June 17, 2025 • 32 mins
For many years, the threat of measles, a deadly disease that spreads more rapidly than COVID and regularly took thousands of lives a year, had been effectively eradicated in the United States due to the widespread acceptance of vaccination. The death of a child from measles in West Texas was the first in over a decade and it came as a shock to the American medical establishment that is now grappling with a disturbing reality: the chief public health bureaucrat is a bonafide anti-vaxxer. This episode will explore the genealogy of anti-vaccination beliefs in the United States and how they spread into mainstream politics.
Sources:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1200696/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8802588/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1123944/
https://time.com/7205900/anti-vaccination-movement-history/
https://historyofvaccines.org/getting-vaccinated/vaccine-faq/vaccination-exemptions
https://historyofvaccines.org/blog/timeline-of-vaccination-mandates
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-68106-1_2
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/rfk-jr-plandemic-funding-1235173801/
https://time.com/5175704/andrew-wakefield-vaccine-autism/
https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2025/the-evidence-on-vaccines-and-autism
https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/plague-the-red-death-strikes-montreal-feature
https://www.cascadepbs.org/2020/05/seattle-always-had-anti-vaxxers-even-during-smallpox
https://www.cascadepbs.org/mossback/2025/02/history-vaccine-skepticism-1920s-seattle-rfk-jr
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Alson media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome back to it could happen here and to episode
two of Anti vax America. I'm Stephen Monachelly. Last episode
I explored the ongoing measles outbreak that started in West
Texas and has since spread to several states across the nation.
A big part of that story is the underlying anti
vax beliefs that are fueling a decline in vaccination rates
(00:26):
across the country, and how the leader of our federal
health bureaucracy, our Hearth K. Junior, has helped seed, spread
and embed those beliefs into policy. But behind all that
is a deeper history of anti vaccination beliefs in America.
And while it is undoubtedly the case that the COVID
nineteen pandemic brought anti vaccination beliefs to the forefront of
(00:46):
American politics, opposition to vaccines is not new. It's about
as old as the technology itself.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
It actually goes back to the founding colonies and even
the nearly eighteen hundreds when you had people kind of peddling
various what they called botanicals as substitutes for mainstream medicine.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
That's doctor Peter Hotez. He's a doctor in Houston with
a long and impressive list of credentials.
Speaker 3 (01:14):
I'm a pediatrician scientist. I have an MD and PhD,
and I'm a professor of pediatrics and Molecular Virology at
Baylor College of Medicine, where I'm also co director of
the Texas Children's Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, and also
dean of our National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor
College and Medicine. And my interest is a lifelong interest
(01:36):
in developing new vaccines, particularly vaccines that the big pharma
companies have no interest in making because they're vaccines for
diseases of poverty. We've made a low cost COVID vaccine
that reached technology, reached one hundred million people in India
and Indonesia during the pandemic, and now vaccines for parasitic
(01:58):
diseases that occur only among the world's poor. And that's
a lifelong passion of mine.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
The first vaccination was created in seventeen ninety six by
Edward Jenner, who was able to build on prior methods
of inoculation, and he was able to create a vaccine
for smallpox, one of the deadliest viruses in human history,
within a matter of decades, vaccination had become widespread in
(02:27):
the Western world. The United Kingdom passed the Vaccination Act
of eighteen forty to provide free vaccinations to the poor,
and then passed another act in eighteen fifty three that
made it compulsory for infants, and another in eighteen sixty
seven that extended the compulsory vaccination requirement to fourteen and
added penalties for non compliance that could be cumulative over time.
(02:48):
Resistance to these laws began in eighteen fifty three with
a few riots in towns across England, and this eventually
formalized into the Anti Compulsory Vaccination League, which contributed literature
likening vaccination to a monster and lobbied the British government
to change the laws. Their efforts actually proved successful, and
(03:09):
a new law was passed in eighteen ninety eight to
remove cumulative penalties and create an exemption for what they
termed conscientious objectors, which is the first time that term
had ever been used in British law. Parallel anti vaccination
movement made similar strides in the United States, and one
of the leaders of the British anti vaccination movement even
(03:30):
came to the United States to help co found one
of the anti vaccination leagues in America. Several states also
passed compulsory vaccination laws in the United States, spurring the
American anti vaccination leagues to fight in the legal courts,
in the court of public opinion and the legislatures across
the country, and they successfully repealed compulsory vaccination laws in California, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Utah,
(03:54):
West Virginia, and Wisconsin. But opposing compulsory vaccinations was only
one part of the strategy of these early anti vaccine organizations.
Another key plank, which may sound familiar to those of
you who follow the news, was the promotion of alternative
remedies such as homeopathy, which were quite popular at the
(04:15):
time among certain sects of medicine. Now, these movements didn't
neatly fall across political lines in the way that they
largely do today. Progressive and conservative anti vaccination activists were
tied together by strongly held beliefs in things like quote
unquote medical freedom, sometimes philosophical beliefs around freedom, their spiritual faiths,
(04:36):
or in some instances, even anti Semitic conspiracy theories. Consider
Eugene carl During, a philosopher and economists, considered one of
the founding fathers of German anti Semitism, who argued that
Jewish doctors were behind a conspiracy to drum up business
for themselves by promoting vaccination to healthy people. These are
all tropes that live on to this day and that
(04:59):
someone like do Hotz knows all too well, and because
of his advocacy of vaccines, he's often been a target
of it.
Speaker 3 (05:07):
I'm a scientist, the vaccine scientists, the Jewish vaccine scientists.
So they've got me doing this in secret with George
Soros or one of the rothschilds that I'm doing it
at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Haven't even invited
to Davos.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
While some of the progressive strain of the historic anti
vaccination movement has lived on in the stereotypical hippie naturalist
lifestyle culture that is popular in parts of the Northwest,
that strain is long and fringe and is kind of
extinct at this point. It had its heyday after the
sixties and seventies, when a lot of alternative therapies and
(05:44):
medicines were being promoted and embraced. In the West. Most
of the anti vaxxers of that variety today have largely
been drawn towards more right winging values and have been
subsumed by the sort of politics that defines the larger
Make America Healthy Again agenda. The way doctor Hotess sees it,
there's a direct line between these old anti vaccine movements
(06:06):
and the modern day MAHA movement, which combines anti vaccine
beliefs with alternative medicine and libertarian mindsets around health freedom
into a sort of single bundle of sticks.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
There's an older thread that goes back to colonial times,
and it has to do with libertarian concepts of what's
sometimes called health freedom medical freedom. Hey, you can't tell
us what to do about our kids, and now we
see that today, right, you know. And this is coming
partly out of the health and wellness and influencer industry.
