Speaker 1: Alson media.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to it could happen here and to episode
Speaker 2: two of Anti vax America. I'm Stephen Monachelly. Last episode
Speaker 2: I explored the ongoing measles outbreak that started in West
Speaker 2: Texas and has since spread to several states across the nation.
Speaker 2: A big part of that story is the underlying anti
Speaker 2: vax beliefs that are fueling a decline in vaccination rates
Speaker 2: across the country, and how the leader of our federal
Speaker 2: health bureaucracy, our Hearth K. Junior, has helped seed, spread
Speaker 2: and embed those beliefs into policy. But behind all that
Speaker 2: is a deeper history of anti vaccination beliefs in America.
Speaker 2: And while it is undoubtedly the case that the COVID
Speaker 2: nineteen pandemic brought anti vaccination beliefs to the forefront of
Speaker 2: American politics, opposition to vaccines is not new. It's about
Speaker 2: as old as the technology itself.
Speaker 3: It actually goes back to the founding colonies and even
Speaker 3: the nearly eighteen hundreds when you had people kind of peddling
Speaker 3: various what they called botanicals as substitutes for mainstream medicine.
Speaker 2: That's doctor Peter Hotez. He's a doctor in Houston with
Speaker 2: a long and impressive list of credentials.
Speaker 3: I'm a pediatrician scientist. I have an MD and PhD,
Speaker 3: and I'm a professor of pediatrics and Molecular Virology at
Speaker 3: Baylor College of Medicine, where I'm also co director of
Speaker 3: the Texas Children's Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, and also
Speaker 3: dean of our National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor
Speaker 3: College and Medicine. And my interest is a lifelong interest
Speaker 3: in developing new vaccines, particularly vaccines that the big pharma
Speaker 3: companies have no interest in making because they're vaccines for
Speaker 3: diseases of poverty. We've made a low cost COVID vaccine
Speaker 3: that reached technology, reached one hundred million people in India
Speaker 3: and Indonesia during the pandemic, and now vaccines for parasitic
Speaker 3: diseases that occur only among the world's poor. And that's
Speaker 3: a lifelong passion of mine.
Speaker 2: The first vaccination was created in seventeen ninety six by
Speaker 2: Edward Jenner, who was able to build on prior methods
Speaker 2: of inoculation, and he was able to create a vaccine
Speaker 2: for smallpox, one of the deadliest viruses in human history,
Speaker 2: within a matter of decades, vaccination had become widespread in
Speaker 2: the Western world. The United Kingdom passed the Vaccination Act
Speaker 2: of eighteen forty to provide free vaccinations to the poor,
Speaker 2: and then passed another act in eighteen fifty three that
Speaker 2: made it compulsory for infants, and another in eighteen sixty
Speaker 2: seven that extended the compulsory vaccination requirement to fourteen and
Speaker 2: added penalties for non compliance that could be cumulative over time.
Speaker 2: Resistance to these laws began in eighteen fifty three with
Speaker 2: a few riots in towns across England, and this eventually
Speaker 2: formalized into the Anti Compulsory Vaccination League, which contributed literature
Speaker 2: likening vaccination to a monster and lobbied the British government
Speaker 2: to change the laws. Their efforts actually proved successful, and
Speaker 2: a new law was passed in eighteen ninety eight to
Speaker 2: remove cumulative penalties and create an exemption for what they
Speaker 2: termed conscientious objectors, which is the first time that term
Speaker 2: had ever been used in British law. Parallel anti vaccination
Speaker 2: movement made similar strides in the United States, and one
Speaker 2: of the leaders of the British anti vaccination movement even
Speaker 2: came to the United States to help co found one
Speaker 2: of the anti vaccination leagues in America. Several states also
Speaker 2: passed compulsory vaccination laws in the United States, spurring the
Speaker 2: American anti vaccination leagues to fight in the legal courts,
Speaker 2: in the court of public opinion and the legislatures across
Speaker 2: the country, and they successfully repealed compulsory vaccination laws in California, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Utah,
Speaker 2: West Virginia, and Wisconsin. But opposing compulsory vaccinations was only
Speaker 2: one part of the strategy of these early anti vaccine organizations.
