Speaker 1: Al Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Welcome to the final episode of Anti vax America, a
Speaker 2: special mini series from It could Happen Here. I'm your host,
Speaker 2: Stephen Monachelli, a journalist in Dallas and sometimes contributor to
Speaker 2: cool Zone Media. Over the past episodes, we've explored the
Speaker 2: origins of the current measles outbreak, the historical roots of
Speaker 2: the anti vaccination movement, the overlap between vaccine hesitancy and
Speaker 2: conservative Christianity that upholds a strong belief in spiritual healing,
Speaker 2: and the eugenic implications of contemporary anti vax ideology and
Speaker 2: the Maha movement. In this episode, we'll explore the future.
Speaker 2: Could the United States see a massive return of viral outbreaks,
Speaker 2: How would a nationwide collapse and vaccination rates impact our
Speaker 2: public health? And what are we to make of the
Speaker 2: rise of alt medicine and whether that could continue to
Speaker 2: spread if people like RFK Junior elevate these hucksters into
Speaker 2: national figures. These are not just academic questions. If vaccination
Speaker 2: rates continue to decline, we could see the return of
Speaker 2: diseases like polio, which had been eradicated in the United
Speaker 2: States for decades. In recent years, there have been cases
Speaker 2: of polio found in waste water, and one confirmed case
Speaker 2: of a man with polio in an unvaccinated community in
Speaker 2: New York. An expert warned that these isolated incidents could
Speaker 2: spread into larger outbreaks, and these concerns are well founded,
Speaker 2: particularly given that RFK Junior has said as recently as
Speaker 2: twenty twenty three that early batches of polio vaccines caused cancer,
Speaker 2: something that has never been demonstrated in the research. Vaccination
Speaker 2: is the most effective tool we have to prevent the
Speaker 2: spread of communicable, deadly diseases. Without widespread vaccination, we face
Speaker 2: the very real possibility of devastating public health crises, and
Speaker 2: the resurgence of diseases like measles and polio, and smallpox
Speaker 2: and more would put our most vulnerable populations at risk,
Speaker 2: especially the elderly, the immunal compromised, and others who cannot
Speaker 2: be vaccinated. We don't have a crystal ball that will
Speaker 2: allow us to see into the future, but as the
Speaker 2: anti vaccination movement grows, it is clear that the risk
Speaker 2: of large scale outbreaks is increasing, and if we don't
Speaker 2: correct the course soon, we could see a public health
Speaker 2: disaster unlike any we've seen in recent history. Perhaps even
Speaker 2: worse than COVID, which took more than one point one
Speaker 2: million American lives. In this episode, we will explore what
Speaker 2: could happen here in the United States if the anti
Speaker 2: vaccination movement continues to get their way. As I conducted
Speaker 2: interviews with medical doctors and public health experts featured in
Speaker 2: this series, I asked them all the same question, where
Speaker 2: do you see this going? Each had their own answer,
Speaker 2: and all of their answers pointed in the same direction.
Speaker 2: Here's Catherine Wells, the head of public health in Lubbock,
Speaker 2: the largest county in West Texas where the measles outbreak began.
Speaker 3: I do worry that, you know, we are going to
Speaker 3: see other vaccine preventable diseases. You know, measles is the
Speaker 3: most highly infectious. But for all of those people that
Speaker 3: are becoming infected with measles, you know they'll be immune,
Speaker 3: But that doesn't mean they're immune from mumps and rubella
Speaker 3: and other vaccine preventable diseases that could easily enter a
Speaker 3: community with lower vaccination rates, and those can come next.
Speaker 3: So I mean that is concerning.
Speaker 2: Measles is sort of like a canary in the coal
Speaker 2: mine when it comes to vaccination rates. It's the first
Speaker 2: sign of a collapsing system. Here's doctor Peter Hotez, the
Speaker 2: vaccine scientist in Houston.
