June 19, 2025 • 25 mins
As anti-vax beliefs become increasingly widespread, and vaccination rates drop, the greater the risk of some sort of massive viral outbreak or the return of horrific illnesses such as polio. This episode will explore what could happen if anti-vax beliefs spread further into United States politics and culture.
Sources:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9577438/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/13/health/polio-vaccine-outbreaks.html
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Al Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome to the final episode of Anti vax America, a
special mini series from It could Happen Here. I'm your host,
Stephen Monachelli, a journalist in Dallas and sometimes contributor to
cool Zone Media. Over the past episodes, we've explored the
origins of the current measles outbreak, the historical roots of
(00:26):
the anti vaccination movement, the overlap between vaccine hesitancy and
conservative Christianity that upholds a strong belief in spiritual healing,
and the eugenic implications of contemporary anti vax ideology and
the Maha movement. In this episode, we'll explore the future.
Could the United States see a massive return of viral outbreaks,
(00:49):
How would a nationwide collapse and vaccination rates impact our
public health? And what are we to make of the
rise of alt medicine and whether that could continue to
spread if people like RFK Junior elevate these hucksters into
national figures. These are not just academic questions. If vaccination
(01:09):
rates continue to decline, we could see the return of
diseases like polio, which had been eradicated in the United
States for decades. In recent years, there have been cases
of polio found in waste water, and one confirmed case
of a man with polio in an unvaccinated community in
New York. An expert warned that these isolated incidents could
(01:32):
spread into larger outbreaks, and these concerns are well founded,
particularly given that RFK Junior has said as recently as
twenty twenty three that early batches of polio vaccines caused cancer,
something that has never been demonstrated in the research. Vaccination
is the most effective tool we have to prevent the
(01:52):
spread of communicable, deadly diseases. Without widespread vaccination, we face
the very real possibility of devastating public health crises, and
the resurgence of diseases like measles and polio, and smallpox
and more would put our most vulnerable populations at risk,
especially the elderly, the immunal compromised, and others who cannot
(02:16):
be vaccinated. We don't have a crystal ball that will
allow us to see into the future, but as the
anti vaccination movement grows, it is clear that the risk
of large scale outbreaks is increasing, and if we don't
correct the course soon, we could see a public health
disaster unlike any we've seen in recent history. Perhaps even
worse than COVID, which took more than one point one
(02:38):
million American lives. In this episode, we will explore what
could happen here in the United States if the anti
vaccination movement continues to get their way. As I conducted
interviews with medical doctors and public health experts featured in
this series, I asked them all the same question, where
do you see this going? Each had their own answer,
(03:01):
and all of their answers pointed in the same direction.
Here's Catherine Wells, the head of public health in Lubbock,
the largest county in West Texas where the measles outbreak began.
Speaker 3 (03:15):
I do worry that, you know, we are going to
see other vaccine preventable diseases. You know, measles is the
most highly infectious. But for all of those people that
are becoming infected with measles, you know they'll be immune,
But that doesn't mean they're immune from mumps and rubella
and other vaccine preventable diseases that could easily enter a
(03:37):
community with lower vaccination rates, and those can come next.
So I mean that is concerning.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
Measles is sort of like a canary in the coal
mine when it comes to vaccination rates. It's the first
sign of a collapsing system. Here's doctor Peter Hotez, the
vaccine scientist in Houston.
Speaker 4 (03:58):
You know, with the formation of anti vaccine groups in
the twenty tens in Texas, you started to get these
steep rise in parents requesting 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
(04:21):
areas of West Texas East Texas, 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
(04:43):
you go below a certain threshold, roughly below 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 transmiss it's
the most transmissible virus we know about. So measles is
kind of the whatever you want to call it, the
(05:06):
early biomarker of a problem with your vaccination system. And unfortunately,
now it's just tearing through West Texas and the Panhandle,
and now it's in four states, all more or less
in the Great Plains area of the country. Right it's
the Panhandle in West Texas at the southern end of
(05:28):
the plain's been into joining areas in New Mexico, then
going up into Oklahoma and now Kansas. In my worry
is that this is a very large probably much larger
than is actually being reported. I mean, I don't see
this thing wearing down anytime soon. And I'm worried about
really prolonged measles epidemic to the point where we could
(05:50):
even lose measles elimination status in the US if it
goes on a full year. Between twenty twenty three and
twenty twenty four, we've had a fold rise in measles
epidemics outbreaks. We've had a sixfold rise and whooping cough
Protessa's cases. We've had polio upear in the wastewater in
New York State. So we're already trending in the wrong
(06:13):
direction even before this current administration because of all the
anti vaccine sentiment rhetoric out there. Now you throw on
top of it efforts to actively dismantle our vaccine ecosystem,
and I can only imagine what's going to happen. I
really worry about the widespread return of all these childhood illnesses,
(06:34):
just like we're seeing now with measles. I mean, we're
looking at the potential of sustained transmission going on for
months and months to the point where we could lose
our measles elimination status, and then it goes on from there,
because measles is the most highly transmissible I worry about
the same with whooping cough protessis. I worry about even
potentially polio returning, and not only in the US, because
(06:56):
you know, as we both know, the US is very
good at exporting its called. Sure, we export our music,
we export our movies. I worry about exporting this stuff,
and I worry about the impact on Latin American countries,
on low and middle income countries in Asia and Africa,
and in Europe as well. So a complete unraveling of
our vaccine ecosystem and global goals, and that really gives
(07:18):
me a lot of pause for concern.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
And on that note, a quick ad break. It's probably
safe to assume that the majority, if not the entirety,
of the audience of this show grew up in a
time when vaccinations were widely embraced and considered beneficial. That
(07:44):
also means that most of us have never lived during
a time when children and adults were regularly disabled or
killed by diseases like smallpox or folio. In the twentieth century,
three hundred million people were killed by smallpox in the
nineteen forties and nineteen fifties, Polio killed nearly half a
million people world wide annually and paralyzed hundreds of thousands,
(08:09):
but both of those diseases were effectively eradicated decades ago.