Speaker 2: Another key plank, which may sound familiar to those of
Speaker 2: you who follow the news, was the promotion of alternative
Speaker 2: remedies such as homeopathy, which were quite popular at the
Speaker 2: time among certain sects of medicine. Now, these movements didn't
Speaker 2: neatly fall across political lines in the way that they
Speaker 2: largely do today. Progressive and conservative anti vaccination activists were
Speaker 2: tied together by strongly held beliefs in things like quote
Speaker 2: unquote medical freedom, sometimes philosophical beliefs around freedom, their spiritual faiths,
Speaker 2: or in some instances, even anti Semitic conspiracy theories. Consider
Speaker 2: Eugene carl During, a philosopher and economists, considered one of
Speaker 2: the founding fathers of German anti Semitism, who argued that
Speaker 2: Jewish doctors were behind a conspiracy to drum up business
Speaker 2: for themselves by promoting vaccination to healthy people. These are
Speaker 2: all tropes that live on to this day and that
Speaker 2: someone like do Hotz knows all too well, and because
Speaker 2: of his advocacy of vaccines, he's often been a target
Speaker 2: of it.
Speaker 3: I'm a scientist, the vaccine scientists, the Jewish vaccine scientists.
Speaker 3: So they've got me doing this in secret with George
Speaker 3: Soros or one of the rothschilds that I'm doing it
Speaker 3: at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Haven't even invited
Speaker 3: to Davos.
Speaker 2: While some of the progressive strain of the historic anti
Speaker 2: vaccination movement has lived on in the stereotypical hippie naturalist
Speaker 2: lifestyle culture that is popular in parts of the Northwest,
Speaker 2: that strain is long and fringe and is kind of
Speaker 2: extinct at this point. It had its heyday after the
Speaker 2: sixties and seventies, when a lot of alternative therapies and
Speaker 2: medicines were being promoted and embraced. In the West. Most
Speaker 2: of the anti vaxxers of that variety today have largely
Speaker 2: been drawn towards more right winging values and have been
Speaker 2: subsumed by the sort of politics that defines the larger
Speaker 2: Make America Healthy Again agenda. The way doctor Hotess sees it,
Speaker 2: there's a direct line between these old anti vaccine movements
Speaker 2: and the modern day MAHA movement, which combines anti vaccine
Speaker 2: beliefs with alternative medicine and libertarian mindsets around health freedom
Speaker 2: into a sort of single bundle of sticks.
Speaker 3: There's an older thread that goes back to colonial times,
Speaker 3: and it has to do with libertarian concepts of what's
Speaker 3: sometimes called health freedom medical freedom. Hey, you can't tell
Speaker 3: us what to do about our kids, and now we
Speaker 3: see that today, right, you know. And this is coming
Speaker 3: partly out of the health and wellness and influencer industry.
Speaker 3: And that's why you get you know, ivermectin which does
Speaker 3: absolutely nothing for covid, or hydroxychloroquine which has done nothing
Speaker 3: for covid, or when you heard mister Kennedy talk about
Speaker 3: vitamin A or as a preventative, or budesini as steroid
Speaker 3: which does nothing, or clarithromycin and antibiotic does nothing. Whatever,
Speaker 3: you know, they can buy in bulk and then sell
Speaker 3: at a profit. That's you know, that's a lot of
Speaker 3: the wellness and influencer industry. And so what you have
Speaker 3: now is that converging thread around that and libertarian politics.
Speaker 3: And that's what you saw. I think, after you know,
Speaker 3: we started to debunk the false links between vaccines and autism,
Speaker 3: they needed a new thing. And this is when you
Speaker 3: saw here in Texas, this rise in parents requesting vaccine
Speaker 3: exemptions around the banner of health freedom, medical freedom. And
Speaker 3: here's where it became really tough to talk about because
Speaker 3: it got adopted by the Republican Tea Party in Texas.