(06:39):
And that's why you get you know, ivermectin which does
absolutely nothing for covid, or hydroxychloroquine which has done nothing
for covid, or when you heard mister Kennedy talk about
vitamin A or as a preventative, or budesini as steroid
which does nothing, or clarithromycin and antibiotic does nothing. Whatever,
you know, they can buy in bulk and then sell
(07:00):
at a profit. That's you know, that's a lot of
the wellness and influencer industry. And so what you have
now is that converging thread around that and libertarian politics.
And that's what you saw. I think, after you know,
we started to debunk the false links between vaccines and autism,
they needed a new thing. And this is when you
(07:21):
saw here in Texas, this rise in parents requesting vaccine
exemptions around the banner of health freedom, medical freedom. And
here's where it became really tough to talk about because
it got adopted by the Republican Tea Party in Texas.
And so anti vaccine groups started getting pack money, political
(07:41):
action committee money to lobby the or educate the state
legislature about health freedom, medical freedom, and even provide money
for candidates to run on anti vaccine platforms.
Speaker 2 (07:55):
But before we explore the contemporary anti vaccination movement further,
we have to turn to history, and before we do that,
we're obligated to take a quick ad break. Anti vaccine
(08:17):
movements appeared to be gaining steam in the late eighteen
hundreds and early nineteen hundreds, but their progress largely halted
when a nineteen oh five US Supreme Court ruling upheld
the authority of states to pass and enforce compulsory vaccination laws.
The continued spread of viruses like smallpox, the deadly Spanish
flu pandemic, and the outbreak of World War II all
(08:37):
spurred advancements in vaccination research and programs to ensure widespread vaccination,
and as this science continued to advance, more and more
states began to mandate vaccines for public school attendance, as
did employers for their workers. By nineteen sixty three, twenty
states required children to be vaccinated before going to school,
and by nineteen eighty every state in the nation had
(08:59):
a similar law on the books. And as the decades
went on, the incident's rates of several diseases dramatically plummeted.
By nineteen eighty, smallpox had been eradicated. But along the way,
there were things done in the name of medical science
that would undercut the great strides made during that period
of time, things that ultimately showed the seeds for some
(09:20):
of today's vaccination skepticism.
Speaker 4 (09:24):
I think it's important to understand that not all suspicion
regarding medicine and doctors, you know, research that not all
of this resistance is totally irrational, it's based on experience.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
That's doctor Michael Phillips, who you may recognize from prior
episodes if it could happen here. He's a historian of race,
eugenics and right wing politics in Texas.
Speaker 4 (09:52):
Going back to the time of slavery, enslaved men and
women were often the unwilling, involuntary subjects of medical experiments.
We have, for instance, a a man named maryon Sims,
and they actually put a statue up of him in
Central Park in New York that's been taken down since,
(10:17):
who was credited as the father of gynecology. There was
a problem in that era before the discovery of germ theory,
where whenever women would give birth and there would be
vaginal tears, doctors would often sew up the wounds and
then there'd be an infection and the woman would die
(10:39):
or get seriously ill or infertile. And the infertility and
death of slaves meant a loss of property. So in
slavers we're very concerned about this issue. Maryon Sims at
some point discovers that if you use silver thread silver
sutures when you operate on women who have had these
(11:01):
vaginal terrors that the infection doesn't happen. Now, he wanted
to prove this. He wanted to perfect his technique, so
he did it on enslaved women.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
During the COVID nineteen pandemic, Black Americans lagged behind whites
in terms of vaccination rates. According to a systemic literature
review on the determinants of vaccine hesitancy among Black Americans,
vaccine hasn't seen in Black communities. Is rooted in a
troubling history of unethical medical experiments, and it persists to
this day due to how this group of the population
(11:35):
still experiences discrimination, racism, mistreatment, and overall health iniquity.
Speaker 4 (11:40):
The most famous case of the medical abuse of marginalized people,
and it's really entered the folk culture to the point
that when I was teaching American history classes at a
community college, all the students had heard about this particular
atrocity and it was called the Tuskegee experiment. What actually
(12:01):
happened is that African American men who got sexually transmitted
diseases would go to this medical clinic that had been established,
and the doctors with this grant wanted to see what
the trajectory of syphilis would be if it was untreated.
So these were people who already had STDs and they
(12:22):
were given a placebo. They were given basically a sugar
pill rather than penicillin or any other ameliative care. And
the doctor's mission in their minds was that's find out
if syphilis progresses in the same way with African American
(12:43):
men as it does with white men. And so they
wanted to see because they knew that syphilis will untreated
eventually attack the central nervous systimuli, seizures, blindness, any number
of terrible side effects. So they would go to the doctor,
they would get the placebo, and syphilis will go into remission,
(13:04):
and so the patient wouldn't have the benefit of medical
knowledge about how syphilis progresses, would think the pill made
it better. And then they would ask them to return
and the doctor would come and then he'd record the
damage that was happening to the patient's body as the
(13:26):
disease progressed. And this went on until the nineteen sixties,
and they published results with no professional repercussions, you know,
And one thing they proved is that syphilis attacks black
people the same way it does white people. If you
leave it untreated, the same symptoms developed. The nervous systems
(13:48):
of black and white people are the same. But they
published these results in ACCLAIM Medical Journal, and the backlash
was not immediate. Eventually, you know, it became a scanned
So that really did strike a chord in the Black
community that I think to this day we've seen skepticism
(14:12):
about white medicine. And again there's valid historical reasons. RFK
Junior and the anti vaccination movement have seized on this
particular historical atrocity, so doubt about vaccines among Black Americans.
More generally, Children's Health Defense, the anti vax group, previously
led by RFK Junior, invoked the Tuskegee Syphlist study in
(14:33):
an anti vaccine film called Medical Racism the New Apartheid.
But before we talk a bit more about Children's Health
Defense and the more recent history of the anti vaccination movement,
we've got to take another ad break. Black Americans aren't
(14:58):
the only population group that organizations like Children's Health Defense
have targeted in recent years. For decades, the anti vax
movement has sought to recruit the parents of autistic children
to their cause. By way of the argument that vaccines
directly cause autism. Incidentally, one such parent of an autistic
child is doctor Hotes, whose twenty thirteen book Vaccines did
(15:21):
Not Cause Rachel's Autism directly targets RFK Junior's long held
belief about the link between autism and vaccines.