Speaker 4: You know, with the formation of anti vaccine groups in
Speaker 4: the twenty tens in Texas, you started to get these
Speaker 4: steep rise in parents requesting non medical exemptions that their
Speaker 4: kids could get out of being vaccinated for school. And
Speaker 4: it was particularly strong in the same places where people
Speaker 4: were refusing COVID vaccine. Years later, especially in conservative rural
Speaker 4: areas of West Texas East Texas, the vaccination rates continue
Speaker 4: to be strong in our cities of the Texas Triangle,
Speaker 4: Dallas where you are, in Houston where I am, and
Speaker 4: San Antonio and Austin. But you know, in the more
Speaker 4: conservative rural areas of West Texas East Texas, that's where
Speaker 4: you saw big declines in kids getting vaccines. And once
Speaker 4: you go below a certain threshold, roughly below ninety percent
Speaker 4: and bam, that you start to see break through childhood infections.
Speaker 4: And usually the first one you see is measles. You
Speaker 4: can ultimately get all of them, but measles is the
Speaker 4: first one you see because it's so highly transmiss it's
Speaker 4: the most transmissible virus we know about. So measles is
Speaker 4: kind of the whatever you want to call it, the
Speaker 4: early biomarker of a problem with your vaccination system. And unfortunately,
Speaker 4: now it's just tearing through West Texas and the Panhandle,
Speaker 4: and now it's in four states, all more or less
Speaker 4: in the Great Plains area of the country. Right it's
Speaker 4: the Panhandle in West Texas at the southern end of
Speaker 4: the plain's been into joining areas in New Mexico, then
Speaker 4: going up into Oklahoma and now Kansas. In my worry
Speaker 4: is that this is a very large probably much larger
Speaker 4: than is actually being reported. I mean, I don't see
Speaker 4: this thing wearing down anytime soon. And I'm worried about
Speaker 4: really prolonged measles epidemic to the point where we could
Speaker 4: even lose measles elimination status in the US if it
Speaker 4: goes on a full year. Between twenty twenty three and
Speaker 4: twenty twenty four, we've had a fold rise in measles
Speaker 4: epidemics outbreaks. We've had a sixfold rise and whooping cough
Speaker 4: Protessa's cases. We've had polio upear in the wastewater in
Speaker 4: New York State. So we're already trending in the wrong
Speaker 4: direction even before this current administration because of all the
Speaker 4: anti vaccine sentiment rhetoric out there. Now you throw on
Speaker 4: top of it efforts to actively dismantle our vaccine ecosystem,
Speaker 4: and I can only imagine what's going to happen. I
Speaker 4: really worry about the widespread return of all these childhood illnesses,
Speaker 4: just like we're seeing now with measles. I mean, we're
Speaker 4: looking at the potential of sustained transmission going on for
Speaker 4: months and months to the point where we could lose
Speaker 4: our measles elimination status, and then it goes on from there,
Speaker 4: because measles is the most highly transmissible I worry about
Speaker 4: the same with whooping cough protessis. I worry about even
Speaker 4: potentially polio returning, and not only in the US, because
Speaker 4: you know, as we both know, the US is very
Speaker 4: good at exporting its called. Sure, we export our music,
Speaker 4: we export our movies. I worry about exporting this stuff,
Speaker 4: and I worry about the impact on Latin American countries,
Speaker 4: on low and middle income countries in Asia and Africa,
Speaker 4: and in Europe as well. So a complete unraveling of
Speaker 4: our vaccine ecosystem and global goals, and that really gives
Speaker 4: me a lot of pause for concern.
Speaker 2: And on that note, a quick ad break. It's probably
Speaker 2: safe to assume that the majority, if not the entirety,
Speaker 2: of the audience of this show grew up in a
Speaker 2: time when vaccinations were widely embraced and considered beneficial. That
Speaker 2: also means that most of us have never lived during
Speaker 2: a time when children and adults were regularly disabled or
Speaker 2: killed by diseases like smallpox or folio. In the twentieth century,
Speaker 2: three hundred million people were killed by smallpox in the
Speaker 2: nineteen forties and nineteen fifties, Polio killed nearly half a
Speaker 2: million people world wide annually and paralyzed hundreds of thousands,
Speaker 2: but both of those diseases were effectively eradicated decades ago.
