Anti-Vax America: The Complete Series

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Media.

Speaker 2 (00:03):
Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let
you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
of the week that just happened is here in one
convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
you can make your own decisions.

Speaker 3 (00:27):
I'm Stephen Monchelli.

Speaker 4 (00:29):
I'm a journalist in Dallas and an occasional Cool Zone
Media contributor. You may have seen in the news lately
that there's a major measles outbreak centered in Texas. It
started back in January of this year in the West
Texas County of Gaines, and it has since spread to
at least two other states. As of this recording, Texas

(00:49):
has reported over seven hundred cases associated with the measles outbreak.
New Mexico has reported over sixty, Oklahoma has reported over fifteen,
and there are other states that have also reported measles
cases that may or may not be linked to this outbreak.
It's the first major measles outbreak in a decade, and

(01:10):
it's already taken three lives, two unvaccinated children, the first
of such deaths in more than twenty years, and one adult.

Speaker 3 (01:18):
All were unvaccinated.

Speaker 4 (01:21):
At the root of the outbreak are low vaccination rates,
which took a sharp downturn after the twenty twenty COVID
nineteen pandemic as dubious vaccine skepticism and opposition to vaccines,
both mandatory and in general, became a.

Speaker 3 (01:36):
Partisan political issue.

Speaker 4 (01:38):
It is no coincidence that the low vaccination rate in
Gaines County, where the outbreak first began, corresponds with deep
red Republican politics. Measles is a sort of canary in
the coal mine. It's one of the most highly communicable
diseases and consequently is among the first to appear in
communities with low vaccination rates. An outbreak in Wiffornio about

(02:00):
a decade ago was eventually stemmed when the state legislature
banned vaccine exemptions for school aged children. This action spurred
response and gave a shot in the arm to a
nascent coalition of vaccine skeptics and outright anti vaccination groups
that had previously struggled to get political traction. By twenty twenty,
such groups had gained meaningful amounts of influence in red

(02:22):
states like Texas and Oklahoma. Then came COVID nineteen, and
suddenly a disparate set of groups big pharma skeptics, wellness influencers,
health freedom libertarians, and conservative religious groups, to name a few,
coalesced in a formidable political force under the banner of
the Republican Party, whose politicization of the COVID nineteen pandemics

(02:44):
served as a sort of ideological cement to unite them.
The logical conclusion of this development is represented in the
avatar of RFK Junior, a long time vaccine misinformation peddler
who now sits atop the highest federal government health bureaucracy,
a perch from which he continues to spread debunked anti
vaccination tropes like a proverbial fox.

Speaker 3 (03:06):
In the henhouse.

Speaker 4 (03:08):
RFK Junior has repeatedly downplayed the importance of vaccines in
the battle against measles, and has refused to distance himself
from long debunked anti vaccination arguments such as that vaccines
cause autism. His influence and the influence of the vaccine
skeptic movement, of which he is a central figure, can
be seen in responses from local West Texans who have
opted for junk palliatives like vitamin A or measles exposure

(03:32):
parties over vaccination. The viral spread of anti vax ideology
threatens to pitch us back one hundred years in time,
when thousands of children and adults either died or disabled
every year from diseases like measles, polio, and smallpox. Research
into the side effects of vaccines has repeatedly shown that
the risks associated with vaccination are far lower than the

(03:55):
risks of an infection, particularly for vulnerable populations like young children,
the elderly, and people with suppressed immune systems. Some people
genuinely cannot get vaccines, such as certain new board babies,
and thus are at higher risk should an outbreak of
a deadly disease occur. When ninety five percent of a
population is vaccinated in an area, diseases can be entirely

(04:18):
removed from circulation, and that's indeed what happened to smallpox
and for a time measles. But the downward trend in
vaccination rates, supercharged by the marriage of right wing politics
with anti vaccination beliefs of all stripes, means that our
collective immunity is at risk. This week, I will be
your host on It Could Happen Here, as I take

(04:40):
you through a five episode mini series called Anti vax America,
three interviews with public health officials, vaccine scientists, medical professionals,
and historians. I will explore the ongoing measles outbreak and
how it serves as a microcosm for where we are,
how we got here, and where we could go if
anti vaxx beliefs continue to become mainstream in the United States.

(05:04):
In the first episode, I will cover the origin of
the measles outbreak in Texas, its deadly consequences, the varying
responses from public health officials at different levels of government,
and the consequence of misinformation being spread at the national
and local level. In the second episode, I will unearth
the deep roots of anti vaccination belief in the United States,

(05:26):
how it's changed over time, and why it's basically become
synonymous with right wing politics in our current day. In
the third episode, I will explore the overlap between anti
vaxx beliefs and the belief in supernatural healing and miracles
that is common among a particular movement of conservative Christianity
that has tied itself closely to President Donald Trump. In

(05:48):
the fourth episode, I will untangle the twisted history of
eugenics and how it's influenced public health and vaccination attitudes,
as well as the historical echo of eugenics that can
be found in RFK Junior Make America Healthy Again agenda.
And in the last episode, I'll consider what could happen
in the United States What could happen here if vaccination

(06:10):
rates continue to plummet and vaccine skeptics like RFK Junior
continue to dictate public health policy. But before we get there,
a quick ad break. Gaines County, the epicenter of the

(06:33):
West Texas outbreak, is a largely rural place home to
oil field workers, farmers, ranchers, and several Mennonite communities. Politically,
it's very conservative. It sits on the Texas New Mexico border,
about three hundred and sixty miles west of Dallas, where
I live. The largest city in the region, Lubbock, is

(06:54):
two counties over. Lubbock is home to two hundred and
sixty thousand plus people and has the largest hospitals in
the area.

Speaker 3 (07:02):
It was at one of those hospitals.

Speaker 4 (07:04):
That the first child died of measles in over two decades.
As the number of cases in the region began to increase,
Lubbock became a central hub for both treatment and the
dissemination of public health information. Weeks before RFK Junior or
Texas Governor Abbott spoke on the issue, local public health
officials and medical institutions were on the front lines in Lubbock.