Speaker 3: And so anti vaccine groups started getting pack money, political
Speaker 3: action committee money to lobby the or educate the state
Speaker 3: legislature about health freedom, medical freedom, and even provide money
Speaker 3: for candidates to run on anti vaccine platforms.
Speaker 2: But before we explore the contemporary anti vaccination movement further,
Speaker 2: we have to turn to history, and before we do that,
Speaker 2: we're obligated to take a quick ad break. Anti vaccine
Speaker 2: movements appeared to be gaining steam in the late eighteen
Speaker 2: hundreds and early nineteen hundreds, but their progress largely halted
Speaker 2: when a nineteen oh five US Supreme Court ruling upheld
Speaker 2: the authority of states to pass and enforce compulsory vaccination laws.
Speaker 2: The continued spread of viruses like smallpox, the deadly Spanish
Speaker 2: flu pandemic, and the outbreak of World War II all
Speaker 2: spurred advancements in vaccination research and programs to ensure widespread vaccination,
Speaker 2: and as this science continued to advance, more and more
Speaker 2: states began to mandate vaccines for public school attendance, as
Speaker 2: did employers for their workers. By nineteen sixty three, twenty
Speaker 2: states required children to be vaccinated before going to school,
Speaker 2: and by nineteen eighty every state in the nation had
Speaker 2: a similar law on the books. And as the decades
Speaker 2: went on, the incident's rates of several diseases dramatically plummeted.
Speaker 2: By nineteen eighty, smallpox had been eradicated. But along the way,
Speaker 2: there were things done in the name of medical science
Speaker 2: that would undercut the great strides made during that period
Speaker 2: of time, things that ultimately showed the seeds for some
Speaker 2: of today's vaccination skepticism.
Speaker 4: I think it's important to understand that not all suspicion
Speaker 4: regarding medicine and doctors, you know, research that not all
Speaker 4: of this resistance is totally irrational, it's based on experience.
Speaker 2: That's doctor Michael Phillips, who you may recognize from prior
Speaker 2: episodes if it could happen here. He's a historian of race,
Speaker 2: eugenics and right wing politics in Texas.
Speaker 4: Going back to the time of slavery, enslaved men and
Speaker 4: women were often the unwilling, involuntary subjects of medical experiments.
Speaker 4: We have, for instance, a a man named maryon Sims,
Speaker 4: and they actually put a statue up of him in
Speaker 4: Central Park in New York that's been taken down since,
Speaker 4: who was credited as the father of gynecology. There was
Speaker 4: a problem in that era before the discovery of germ theory,
Speaker 4: where whenever women would give birth and there would be
Speaker 4: vaginal tears, doctors would often sew up the wounds and
Speaker 4: then there'd be an infection and the woman would die
Speaker 4: or get seriously ill or infertile. And the infertility and
Speaker 4: death of slaves meant a loss of property. So in
Speaker 4: slavers we're very concerned about this issue. Maryon Sims at
Speaker 4: some point discovers that if you use silver thread silver
Speaker 4: sutures when you operate on women who have had these
Speaker 4: vaginal terrors that the infection doesn't happen. Now, he wanted
Speaker 4: to prove this. He wanted to perfect his technique, so
Speaker 4: he did it on enslaved women.
Speaker 2: During the COVID nineteen pandemic, Black Americans lagged behind whites
Speaker 2: in terms of vaccination rates. According to a systemic literature
Speaker 2: review on the determinants of vaccine hesitancy among Black Americans,
Speaker 2: vaccine hasn't seen in Black communities. Is rooted in a
Speaker 2: troubling history of unethical medical experiments, and it persists to
Speaker 2: this day due to how this group of the population
Speaker 2: still experiences discrimination, racism, mistreatment, and overall health iniquity.