Speaker 2: The last person living in an iron lung, the medical
Speaker 2: device that keeps people who were paralyzed from polio alive,
Speaker 2: died in March of twenty twenty four, and even measles,
Speaker 2: which is considered a relatively less dangerous illness, was routinely
Speaker 2: deadly before vaccination was widespread. There was a time when
Speaker 2: thousands of Americans died from the disease every year. All
Speaker 2: of that was due to the creation of vaccine policy
Speaker 2: and infrastructure over time. But now RFK Junior and the
Speaker 2: MAHA movement threatened to tear all that down and send
Speaker 2: us back in time. Here's doctor David Gorsky.
Speaker 5: I'll start with vaccines and then I'll try to move
Speaker 5: more to MAHA. So with vaccines, what I think we're
Speaker 5: seeing is the systematic intentional dismantling of federal vaccine infrastructure
Speaker 5: and policy, this whole call for placebo controlled trials. If
Speaker 5: they define new vaccines as any new vaccine, it will
Speaker 5: mean that there will be no new vaccines approve until
Speaker 5: it's changed, which would at the earliest be after Trump
Speaker 5: is out of office. If they define it as just
Speaker 5: new vaccines for diseases that don't have vaccines, it might
Speaker 5: be less of an issue either way, though contrary to
Speaker 5: what they claim they want to do, which is increase
Speaker 5: public confidence in vaccines, it will almost certainly have the
Speaker 5: opposite effect. I recently wrote I think yeah. It was
Speaker 5: last week's post. I wrote about a study that modeled
Speaker 5: what would happen with certain percentage declines in vaccine uptake
Speaker 5: for four different vaccines, including the measles vaccine, of course,
Speaker 5: and it estimates did you know some pretty catastrophic numbers, if,
Speaker 5: for instance, vaccine uptake declined even ten percent or fifty
Speaker 5: percent over the next twenty five years, you know, millions
Speaker 5: of cases, thousands of deaths, you know, in other words,
Speaker 5: going back to basically the way it was before the
Speaker 5: measles vaccine was licensed in the early nineteen sixties. You know,
Speaker 5: you sure you can. You can complain that, you know,
Speaker 5: the model was somewhat simplistic, but if anything, I think
Speaker 5: it was probably conservative because they used a lot of
Speaker 5: conservative assumptions. We could well be heading for that sort
Speaker 5: of future, although it takes a while for things to change,
Speaker 5: even with this sort of radical action that RFK Junior
Speaker 5: is taking, and likely we would not see the worst
Speaker 5: effects really take off until after Trump's out of office,
Speaker 5: assuming he leaves office in twenty twenty nine, so you know,
Speaker 5: it'll be left to his successsessors to deal with the mess.
Speaker 5: And it's always easier to destroy than it is to
Speaker 5: rebuild out. Obviously. Now the interesting counterpoint to you know,
Speaker 5: Maha saying, oh, we must increase the gold standard science
Speaker 5: applied to vaccines and make the standards for approval and
Speaker 5: licensure you know, much more stringent. The exact opposite is
Speaker 5: what they're talking about. For things like stem cell therapies,
Speaker 5: you know, they're on the vast majority of which are
Speaker 5: unproven and often very expensive. A lot of other you know,
Speaker 5: wellness treatments and that sort of a thing. So we
Speaker 5: could be seeing a lot less novel pharmaceuticals and vaccines
Speaker 5: being approved because the anti pharma you know, suspicion will
Speaker 5: be such that the bar for approval will be higher,
Speaker 5: arguably too high. I realize that in the past I
Speaker 5: once argued that that maybe our bar for approving some
Speaker 5: drugs was too low, but that was more based on
Speaker 5: the various accelerated approval programs that had come into being
Speaker 5: in the years before that, where I thought that perhaps
Speaker 5: the follow up after the initial accelerated approval was not adequate.
Speaker 5: At the same time, it could become more and more
Speaker 5: like the Wild West. When it comes to everything else,
Speaker 5: we could very well have the equivalent of you know,
Speaker 5: the traveling snake. Oil salesmen going across you know, the
Speaker 5: planes in their cart, you know, selling There are various lineaments.