Speaker 5 (07:29):
So my name is Catherine Wells, and I am the
director for Lubbock Public Health and Lubbock Public Health is
the city and county health department in both the city
and County of Lubbock, Texas. I've been in this role
for about ten years now. We're about seventy five miles

(07:50):
from Gaines County, which is where kind of the epicenter
of this measles outbreak is.

Speaker 4 (07:57):
Let's maybe go back all the way to the day
that you know it sort of began. The first case
came out in January. So can you take us a
little back to that day and what was going on
in your world and you know, what were you doing,
and how did you hear about this first case and
what your reaction was.

Speaker 5 (08:15):
And we'll actually need to take a couple of days
kind of before the announcement. I first found out about
the possibility of measles that Friday, the twenty eighth. I
have all my dates messed up, but it's that Friday,
before the first case was announced, one of my staff

(08:36):
came and told me that we had two children that
had been admitted to our local hospital. So we have
the children's hospital for this whole region. People come, you know,
over two hundred miles to come to the children's hospital
in Luppock. And she mentioned that there was two children.
The physician thought it might be measles that they were

(08:58):
going to send for test. So in public health, measles
is so rare that even sending somebody for testing is
required to be reported to public health. That physician thought
it was measles. We kind of waited over the weekend,
and then that Monday and Tuesday, I started hearing some

(09:19):
rumors that there were multiple measles cases down on the
ground in Gaines County, which was interesting. People were calling
and saying, you know, I heard this rumor have you
heard this? And I'm like nope. And then all of
a sudden, those two cases or those two cases both
tested positive and then when we went and started talking

(09:42):
to the families and learning more, we realized that those
rumors about measles circulating and Gaines County was true, and
there were reports of you know, multiple individuals that had
been sick and measles had probably been there or at
least a little bit of time. And then when we
got the confirmed cases, that really just put everything into
really you know, moving very quickly trying to really figure

(10:05):
out what was going on for measles.

Speaker 4 (10:08):
So at that time, it was it was flu season,
and so were you all was your office preparing, you know,
or working on anything else at that time when you
had first heard about this first testing and you know,
started hearing about these rumors.

Speaker 5 (10:23):
Yeah, I mean, we had increases in flu, we had
increases in COVID. We actually had some birds that had
died that had tested positive with the new Avian flu.
You know, just that's a busy time of the year
for public health with lots of different reports coming in,
lots of multiple reports of pertussis, and it's not unusual

(10:46):
that we have a physician wanting to test for measles
ruling out. I mean, it happens a couple of times
a year. But in my entire career, every time that happened,
it had always been negative.

Speaker 6 (10:56):
So I was.

Speaker 5 (10:57):
Kind of thinking that it was one of those cases,
especially that Friday afternoon, like, oh, this is just a doctor,
you know, you know, just wanting to rule something out.
You know, it's probably blue or something else going on
with those children.

Speaker 4 (11:11):
And so when you had gotten that confirmation it was
verified that those cases had indeed been measles. I mean,
what was going through your mind at that time?

Speaker 5 (11:22):
I mean that was like, you know, people have always
talked about we're kind of on the edge of seeing
more measles outbreaks in the United States, and it was
really kind of a no, no, a crap moment of Wow,
this is in our backyard. Is our department you know,
ready to take this on? And then also reaching out

(11:43):
to Gaines County, which has a much smaller health department,
and being like, what can we help you with? Do
you guys know what you need next? You know, they
don't have a communications person, so it was like my
staff writing the press release for Gaines County to send
out to make the notifications about the first measles cases.
So it was just really what can we do to

(12:04):
help them immediately and figure out what the next steps
would be with that.

Speaker 4 (12:08):
So since January, cases have been on the rise, and
so we're in a different place now than just two cases.

Speaker 3 (12:17):
Can you just tell us a little.

Speaker 4 (12:17):
Bit about where things are now in Lubbock and how
medical authorities have responded to the outbreak.

Speaker 5 (12:25):
So initially, you know, all of the cases were in
Gaines County. The only exposures we were seeing outside of
Gaines County was when somebody was seeking medical care and
was sitting in like say, a waiting room at a
physician's office, and then they were exposing other individuals. But
after a couple of weeks, we started seeing spread outside

(12:48):
of Gaines County, So we were seeing more and more
cases in those surrounding counties, and then we started getting
cases in Lubbock, that's seventy five miles away. Over the
last three weeks, really seen the cases in the Lubbock increase.
You know, we originally just had a handful. Now we're
up to forty one or forty two, and that number

(13:09):
will be updated again tomorrow. So just seeing more and
more spread of measles, and the concern is that public
health can't necessarily trace those back to a specific case.
So people that have got out to the store or
gone to a public place have now contracted measles.

Speaker 4 (13:28):
So tell me a little bit more about you know,
what efforts have taken place and what sort of initiatives
have been put into place as measles have spread. You know,
what does that look like from love at Public Health
or any of your partners.

Speaker 5 (13:44):
Yeah, so ours is really the first one was getting
testing set up. Originally when this started, all of our
testing samples had to go to Austin, which is about
a five and a half hour drive, So working with
the state Health Department to get testing capability up here
in Lubbock so we could quickly identify people. The next

(14:05):
one is really about education, providing information to the physician's
offices the hospitals about measles because we hadn't seen it
in twenty one years here. So just think about how
many physicians have been trained over the last twenty one
years that never saw a measles case in their residency.

(14:25):
So getting them to feel comfortable about what the signs
and symptoms are and really making sure that we were
notifying or that they were notifying Public Health and getting
people tested and then doing that contact tracing, and then
the other big ones vaccinations. You know, there's two ways
to prevent measles. One is the vaccination that's going to

(14:46):
protect you, and then the other one is avoiding being
exposed to measles. So really getting more and more people
vaccinated with pop up clinics and then running a measles
vaccination clinic here at our health department.

Speaker 4 (15:00):
Can you tell me a little bit about what the
response in particular too, You know, the vaccination clinics being
set up has been. You know, I have a lot
of people shown up for that. Has it drawn a
lot of you know, new people that are trying to
get their children vaccinated.