The last person living in an iron lung, the medical
device that keeps people who were paralyzed from polio alive,
died in March of twenty twenty four, and even measles,
which is considered a relatively less dangerous illness, was routinely
deadly before vaccination was widespread. There was a time when
(08:30):
thousands of Americans died from the disease every year. All
of that was due to the creation of vaccine policy
and infrastructure over time. But now RFK Junior and the
MAHA movement threatened to tear all that down and send
us back in time. Here's doctor David Gorsky.
Speaker 5 (08:50):
I'll start with vaccines and then I'll try to move
more to MAHA. So with vaccines, what I think we're
seeing is the systematic intentional dismantling of federal vaccine infrastructure
and policy, this whole call for placebo controlled trials. If
(09:11):
they define new vaccines as any new vaccine, it will
mean that there will be no new vaccines approve until
it's changed, which would at the earliest be after Trump
is out of office. If they define it as just
new vaccines for diseases that don't have vaccines, it might
(09:31):
be less of an issue either way, though contrary to
what they claim they want to do, which is increase
public confidence in vaccines, it will almost certainly have the
opposite effect. I recently wrote I think yeah. It was
last week's post. I wrote about a study that modeled
what would happen with certain percentage declines in vaccine uptake
(09:55):
for four different vaccines, including the measles vaccine, of course,
and it estimates did you know some pretty catastrophic numbers, if,
for instance, vaccine uptake declined even ten percent or fifty
percent over the next twenty five years, you know, millions
of cases, thousands of deaths, you know, in other words,
going back to basically the way it was before the
(10:18):
measles vaccine was licensed in the early nineteen sixties. You know,
you sure you can. You can complain that, you know,
the model was somewhat simplistic, but if anything, I think
it was probably conservative because they used a lot of
conservative assumptions. We could well be heading for that sort
of future, although it takes a while for things to change,
(10:40):
even with this sort of radical action that RFK Junior
is taking, and likely we would not see the worst
effects really take off until after Trump's out of office,
assuming he leaves office in twenty twenty nine, so you know,
it'll be left to his successsessors to deal with the mess.
(11:02):
And it's always easier to destroy than it is to
rebuild out. Obviously. Now the interesting counterpoint to you know,
Maha saying, oh, we must increase the gold standard science
applied to vaccines and make the standards for approval and
licensure you know, much more stringent. The exact opposite is
what they're talking about. For things like stem cell therapies,
(11:26):
you know, they're on the vast majority of which are
unproven and often very expensive. A lot of other you know,
wellness treatments and that sort of a thing. So we
could be seeing a lot less novel pharmaceuticals and vaccines
being approved because the anti pharma you know, suspicion will
(11:49):
be such that the bar for approval will be higher,
arguably too high. I realize that in the past I
once argued that that maybe our bar for approving some
drugs was too low, but that was more based on
the various accelerated approval programs that had come into being
in the years before that, where I thought that perhaps
(12:11):
the follow up after the initial accelerated approval was not adequate.
At the same time, it could become more and more
like the Wild West. When it comes to everything else,
we could very well have the equivalent of you know,
the traveling snake. Oil salesmen going across you know, the
planes in their cart, you know, selling There are various lineaments.