Speaker 4: The most famous case of the medical abuse of marginalized people,
Speaker 4: and it's really entered the folk culture to the point
Speaker 4: that when I was teaching American history classes at a
Speaker 4: community college, all the students had heard about this particular
Speaker 4: atrocity and it was called the Tuskegee experiment. What actually
Speaker 4: happened is that African American men who got sexually transmitted
Speaker 4: diseases would go to this medical clinic that had been established,
Speaker 4: and the doctors with this grant wanted to see what
Speaker 4: the trajectory of syphilis would be if it was untreated.
Speaker 4: So these were people who already had STDs and they
Speaker 4: were given a placebo. They were given basically a sugar
Speaker 4: pill rather than penicillin or any other ameliative care. And
Speaker 4: the doctor's mission in their minds was that's find out
Speaker 4: if syphilis progresses in the same way with African American
Speaker 4: men as it does with white men. And so they
Speaker 4: wanted to see because they knew that syphilis will untreated
Speaker 4: eventually attack the central nervous systimuli, seizures, blindness, any number
Speaker 4: of terrible side effects. So they would go to the doctor,
Speaker 4: they would get the placebo, and syphilis will go into remission,
Speaker 4: and so the patient wouldn't have the benefit of medical
Speaker 4: knowledge about how syphilis progresses, would think the pill made
Speaker 4: it better. And then they would ask them to return
Speaker 4: and the doctor would come and then he'd record the
Speaker 4: damage that was happening to the patient's body as the
Speaker 4: disease progressed. And this went on until the nineteen sixties,
Speaker 4: and they published results with no professional repercussions, you know,
Speaker 4: And one thing they proved is that syphilis attacks black
Speaker 4: people the same way it does white people. If you
Speaker 4: leave it untreated, the same symptoms developed. The nervous systems
Speaker 4: of black and white people are the same. But they
Speaker 4: published these results in ACCLAIM Medical Journal, and the backlash
Speaker 4: was not immediate. Eventually, you know, it became a scanned
Speaker 4: So that really did strike a chord in the Black
Speaker 4: community that I think to this day we've seen skepticism
Speaker 4: about white medicine. And again there's valid historical reasons. RFK
Speaker 4: Junior and the anti vaccination movement have seized on this
Speaker 4: particular historical atrocity, so doubt about vaccines among Black Americans.
Speaker 4: More generally, Children's Health Defense, the anti vax group, previously
Speaker 4: led by RFK Junior, invoked the Tuskegee Syphlist 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 to take 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 3: It actually came about after a year of discussions with
Speaker 3: Robert F. Kennedy Junior explaining to him the evidence showing
Speaker 3: vaccines don't cause autism, and finally decide to write it
Speaker 3: all up in a book. And it's about my daughter.
Speaker 3: So you know, I wear two hats as a vaccine scientist,
Speaker 3: but also wound up going up against anti vaccine groups
Speaker 3: because I do have a daughter with autism and intellectual
Speaker 3: disabilities and now she's an adult. And essentially, there's two
Speaker 3: major threads in the book other than telling the story
Speaker 3: about Rachel and our family, and one is the overwhelming
Speaker 3: evidence showing there's no link between vaccines and autism. And
Speaker 3: even within that, there's a lot of subcategories because what
Speaker 3: happens is anti vaccine groups keeps switching up the concern
Speaker 3: about a specific vaccine, and when it gets debunked and
Speaker 3: they just switch it up to something else. I call
Speaker 3: it biomedical whack a mole or moving the goalposts of
Speaker 3: The original assertion came out of the late nineteen nineties
Speaker 3: of the false claims that it was the MMR vaccine
Speaker 3: the measles, smumps rubella vaccine, and that was actually published
Speaker 3: in a biomedical journal called The Lancet in the UK.
Speaker 3: The paper was retracted eventually because it was some to
Speaker 3: be false, and also the scientific community responded with large
Speaker 3: epidemiologic studies showing that kids who got the MMR vaccine
Speaker 3: were no more likely to acquire autism than kids who didn't,
Speaker 3: and similarly, kids on the autism we're no more likely
Speaker 3: to have gotten MMR the kids not on the autism spectrum.