Speaker 5 (15:15):
It's a mix. I feel that our vaccination clinic here
at our Health department's been pretty successful in that we're
getting people every day coming in to get vaccinated, and
we're seeing people that were hesitant prior, that had chosen
not to vaccinate their children kind of with the idea, well,

(15:35):
I've never seen measles or moms or rebella, so why
give my child a vaccine if that doesn't exist. Now
that measles are circulating in the community, they're changing, you know,
that thought process and are coming forward to get vaccinated.
Some of the rural clinics have been a lot harder
to get people to come in. I mean they've stood
up clinics and only a handful of people have come

(15:57):
in to that clinic that day. So real mixed response.
But I think is public health, it's important for us
to be offering the MMR vaccine with as few barriers
as possible.

Speaker 4 (16:10):
So you were in this position during the COVID pandemic
and when that began and all throughout it, So can
you tell me a little bit what it was like
working in your role as a public health official at
that time, and then also maybe whether things are any
different today, has anything changed?

Speaker 5 (16:28):
I mean, I think our community did fairly well throughout COVID,
given you know, everything that went on. I've always believed
in just being honest and talking about what I do know,
what I don't know, what the science is showing, and
I think that helped our community get vaccinated and take
some of the precautions during COVID. And I'm kind of

(16:51):
taking that same you know thought process and that same
you know leadership style as we're dealing with measles out
here with measles. It's a challenge. I think people are
paying attention to it because it's really impacting children, whereas
we didn't see, you know, that same impact with COVID.

(17:12):
It's frustrating because we know what the solution is. When
COVID showed up. You know, nobody in public health and
the medical community, you know, knew exactly what COVID is.
With measles, we know what we're dealing with, and we
also have a known solution, which is a vaccine. So
it is frustrating that people are choosing not to vaccinate. Still,

(17:33):
the other challenges is during COVID, all of our other
work for public health got put on hold. Here with measles,
our health Department's still expected to do all of our
other jobs and respond to a measles outbreak, which is
really stressful on staff.

Speaker 4 (17:48):
I can completely understand that in terms of some stressful things.
I understand that just from doing some background research and
reading up that your office or maybe even you your self,
were subject to some threats or some sort of pretty
extreme reactions during COVID. And is that the case? And

(18:08):
is that still happening?

Speaker 5 (18:10):
Thankfully, it's not happening during COVID. We did have some
very strong opinions and some threats, mostly around when the
children's vaccine was released and why we were promoting that.
We have not seen that with measles, which is very good.
I don't want any of my staff to be threatened.
I mean, you always got these random posters on people

(18:32):
that post on social media, but they're not even individuals
from our community.

Speaker 3 (18:37):
Got it, Okay?

Speaker 4 (18:38):
Well, I'm glad to hear that, genuinely, that that is
a positive change. I suppose that is something that's a
good difference.

Speaker 5 (18:46):
And also good support from our pediatricians and the medical
community has been very good and outspoken about the importance
of getting vaccinated, which has helped us.

Speaker 4 (18:56):
So where do you see things going from here? I mean,
do you think we'll continue to see more cases? I
know that they're on the rise, but do you think
that will continue? Or do you have other concerns about
potentially other outbreaks of diseases that had been kind of
pushed out of circulation coming back.

Speaker 7 (19:17):
Yeah, all of the above.

Speaker 5 (19:19):
I think in Gaines County in particular, we don't have
a good understanding of where we are in the epidemic,
like how many vulnerable individuals in that community are still remaining,
so we don't know how long that initial epicenter outbreaks
going to last. We're also seeing, you know, as measles

(19:43):
gets into a community, it is so infectious that it
is going to find all of those little pockets of
people that are unvaccinated. And that's what we're seeing here
in Lubbott County is you know, measles taking hold and
fine little pockets, and public health trying to go put
out you know, little fires, trying to make sure that

(20:05):
we've figured out who's been exposed and who's at risk.

Speaker 4 (20:09):
You described, you know, how this is an incredibly infectious
disease and it is you know, finding all the pockets
of people that are vulnerable or not vaccinated. And so
I'm wondering if you can, you know, if there are
any examples or specifics that you could share about how
the outbreak is impacting communities or particular communities. Has it

(20:31):
resulted in disruptions in school for children, Has it, you know,
caused any other sort of notable breakdowns or sort of
pauses in day to day regular activity in Lubbic.

Speaker 5 (20:44):
You know, those breakdowns have been more minor that a child,
say that's unvaccinated's been exposed, and that's requiring that child
to sit out from school. So there is that, you know,
element that they're missing those important, you know, days of education.
Our bigger impacts here have been around daycares. We had

(21:07):
a large outbreak or large in the sense that we've
had now eight children or eight individuals associated with one
daycare all test positive with measles. So that's meant that
you know, children have had to be sent home from daycare,
which then impacts parents' ability to work and also impacts

(21:28):
you know, you know, daycare along with you know, the
number of students there children having to go home that
have been exposed working a lot to get additional doses
of vaccine into a daycare. So it both impacts the
public health system, our healthcare system, because kids need health,
but then it also impacts parents because if your child's

(21:49):
not in daycare, a parent can't go to work. Those
have been the bigger disruptions and then disruptions in our
healthcare system that we're now having to do a lot
of screen Like you call to make an appointment for
the doctor, and it's kind of like COVID, have you
been exposed to measles? Are you vaccinated? They're asking all
those screening questions before people enter our healthcare facilities.

Speaker 4 (22:12):
In terms of sort of interactions with the state and
their response to this, can you tell me a little
bit more about how the State of Texas has responded
and partnered with local.