(12:35):
I'm not exactly sure what that would look like. I
do know that, for instance, it's already pretty much like
that for a lot of quote unquote stem cell therapies
that have never really been demonstrated to be effective and safe,
and you know, the same randomized clinical controlled trials that
they demand, you know, for vaccines. One thing I have
(12:55):
little doubt of is that public health is going to
be degraded significantly over the next four years. And how
we recover from that, I don't know. I'm struggling with
thea of what can be done to resist it or
slow it down, given that you know, the entire Republican
Party doesn't seem to want to put any sort of
(13:17):
checks on this administration mm hm.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
And you know, if we were to have some other
sort of major pandemic, either a new virus that breaks
through or a return of some disease that was once
out of circulation, there's no real guarantee that deaths or
(13:41):
widespread illness or disability as a result of those possible
events will even spur a reaction in a way that
would set us on a path back towards confidence in
public health and vaccination. You know, the outcome of COVID
was you know, it's it's quite clear that COVID was
(14:01):
sort of an accelerant for a lot of the anti
vaccination beliefs that had long been incubating. And you know,
our public discourse and broad distrust of public health entities
in general. And you know, like you said, you know,
Trump's successor will be left to clean up whatever mess
is made. And it's possible that Trump's successor could be
(14:24):
someone like JD. Van's, Yes, it could, or someone who
shares this affinity for you know, quasi eugenic statements or beliefs,
or this general disregard for the consequences of a sort
of social Diarwinist approach to public health. And so, you know,
(14:45):
we don't want to overstate the risks and be doomsayers.
But on the other hand, there's this real potential for
the return of you know, God forbid something like polio
or a breakthrough a and flu.
Speaker 5 (15:00):
You just reminded me polio was one of the diseases
modeled in that study, and the results was coming back
and hundreds or even thousands of cases of paralytic polio. Right.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
And we live now in a time in which it's
always been the majority of people who have never had
someone in their family who was in an iron lung
but we live in a time now where like the
historical memory of that is somewhat lost because it's not
even in the popular consciousness. It's not something that is featured,
(15:33):
you know in media. You know, used to read books
or watch films or even in television. You know, there
would be examples of something like that, someone who had
been impacted by polio and whether they were left disabled,
you know, and had less use of their limbs, or
you know, if they ended up in an iron lung.
You know, that was something at least people were aware
(15:54):
of the risk, and it's it's kind of paralleled with
something Another public health official I spoke with talked about
how there's been like two decades of doctors who went
through their residencies never even seeing a case of measles,
and so now we're having to sort of re educate
not just our doctors, but really the whole population, and
(16:15):
that's a massive undertaking. We'll hear a bit more from
doctor Gorsky right after the sad break.
Speaker 3 (16:31):
You know.
Speaker 5 (16:31):
One of the things that anti vaxers like to do
is to try to claim that, oh, back before the vaccine,
people didn't think measles was a big deal, and they
will point to that famous episode of The Brady Bunch
that I don't know if you ever heard of, where
all the kids got the measles, and it was played
mainly for laughs, you know, like they're all happy about
being home from school and they're not very sick. They
(16:52):
just have little thoughts painted all over them, because I
guess that's how they showed them having the measles.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
This is a life, isn't it. Yeah, if you have
to get sick, she can't beat the measles.
Speaker 4 (17:02):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
No medicine insider out like shots.
Speaker 2 (17:06):
Me don't even mention shots.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
Yeah, measles, measles, measles. Well, all the kids have now
had the measles so far, lot of them years ago.
Looks like the Brady's are.
Speaker 5 (17:19):
Finished with a meaz There was also an episode of
The Flintstones that, believe it or not, they played the
measles for laughs, And there was an episode of The
Donna Reid Show from the fifties. They would point like
those and go, oh, they didn't consider measles a big deal. Well,
if you read the actual medical and public health literature,
you know they did. And you know there were hundreds
(17:41):
of thousands of confirmed cases a year, maybe millions of
cases a year, and at least averaging about four or
five hundred deaths a year, which doesn't sound like a lot,
but in anything having to do with children, that's a
lot of death because we don't expect children to die.
Children should not die. They usually, you know, it's not
(18:01):
like elderly people where you know, it's expected that that's
when you know, the body starts giving out and people
are reaching the end of their lives. Children's death rates
should be low. That's why that's why we look at,
you know, childhood cancer, and there was such an effort made,
you know, over from like the fifties on to try
(18:22):
to decrease the rate of death from childhood cancer. And
you know, the results have been pretty spectacular. About eighty
five percent of children with you know, cancer live, which
you know, before it was you know, a pretty small number.
And the funny thing is the number of childhood cancers
(18:43):
is very small compared to a lot of other things
that cause death. We viewed it as sufficiently important to
try to do something about it. At least we did,
the question of whether we will continue to because you know,
anti kenemotherapy and various cancer nonsense tends to go right
(19:04):
along with maha and the other thing.
Speaker 3 (19:06):
You know.