Speaker 3: That should have been the end of it. But then
Speaker 3: our friend Robert F. Kennedy Junior came on the scene
Speaker 3: in two thousand and five and wrote an article in
Speaker 3: Rolling Stone magazine claiming, Okay, if it's not MMR, it
Speaker 3: must be the thimerosol preservative that's in vaccine, and that
Speaker 3: was also retracted and thoroughly debunked through large epidemiologic studies,
Speaker 3: even nonhuman primate studies, and its switched up again to
Speaker 3: spacing vaccines too close together. We have to green our
Speaker 3: vaccine ecosystem. And you saw celebrities like Jenny McCarthy, your husband,
Speaker 3: Jim Carrey walking around in green t shirts. It was
Speaker 3: all phony boloni and that was debunked, and then it
Speaker 3: was alum in vaccine. So it became this kind of
Speaker 3: exhausting exercise, and each time we were able to successfully
Speaker 3: refute it.
Speaker 2: Founded in two thousand and seven, Children's Health Defense represented
Speaker 2: a formalization of late twentieth century anti vaccination resistance. Unlike
Speaker 2: the anti vaccination leagues of the late nineteenth and early
Speaker 2: twentieth century, Children's Health Defense pedals dubies cures like homeopathy
Speaker 2: and promotes conspiratorial narratives like the Great Reset, which claims
Speaker 2: that billionaire Bill Gates and others have used the COVID
Speaker 2: nineteen pandemic as a part of a plan to make
Speaker 2: America Marxist. The idea that vaccines cause autism is a
Speaker 2: part of a larger claim that vaccines can cause injuries
Speaker 2: among those who receive them, and that our understanding of
Speaker 2: these injuries is far less than what the science shows.
Speaker 2: This notion gained traction in the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties,
Speaker 2: when controversy erupted regarding the DPT vaccine for diphtheria, pertussis,
Speaker 2: and tetanus. A sensational film called DPT Vaccine Roulette drew
Speaker 2: an erroneous link between the vaccine and illnesses of some
Speaker 2: children who received it. Two parents of children who received
Speaker 2: the vaccine formed the National Vaccine Information Center, which exists
Speaker 2: to this day and was a major source of COVID
Speaker 2: nineteen misinformation. The controversy around the DPT vaccine led to
Speaker 2: lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers, leading many of those manufacturers to
Speaker 2: stop producing the vaccine by the end of nineteen eighty five.
Speaker 2: Because of this, Congress passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury
Speaker 2: Act in nineteen eighty six, establishing a no fault system
Speaker 2: to alleviate pressure on vaccine manufacturers and provide an avenue
Speaker 2: for victims of a vaccine injury to be compensated. As
Speaker 2: doctor Hotez describes it, a lot of this is overblown. Yes,
Speaker 2: there are individuals who can have reactions to vaccines that
Speaker 2: can cause issues, but the studies around DPT and the
Speaker 2: notions that it caused these illnesses that these parents were
Speaker 2: concerned about, actually showed that there was no connection. Nevertheless,
Speaker 2: it is a reality that some people may face some
Speaker 2: sort of complications and we can't dismiss that. But when
Speaker 2: we stack it up against the side effects disease and
Speaker 2: one of those being death, well it's a pretty easy
Speaker 2: comparison to make.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's going to be so important to keep up,
Speaker 3: you know, the education about vaccines. And one of the
Speaker 3: things that I've done has been preparing these infographics, which
Speaker 3: I initially did with a guy named Bill Marsh at
Speaker 3: the New York Times. Is this brilliant guy who does
Speaker 3: all these cool graphics for the New York Times, and
Speaker 3: he had this really interesting idea that we published in
Speaker 3: The New York Times in twenty twenty where you create
Speaker 3: a box representing ten thousand kids and two boxes aligned
Speaker 3: side to side. One box is what happens if ten
Speaker 3: thousand kids get saved, for instance, the MMR vaccine versus
Speaker 3: the other box ten thousand kids getting measles, and you know,
Speaker 3: the ones getting the MMR vaccine. You see these tiny
Speaker 3: little pinpricks of very rare side effects like allergic reaction
Speaker 3: or febrill seizures one and three thousand, that sort of thing.