Speaker 5 (22:23):
Authorities, so we have a good working relationship with the
State of Texas. Texas has to do everything differently, so
we kind of have this decentralized system where the state
and locals both kind of have their own authority, very
independent at the county level, but the state is offered

(22:44):
support to us. They've helped me bring in temp nurses
to be able to assist with vaccine clinics. They're paying
for some additional staff answer phones, so we're getting that
kind of support. And then I meet with the state
regularly about what's going on in Lubbock, how Lubbock fits
in the context of the rest of this outbreak, and

(23:06):
you know, how we're going to work together to move forward.
We always thought of measles as an airplane ride away,
so we would see, you know, somebody travel to a
foreign country, come back to the United States and maybe
pass measles. To a couple of people in their household.
This outbreak is not that we're seeing transmission within a community,

(23:31):
and it's making measles more of a car ride away.
And that's concerning because we have individuals that are susceptible
to measles, either through too young to be vaccinated, not vaccinated,
or some other immune compromised state. So just concerning that
we're going to see more outbreaks spreading out into the

(23:53):
United States, especially as we're moving into spring and summer,
where people are traveling and driving through communities that we
could just see kind of explode everywhere, which is my
biggest fear.

Speaker 7 (24:06):
Yeah. Absolutely.

Speaker 4 (24:07):
I mean, given that vaccinations and to some degree public
health in general has kind of become a politicized issue,
I can only imagine that it can make it quite
difficult for you to convey these messages to people and
for them to understand them.

Speaker 5 (24:24):
Yeah, and I'm talking. I mean I've talked to many
health department directors across the country, and you know, one
of the values of local public health is that you know,
all of us local health department directors and those staff
were coming from these individuals, communities, and our goals to
keep our community safe, and it really doesn't matter what's
happening at the federal level. It's about your community, your connections,

(24:49):
watching out for this diseases and then convincing your community
to do the right thing. And luckily we have you know,
twenty five hundred health departments across the US, and that
is their goals, and hopefully people will continue to trust
their local directors.

Speaker 4 (25:03):
That is a great point, and I'm wondering if is
there anything else that you can speak to on how
the distrust that is there can potentially be bridged, or
you know, specific things that y'all have done to try
to sort of rebuild that trust or establish that trust.

Speaker 5 (25:20):
I mean with us locally, it's making sure that we're
talking to our local news and our local reporters and
answering the phone call when a concerned parent calls, and
going through the information we know, and utilizing our local
physicians to tell them the story. Because I think if
you can still see it at the local level, you know,

(25:42):
people can really understand that this is a risk and
really make that right choice to get the vaccine or
if they've been exposed, to stay home.

Speaker 3 (25:51):
We'll hear more from Catherine in just a moment.

Speaker 4 (25:53):
But first, as we are obligated to do, here's some ads.
So I do understand there's quite a bit of skepticism
towards vaccination, and that's certainly going to be a subject

(26:16):
that we're exploring in this podcast. And at least by
the numbers, it shows that in places like West Texas
and particularly more rural areas, even more than a place
like Lubbock, that there's pretty low vaccination rates. Several counties
are below the I guess what was it ninety five
percent threshold that really helps bring diesls out of circulation.

(26:40):
And so, you know, I'm kind of curious. You've been
there for over a decade, do you have a sense
sort of what the key drivers of vaccine hesitancy are
and why so many West Texans choose not to get
their children vaccinated. You already mentioned, you know, the fact
that it hasn't been seen for so long, so sort
of out of sight, out of mind, be But are

(27:00):
there are there other drivers that come to mind for you?

Speaker 8 (27:04):
Yeah?

Speaker 5 (27:04):
I mean I don't think. You know, West Texas is
unique from many other communities in the United States. You know,
people are very much influenced by social media and some
of our media outlets, and there's a lot of you know,
scare tactics or misinformation around vaccines and you know, anything

(27:28):
from autism that's been debunked so many times about vaccines
causing autism, other misinformation about what's in vaccines and the
risks of vaccines. I mean, every medical intervention, every medication
has some type you know of risk. But vaccines have
been long studied, and especially when you're looking at the

(27:49):
MMR vaccine, we've been using this for fifty years and
that's why we don't have measles cases or hadn't had
measles cases. But people have really bought into a lot
of that information out there, and it's really hard to
combat that. I've gone and read the stories and I
can see how people feel miss and pick up on this,
but I just don't know from public health standpoint how

(28:10):
we combat it right.

Speaker 7 (28:12):
Right.

Speaker 4 (28:12):
It's a very difficult problem, the challenge that has a
long history and has a lot of different factors.

Speaker 5 (28:19):
And things are so complex. A it's not a one
for one, it's just it's been a challenge. But I
think out here I always felt like we hadn't been
impacted as much from some of these anti vaccine movements.
I think post COVID people you know, have a mistrust
in government or wanting to listen to mandates or recommendations

(28:42):
or whatever we call them. We're just seeing that more
and more, and that hesitancy, you know, to come through
and trust both government, trust the medical system, or all concerns,
and that all contributes to these lower vaccination rates.

Speaker 4 (28:58):
In a media environment rife with misinformation about vaccines and
public health, Catherine's perspective is refreshing and a bit heartening.
Local public health officials like her have done great work
to raise the alarm around viral outbreaks, but they're up
against a problem that is much bigger than what they
can address on their own, and that's the widespread belief

(29:20):
in bogus theories, be they scientific or religious, that undercut
the proven science around vaccines. Much of this misinformation comes
from places far from West Texas, like the anti vaccination
group Children's Health Defense, which RFK Junior previously led. It
is widely recognized as a major source of online vaccine misinformation,

(29:43):
including the debunked allegation that vaccines cause autism. After the
death of a six year old child of measles. In March,
Children's Health Defense released a video interview with the parents
who said they still would not take the vaccine and
wouldn't recommend it.

Speaker 3 (30:00):
To other parents.

Speaker 4 (30:02):
Here's a clip from that interview in which the Mennonite
parents speak in their Lowland German dialect.

Speaker 9 (30:07):
So, when you see the fairmoon ring in the crest,
which is what we once stops. We want to get
the truth out. What do you say to the parents
that are rushing out panicking to get that and my
mouth had a six months daily because they think that
that child is going to die of measles.

Speaker 4 (30:24):
Apartment to your daughter, and.

Speaker 10 (30:27):
A good sign is only would be so trust me,
so bad like theresign doctors with the whole town, she says,
they would still say don't do the shots. There's doctors
that can help with measles. They're not as bad as
they're making it out to be.