Speaker 3 (15:31):
It actually came about after a year of discussions with
Robert F. Kennedy Junior explaining to him the evidence showing
vaccines don't cause autism, and finally decide to write it
all up in a book. And it's about my daughter.
So you know, I wear two hats as a vaccine scientist,
but also wound up going up against anti vaccine groups
(15:53):
because I do have a daughter with autism and intellectual
disabilities and now she's an adult. And essentially, there's two
major threads in the book other than telling the story
about Rachel and our family, and one is the overwhelming
evidence showing there's no link between vaccines and autism. And
(16:14):
even within that, there's a lot of subcategories because what
happens is anti vaccine groups keeps switching up the concern
about a specific vaccine, and when it gets debunked and
they just switch it up to something else. I call
it biomedical whack a mole or moving the goalposts of
The original assertion came out of the late nineteen nineties
(16:34):
of the false claims that it was the MMR vaccine
the measles, smumps rubella vaccine, and that was actually published
in a biomedical journal called The Lancet in the UK.
The paper was retracted eventually because it was some to
be false, and also the scientific community responded with large
epidemiologic studies showing that kids who got the MMR vaccine
(16:54):
were no more likely to acquire autism than kids who didn't,
and similarly, kids on the autism we're no more likely
to have gotten MMR the kids not on the autism spectrum.
That should have been the end of it. But then
our friend Robert F. Kennedy Junior came on the scene
in two thousand and five and wrote an article in
Rolling Stone magazine claiming, Okay, if it's not MMR, it
(17:15):
must be the thimerosol preservative that's in vaccine, and that
was also retracted and thoroughly debunked through large epidemiologic studies,
even nonhuman primate studies, and its switched up again to
spacing vaccines too close together. We have to green our
vaccine ecosystem. And you saw celebrities like Jenny McCarthy, your husband,
(17:35):
Jim Carrey walking around in green t shirts. It was
all phony boloni and that was debunked, and then it
was alum in vaccine. So it became this kind of
exhausting exercise, and each time we were able to successfully
refute it.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
Founded in two thousand and seven, Children's Health Defense represented
a formalization of late twentieth century anti vaccination resistance. Unlike
the anti vaccination leagues of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century, Children's Health Defense pedals dubies cures like homeopathy
and promotes conspiratorial narratives like the Great Reset, which claims
(18:12):
that billionaire Bill Gates and others have used the COVID
nineteen pandemic as a part of a plan to make
America Marxist. The idea that vaccines cause autism is a
part of a larger claim that vaccines can cause injuries
among those who receive them, and that our understanding of
these injuries is far less than what the science shows.
(18:34):
This notion gained traction in the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties,
when controversy erupted regarding the DPT vaccine for diphtheria, pertussis,
and tetanus. A sensational film called DPT Vaccine Roulette drew
an erroneous link between the vaccine and illnesses of some
children who received it. Two parents of children who received
(18:55):
the vaccine formed the National Vaccine Information Center, which exists
to this day and was a major source of COVID
nineteen misinformation. The controversy around the DPT vaccine led to
lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers, leading many of those manufacturers to
stop producing the vaccine by the end of nineteen eighty five.
Because of this, Congress passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury
(19:17):
Act in nineteen eighty six, establishing a no fault system
to alleviate pressure on vaccine manufacturers and provide an avenue
for victims of a vaccine injury to be compensated. As
doctor Hotez describes it, a lot of this is overblown. Yes,
there are individuals who can have reactions to vaccines that
(19:38):
can cause issues, but the studies around DPT and the
notions that it caused these illnesses that these parents were
concerned about, actually showed that there was no connection. Nevertheless,
it is a reality that some people may face some
sort of complications and we can't dismiss that. But when
we stack it up against the side effects disease and
(20:01):
one of those being death, well it's a pretty easy
comparison to make.
Speaker 3 (20:06):
Yeah, it's going to be so important to keep up,
you know, the education about vaccines. And one of the
things that I've done has been preparing these infographics, which
I initially did with a guy named Bill Marsh at
the New York Times. Is this brilliant guy who does
all these cool graphics for the New York Times, and
(20:26):
he had this really interesting idea that we published in
The New York Times in twenty twenty where you create
a box representing ten thousand kids and two boxes aligned
side to side. One box is what happens if ten
thousand kids get saved, for instance, the MMR vaccine versus
the other box ten thousand kids getting measles, and you know,
(20:50):
the ones getting the MMR vaccine. You see these tiny
little pinpricks of very rare side effects like allergic reaction
or febrill seizures one and three thousand, that sort of thing.
So maybe there's a tiny little pinprick representing you know,
three or thirty kids as opposed to measles, which you know,
twenty percent of kids hospitalized in measles deaths. And these
(21:13):
are large red and black boxes. I think those kinds
of things are helpful because I think one of the
problems is the anti vaccine guys. What they'll do is
they will exaggerate the frequency of rare, rare side effects
and in simultaneously downplay the severity of the illness. And
we even heard that before the two deaths. You know,
(21:34):
you heard all this rhetoric all measles is just like
a benign illness. And now we've got two deaths right
here in Texas of nice school age kids that never
had to lose their lives because the parents, you know,
were taken in by the disinformation machine.
Speaker 2 (21:51):
The contemporary rise of anti vaccine rhetoric in the US
can also be tied to the political climate of the
early twenty first century. Figures like Congressman Ron Paul, for example,
have capitalized on the growing sentiment that government should not
interfere with individual medical decisions. With increasing distrust in government,
particularly during the Bush administration, vaccine hesitancy began to align
(22:15):
with broader libertarian and some conservative ideologies. The idea that
the government should not mandate personal medical choices further gain
traction with the election of President Barack Obama in two
thousand and eight, adding fuel to the anti vaccination fire,
and the anti vax movement began to dovetail with the
booming alternative health and wellness industry that excused Western medicine
(22:35):
in favor of natural medicines and holistic approaches, and often
this includes some sort of spiritual element. This convergence is
crystallized in modern figures like Vonnie Hare, also known as
the food Babe, who is a conservative wellness influencer. She's
aligned herself with RFK Junior's Maha agenda and promotes the
(22:55):
standard Goop like fare, but with a right wing edge.
The American food industry, for example, or Big Pharma for example,
are poisoning us. But also you shouldn't get the flu vaccine.
Despite the best efforts of scientists like doctor Hotes to
debunk he claims that motivate the modern anti vaccination movement,
it has only gathered steam in the last few decades.