Speaker 5 (19:06):
For instance, when RFK Junior made his one of his statements,
was it in early March I believe, or it was
in March sometime about you know, where everyone was like, oh,
he said, the MMR works and is the best way
to stop the spread of measles. Yes, but you know,
instead of the traditional messaging that you would come out
(19:28):
of the CDC, which would be, you know, get vaccinated.
You know MMR is the best way to put a
stop to this. Please, please, parents, get your kids vaccinated. Instead,
what he sort of said is, yes, the vaccine, you know,
vaccination is good, you know the best way to stop
the outbreak. But then he buries it instead of baffling
with bullshit, it's more like burying it in bullshit. He
(19:50):
talks about, you know, vitamin A supposedly to treat measles.
He talks about how children die with measles rather than
of measles, which should sound very familiar because they pulled
the same rhetoric out for COVID and the idea being
that only the children who were already sick were harmed
by measles, and that you know, your middle class healthy
(20:13):
children are not in any danger. You know. One way
to look at the anti vaccine movement, besides the eugenesis undertones,
sometimes not even undertones, one way to look at it
is as a purity cult. You may remember the whole
pure blood thing from a few years ago, like those
who were not vaccinated refusing to mingle with those who are.
(20:34):
Who are you know whose blood has somehow been contaminated
by the vaccine. It's the same as all. And think
of how much of alternative medicine involves quote unquote detoxification.
I like to call it ritual purification because it's like
more of a religious concept than it is actually a
medical concept. And look at how treatment of quote unquote
(20:55):
vaccine injury involves something like elation therapy to pull the
evil heavy metals that are supposedly causing autism out of you.
So the idea that you have control of your health
if you only make your terrain in your body hostile
to microbes through your superior lifestyle. The one example of
(21:16):
this that I like to point out, and the best
retort to it that I like to point out, comes
from about two thousand and nine. If I recall right,
it was Bill Maher on his HBO show, and Bob
Costas was the guess, and he was going on about how,
you know, this was around the time of the each
one in one flu pandemic, and he was going you knowing,
(21:39):
he was going on about how he didn't need the
flu vaccine because you know, his terrain was so hostile
to the flu, because you know, of his superior lifestyle.
Caused me to roll my eyes. But and that if
he were on an airplane with people coughing with the flu,
he would not get the flu. What did Costas say
to him? I love this retort? He said, Oh, come on, superman.
Speaker 2 (22:07):
Bob Costas could have easily used a different word in
his retort, given the eugenic tendencies of the modern anti
vaccination movement, and the word I have in mind is
uber minch. But I digress. If the uber mensch of
the anti VAXX movement like RFK get what they want,
we will live in a world where preventable communicable diseases
(22:28):
run rampant, the deaths of children are justified as either
a part of God's plan or a survival of the
fittest herd. Immunity strategy, where snake oil and beef tallow
salesmen are heralded above doctors and scientists, and where only
the strongest will survive at the expense of the week.
Diseases long thought defeated could return, and our ability to
(22:50):
address new viruses will be diminished. If RFK Junior successfully
dismantles what remains of our public health bureaucracy, and he's
doing it at a steady clip. In other words, the
future may end up looking a lot like the past,
more than it already does, and that's terrifying. The last
time deadly pandemics, religious fervor, and resistance to medical science
(23:14):
and eugenic policies all coincided historically with global trade breakdowns,
things did not work out so well for anyone involved.
And unfortunately, if I've taken one thing away from my
exploration of anti vacs America, it's that things will likely
have to get worse before they get better. It's really
(23:35):
hard to get people unstuck from their beliefs. Despite more
than one million Americans dying of COVID, the reaction to
pandemic restrictions combined with the anti vaccination movements convincing misinformation
around vaccines radicalized many people against vaccines and public health
measures in general. Before I recorded this final statement, the
(23:59):
Texas House voted to advance a bill that will expand
the ability for parents to seek exemptions for child vaccination
requirements for school. And this is happening as a measles
outbreak is ongoing, and things aren't looking good, But there
is at least one sliver of hope that I've found.
As my conversation with Gere illustrates, it's possible for people
(24:22):
who grow up in communities where vaccinations are avoided or
where there is no belief in them to get out
of those communities and to get themselves vaccinated. And as
my conversation with Catherine Wells illustrated, it is also possible
for people who had been hesitant to get their children
vaccinated for something like measles to be spurred into action
(24:44):
given reporting around an outbreak. But the question that ultimately
remains is whether enough people will have their minds changed
and embrace what the science tells us we should do.
Given doctor Gorsky's astute observation that the anti vaccine movement
is someone like a purity cult and Gear's comment that
(25:06):
escaping their anti vax upbringing was sort of like escaping
a cult. Unfortunately, I think we will have to temper
our expectations for how quickly we can extricate our nation
from this deep dark place that I call anti vax America.