Speaker 11 (30:43):
And also the measles are good for the body for
the people because the measles are then given the what
is it what can yea.

Speaker 7 (31:02):
And cinema conduction?

Speaker 9 (31:04):
But infection?

Speaker 7 (31:05):
Yeah, did you get infection out?

Speaker 10 (31:07):
And he's would immune system.

Speaker 7 (31:10):
Yes.

Speaker 10 (31:11):
They're trying to say that the measles actually helped build
the immune system in the long run. If they get
the measles, now.

Speaker 12 (31:17):
No.

Speaker 10 (31:19):
Chief in the long run, In the long run, the
clinic sal like okay, So in the long run, he said,
they wouldn't get cancer as easily and like it fights
off a lot of a lot of stuff, the immunity
that they get from the back from the measles.

Speaker 4 (31:42):
But some of what public officials like Catherine have been
trying to combat is coming from other medical professionals much
closer to home, such as doctor Ben Edwards, who appeared
in the Children's Health Defense video and has promoted anti
vaccination misinformation on his own podcast, including the recommendation to
take vitamin A to treat measles, an approach that has

(32:04):
resulted in several cases of vitamin A toxicity among children
diagnosed with measles in West Texas. During their interview with
Children's Health Defense, the Mennonite parents of the first child
to die of measles actually said they were working with
doctor Ben Edwards for their treatment. One video that went
viral online showed Edwards visibly infected with measles at the time,

(32:29):
treating patients with measles and inhabiting spaces where individuals who
were not infected with measles were present, and this elicited
widespread condemnation from the medical community, quite unsurprisingly. Nevertheless, it
demonstrates the sort of attitude of certain medical professionals in
the area who have used their platforms and their credentials

(32:51):
to sow doubt about the importance of the vaccine, making
matters worse. RFKA Junior praised doctor Edwards as a quote
extra extraordinary healer just one week after Edwards was seen
in that video treating patients while himself infected with measles.
While anti vaccination beliefs have certainly gone viral in the

(33:12):
aftermath of the COVID pandemic, they are by no means
new Practitioners like Edwards and advocacy groups like Children's Health
Defense have been peddling their snake oil for decades. But
the roots of anti vaccination belief around even deeper than that.
In the next episode of Anti vaxx America, I'll do
a deep dive into the history of anti vaccination beliefs

(33:33):
to understand the origins of them, how they've changed over time,
and why they've become embraced in mainstream right wing politics,
which is a change from the sort of bipartisan and
even sometimes progressive nature of some anti vaccination skepticism. But
until then, thanks for listening. I'm Stephen Monchelli for Cool

(33:55):
Zone Media and this is Anti vax America. Welcome back

(34:21):
to it could happen here and to episode two of
Anti vax America. I'm Stephen mon and Shelley. 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
across the country, and how the leader of our federal

(34:43):
health bureaucracy, a arth 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
American politics, opposition to vaccines is not new. It's about

(35:06):
as old as the technology itself.

Speaker 13 (35:10):
It actually goes back to the founding colonies and even
the early eighteen hundreds when you had people kind of
peddling various what they called botanicals as substitutes for mainstream medicine.

Speaker 4 (35:23):
That's doctor Peter Hotez. He's a doctor in Houston with
a long and impressive list of credentials.

Speaker 13 (35:29):
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

(35:51):
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 diseases

(36:14):
that occur only among the world's poor. And that's a
lifelong passion of mine.

Speaker 4 (36:22):
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.

Speaker 3 (36:37):
In human history.

Speaker 4 (36:38):
Within a matter of decades, vaccination had become widespread in
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

(36:59):
added penalties for non compliance that could be cumulative over time.
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 distributed literature
likening vaccination to a monster and lobbied the British government

(37:19):
to change the laws. Their efforts actually proved successful, and
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

(37:41):
of the leaders of the British anti vaccination movement even
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,

(38:09):
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

(38:30):
time among certain sects of medicine. Now, these movements didn't
neatly fall across political lines in.

Speaker 3 (38:36):
The way that they largely do today.

Speaker 4 (38:38):
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, or in
some instances, even anti Semitic conspiracy theories. Consider Eugene carl During,

(38:58):
a philosopher and aomus, 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 someone like doctor
Hotez knows.

Speaker 3 (39:16):
All too well, and.

Speaker 4 (39:17):
Because of his advocacy of vaccines, he's often been a
target of it.

Speaker 13 (39:21):
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. I haven't even
invited the Davos.

Speaker 4 (39:37):
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 in 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

(39:59):
medicines were being promoted and embraced in the West. Most
of the anti vaxxors 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

(40:20):
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 13 (40:32):
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,

(40:54):
and that's why you get you know, ivermectin, which does
absolutely nothing for covid or hydroxychloroquin 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.

Speaker 3 (41:11):
Whatever.

Speaker 13 (41:12):
You know, they can buy in bulk and then sell
at a profit. That's you know, that's 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 were started to debunk the false links between vaccines

(41:32):
and autism, they needed a new thing. And and this
is when you 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

(41:55):
pack money, political 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 4 (42:10):
But before we explore the contemporary anti vaccination movement further,
we have to return to history, and before we do that,
we're obligated to take a quick ad break. Anti vaccine

(42:32):
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.

Speaker 14 (42:45):
They continued.

Speaker 4 (42:46):
Spread of viruses like smallpox, the deadly Spanish flu pandemic,
and the outbreak of World War II all 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

(43:09):
require children to be vaccinated before going to school, and
by nineteen eighty, every state in the nation had 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

(43:29):
undercut the great strides made during that period of time,
things that ultimately showed the seeds for some of today's
vaccination skepticism.

Speaker 15 (43:39):
I think it's important to understand that not all suspicion
regarding medicine and doctors research, that not all of this
resistance is totally irrational.

Speaker 14 (43:56):
It's based on experience.

Speaker 4 (43:58):
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 15 (44:07):
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 Marion Simms,
and they actually put a statue up of him in
Central Park in New York that's been taken down since.