Speaker 5: I'm not exactly sure what that would look like. I
Speaker 5: do know that, for instance, it's already pretty much like
Speaker 5: that for a lot of quote unquote stem cell therapies
Speaker 5: that have never really been demonstrated to be effective and safe,
Speaker 5: and you know, the same randomized clinical controlled trials that
Speaker 5: they demand, you know, for vaccines. One thing I have
Speaker 5: little doubt of is that public health is going to
Speaker 5: be degraded significantly over the next four years. And how
Speaker 5: we recover from that, I don't know. I'm struggling with
Speaker 5: thea of what can be done to resist it or
Speaker 5: slow it down, given that you know, the entire Republican
Speaker 5: Party doesn't seem to want to put any sort of
Speaker 5: checks on this administration mm hm.
Speaker 2: And you know, if we were to have some other
Speaker 2: sort of major pandemic, either a new virus that breaks
Speaker 2: through or a return of some disease that was once
Speaker 2: out of circulation, there's no real guarantee that deaths or
Speaker 2: widespread illness or disability as a result of those possible
Speaker 2: events will even spur a reaction in a way that
Speaker 2: would set us on a path back towards confidence in
Speaker 2: public health and vaccination. You know, the outcome of COVID
Speaker 2: was you know, it's it's quite clear that COVID was
Speaker 2: sort of an accelerant for a lot of the anti
Speaker 2: vaccination beliefs that had long been incubating. And you know,
Speaker 2: our public discourse and broad distrust of public health entities
Speaker 2: in general. And you know, like you said, you know,
Speaker 2: Trump's successor will be left to clean up whatever mess
Speaker 2: is made. And it's possible that Trump's successor could be
Speaker 2: someone like JD. Van's, Yes, it could, or someone who
Speaker 2: shares this affinity for you know, quasi eugenic statements or beliefs,
Speaker 2: or this general disregard for the consequences of a sort
Speaker 2: of social Diarwinist approach to public health. And so, you know,
Speaker 2: we don't want to overstate the risks and be doomsayers.
Speaker 2: But on the other hand, there's this real potential for
Speaker 2: the return of you know, God forbid something like polio
Speaker 2: or a breakthrough a and flu.
Speaker 5: You just reminded me polio was one of the diseases
Speaker 5: modeled in that study, and the results was coming back
Speaker 5: and hundreds or even thousands of cases of paralytic polio. Right.
Speaker 2: And we live now in a time in which it's
Speaker 2: always been the majority of people who have never had
Speaker 2: someone in their family who was in an iron lung
Speaker 2: but we live in a time now where like the
Speaker 2: historical memory of that is somewhat lost because it's not
Speaker 2: even in the popular consciousness. It's not something that is featured,
Speaker 2: you know in media. You know, used to read books
Speaker 2: or watch films or even in television. You know, there
Speaker 2: would be examples of something like that, someone who had
Speaker 2: been impacted by polio and whether they were left disabled,
Speaker 2: you know, and had less use of their limbs, or
Speaker 2: you know, if they ended up in an iron lung.
Speaker 2: You know, that was something at least people were aware
Speaker 2: of the risk, and it's it's kind of paralleled with
Speaker 2: something Another public health official I spoke with talked about
Speaker 2: how there's been like two decades of doctors who went
Speaker 2: through their residencies never even seeing a case of measles,
Speaker 2: and so now we're having to sort of re educate
Speaker 2: not just our doctors, but really the whole population, and
Speaker 2: that's a massive undertaking. We'll hear a bit more from
Speaker 2: doctor Gorsky right after the sad break.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 5: One of the things that anti vaxers like to do
Speaker 5: is to try to claim that, oh, back before the vaccine,
Speaker 5: people didn't think measles was a big deal, and they
Speaker 5: will point to that famous episode of The Brady Bunch
Speaker 5: that I don't know if you ever heard of, where
Speaker 5: all the kids got the measles, and it was played
Speaker 5: mainly for laughs, you know, like they're all happy about
Speaker 5: being home from school and they're not very sick. They
Speaker 5: just have little thoughts painted all over them, because I
Speaker 5: guess that's how they showed them having the measles.
Speaker 1: This is a life, isn't it. Yeah, if you have
Speaker 1: to get sick, she can't beat the measles.
Speaker 4: That's right.
Speaker 1: No medicine insider out like shots.
Speaker 2: Me don't even mention shots.