I'm Stephen Monicelli. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1 (25:29):
It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
coolzonmedia 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.
Al Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome to the final episode of Anti vax America, a
special mini series from It could Happen Here. I'm your host,
Stephen Monachelli, a journalist in Dallas and sometimes contributor to
cool Zone Media. Over the past episodes, we've explored the
origins of the current measles outbreak, the historical roots of
(00:26):
the anti vaccination movement, the overlap between vaccine hesitancy and
conservative Christianity that upholds a strong belief in spiritual healing,
and the eugenic implications of contemporary anti vax ideology and
the Maha movement. In this episode, we'll explore the future.
Could the United States see a massive return of viral outbreaks,
(00:49):
How would a nationwide collapse and vaccination rates impact our
public health? And what are we to make of the
rise of alt medicine and whether that could continue to
spread if people like RFK Junior elevate these hucksters into
national figures. These are not just academic questions. If vaccination
(01:09):
rates continue to decline, we could see the return of
diseases like polio, which had been eradicated in the United
States for decades. In recent years, there have been cases
of polio found in waste water, and one confirmed case
of a man with polio in an unvaccinated community in
New York. An expert warned that these isolated incidents could
(01:32):
spread into larger outbreaks, and these concerns are well founded,
particularly given that RFK Junior has said as recently as
twenty twenty three that early batches of polio vaccines caused cancer,
something that has never been demonstrated in the research. Vaccination
is the most effective tool we have to prevent the
(01:52):
spread of communicable, deadly diseases. Without widespread vaccination, we face
the very real possibility of devastating public health crises, and
the resurgence of diseases like measles and polio, and smallpox
and more would put our most vulnerable populations at risk,
especially the elderly, the immunal compromised, and others who cannot
(02:16):
be vaccinated. We don't have a crystal ball that will
allow us to see into the future, but as the
anti vaccination movement grows, it is clear that the risk
of large scale outbreaks is increasing, and if we don't
correct the course soon, we could see a public health
disaster unlike any we've seen in recent history. Perhaps even
worse than COVID, which took more than one point one
(02:38):
million American lives. In this episode, we will explore what
could happen here in the United States if the anti
vaccination movement continues to get their way. As I conducted
interviews with medical doctors and public health experts featured in
this series, I asked them all the same question, where
do you see this going? Each had their own answer,
(03:01):
and all of their answers pointed in the same direction.
Here's Catherine Wells, the head of public health in Lubbock,
the largest county in West Texas where the measles outbreak began.
Speaker 3 (03:15):
I do worry that, you know, we are going to
see other vaccine preventable diseases. You know, measles is the
most highly infectious. But for all of those people that
are becoming infected with measles, you know they'll be immune,
But that doesn't mean they're immune from mumps and rubella
and other vaccine preventable diseases that could easily enter a
(03:37):
community with lower vaccination rates, and those can come next.
So I mean that is concerning.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
Measles is sort of like a canary in the coal
mine when it comes to vaccination rates. It's the first
sign of a collapsing system. Here's doctor Peter Hotez, the
vaccine scientist in Houston.
Speaker 4 (03:58):
You know, with the formation of anti vaccine groups in
the twenty tens in Texas, you started to get these
steep rise in parents requesting 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
(04:21):
areas of West Texas East Texas, 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
(04:43):
you go below a certain threshold, roughly below 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 transmiss it's
the most transmissible virus we know about. So measles is
kind of the whatever you want to call it, the
(05:06):
early biomarker of a problem with your vaccination system. And unfortunately,
now it's just tearing through West Texas and the Panhandle,
and now it's in four states, all more or less
in the Great Plains area of the country. Right it's
the Panhandle in West Texas at the southern end of
(05:28):
the plain's been into joining areas in New Mexico, then
going up into Oklahoma and now Kansas. In my worry
is that this is a very large probably much larger
than is actually being reported. I mean, I don't see
this thing wearing down anytime soon. And I'm worried about
really prolonged measles epidemic to the point where we could
(05:50):
even lose measles elimination status in the US if it
goes on a full year. Between twenty twenty three and
twenty twenty four, we've had a fold rise in measles
epidemics outbreaks. We've had a sixfold rise and whooping cough
Protessa's cases. We've had polio upear in the wastewater in
New York State. So we're already trending in the wrong
(06:13):
direction even before this current administration because of all the
anti vaccine sentiment rhetoric out there. Now you throw on
top of it efforts to actively dismantle our vaccine ecosystem,
and I can only imagine what's going to happen. I
really worry about the widespread return of all these childhood illnesses,
(06:34):
just like we're seeing now with measles. I mean, we're
looking at the potential of sustained transmission going on for
months and months to the point where we could lose
our measles elimination status, and then it goes on from there,
because measles is the most highly transmissible I worry about
the same with whooping cough protessis. I worry about even
potentially polio returning, and not only in the US, because
(06:56):
you know, as we both know, the US is very
good at exporting its called. Sure, we export our music,
we export our movies. I worry about exporting this stuff,
and I worry about the impact on Latin American countries,
on low and middle income countries in Asia and Africa,
and in Europe as well. So a complete unraveling of
our vaccine ecosystem and global goals, and that really gives
(07:18):
me a lot of pause for concern.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
And on that note, a quick ad break. It's probably
safe to assume that the majority, if not the entirety,
of the audience of this show grew up in a
time when vaccinations were widely embraced and considered beneficial. That
(07:44):
also means that most of us have never lived during
a time when children and adults were regularly disabled or
killed by diseases like smallpox or folio. In the twentieth century,
three hundred million people were killed by smallpox in the
nineteen forties and nineteen fifties, Polio killed nearly half a
million people world wide annually and paralyzed hundreds of thousands,
(08:09):
but both of those diseases were effectively eradicated decades ago.