(44:32):
Who was credited as the father of gynecology.

Speaker 14 (44:36):
There was a.

Speaker 15 (44:37):
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
or get seriously ill or infertile, and the infertility and

(44:58):
death of slaves meant a loss of property. So enslavers
we're very concerned about this issue. Marion Simms at some
point discovers that if you use silver thread, silver sutures
when you operate on women who have had these vaginal terrors,

(45:18):
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 4 (45:29):
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 hasnency 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 still

(45:50):
experiences discrimination, racism, mistreatment, and overall health iniquity.

Speaker 15 (45:55):
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

(46:16):
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

(46:37):
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

(46:58):
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,

(47:19):
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

(47:41):
disease progressed. And this went on until the nineteen sixties,
and they published results with no professional repercussions.

Speaker 9 (47:52):
You know.

Speaker 15 (47:52):
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
of black and white people are the same. But they
publish these results in ACCLAIM Medical Journal, and the backlash
was not immediate.

Speaker 14 (48:12):
Eventually, you know, it became a scandal.

Speaker 15 (48:15):
So that really did strike a chord in the Black
community that I think to this day we've seen skepticism
about white medicine. And again there's valid historical reasons.

Speaker 4 (48:31):
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 VAXX group previously
led by RFK Junior, invoked the Tuskegee Syphilist study in
an anti vaccine film called medical Racism the New Apartheid.

(48:53):
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 it to another ad break. Black Americans aren't

(49:13):
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

(49:36):
Not Cause Rachel's Autism directly targets RFK Junior's long held
belief about the link between autism and vaccines.

Speaker 13 (49:46):
It actually came about after a year of discussions with
Robert F. Kennedy Junior explaining tim 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

(50:08):
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

(50:29):
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

(50:49):
of the false claims that it was the MMR vaccine
the measles, mumps 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 known to
be false, and also the scientific community responded with large
epidemiologic studies showing that kids who got the MMR vaccine

(51:09):
were no more likely to acquire autism than kids who didn't,
and similarly, kids on the autism spectrum were 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,

(51:29):
it 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 it 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,

(51:50):
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
exhaust exercise and each time we were able to successfully
refute it.

Speaker 4 (52:06):
Founded in two thousand and seven, Children's Health Defense represented
a formalization of late twentieth century anti vaccination resistance. Not
unlike the anti vaccination leagues of the late nineteenth and
early twentieth century, Children's Health Defense pedals dubious cures like
homeopathy and promotes conspiratorial narratives like the Great Reset, which

(52:27):
claims that billionaire Bill Gates and others have used the
COVID nineteen pandemic as part of a plan to make
America a 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.

(52:49):
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

(53:10):
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

(53:32):
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 two vaccines that

(53:53):
can cause issues, but the studies around DPT and the
notions that it caused these illnesses that these parents were
concerned about, it 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 of disease

(54:15):
and one of those being death, well it's a pretty
easy comparison to make.

Speaker 13 (54:21):
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

(54:41):
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 save, for instance, the MMR vaccine versus
is the other box. Ten thousand kids getting measles and

(55:04):
you know, the ones getting the MMR vaccine. You see
these tiny little pin pricks of very rare side effects
like allergic reaction or febril seizures, one in three thousand,
that sort of thing. So maybe there's a tiny little
pin prick representing you know, three year thirty kids as
opposed to measles, which you know twenty percent of kids

(55:25):
hospitalized and measles deaths, and these 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

(55:45):
the severity of the illness. And we even heard that
before the two deaths. You know, you heard all this
rhetorical 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 were taken in by the disinformation machine.

Speaker 4 (56:06):
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

(56:29):
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 vact movement began to dovetail with the
booming alternative health and wellness industry that excused Western medicine

(56:50):
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 Vo 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

(57:10):
standard goop like fair 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.

(57:33):
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 13 (57:48):
And it was a physician scientist. The last thing I
want to talk about is politics, right. I mean, I
feel that every American is 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.

(58:11):
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 areas. Of West Texas, East Texas.

(58:32):
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

(58:55):
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 3 (59:08):
But Texas is not alone.

Speaker 4 (59:10):
Well, 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

(59:33):
outbreak of measles in California, one that ultimately spurred policy
changes that reverberated across the country.

Speaker 13 (59:40):
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 legislatures 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.
That solved the measles problem, but then it produced this

(01:00:03):
health freedom backlash in states like Texas, also Oklahoma, and
very much a red state phenomenon read being Republican, blue
being a Democrat, and that's where you saw these this
Rizon vaccine exemptions. You started getting anti vaccine groups forming.
They were getting pack money, political Action committee money, and

(01:00:25):
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

(01:00:48):
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. So that's a lot
of kids. And this doesn't say anything about the homeschooled
kids in Texas. I'm told that we may have as
many as seven hundred thousand homeschooled kids, but you might

(01:01:11):
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 homeschools.

Speaker 4 (01:01:19):
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

(01:01:41):
rates among school aged 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

(01:02:04):
low vaccination rates far more difficult for people like doctor Hotez.

Speaker 13 (01:02:08):
How do you thread that needle and say, look, everybody
has a right to their political views. I'm not 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,

(01:02:30):
even 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,

(01:02:52):
it's a plandemic that somehow I've been involved with, or
that I'm profiting from vaccines and secretly working for or
pharma companies even though it's the opposite right and 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

(01:03:13):
says that 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 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.

(01:03:34):
I mean, the funny thing is the said thing is
the crazier the conspiracy the faster it seems to travel.

Speaker 4 (01:03:44):
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

(01:04:05):
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

(01:04:27):
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

(01:04:48):
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 really,

(01:05:09):
wrote 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

(01:05:31):
Vaxxs 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,

(01:05:56):
I'm Stephen Mamicelli and this is Anti vaxx America for
COOLS Media.

Speaker 3 (01:06:01):
Thanks for listening.