(23:18):
In recent years, a number of states have passed new
laws allowing for personal exemptions from vaccines, and because of
doctor Hotes's public involvement, he's had a front row seat
as anti vaccination beliefs have become part and parcel of
Republican politics.
Speaker 3 (23:33):
And it was a physician, scientist. The last thing I
want to talk about is politics, right. I mean, I
feel that every American has a right to their political views.
That's embedded in our history and our constitution. But how
do you say, don't adopt this stuff because it's going
to be so detrimental. But that's what happened with the
formation of anti vaccine groups in the twenty tens in Texas.
(23:57):
He started to get these steep rides in parents questing
non medical exemptions that their kids could get out of
being vaccinated for school. And it was particularly strong in
the same places where people were refusing COVID vaccine. Years later,
especially in conservative rural areas of West Texas East Texas.
(24:17):
The vaccination rates continue to be strong in our cities
of the Texas Triangle, Dallas where you are, in Houston
where I am, and San Antonio and Austin. But you know,
in the more conservative rural areas of West Texas, East Texas.
That's where you saw big declines in kids getting vaccines.
And once you go below a certain threshold, roughly below
(24:40):
ninety percent, and bam that you start to see break
through childhood infections. And usually the first one you see
is measles. You can ultimately get all of them, but
measles is the first one you see because it's so
highly transmissible.
Speaker 2 (24:53):
But Texas is not alone.
Speaker 3 (24:55):
Well.
Speaker 2 (24:56):
Immunization rates certainly have limited in Republican states faster than
they have in Democratic states. Immunization rates have fallen in
most states since the pandemic. But there was another event
over half a decade before social distancing and vaccination cards
became household concepts that also informed the Republican Party's embrace
of anti vaccine politics. This was a particular viral outbreak
(25:18):
of measles in California, one that ultimately spurred policy changes
that reverberated across the country.
Speaker 3 (25:25):
It started happening in the twenty tens and really ramped
up after. There was a large measles epidemic in California,
of all places, on twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen, and the
California legislature shut down vaccine exemptions. They said, Okay, from
now on, you want to send you kids to school,
the kids have to be vaccinated. And I supported that
and it solved the measles problem, but then it produced
(25:48):
this health freedom backlash in states like Texas, also Oklahoma,
and very much a red state phenomenon read being Republican,
blue being a Democrat, and and that's where you saw
these derise in vaccine exemptions. You started getting anti vaccine
groups forming. They were getting pack money, political Action committee money,
(26:10):
and I saw that as really dangerous because now rather
than being sort of small, underfunded groups, they now had
the backing of a major political party and everything that
goes along with it in terms of influence and PAC money,
and this gives them a lot of bandwidth and a
lot of political clout, and it's so self defeating, but
(26:33):
there you are. And so now we're at the point
in Texas where we have over one hundred thousand non
medical exemption requests of various sorts. That's a lot of kids.
And this doesn't say anything about the homeschool kids in Texas.
I'm told that we may have as many as seven
(26:54):
hundred thousand homeschooled kids, but you might want to document that,
and I don't think we have any idea of the
percentage of those kids that are not getting their vaccines
because they're homeschooled.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
Private schools in Texas have significantly lower vaccination rates on average,
and the numbers among homeschoolers, while not precisely known, are
likely just as bad, if not worse. Texas just passed
the largest school privatization scheme in the nation, through which
parents will be subsidized by the state to send their
kids to private schools or to homeschool them, meaning vaccination
(27:26):
rates among school as children will likely continue to fall.
The prevalence of homeschooling among left leaning, crunchy alternative types
has also contributed to the shift towards right wing politics,
as the homeschool movement has deliberately tried to recruit those
families and pushed them towards right wing politics. The complete
partisan politicization of vaccinations has made communicating the risks of
(27:49):
low vaccination rates far more difficult for people like doctor Hotez.
Speaker 3 (27:53):
How do you thread that needle and say, look, everybody
has a right to their political views, going there with
you that you're right as an American citizen, but don't
adopt the anti vaccine stuff because it's so dangerous for
your health and the health of your loved ones, the
health of your kids. But it's a tough needle to thread,
and as a result, I, you know, will often, even
(28:15):
though I try to bend over backwards explaining I don't
care about your politics, for their convenient purposes, I'm treated
as a political figure and portrayed as a cartoon villain
or you know, a scientist and white coat plotting nefarious things.
You know, they have this crazy concept out there they
call plandemic now that it's not a pandemic, it's a
(28:38):
plandemic that somehow I've been involved with, or that I'm
profiting from vaccines and secretly working for pharma companies even
though it's the opposite, right, I make load cost vaccines
that actually showed me could bypass the big pharma companies.
And and some of it gets outright absurd. I mean,
there's this whole thread on the Internet that says that
(28:59):
I'm not even a real person, that I'm I'm actually
being played by Jack Black, and that he's paid for
by the CIA, And it's got these amazing you know
forensic analysis of close ups of my teeth with Jack
Black's teeth and all this profiles and things. I mean,
(29:19):
the funny thing is the said thing is the crazier
the conspiracy, the faster it seems to travel.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
These sorts of conspiracy theories would be laughable if they
did not have deadly consequences, And unfortunately, this sort of
public health focused conspiracism is not new. In the late
eighteen hundred, several Canadian doctors, such as Alexander Milton Ross,
insisted that vaccines were the true danger, not smallpox. Others
(29:50):
argued that British doctors were promoting vaccinations to poison the
French Canadian community due to nationalistic conflicts. If you were
not in a coma during the COVID nineteen pandemic, these
ideas should sound familiar. And in nineteen twenty, at the
tail end of the deadly Spanish flu pandemic that killed
somewhere between seventeen and fifty million people worldwide, the Commissioner
(30:12):
of Public Health in Seattle, doctor Hiram Reid, was dealing
with the nasty outbreak of smallpox. The year prior. The
Washington State legislature, facing pressure from anti vaccination activists allowed
for students to avoid vaccination requirements if their parents objected,
effectively ending mandatory vaccination. Hiram, frustrated with the ongoing resistance
(30:33):
to his attempts to vaccinate the public in Seattle, vented
in a nineteen twenty annual health report quote the number
of unvaccinated persons in this city is large, the city
being a hotbed for anti vaccination, Christian Science, and various
anti medical cults, and it is difficult to enforce vaccination
(30:54):
rewrote for those who are unfamiliar. Christian Science is an
offshoot of Christianity that was formed in eighteen seventy nine
in New England and by nineteen thirty six was the
fastest growing religion in the nation. Christian scientists typically avoid
medical care and rely instead on their belief in the
healing power of prayer. On the next episode of Anti
(31:16):
Vacs America, I'll explore the intersection of conservative Christianity, its
belief in spiritual healing miracles, anti vaccination beliefs, and vaccination hesitancy.