The last person living in an iron lung, the medical
device that keeps people who were paralyzed from polio alive,
died in March of twenty twenty four, and even measles,
which is considered a relatively less dangerous illness, was routinely
deadly before vaccination was widespread. There was a time when
(08:30):
thousands of Americans died from the disease every year. All
of that was due to the creation of vaccine policy
and infrastructure over time. But now RFK Junior and the
MAHA movement threatened to tear all that down and send
us back in time. Here's doctor David Gorsky.
Speaker 5 (08:50):
I'll start with vaccines and then I'll try to move
more to MAHA. So with vaccines, what I think we're
seeing is the systematic intentional dismantling of federal vaccine infrastructure
and policy, this whole call for placebo controlled trials. If
(09:11):
they define new vaccines as any new vaccine, it will
mean that there will be no new vaccines approve until
it's changed, which would at the earliest be after Trump
is out of office. If they define it as just
new vaccines for diseases that don't have vaccines, it might
(09:31):
be less of an issue either way, though contrary to
what they claim they want to do, which is increase
public confidence in vaccines, it will almost certainly have the
opposite effect. I recently wrote I think yeah. It was
last week's post. I wrote about a study that modeled
what would happen with certain percentage declines in vaccine uptake
(09:55):
for four different vaccines, including the measles vaccine, of course,
and it estimates did you know some pretty catastrophic numbers, if,
for instance, vaccine uptake declined even ten percent or fifty
percent over the next twenty five years, you know, millions
of cases, thousands of deaths, you know, in other words,
going back to basically the way it was before the
(10:18):
measles vaccine was licensed in the early nineteen sixties. You know,
you sure you can. You can complain that, you know,
the model was somewhat simplistic, but if anything, I think
it was probably conservative because they used a lot of
conservative assumptions. We could well be heading for that sort
of future, although it takes a while for things to change,
(10:40):
even with this sort of radical action that RFK Junior
is taking, and likely we would not see the worst
effects really take off until after Trump's out of office,
assuming he leaves office in twenty twenty nine, so you know,
it'll be left to his successsessors to deal with the mess.
(11:02):
And it's always easier to destroy than it is to
rebuild out. Obviously. Now the interesting counterpoint to you know,
Maha saying, oh, we must increase the gold standard science
applied to vaccines and make the standards for approval and
licensure you know, much more stringent. The exact opposite is
what they're talking about. For things like stem cell therapies,
(11:26):
you know, they're on the vast majority of which are
unproven and often very expensive. A lot of other you know,
wellness treatments and that sort of a thing. So we
could be seeing a lot less novel pharmaceuticals and vaccines
being approved because the anti pharma you know, suspicion will
(11:49):
be such that the bar for approval will be higher,
arguably too high. I realize that in the past I
once argued that that maybe our bar for approving some
drugs was too low, but that was more based on
the various accelerated approval programs that had come into being
in the years before that, where I thought that perhaps
(12:11):
the follow up after the initial accelerated approval was not adequate.
At the same time, it could become more and more
like the Wild West. When it comes to everything else,
we could very well have the equivalent of you know,
the traveling snake. Oil salesmen going across you know, the
planes in their cart, you know, selling There are various lineaments.