Speaker 4 (01:06:22):
I'm Stephen Manicelli. I'm a journalist in Dallas and an
occasional contributor to Cool Zone Media. And this is episode
three of Anti VAXs America, a special five parts series
exploring anti vaccination beliefs in the United States through the
lens of the West Texas measles outbreak that has since
spread to several other states in the nation and claimed
three lives. One of those lives was the daughter of

(01:06:46):
a man named Peter, a member of a Mennonite community
in West Texas. For Peter, the death of his child
was basically God's will. He did an interview in which
he discrib that if it's God's plan, you know, that
is basically what he has to accept, but he also

(01:07:06):
continued to oppose vaccines, and his wife said that they
wouldn't recommend them to other parents. Now, Mennonites have been
singled out in a lot of the coverage about this
Measle's outbreak, given that the outbreak has centered in their
community in West Texas, and there's been a lot of
pushback with regard to the idea that Mennonites broadly speaking

(01:07:28):
are opposed to vaccinations. There's nothing explicit in their theology
or worldview that opposes vaccinations on principle. But these are
individuals who hold strongly held beliefs regarding their religion, regarding
their theology, and what they believe is right for them
to do for their families and for their communities. It's

(01:07:50):
not merely a few sectarian Mennonite communities in the United
States that are hesitant to vaccinate their children in this way.
It's actually a much bigger problem among what we could call,
you know, some people might say mainstream evangelical Christians. Others
might specifically refer to it as non denominational charismatic Christianity.

(01:08:12):
But no matter which way you cut it, there is
a clear and observable relationship between conservative Christianity and anti
vaccination beliefs. Now, as a journalist in Texas, I've done
my fair share of reporting on conservative Christianity, particularly the
highly politicized strains of it that are popular in the
Lone Star State and in North Texas where I live.

(01:08:35):
I didn't grow up in one of these communities. I'm
an outsider. So to help me unpack how conservative Christianity
became so intertwined with this sort of anti vaccination movement,
I brought in a special guest with whom you may
be familiar.

Speaker 6 (01:08:51):
Hi, I'm Garrison Davis. I write about politics, extremism, and
how much fun it is to be in the twenty
first century for cool zone Media.

Speaker 4 (01:09:00):
So, you know, in terms of what I hope to
hear from you, I mean, let's let's go back to
your upbringing. Tell me a little bit about the community
you grew up in and the sort of religious system
that you were brought up in.

Speaker 7 (01:09:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:09:14):
So, I grew up in a non denominational evangelical community
that was largely at least on like the leadership side
was transplanted from Texas to a well, not a small town,
because it's actually the biggest town in the province, but
a relatively medium sized city, I guess in Saskatchewan. Definitely

(01:09:39):
an interesting mix of like Canadian customs matched with the
whole Texas vibe, but definitely the type of like Bible belts,
post fire and brimstone Christianity that came out of Texas
was like the dominant form of Christianity, which was like
preached from the pulpit and like influenced all other life

(01:10:00):
voices beyond just your Sunday morning service or your Saturday
night service, or your Wednesday night service or your Tuesday
morning service, etc.

Speaker 4 (01:10:11):
So let's dig a little bit more into the character
of it. So you know, in Texas, we've got you know,
a wide variety of congregations and sub sets and non
denominational Christianity is absolutely the fastest growing flavor of Christianity,
not just in Texas but in the United States.

Speaker 3 (01:10:31):
There's some good research about this.

Speaker 4 (01:10:32):
And some people describe it as evangelical, some people describe
it as charismatic. Sometimes both of those descriptions are accurate.
There could be some differences between these types of churches.
Some of them are focused a lot on like things
like prosperity, gospel. Others hu maybe towards more Southern Baptist
esque style of preaching and theology, and some really lean

(01:10:56):
into maybe more like Pentecostal style belief in miracles and
supernatural power of God to directly intervene in people's lives
and things like that. So, you know, how would you
characterize your church and the community that you were part of, Like,
you know, was it was it common for people to

(01:11:17):
talk about spiritual healing or sort of those miraculous interventions totally?

Speaker 6 (01:11:21):
Yeah, yeah, no, it was. It was kind of like
a Christian chili. We certainly had some prosperity gospel elements.
You had some like Southern Baptist elements certainly when it
comes to like social views. But yeah, no, like the
spirit healing aspect to huge, huge people will get like
healed during services, people would like faint and pass out.

(01:11:43):
They would like bring in preachers from the states who
would go go on these big like tours where you're
you know, both trying to like recruit people and then
also like offer these like miraculous healing services during these
like you know, five hour long sermons. So yeah, certainly
a Pentecostal element was pretty dominant combined with like you know,

(01:12:04):
focus on the family type stuff, some Southern Baptist stuff.

Speaker 4 (01:12:08):
That makes sense. I mean that tracks with what I
expected and the sort of things that I see around here.
Maybe you're familiar with Kenneth Copeland.

Speaker 6 (01:12:15):
Kenneth Copeland is how do I try this? So the
main pastor of the church I was from is the
uncle of a pastor in Oklahoma who used to run
a church called Church on the Move, and he is
very close personal friends with Kenneth Copeland. And I think

(01:12:36):
I've seen Copeland a few times in person, like dinners
and stuff. He was a pretty regular figure, I believe
preached at the church a few times I was younger,
but I know my dad's met him through works. My
dad worked for the church. And yeah, so no, very
very Kenneth Copeland vibes.

Speaker 4 (01:12:55):
Well, that makes sense because Kenneth Copeland, you know, he's
not only the wealthiest pastor in the United States, but
he's one of the most influential as well, and definitely
in North Texas where his home base is. He's got
a big church in you know, Terran County, and I've
been to his annual convention, which is a special time,

(01:13:18):
So you know, I totally understand the vibe that you're
talking about. Then it also illustrates the vast reach of
someone like Kenneth Copeland for it to be all the
way up in Saskatchewan.

Speaker 6 (01:13:28):
And like the interconnectedness I mean, because like the pastor
of my old church is American, born in Texas, is
currently in America because he's in hiding from Canadian authorities
related to a series of court cases and criminal complaints
about abuse in this church. So he's currently he's currently
fled and is in hiding somewhere in the US, hiding

(01:13:51):
from his Majesty's Royal court.