Speaker 1: Yeah, measles, measles, measles. Well, all the kids have now
Speaker 1: had the measles so far, lot of them years ago.
Speaker 1: Looks like the Brady's are.
Speaker 5: Finished with a meaz There was also an episode of
Speaker 5: The Flintstones that, believe it or not, they played the
Speaker 5: measles for laughs, And there was an episode of The
Speaker 5: Donna Reid Show from the fifties. They would point like
Speaker 5: those and go, oh, they didn't consider measles a big deal. Well,
Speaker 5: if you read the actual medical and public health literature,
Speaker 5: you know they did. And you know there were hundreds
Speaker 5: of thousands of confirmed cases a year, maybe millions of
Speaker 5: cases a year, and at least averaging about four or
Speaker 5: five hundred deaths a year, which doesn't sound like a lot,
Speaker 5: but in anything having to do with children, that's a
Speaker 5: lot of death because we don't expect children to die.
Speaker 5: Children should not die. They usually, you know, it's not
Speaker 5: like elderly people where you know, it's expected that that's
Speaker 5: when you know, the body starts giving out and people
Speaker 5: are reaching the end of their lives. Children's death rates
Speaker 5: should be low. That's why that's why we look at,
Speaker 5: you know, childhood cancer, and there was such an effort made,
Speaker 5: you know, over from like the fifties on to try
Speaker 5: to decrease the rate of death from childhood cancer. And
Speaker 5: you know, the results have been pretty spectacular. About eighty
Speaker 5: five percent of children with you know, cancer live, which
Speaker 5: you know, before it was you know, a pretty small number.
Speaker 5: And the funny thing is the number of childhood cancers
Speaker 5: is very small compared to a lot of other things
Speaker 5: that cause death. We viewed it as sufficiently important to
Speaker 5: try to do something about it. At least we did,
Speaker 5: the question of whether we will continue to because you know,
Speaker 5: anti kenemotherapy and various cancer nonsense tends to go right
Speaker 5: along with maha and the other thing.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 5: For instance, when RFK Junior made his one of his statements,
Speaker 5: was it in early March I believe, or it was
Speaker 5: in March sometime about you know, where everyone was like, oh,
Speaker 5: he said, the MMR works and is the best way
Speaker 5: to stop the spread of measles. Yes, but you know,
Speaker 5: instead of the traditional messaging that you would come out
Speaker 5: of the CDC, which would be, you know, get vaccinated.
Speaker 5: You know MMR is the best way to put a
Speaker 5: stop to this. Please, please, parents, get your kids vaccinated. Instead,
Speaker 5: what he sort of said is, yes, the vaccine, you know,
Speaker 5: vaccination is good, you know the best way to stop
Speaker 5: the outbreak. But then he buries it instead of baffling
Speaker 5: with bullshit, it's more like burying it in bullshit. He
Speaker 5: talks about, you know, vitamin A supposedly to treat measles.
Speaker 5: He talks about how children die with measles rather than
Speaker 5: of measles, which should sound very familiar because they pulled
Speaker 5: the same rhetoric out for COVID and the idea being
Speaker 5: that only the children who were already sick were harmed
Speaker 5: by measles, and that you know, your middle class healthy
Speaker 5: children are not in any danger. You know. One way
Speaker 5: to look at the anti vaccine movement, besides the eugenesis undertones,
Speaker 5: sometimes not even undertones, one way to look at it
Speaker 5: is as a purity cult. You may remember the whole
Speaker 5: pure blood thing from a few years ago, like those
Speaker 5: who were not vaccinated refusing to mingle with those who are.
Speaker 5: Who are you know whose blood has somehow been contaminated
Speaker 5: by the vaccine. It's the same as all. And think
Speaker 5: of how much of alternative medicine involves quote unquote detoxification.
Speaker 5: I like to call it ritual purification because it's like
Speaker 5: more of a religious concept than it is actually a
Speaker 5: medical concept. And look at how treatment of quote unquote
Speaker 5: vaccine injury involves something like elation therapy to pull the
Speaker 5: evil heavy metals that are supposedly causing autism out of you.
