
Speaker 1: a week later that her one child is starting to
Speaker 1: act completely different and then you do see is it
Speaker 1: the vaccine? I don't know. She wound up giving the
Speaker 1: MMR to all of her kids, just split into three
Speaker 1: separate vaccines. There isn't really good evidence to support this idea,
Speaker 1: but she wanted to wait and see if her kids
Speaker 1: would have an allergic reaction to each of the individual shots.
Speaker 1: There's concern from experts that messing with the prescribed vaccine
Speaker 1: schedule leaves kids vulnerable to illness for longer and could
Speaker 1: lead to more spread of disease. But it's better that
Speaker 1: parents vaccinate their kids on their own terms rather than
Speaker 1: not at all. For parents like Kristen, breaking up multi
Speaker 1: shots into individual ones helps them feel more in control.
Speaker 1: I think being informed and not just going in and saying, okay,
Speaker 1: this is the protocol that we give babies when they're
Speaker 1: born and for the next eighteen years of their lives.
Speaker 1: That didn't make sense to me. I'm their mom. I
Speaker 1: feel like I should know why it's happening. I'm not
Speaker 1: against vaccines at all. I think there's a place for
Speaker 1: certain ones, but I also think some of them are
Speaker 1: not things that would give my children. And there's three
Speaker 1: or four that I feel very strongly about that the
Speaker 1: side effects, for the potential side effects or the things
Speaker 1: that are written on the warning label, the risk of
Speaker 1: that to me is just not worth it. The other
Speaker 1: thing that was different about Kristen was that in her
Speaker 1: own life she actually had an example of why people
Speaker 1: should give vaccines. One of my friends chat children, Um
Speaker 1: had brain cancer, and we were talking about how his
Speaker 1: immune system is so um suppressed. And when she goes
Speaker 1: out in public, she doesn't worry. She worries about her son,
Speaker 1: but she also worries about the people who have made
Speaker 1: choices that she can't control. And she wasn't necessarily talking
Speaker 1: about vaccines at that time. It was just things that
Speaker 1: they let their children do or so here she is
Speaker 1: trying to protect your son um, who was at the
Speaker 1: time was very sick, and they were living who he
Speaker 1: was exposed to. And I had this thought to myself
Speaker 1: that was, Okay, I'm having this discussion in my head
Speaker 1: about what vaccines I'm going to give my children. But
Speaker 1: at the same time, I don't want to ever put
Speaker 1: somebody else's children at risk because of a decision that
Speaker 1: I made. And I do think it's part of our
Speaker 1: responsibility to take care of everybody within reason. I think
Speaker 1: you have to be comfortable with it. One thing that
Speaker 1: became clear from my conversations with Kristen and all of
Speaker 1: the New Jersey parents was that efforts to take away
Speaker 1: their choice to decide whether or not to vaccinate their
Speaker 1: kids really spurred them to action. New Jersey tried to
Speaker 1: tighten its vaccine laws in and Kristen was out there protesting.
Speaker 1: You were seeing vaccinators and non vaccinators coming together um
Speaker 1: to go because they all kind of felt the same
Speaker 1: way whether whatever your choices are, it should be my choice.
Speaker 1: On June, California Governor Jerry Brown signed rhet Spill into law.
Speaker 1: It was only six months after the Disneyland outbreak. Rhet
Speaker 1: and his campaign had one people told me that my
Speaker 1: story was one of the main reasons to bill passed
Speaker 1: so quickly, and that is really exciting to me that
Speaker 1: I was such a big part in helping something that
Speaker 1: was so important. Rd as twelve. Now, he's been cancer
Speaker 1: free for years and he's mostly just a normal middle
Speaker 1: school kid, but he says the past year has him
Speaker 1: thinking about all of these things again as a cancer survivor,
Speaker 1: his risk of having severe illness if he contracts COVID nineteen,
Speaker 1: it's still a bit higher than other kids this age.
Speaker 1: Now that COVID has happened and we have vaccines and
Speaker 1: that a lot of people aren't like say that they
Speaker 1: won't be getting either, that there they don't trust it.
Speaker 1: It's now another it's an issue again, and I think
Speaker 1: that now I am thinking about it and how if
Speaker 1: we don't it's a lot of people who don't get vaccinated.
Speaker 1: It's not gonna end this pandemic. And that's a problem.
Speaker 1: The opposition from anti vaccine advocates wasn't enough to stop
Speaker 1: RT spill. New outbreaks of disease would spur other states
Speaker 1: to follow California's lead. There were more than twelses of
Speaker 1: the measles that year. Washington, New York, and Maine all
Speaker 1: placed new limits on vaccine exemptions. This made vaccine skeptics
Speaker 1: grow louder than ever. Oregon in New Jersey would both
Speaker 1: fail to pass their own versions of new laws. At
Speaker 1: the end of vaccines were clearly in the headlines again,
Speaker 1: but the debate about vaccines reached a larger scale than ever,
Speaker 1: and this is something that vaccine proponents and skeptics like
Speaker 1: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Agree on I Think you Know,
Speaker 1: It's undeniable that the explosive expansion of movement place after
Speaker 1: the pandemic. Next time on Doubt, anti vaccine extremists pounced
Speaker 1: on the pandemic to take their movement mainstream. Doubt is
Speaker 1: written and reported by me christ and v Brown Top
Speaker 1: Foreheads is our senior producer. Molly Nugent is our associate producer.
Speaker 1: Our theme was composed and performed by Hannis Brown. Special
Speaker 1: thanks to Bloomberg editors Tim Annette and Rick Shine. Francesco
Speaker 1: Levy is the head of Bloomberg Podcasts. Be sure to
Speaker 1: subscribe to Prognosis if you haven't already, and if you
Speaker 1: like our show, please leave us. A review helps others
Speaker 1: find out about the show. Thanks for listening, See you
Speaker 1: next time. The pretty Part in Them