Speaker 3: So maybe there's a tiny little pinprick representing you know,
Speaker 3: three or thirty kids as opposed to measles, which you know,
Speaker 3: twenty percent of kids hospitalized in measles deaths. And these
Speaker 3: are large red and black boxes. I think those kinds
Speaker 3: of things are helpful because I think one of the
Speaker 3: problems is the anti vaccine guys. What they'll do is
Speaker 3: they will exaggerate the frequency of rare, rare side effects
Speaker 3: and in simultaneously downplay the severity of the illness. And
Speaker 3: we even heard that before the two deaths. You know,
Speaker 3: you heard all this rhetoric all measles is just like
Speaker 3: a benign illness. And now we've got two deaths right
Speaker 3: here in Texas of nice school age kids that never
Speaker 3: had to lose their lives because the parents, you know,
Speaker 3: were taken in by the disinformation machine.
Speaker 2: The contemporary rise of anti vaccine rhetoric in the US
Speaker 2: can also be tied to the political climate of the
Speaker 2: early twenty first century. Figures like Congressman Ron Paul, for example,
Speaker 2: have capitalized on the growing sentiment that government should not
Speaker 2: interfere with individual medical decisions. With increasing distrust in government,
Speaker 2: particularly during the Bush administration, vaccine hesitancy began to align
Speaker 2: with broader libertarian and some conservative ideologies. The idea that
Speaker 2: the government should not mandate personal medical choices further gain
Speaker 2: traction with the election of President Barack Obama in two
Speaker 2: thousand and eight, adding fuel to the anti vaccination fire,
Speaker 2: and the anti vax movement began to dovetail with the
Speaker 2: booming alternative health and wellness industry that excused Western medicine
Speaker 2: in favor of natural medicines and holistic approaches, and often
Speaker 2: this includes some sort of spiritual element. This convergence is
Speaker 2: crystallized in modern figures like Vonnie Hare, also known as
Speaker 2: the food Babe, who is a conservative wellness influencer. She's
Speaker 2: aligned herself with RFK Junior's Maha agenda and promotes the
Speaker 2: standard Goop like fare, but with a right wing edge.
Speaker 2: The American food industry, for example, or Big Pharma for example,
Speaker 2: are poisoning us. But also you shouldn't get the flu vaccine.
Speaker 2: Despite the best efforts of scientists like doctor Hotes to
Speaker 2: debunk he claims that motivate the modern anti vaccination movement,
Speaker 2: it has only gathered steam in the last few decades.
Speaker 2: In recent years, a number of states have passed new
Speaker 2: laws allowing for personal exemptions from vaccines, and because of
Speaker 2: doctor Hotes's public involvement, he's had a front row seat
Speaker 2: as anti vaccination beliefs have become part and parcel of
Speaker 2: Republican politics.
Speaker 3: And it was a physician, scientist. The last thing I
Speaker 3: want to talk about is politics, right. I mean, I
Speaker 3: feel that every American has a right to their political views.
Speaker 3: That's embedded in our history and our constitution. But how
Speaker 3: do you say, don't adopt this stuff because it's going
Speaker 3: to be so detrimental. But that's what happened with the
Speaker 3: formation of anti vaccine groups in the twenty tens in Texas.
Speaker 3: He started to get these steep rides in parents questing
Speaker 3: non medical exemptions that their kids could get out of
Speaker 3: being vaccinated for school. And it was particularly strong in
Speaker 3: the same places where people were refusing COVID vaccine. Years later,
Speaker 3: especially in conservative rural areas of West Texas East Texas.