We'll talk about how a very influential strain of conservative
Christianity that is highly political and has tied itself with
Donald Trump is also influencing people's attitudes about vaccination. Until then,
(31:41):
I'm Stephen Mamaicelli and this is anti vaxx America. For
Cool Zone Media, Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
now find sources for It Could Happen here, listed directly
in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.
Alson media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome back to it could happen here and to episode
two of Anti vax America. I'm Stephen Monachelly. Last episode
I explored the ongoing measles outbreak that started in West
Texas and has since spread to several states across the nation.
A big part of that story is the underlying anti
vax beliefs that are fueling a decline in vaccination rates
(00:26):
across the country, and how the leader of our federal
health bureaucracy, our Hearth K. Junior, has helped seed, spread
and embed those beliefs into policy. But behind all that
is a deeper history of anti vaccination beliefs in America.
And while it is undoubtedly the case that the COVID
nineteen pandemic brought anti vaccination beliefs to the forefront of
(00:46):
American politics, opposition to vaccines is not new. It's about
as old as the technology itself.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
It actually goes back to the founding colonies and even
the nearly eighteen hundreds when you had people kind of peddling
various what they called botanicals as substitutes for mainstream medicine.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
That's doctor Peter Hotez. He's a doctor in Houston with
a long and impressive list of credentials.
Speaker 3 (01:14):
I'm a pediatrician scientist. I have an MD and PhD,
and I'm a professor of pediatrics and Molecular Virology at
Baylor College of Medicine, where I'm also co director of
the Texas Children's Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, and also
dean of our National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor
College and Medicine. And my interest is a lifelong interest
(01:36):
in developing new vaccines, particularly vaccines that the big pharma
companies have no interest in making because they're vaccines for
diseases of poverty. We've made a low cost COVID vaccine
that reached technology, reached one hundred million people in India
and Indonesia during the pandemic, and now vaccines for parasitic
(01:58):
diseases that occur only among the world's poor. And that's
a lifelong passion of mine.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
The first vaccination was created in seventeen ninety six by
Edward Jenner, who was able to build on prior methods
of inoculation, and he was able to create a vaccine
for smallpox, one of the deadliest viruses in human history,
within a matter of decades, vaccination had become widespread in
(02:27):
the Western world. The United Kingdom passed the Vaccination Act
of eighteen forty to provide free vaccinations to the poor,
and then passed another act in eighteen fifty three that
made it compulsory for infants, and another in eighteen sixty
seven that extended the compulsory vaccination requirement to fourteen and
added penalties for non compliance that could be cumulative over time.
(02:48):
Resistance to these laws began in eighteen fifty three with
a few riots in towns across England, and this eventually
formalized into the Anti Compulsory Vaccination League, which contributed literature
likening vaccination to a monster and lobbied the British government
to change the laws. Their efforts actually proved successful, and
(03:09):
a new law was passed in eighteen ninety eight to
remove cumulative penalties and create an exemption for what they
termed conscientious objectors, which is the first time that term
had ever been used in British law. Parallel anti vaccination
movement made similar strides in the United States, and one
of the leaders of the British anti vaccination movement even
(03:30):
came to the United States to help co found one
of the anti vaccination leagues in America. Several states also
passed compulsory vaccination laws in the United States, spurring the
American anti vaccination leagues to fight in the legal courts,
in the court of public opinion and the legislatures across
the country, and they successfully repealed compulsory vaccination laws in California, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Utah,
(03:54):
West Virginia, and Wisconsin. But opposing compulsory vaccinations was only
one part of the strategy of these early anti vaccine organizations.
Another key plank, which may sound familiar to those of
you who follow the news, was the promotion of alternative
remedies such as homeopathy, which were quite popular at the
(04:15):
time among certain sects of medicine. Now, these movements didn't
neatly fall across political lines in the way that they
largely do today. Progressive and conservative anti vaccination activists were
tied together by strongly held beliefs in things like quote
unquote medical freedom, sometimes philosophical beliefs around freedom, their spiritual faiths,
(04:36):
or in some instances, even anti Semitic conspiracy theories. Consider
Eugene carl During, a philosopher and economists, considered one of
the founding fathers of German anti Semitism, who argued that
Jewish doctors were behind a conspiracy to drum up business
for themselves by promoting vaccination to healthy people. These are
all tropes that live on to this day and that
(04:59):
someone like do Hotz knows all too well, and because
of his advocacy of vaccines, he's often been a target
of it.
Speaker 3 (05:07):
I'm a scientist, the vaccine scientists, the Jewish vaccine scientists.
So they've got me doing this in secret with George
Soros or one of the rothschilds that I'm doing it
at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Haven't even invited
to Davos.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
While some of the progressive strain of the historic anti
vaccination movement has lived on in the stereotypical hippie naturalist
lifestyle culture that is popular in parts of the Northwest,
that strain is long and fringe and is kind of
extinct at this point. It had its heyday after the
sixties and seventies, when a lot of alternative therapies and
(05:44):
medicines were being promoted and embraced. In the West. Most
of the anti vaxxers of that variety today have largely
been drawn towards more right winging values and have been
subsumed by the sort of politics that defines the larger
Make America Healthy Again agenda. The way doctor Hotess sees it,
there's a direct line between these old anti vaccine movements
(06:06):
and the modern day MAHA movement, which combines anti vaccine
beliefs with alternative medicine and libertarian mindsets around health freedom
into a sort of single bundle of sticks.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
There's an older thread that goes back to colonial times,
and it has to do with libertarian concepts of what's
sometimes called health freedom medical freedom. Hey, you can't tell
us what to do about our kids, and now we
see that today, right, you know. And this is coming
partly out of the health and wellness and influencer industry.
(06:39):
And that's why you get you know, ivermectin which does
absolutely nothing for covid, or hydroxychloroquine which has done nothing
for covid, or when you heard mister Kennedy talk about
vitamin A or as a preventative, or budesini as steroid
which does nothing, or clarithromycin and antibiotic does nothing. Whatever,
you know, they can buy in bulk and then sell
(07:00):
at a profit. That's you know, that's a lot of
the wellness and influencer industry. And so what you have
now is that converging thread around that and libertarian politics.