(12:35):
I'm not exactly sure what that would look like. I
do know that, for instance, it's already pretty much like
that for a lot of quote unquote stem cell therapies
that have never really been demonstrated to be effective and safe,
and you know, the same randomized clinical controlled trials that
they demand, you know, for vaccines. One thing I have
(12:55):
little doubt of is that public health is going to
be degraded significantly over the next four years. And how
we recover from that, I don't know. I'm struggling with
thea of what can be done to resist it or
slow it down, given that you know, the entire Republican
Party doesn't seem to want to put any sort of
(13:17):
checks on this administration mm hm.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
And you know, if we were to have some other
sort of major pandemic, either a new virus that breaks
through or a return of some disease that was once
out of circulation, there's no real guarantee that deaths or
(13:41):
widespread illness or disability as a result of those possible
events will even spur a reaction in a way that
would set us on a path back towards confidence in
public health and vaccination. You know, the outcome of COVID
was you know, it's it's quite clear that COVID was
(14:01):
sort of an accelerant for a lot of the anti
vaccination beliefs that had long been incubating. And you know,
our public discourse and broad distrust of public health entities
in general. And you know, like you said, you know,
Trump's successor will be left to clean up whatever mess
is made. And it's possible that Trump's successor could be
(14:24):
someone like JD. Van's, Yes, it could, or someone who
shares this affinity for you know, quasi eugenic statements or beliefs,
or this general disregard for the consequences of a sort
of social Diarwinist approach to public health. And so, you know,
(14:45):
we don't want to overstate the risks and be doomsayers.
But on the other hand, there's this real potential for
the return of you know, God forbid something like polio
or a breakthrough a and flu.
Speaker 5 (15:00):
You just reminded me polio was one of the diseases
modeled in that study, and the results was coming back
and hundreds or even thousands of cases of paralytic polio. Right.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
And we live now in a time in which it's
always been the majority of people who have never had
someone in their family who was in an iron lung
but we live in a time now where like the
historical memory of that is somewhat lost because it's not
even in the popular consciousness. It's not something that is featured,
(15:33):
you know in media. You know, used to read books
or watch films or even in television. You know, there
would be examples of something like that, someone who had
been impacted by polio and whether they were left disabled,
you know, and had less use of their limbs, or
you know, if they ended up in an iron lung.
You know, that was something at least people were aware
(15:54):
of the risk, and it's it's kind of paralleled with
something Another public health official I spoke with talked about
how there's been like two decades of doctors who went
through their residencies never even seeing a case of measles,
and so now we're having to sort of re educate
not just our doctors, but really the whole population, and
(16:15):
that's a massive undertaking. We'll hear a bit more from
doctor Gorsky right after the sad break.
Speaker 3 (16:31):
You know.
Speaker 5 (16:31):
One of the things that anti vaxers like to do
is to try to claim that, oh, back before the vaccine,
people didn't think measles was a big deal, and they
will point to that famous episode of The Brady Bunch
that I don't know if you ever heard of, where
all the kids got the measles, and it was played
mainly for laughs, you know, like they're all happy about
being home from school and they're not very sick. They
(16:52):
just have little thoughts painted all over them, because I
guess that's how they showed them having the measles.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
This is a life, isn't it. Yeah, if you have
to get sick, she can't beat the measles.
Speaker 4 (17:02):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
No medicine insider out like shots.
Speaker 2 (17:06):
Me don't even mention shots.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
Yeah, measles, measles, measles. Well, all the kids have now
had the measles so far, lot of them years ago.
Looks like the Brady's are.
Speaker 5 (17:19):
Finished with a meaz There was also an episode of
The Flintstones that, believe it or not, they played the
measles for laughs, And there was an episode of The
Donna Reid Show from the fifties. They would point like
those and go, oh, they didn't consider measles a big deal. Well,
if you read the actual medical and public health literature,
you know they did. And you know there were hundreds
(17:41):
of thousands of confirmed cases a year, maybe millions of
cases a year, and at least averaging about four or
five hundred deaths a year, which doesn't sound like a lot,
but in anything having to do with children, that's a
lot of death because we don't expect children to die.
Children should not die. They usually, you know, it's not
(18:01):
like elderly people where you know, it's expected that that's
when you know, the body starts giving out and people
are reaching the end of their lives. Children's death rates
should be low. That's why that's why we look at,
you know, childhood cancer, and there was such an effort made,
you know, over from like the fifties on to try
(18:22):
to decrease the rate of death from childhood cancer. And
you know, the results have been pretty spectacular. About eighty
five percent of children with you know, cancer live, which
you know, before it was you know, a pretty small number.
And the funny thing is the number of childhood cancers
(18:43):
is very small compared to a lot of other things
that cause death. We viewed it as sufficiently important to
try to do something about it. At least we did,
the question of whether we will continue to because you know,
anti kenemotherapy and various cancer nonsense tends to go right
(19:04):
along with maha and the other thing.
Speaker 3 (19:06):
You know.