Speaker 3: The vaccination rates continue to be strong in our cities
Speaker 3: of the Texas Triangle, Dallas where you are, in Houston
Speaker 3: where I am, and San Antonio and Austin. But you know,
Speaker 3: in the more conservative rural areas of West Texas, East Texas.
Speaker 3: That's where you saw big declines in kids getting vaccines.
Speaker 3: And once you go below a certain threshold, roughly below
Speaker 3: ninety percent, and bam that you start to see break
Speaker 3: through childhood infections. And usually the first one you see
Speaker 3: is measles. You can ultimately get all of them, but
Speaker 3: measles is the first one you see because it's so
Speaker 3: highly transmissible.
Speaker 2: But Texas is not alone.
Speaker 3: Well.
Speaker 2: Immunization rates certainly have limited in Republican states faster than
Speaker 2: they have in Democratic states. Immunization rates have fallen in
Speaker 2: most states since the pandemic. But there was another event
Speaker 2: over half a decade before social distancing and vaccination cards
Speaker 2: became household concepts that also informed the Republican Party's embrace
Speaker 2: of anti vaccine politics. This was a particular viral outbreak
Speaker 2: of measles in California, one that ultimately spurred policy changes
Speaker 2: that reverberated across the country.
Speaker 3: It started happening in the twenty tens and really ramped
Speaker 3: up after. There was a large measles epidemic in California,
Speaker 3: of all places, on twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen, and the
Speaker 3: California legislature shut down vaccine exemptions. They said, Okay, from
Speaker 3: now on, you want to send you kids to school,
Speaker 3: the kids have to be vaccinated. And I supported that
Speaker 3: and it solved the measles problem, but then it produced
Speaker 3: this health freedom backlash in states like Texas, also Oklahoma,
Speaker 3: and very much a red state phenomenon read being Republican,
Speaker 3: blue being a Democrat, and and that's where you saw
Speaker 3: these derise in vaccine exemptions. You started getting anti vaccine
Speaker 3: groups forming. They were getting pack money, political Action committee money,
Speaker 3: and I saw that as really dangerous because now rather
Speaker 3: than being sort of small, underfunded groups, they now had
Speaker 3: the backing of a major political party and everything that
Speaker 3: goes along with it in terms of influence and PAC money,
Speaker 3: and this gives them a lot of bandwidth and a
Speaker 3: lot of political clout, and it's so self defeating, but
Speaker 3: there you are. And so now we're at the point
Speaker 3: in Texas where we have over one hundred thousand non
Speaker 3: medical exemption requests of various sorts. That's a lot of kids.
Speaker 3: And this doesn't say anything about the homeschool kids in Texas.
Speaker 3: I'm told that we may have as many as seven
Speaker 3: hundred thousand homeschooled kids, but you might want to document that,
Speaker 3: and I don't think we have any idea of the
Speaker 3: percentage of those kids that are not getting their vaccines
Speaker 3: because they're homeschooled.
Speaker 2: Private schools in Texas have significantly lower vaccination rates on average,
Speaker 2: and the numbers among homeschoolers, while not precisely known, are
Speaker 2: likely just as bad, if not worse. Texas just passed
Speaker 2: the largest school privatization scheme in the nation, through which
Speaker 2: parents will be subsidized by the state to send their
Speaker 2: kids to private schools or to homeschool them, meaning vaccination
Speaker 2: rates among school as children will likely continue to fall.
Speaker 2: The prevalence of homeschooling among left leaning, crunchy alternative types
Speaker 2: has also contributed to the shift towards right wing politics,
Speaker 2: as the homeschool movement has deliberately tried to recruit those
Speaker 2: families and pushed them towards right wing politics. The complete
Speaker 2: partisan politicization of vaccinations has made communicating the risks of
Speaker 2: low vaccination rates far more difficult for people like doctor Hotez.