And that's what you saw. I think, after you know,
we started to debunk the false links between vaccines and autism,
they needed a new thing. And this is when you
(07:21):
saw here in Texas, this rise in parents requesting vaccine
exemptions around the banner of health freedom, medical freedom. And
here's where it became really tough to talk about because
it got adopted by the Republican Tea Party in Texas.
And so anti vaccine groups started getting pack money, political
(07:41):
action committee money to lobby the or educate the state
legislature about health freedom, medical freedom, and even provide money
for candidates to run on anti vaccine platforms.
Speaker 2 (07:55):
But before we explore the contemporary anti vaccination movement further,
we have to turn to history, and before we do that,
we're obligated to take a quick ad break. Anti vaccine
(08:17):
movements appeared to be gaining steam in the late eighteen
hundreds and early nineteen hundreds, but their progress largely halted
when a nineteen oh five US Supreme Court ruling upheld
the authority of states to pass and enforce compulsory vaccination laws.
The continued spread of viruses like smallpox, the deadly Spanish
flu pandemic, and the outbreak of World War II all
(08:37):
spurred advancements in vaccination research and programs to ensure widespread vaccination,
and as this science continued to advance, more and more
states began to mandate vaccines for public school attendance, as
did employers for their workers. By nineteen sixty three, twenty
states required children to be vaccinated before going to school,
and by nineteen eighty every state in the nation had
(08:59):
a similar law on the books. And as the decades
went on, the incident's rates of several diseases dramatically plummeted.
By nineteen eighty, smallpox had been eradicated. But along the way,
there were things done in the name of medical science
that would undercut the great strides made during that period
of time, things that ultimately showed the seeds for some
(09:20):
of today's vaccination skepticism.
Speaker 4 (09:24):
I think it's important to understand that not all suspicion
regarding medicine and doctors, you know, research that not all
of this resistance is totally irrational, it's based on experience.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
That's doctor Michael Phillips, who you may recognize from prior
episodes if it could happen here. He's a historian of race,
eugenics and right wing politics in Texas.
Speaker 4 (09:52):
Going back to the time of slavery, enslaved men and
women were often the unwilling, involuntary subjects of medical experiments.
We have, for instance, a a man named maryon Sims,
and they actually put a statue up of him in
Central Park in New York that's been taken down since,
(10:17):
who was credited as the father of gynecology. There was
a problem in that era before the discovery of germ theory,
where whenever women would give birth and there would be
vaginal tears, doctors would often sew up the wounds and
then there'd be an infection and the woman would die
(10:39):
or get seriously ill or infertile. And the infertility and
death of slaves meant a loss of property. So in
slavers we're very concerned about this issue. Maryon Sims at
some point discovers that if you use silver thread silver
sutures when you operate on women who have had these
(11:01):
vaginal terrors that the infection doesn't happen. Now, he wanted
to prove this. He wanted to perfect his technique, so
he did it on enslaved women.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
During the COVID nineteen pandemic, Black Americans lagged behind whites
in terms of vaccination rates. According to a systemic literature
review on the determinants of vaccine hesitancy among Black Americans,
vaccine hasn't seen in Black communities. Is rooted in a
troubling history of unethical medical experiments, and it persists to
this day due to how this group of the population
(11:35):
still experiences discrimination, racism, mistreatment, and overall health iniquity.
Speaker 4 (11:40):
The most famous case of the medical abuse of marginalized people,
and it's really entered the folk culture to the point
that when I was teaching American history classes at a
community college, all the students had heard about this particular
atrocity and it was called the Tuskegee experiment. What actually
(12:01):
happened is that African American men who got sexually transmitted
diseases would go to this medical clinic that had been established,
and the doctors with this grant wanted to see what
the trajectory of syphilis would be if it was untreated.
So these were people who already had STDs and they
(12:22):
were given a placebo. They were given basically a sugar
pill rather than penicillin or any other ameliative care. And
the doctor's mission in their minds was that's find out
if syphilis progresses in the same way with African American
(12:43):
men as it does with white men. And so they
wanted to see because they knew that syphilis will untreated
eventually attack the central nervous systimuli, seizures, blindness, any number
of terrible side effects. So they would go to the doctor,
they would get the placebo, and syphilis will go into remission,
(13:04):
and so the patient wouldn't have the benefit of medical
knowledge about how syphilis progresses, would think the pill made
it better. And then they would ask them to return
and the doctor would come and then he'd record the
damage that was happening to the patient's body as the
(13:26):
disease progressed. And this went on until the nineteen sixties,
and they published results with no professional repercussions, you know,
And one thing they proved is that syphilis attacks black
people the same way it does white people. If you
leave it untreated, the same symptoms developed. The nervous systems
(13:48):
of black and white people are the same. But they
published these results in ACCLAIM Medical Journal, and the backlash
was not immediate. Eventually, you know, it became a scanned
So that really did strike a chord in the Black
community that I think to this day we've seen skepticism
(14:12):
about white medicine. And again there's valid historical reasons. RFK
Junior and the anti vaccination movement have seized on this
particular historical atrocity, so doubt about vaccines among Black Americans.
More generally, Children's Health Defense, the anti vax group, previously
led by RFK Junior, invoked the Tuskegee Syphlist study in
(14:33):
an anti vaccine film called Medical Racism the New Apartheid.
But before we talk a bit more about Children's Health
Defense and the more recent history of the anti vaccination movement,
we've got to take another ad break. Black Americans aren't
(14:58):
the only population group that organizations like Children's Health Defense
have targeted in recent years. For decades, the anti vax
movement has sought to recruit the parents of autistic children
to their cause. By way of the argument that vaccines
directly cause autism. Incidentally, one such parent of an autistic
child is doctor Hotes, whose twenty thirteen book Vaccines did
(15:21):
Not Cause Rachel's Autism directly targets RFK Junior's long held
belief about the link between autism and vaccines.
Speaker 3 (15:31):
It actually came about after a year of discussions with
Robert F. Kennedy Junior explaining to him the evidence showing
vaccines don't cause autism, and finally decide to write it
all up in a book. And it's about my daughter.
So you know, I wear two hats as a vaccine scientist,
but also wound up going up against anti vaccine groups
(15:53):
because I do have a daughter with autism and intellectual
disabilities and now she's an adult. And essentially, there's two
major threads in the book other than telling the story
about Rachel and our family, and one is the overwhelming
evidence showing there's no link between vaccines and autism. And
(16:14):
even within that, there's a lot of subcategories because what
happens is anti vaccine groups keeps switching up the concern
about a specific vaccine, and when it gets debunked and
they just switch it up to something else. I call
it biomedical whack a mole or moving the goalposts of
The original assertion came out of the late nineteen nineties
(16:34):
of the false claims that it was the MMR vaccine
the measles, smumps rubella vaccine, and that was actually published
in a biomedical journal called The Lancet in the UK.