Speaker 5 (19:06):
For instance, when RFK Junior made his one of his statements,
was it in early March I believe, or it was
in March sometime about you know, where everyone was like, oh,
he said, the MMR works and is the best way
to stop the spread of measles. Yes, but you know,
instead of the traditional messaging that you would come out
(19:28):
of the CDC, which would be, you know, get vaccinated.
You know MMR is the best way to put a
stop to this. Please, please, parents, get your kids vaccinated. Instead,
what he sort of said is, yes, the vaccine, you know,
vaccination is good, you know the best way to stop
the outbreak. But then he buries it instead of baffling
with bullshit, it's more like burying it in bullshit. He
(19:50):
talks about, you know, vitamin A supposedly to treat measles.
He talks about how children die with measles rather than
of measles, which should sound very familiar because they pulled
the same rhetoric out for COVID and the idea being
that only the children who were already sick were harmed
by measles, and that you know, your middle class healthy
(20:13):
children are not in any danger. You know. One way
to look at the anti vaccine movement, besides the eugenesis undertones,
sometimes not even undertones, one way to look at it
is as a purity cult. You may remember the whole
pure blood thing from a few years ago, like those
who were not vaccinated refusing to mingle with those who are.
(20:34):
Who are you know whose blood has somehow been contaminated
by the vaccine. It's the same as all. And think
of how much of alternative medicine involves quote unquote detoxification.
I like to call it ritual purification because it's like
more of a religious concept than it is actually a
medical concept. And look at how treatment of quote unquote
(20:55):
vaccine injury involves something like elation therapy to pull the
evil heavy metals that are supposedly causing autism out of you.
So the idea that you have control of your health
if you only make your terrain in your body hostile
to microbes through your superior lifestyle. The one example of
(21:16):
this that I like to point out, and the best
retort to it that I like to point out, comes
from about two thousand and nine. If I recall right,
it was Bill Maher on his HBO show, and Bob
Costas was the guess, and he was going on about how,
you know, this was around the time of the each
one in one flu pandemic, and he was going you knowing,
(21:39):
he was going on about how he didn't need the
flu vaccine because you know, his terrain was so hostile
to the flu, because you know, of his superior lifestyle.
Caused me to roll my eyes. But and that if
he were on an airplane with people coughing with the flu,
he would not get the flu. What did Costas say
to him? I love this retort? He said, Oh, come on, superman.
Speaker 2 (22:07):
Bob Costas could have easily used a different word in
his retort, given the eugenic tendencies of the modern anti
vaccination movement, and the word I have in mind is
uber minch. But I digress. If the uber mensch of
the anti VAXX movement like RFK get what they want,
we will live in a world where preventable communicable diseases
(22:28):
run rampant, the deaths of children are justified as either
a part of God's plan or a survival of the
fittest herd. Immunity strategy, where snake oil and beef tallow
salesmen are heralded above doctors and scientists, and where only
the strongest will survive at the expense of the week.
Diseases long thought defeated could return, and our ability to
(22:50):
address new viruses will be diminished. If RFK Junior successfully
dismantles what remains of our public health bureaucracy, and he's
doing it at a steady clip. In other words, the
future may end up looking a lot like the past,
more than it already does, and that's terrifying. The last
time deadly pandemics, religious fervor, and resistance to medical science
(23:14):
and eugenic policies all coincided historically with global trade breakdowns,
things did not work out so well for anyone involved.
And unfortunately, if I've taken one thing away from my
exploration of anti vacs America, it's that things will likely
have to get worse before they get better. It's really
(23:35):
hard to get people unstuck from their beliefs. Despite more
than one million Americans dying of COVID, the reaction to
pandemic restrictions combined with the anti vaccination movements convincing misinformation
around vaccines radicalized many people against vaccines and public health
measures in general. Before I recorded this final statement, the
(23:59):
Texas House voted to advance a bill that will expand
the ability for parents to seek exemptions for child vaccination
requirements for school. And this is happening as a measles
outbreak is ongoing, and things aren't looking good, But there
is at least one sliver of hope that I've found.
As my conversation with Gere illustrates, it's possible for people
(24:22):
who grow up in communities where vaccinations are avoided or
where there is no belief in them to get out
of those communities and to get themselves vaccinated. And as
my conversation with Catherine Wells illustrated, it is also possible
for people who had been hesitant to get their children
vaccinated for something like measles to be spurred into action
(24:44):
given reporting around an outbreak. But the question that ultimately
remains is whether enough people will have their minds changed
and embrace what the science tells us we should do.
Given doctor Gorsky's astute observation that the anti vaccine movement
is someone like a purity cult and Gear's comment that
(25:06):
escaping their anti vax upbringing was sort of like escaping
a cult. Unfortunately, I think we will have to temper
our expectations for how quickly we can extricate our nation
from this deep dark place that I call anti vax America.
I'm Stephen Monicelli. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1 (25:29):
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