Speaker 5: So the idea that you have control of your health
Speaker 5: if you only make your terrain in your body hostile
Speaker 5: to microbes through your superior lifestyle. The one example of
Speaker 5: this that I like to point out, and the best
Speaker 5: retort to it that I like to point out, comes
Speaker 5: from about two thousand and nine. If I recall right,
Speaker 5: it was Bill Maher on his HBO show, and Bob
Speaker 5: Costas was the guess, and he was going on about how,
Speaker 5: you know, this was around the time of the each
Speaker 5: one in one flu pandemic, and he was going you knowing,
Speaker 5: he was going on about how he didn't need the
Speaker 5: flu vaccine because you know, his terrain was so hostile
Speaker 5: to the flu, because you know, of his superior lifestyle.
Speaker 5: Caused me to roll my eyes. But and that if
Speaker 5: he were on an airplane with people coughing with the flu,
Speaker 5: he would not get the flu. What did Costas say
Speaker 5: to him? I love this retort? He said, Oh, come on, superman.
Speaker 2: Bob Costas could have easily used a different word in
Speaker 2: his retort, given the eugenic tendencies of the modern anti
Speaker 2: vaccination movement, and the word I have in mind is
Speaker 2: uber minch. But I digress. If the uber mensch of
Speaker 2: the anti VAXX movement like RFK get what they want,
Speaker 2: we will live in a world where preventable communicable diseases
Speaker 2: run rampant, the deaths of children are justified as either
Speaker 2: a part of God's plan or a survival of the
Speaker 2: fittest herd. Immunity strategy, where snake oil and beef tallow
Speaker 2: salesmen are heralded above doctors and scientists, and where only
Speaker 2: the strongest will survive at the expense of the week.
Speaker 2: Diseases long thought defeated could return, and our ability to
Speaker 2: address new viruses will be diminished. If RFK Junior successfully
Speaker 2: dismantles what remains of our public health bureaucracy, and he's
Speaker 2: doing it at a steady clip. In other words, the
Speaker 2: future may end up looking a lot like the past,
Speaker 2: more than it already does, and that's terrifying. The last
Speaker 2: time deadly pandemics, religious fervor, and resistance to medical science
Speaker 2: and eugenic policies all coincided historically with global trade breakdowns,
Speaker 2: things did not work out so well for anyone involved.
Speaker 2: And unfortunately, if I've taken one thing away from my
Speaker 2: exploration of anti vacs America, it's that things will likely
Speaker 2: have to get worse before they get better. It's really
Speaker 2: hard to get people unstuck from their beliefs. Despite more
Speaker 2: than one million Americans dying of COVID, the reaction to
Speaker 2: pandemic restrictions combined with the anti vaccination movements convincing misinformation
Speaker 2: around vaccines radicalized many people against vaccines and public health
Speaker 2: measures in general. Before I recorded this final statement, the
Speaker 2: Texas House voted to advance a bill that will expand
Speaker 2: the ability for parents to seek exemptions for child vaccination
Speaker 2: requirements for school. And this is happening as a measles
Speaker 2: outbreak is ongoing, and things aren't looking good, But there
Speaker 2: is at least one sliver of hope that I've found.
Speaker 2: As my conversation with Gere illustrates, it's possible for people
Speaker 2: who grow up in communities where vaccinations are avoided or
Speaker 2: where there is no belief in them to get out
Speaker 2: of those communities and to get themselves vaccinated. And as
Speaker 2: my conversation with Catherine Wells illustrated, it is also possible
Speaker 2: for people who had been hesitant to get their children
Speaker 2: vaccinated for something like measles to be spurred into action
Speaker 2: given reporting around an outbreak. But the question that ultimately
Speaker 2: remains is whether enough people will have their minds changed
Speaker 2: and embrace what the science tells us we should do.
Speaker 2: Given doctor Gorsky's astute observation that the anti vaccine movement
Speaker 2: is someone like a purity cult and Gear's comment that
Speaker 2: escaping their anti vax upbringing was sort of like escaping
Speaker 2: a cult. Unfortunately, I think we will have to temper
Speaker 2: our expectations for how quickly we can extricate our nation
Speaker 2: from this deep dark place that I call anti vax America.
Speaker 2: I'm Stephen Monicelli. Thanks for listening.
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