The paper was retracted eventually because it was some to
be false, and also the scientific community responded with large
epidemiologic studies showing that kids who got the MMR vaccine
(16:54):
were no more likely to acquire autism than kids who didn't,
and similarly, kids on the autism we're no more likely
to have gotten MMR the kids not on the autism spectrum.
That should have been the end of it. But then
our friend Robert F. Kennedy Junior came on the scene
in two thousand and five and wrote an article in
Rolling Stone magazine claiming, Okay, if it's not MMR, it
(17:15):
must be the thimerosol preservative that's in vaccine, and that
was also retracted and thoroughly debunked through large epidemiologic studies,
even nonhuman primate studies, and its switched up again to
spacing vaccines too close together. We have to green our
vaccine ecosystem. And you saw celebrities like Jenny McCarthy, your husband,
(17:35):
Jim Carrey walking around in green t shirts. It was
all phony boloni and that was debunked, and then it
was alum in vaccine. So it became this kind of
exhausting exercise, and each time we were able to successfully
refute it.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
Founded in two thousand and seven, Children's Health Defense represented
a formalization of late twentieth century anti vaccination resistance. Unlike
the anti vaccination leagues of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century, Children's Health Defense pedals dubies cures like homeopathy
and promotes conspiratorial narratives like the Great Reset, which claims
(18:12):
that billionaire Bill Gates and others have used the COVID
nineteen pandemic as a part of a plan to make
America Marxist. The idea that vaccines cause autism is a
part of a larger claim that vaccines can cause injuries
among those who receive them, and that our understanding of
these injuries is far less than what the science shows.
(18:34):
This notion gained traction in the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties,
when controversy erupted regarding the DPT vaccine for diphtheria, pertussis,
and tetanus. A sensational film called DPT Vaccine Roulette drew
an erroneous link between the vaccine and illnesses of some
children who received it. Two parents of children who received
(18:55):
the vaccine formed the National Vaccine Information Center, which exists
to this day and was a major source of COVID
nineteen misinformation. The controversy around the DPT vaccine led to
lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers, leading many of those manufacturers to
stop producing the vaccine by the end of nineteen eighty five.
Because of this, Congress passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury
(19:17):
Act in nineteen eighty six, establishing a no fault system
to alleviate pressure on vaccine manufacturers and provide an avenue
for victims of a vaccine injury to be compensated. As
doctor Hotez describes it, a lot of this is overblown. Yes,
there are individuals who can have reactions to vaccines that
(19:38):
can cause issues, but the studies around DPT and the
notions that it caused these illnesses that these parents were
concerned about, actually showed that there was no connection. Nevertheless,
it is a reality that some people may face some
sort of complications and we can't dismiss that. But when
we stack it up against the side effects disease and
(20:01):
one of those being death, well it's a pretty easy
comparison to make.
Speaker 3 (20:06):
Yeah, it's going to be so important to keep up,
you know, the education about vaccines. And one of the
things that I've done has been preparing these infographics, which
I initially did with a guy named Bill Marsh at
the New York Times. Is this brilliant guy who does
all these cool graphics for the New York Times, and
(20:26):
he had this really interesting idea that we published in
The New York Times in twenty twenty where you create
a box representing ten thousand kids and two boxes aligned
side to side. One box is what happens if ten
thousand kids get saved, for instance, the MMR vaccine versus
the other box ten thousand kids getting measles, and you know,
(20:50):
the ones getting the MMR vaccine. You see these tiny
little pinpricks of very rare side effects like allergic reaction
or febrill seizures one and three thousand, that sort of thing.
So maybe there's a tiny little pinprick representing you know,
three or thirty kids as opposed to measles, which you know,
twenty percent of kids hospitalized in measles deaths. And these
(21:13):
are large red and black boxes. I think those kinds
of things are helpful because I think one of the
problems is the anti vaccine guys. What they'll do is
they will exaggerate the frequency of rare, rare side effects
and in simultaneously downplay the severity of the illness. And
we even heard that before the two deaths. You know,
(21:34):
you heard all this rhetoric all measles is just like
a benign illness. And now we've got two deaths right
here in Texas of nice school age kids that never
had to lose their lives because the parents, you know,
were taken in by the disinformation machine.
Speaker 2 (21:51):
The contemporary rise of anti vaccine rhetoric in the US
can also be tied to the political climate of the
early twenty first century. Figures like Congressman Ron Paul, for example,
have capitalized on the growing sentiment that government should not
interfere with individual medical decisions. With increasing distrust in government,
particularly during the Bush administration, vaccine hesitancy began to align
(22:15):
with broader libertarian and some conservative ideologies. The idea that
the government should not mandate personal medical choices further gain
traction with the election of President Barack Obama in two
thousand and eight, adding fuel to the anti vaccination fire,
and the anti vax movement began to dovetail with the
booming alternative health and wellness industry that excused Western medicine
(22:35):
in favor of natural medicines and holistic approaches, and often
this includes some sort of spiritual element. This convergence is
crystallized in modern figures like Vonnie Hare, also known as
the food Babe, who is a conservative wellness influencer. She's
aligned herself with RFK Junior's Maha agenda and promotes the
(22:55):
standard Goop like fare, but with a right wing edge.
The American food industry, for example, or Big Pharma for example,
are poisoning us. But also you shouldn't get the flu vaccine.
Despite the best efforts of scientists like doctor Hotes to
debunk he claims that motivate the modern anti vaccination movement,
it has only gathered steam in the last few decades.
(23:18):
In recent years, a number of states have passed new
laws allowing for personal exemptions from vaccines, and because of
doctor Hotes's public involvement, he's had a front row seat
as anti vaccination beliefs have become part and parcel of
Republican politics.
Speaker 3 (23:33):
And it was a physician, scientist. The last thing I
want to talk about is politics, right. I mean, I
feel that every American has a right to their political views.
That's embedded in our history and our constitution. But how
do you say, don't adopt this stuff because it's going
to be so detrimental. But that's what happened with the
formation of anti vaccine groups in the twenty tens in Texas.