Speaker 3: How do you thread that needle and say, look, everybody
Speaker 3: has a right to their political views, going there with
Speaker 3: you that you're right as an American citizen, but don't
Speaker 3: adopt the anti vaccine stuff because it's so dangerous for
Speaker 3: your health and the health of your loved ones, the
Speaker 3: health of your kids. But it's a tough needle to thread,
Speaker 3: and as a result, I, you know, will often, even
Speaker 3: though I try to bend over backwards explaining I don't
Speaker 3: care about your politics, for their convenient purposes, I'm treated
Speaker 3: as a political figure and portrayed as a cartoon villain
Speaker 3: or you know, a scientist and white coat plotting nefarious things.
Speaker 3: You know, they have this crazy concept out there they
Speaker 3: call plandemic now that it's not a pandemic, it's a
Speaker 3: plandemic that somehow I've been involved with, or that I'm
Speaker 3: profiting from vaccines and secretly working for pharma companies even
Speaker 3: though it's the opposite, right, I make load cost vaccines
Speaker 3: that actually showed me could bypass the big pharma companies.
Speaker 3: And and some of it gets outright absurd. I mean,
Speaker 3: there's this whole thread on the Internet that says that
Speaker 3: I'm not even a real person, that I'm I'm actually
Speaker 3: being played by Jack Black, and that he's paid for
Speaker 3: by the CIA, And it's got these amazing you know
Speaker 3: forensic analysis of close ups of my teeth with Jack
Speaker 3: Black's teeth and all this profiles and things. I mean,
Speaker 3: the funny thing is the said thing is the crazier
Speaker 3: the conspiracy, the faster it seems to travel.
Speaker 2: These sorts of conspiracy theories would be laughable if they
Speaker 2: did not have deadly consequences, And unfortunately, this sort of
Speaker 2: public health focused conspiracism is not new. In the late
Speaker 2: eighteen hundred, several Canadian doctors, such as Alexander Milton Ross,
Speaker 2: insisted that vaccines were the true danger, not smallpox. Others
Speaker 2: argued that British doctors were promoting vaccinations to poison the
Speaker 2: French Canadian community due to nationalistic conflicts. If you were
Speaker 2: not in a coma during the COVID nineteen pandemic, these
Speaker 2: ideas should sound familiar. And in nineteen twenty, at the
Speaker 2: tail end of the deadly Spanish flu pandemic that killed
Speaker 2: somewhere between seventeen and fifty million people worldwide, the Commissioner
Speaker 2: of Public Health in Seattle, doctor Hiram Reid, was dealing
Speaker 2: with the nasty outbreak of smallpox. The year prior. The
Speaker 2: Washington State legislature, facing pressure from anti vaccination activists allowed
Speaker 2: for students to avoid vaccination requirements if their parents objected,
Speaker 2: effectively ending mandatory vaccination. Hiram, frustrated with the ongoing resistance
Speaker 2: to his attempts to vaccinate the public in Seattle, vented
Speaker 2: in a nineteen twenty annual health report quote the number
Speaker 2: of unvaccinated persons in this city is large, the city
Speaker 2: being a hotbed for anti vaccination, Christian Science, and various
Speaker 2: anti medical cults, and it is difficult to enforce vaccination
Speaker 2: rewrote for those who are unfamiliar. Christian Science is an
Speaker 2: offshoot of Christianity that was formed in eighteen seventy nine
Speaker 2: in New England and by nineteen thirty six was the
Speaker 2: fastest growing religion in the nation. Christian scientists typically avoid
Speaker 2: medical care and rely instead on their belief in the
Speaker 2: healing power of prayer. On the next episode of Anti
Speaker 2: Vacs America, I'll explore the intersection of conservative Christianity, its
Speaker 2: belief in spiritual healing miracles, anti vaccination beliefs, and vaccination hesitancy.
Speaker 2: We'll talk about how a very influential strain of conservative
Speaker 2: Christianity that is highly political and has tied itself with
Speaker 2: Donald Trump is also influencing people's attitudes about vaccination. Until then,
Speaker 2: I'm Stephen Mamaicelli and this is anti vaxx America. For
Speaker 2: Cool Zone Media, Thanks for listening.
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