(23:57):
He started to get these steep rides in parents questing
non medical exemptions that their kids could get out of
being vaccinated for school. And it was particularly strong in
the same places where people were refusing COVID vaccine. Years later,
especially in conservative rural areas of West Texas East Texas.
(24:17):
The vaccination rates continue to be strong in our cities
of the Texas Triangle, Dallas where you are, in Houston
where I am, and San Antonio and Austin. But you know,
in the more conservative rural areas of West Texas, East Texas.
That's where you saw big declines in kids getting vaccines.
And once you go below a certain threshold, roughly below
(24:40):
ninety percent, and bam that you start to see break
through childhood infections. And usually the first one you see
is measles. You can ultimately get all of them, but
measles is the first one you see because it's so
highly transmissible.
Speaker 2 (24:53):
But Texas is not alone.
Speaker 3 (24:55):
Well.
Speaker 2 (24:56):
Immunization rates certainly have limited in Republican states faster than
they have in Democratic states. Immunization rates have fallen in
most states since the pandemic. But there was another event
over half a decade before social distancing and vaccination cards
became household concepts that also informed the Republican Party's embrace
of anti vaccine politics. This was a particular viral outbreak
(25:18):
of measles in California, one that ultimately spurred policy changes
that reverberated across the country.
Speaker 3 (25:25):
It started happening in the twenty tens and really ramped
up after. There was a large measles epidemic in California,
of all places, on twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen, and the
California legislature shut down vaccine exemptions. They said, Okay, from
now on, you want to send you kids to school,
the kids have to be vaccinated. And I supported that
and it solved the measles problem, but then it produced
(25:48):
this health freedom backlash in states like Texas, also Oklahoma,
and very much a red state phenomenon read being Republican,
blue being a Democrat, and and that's where you saw
these derise in vaccine exemptions. You started getting anti vaccine
groups forming. They were getting pack money, political Action committee money,
(26:10):
and I saw that as really dangerous because now rather
than being sort of small, underfunded groups, they now had
the backing of a major political party and everything that
goes along with it in terms of influence and PAC money,
and this gives them a lot of bandwidth and a
lot of political clout, and it's so self defeating, but
(26:33):
there you are. And so now we're at the point
in Texas where we have over one hundred thousand non
medical exemption requests of various sorts. That's a lot of kids.
And this doesn't say anything about the homeschool kids in Texas.
I'm told that we may have as many as seven
(26:54):
hundred thousand homeschooled kids, but you might want to document that,
and I don't think we have any idea of the
percentage of those kids that are not getting their vaccines
because they're homeschooled.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
Private schools in Texas have significantly lower vaccination rates on average,
and the numbers among homeschoolers, while not precisely known, are
likely just as bad, if not worse. Texas just passed
the largest school privatization scheme in the nation, through which
parents will be subsidized by the state to send their
kids to private schools or to homeschool them, meaning vaccination
(27:26):
rates among school as children will likely continue to fall.
The prevalence of homeschooling among left leaning, crunchy alternative types
has also contributed to the shift towards right wing politics,
as the homeschool movement has deliberately tried to recruit those
families and pushed them towards right wing politics. The complete
partisan politicization of vaccinations has made communicating the risks of
(27:49):
low vaccination rates far more difficult for people like doctor Hotez.
Speaker 3 (27:53):
How do you thread that needle and say, look, everybody
has a right to their political views, going there with
you that you're right as an American citizen, but don't
adopt the anti vaccine stuff because it's so dangerous for
your health and the health of your loved ones, the
health of your kids. But it's a tough needle to thread,
and as a result, I, you know, will often, even
(28:15):
though I try to bend over backwards explaining I don't
care about your politics, for their convenient purposes, I'm treated
as a political figure and portrayed as a cartoon villain
or you know, a scientist and white coat plotting nefarious things.
You know, they have this crazy concept out there they
call plandemic now that it's not a pandemic, it's a
(28:38):
plandemic that somehow I've been involved with, or that I'm
profiting from vaccines and secretly working for pharma companies even
though it's the opposite, right, I make load cost vaccines
that actually showed me could bypass the big pharma companies.
And and some of it gets outright absurd. I mean,
there's this whole thread on the Internet that says that
(28:59):
I'm not even a real person, that I'm I'm actually
being played by Jack Black, and that he's paid for
by the CIA, And it's got these amazing you know
forensic analysis of close ups of my teeth with Jack
Black's teeth and all this profiles and things. I mean,
(29:19):
the funny thing is the said thing is the crazier
the conspiracy, the faster it seems to travel.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
These sorts of conspiracy theories would be laughable if they
did not have deadly consequences, And unfortunately, this sort of
public health focused conspiracism is not new. In the late
eighteen hundred, several Canadian doctors, such as Alexander Milton Ross,
insisted that vaccines were the true danger, not smallpox. Others
(29:50):
argued that British doctors were promoting vaccinations to poison the
French Canadian community due to nationalistic conflicts. If you were
not in a coma during the COVID nineteen pandemic, these
ideas should sound familiar. And in nineteen twenty, at the
tail end of the deadly Spanish flu pandemic that killed
somewhere between seventeen and fifty million people worldwide, the Commissioner
(30:12):
of Public Health in Seattle, doctor Hiram Reid, was dealing
with the nasty outbreak of smallpox. The year prior. The
Washington State legislature, facing pressure from anti vaccination activists allowed
for students to avoid vaccination requirements if their parents objected,
effectively ending mandatory vaccination. Hiram, frustrated with the ongoing resistance
(30:33):
to his attempts to vaccinate the public in Seattle, vented
in a nineteen twenty annual health report quote the number
of unvaccinated persons in this city is large, the city
being a hotbed for anti vaccination, Christian Science, and various
anti medical cults, and it is difficult to enforce vaccination
(30:54):
rewrote for those who are unfamiliar. Christian Science is an
offshoot of Christianity that was formed in eighteen seventy nine
in New England and by nineteen thirty six was the
fastest growing religion in the nation. Christian scientists typically avoid
medical care and rely instead on their belief in the
healing power of prayer. On the next episode of Anti
(31:16):
Vacs America, I'll explore the intersection of conservative Christianity, its
belief in spiritual healing miracles, anti vaccination beliefs, and vaccination hesitancy.
We'll talk about how a very influential strain of conservative
Christianity that is highly political and has tied itself with
Donald Trump is also influencing people's attitudes about vaccination. Until then,
(31:41):
I'm Stephen Mamaicelli and this is anti vaxx America. For
Cool Zone Media, Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
now find sources for It Could Happen here, listed directly
in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.
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