Speaker 3 (01:13:53):
Incredible.

Speaker 6 (01:13:54):
Yes, he's also my step grandfather.

Speaker 4 (01:13:57):
I'll get back to my conversation with Gahre here shortly,
but first.

Speaker 3 (01:14:01):
An ad break.

Speaker 4 (01:14:12):
So before we go any further, we need to talk
a little bit more about Kenneth Copeland. So he's the
wealthiest and one of the most influential pastors in the
United States, perhaps the world, but he's also a highly
political one. He's affiliated with the charismatic Christian movement, which
is one of the fastest growing, if not the fastest

(01:14:35):
growing Christian movements in the United States, and early on
he lent his support to Donald Trump in Donald Trump's
first campaign in twenty sixteen. Three years before that, in
twenty thirteen, the church led by his daughter Terry, which
is called Eagle Mountain International, was at the center of
a measles outbreak. At the time, the church and its

(01:14:57):
leaders were criticized for preaching against vaccinations, and even as
they set up vaccine clinics at the back of the
church when things got really bad, they continued to speak
out against vaccinations in this way and implying to their
flock that they need to place their faith not in medicine,
but in prayer and in God. And when the COVID
nineteen pandemic was first kicking off in America, Kenneth Copeland

(01:15:19):
spoke of the disease as a sort of tool of Satan,
but he actually called for vaccinations.

Speaker 3 (01:15:26):
Interestingly enough, I execute judgment on you, COVID nineteen.

Speaker 7 (01:15:32):
I execute judgment.

Speaker 4 (01:15:34):
On you, Satan, you destroyer, you killer, you get out,
you point break coper, you get confiscations.

Speaker 3 (01:15:42):
I demand judgment on you.

Speaker 7 (01:15:45):
I didn't mod smen de man a vaccination of common media.

Speaker 4 (01:15:52):
Yes, But Copeland's belief in spiritual healing and his ties
to the Trump administration seemingly led him to quickly turned
to his old antics. He preached that COVID would be
over soon because God would destroy it.

Speaker 7 (01:16:06):
OVID nineteen.

Speaker 9 (01:16:15):
I'm good.

Speaker 4 (01:16:20):
On you, on you, you.

Speaker 2 (01:16:23):
Are destroying forever and you will never be back.

Speaker 16 (01:16:32):
Thank you are God, let it happen.

Speaker 4 (01:16:42):
Over the course of many sermons, Copeland compared the virus
to the flu. He suggested people who attended his services
could be healed in person, and asserted that the president's
opponents had quote opened the door for the pandemic with
their quote displays of hate against him. Later that with
the pandemic fully raging across America, Copeland still held his

(01:17:05):
annual conference in Fort Worth, Texas. In August of twenty twenty,
a television news report showed that no one at the
conference was wearing a mask, and in September twenty twenty one,
Copeland begged his viewers to help him fund the purchase
of a new private jet that would allow him to
avoid travel restrictions that were still in place around COVID
nineteen and requiring vaccinations. He compared those vaccination requirements for

(01:17:28):
flying to the satanic quote mark of the beasts. By
the time that I attended Copeland's annual convention in twenty
twenty three, he had embraced the likes of Mike Lindell,
the election conspiracist who has promoted junkiers for COVID while
sewing doubts without vaccines. So you know, I didn't grow
up in one of these communities. I had been to

(01:17:49):
some megachurch sermons and services in the past. I knew
people who went to places like Gateway Church, which is
a huge one here in North Texas, very politically involved
in there. Founding pastor was just implicated in you know, child.

Speaker 6 (01:18:04):
Sex abuse, many such cases.

Speaker 4 (01:18:06):
Many such cases, And as an outsider, in my mind,
I directly link sort of belief in spiritual healing with
vaccine hesitancy. Yeah, because you know, there's there's this sense
that will, if God can heal you, why would you
need to rely on something like a vaccine. But also

(01:18:27):
that you know, you need to place your faith in
God more than man or the government.

Speaker 6 (01:18:31):
It is more that thing. It's that by electing to
get a vaccine, that demonstrates that you do not have
faith in God like it's it's it's it's more so
like a larger theological issue beyond just like you know,
we don't we don't trust the science like I trust
God more than the science. It's that like even electing
to do that demonstrates this deeper, like more core belief

(01:18:53):
that you do not have the faith in God that
is adequate in order to like take care of you,
your body and whatever He may have planned for you.
Perhaps that includes getting measles and you'll you'll work through
that maybe or not, you know, as we're seeing now
in Texas a lot. But yeah, like it's it's not
just about like medical skepticism, science skepticism. It is this

(01:19:17):
deeper aspect that that more relates to someone's like individual
relationship and faith in God.

Speaker 4 (01:19:23):
So when you were growing up, I mean, did you
pick up at all on this sort of skepticism with
regard to not, you know, I guess modern science broadly,
but also medical interventions totally?

Speaker 6 (01:19:37):
Totally? Yeah, No, I mean like literally this the school
that I went to, which was which was a part
of this church like I was. I was, I was
taught from like an American creationist curriculum for like the
first I guess like seven grades called ACE. There was
big Ace conferences that like the teachers and my dad

(01:19:58):
would travel to the States for every year. But yeah,
like this stuff is literally like taught to all the
kids because in order to go to this church, you
have to also send your kids to the school. You
are raised in this and like you have no choice
in the matter, and that that just becomes like what
is real? Like that just is reality? Like it's it's
not it's not that there's like an alternative to that.
It's like like a nine year old kid, like that

(01:20:20):
just is what the world is. So like what you're
reading those textbooks that just is truth. It's very isolated environments,
like you're you you aren't really fully aware that there's
like an alternative to that, and if there is, it's
like what's the word? We didn't even use words like
like like atheist. I think secular was was maybe the word.
That was maybe the word that they use. Like you
can't you can't like listen to like secular music or

(01:20:41):
like be aware of like you know, likee like secular
culture because that's satanic or it can lead you away
from God or it's a distraction from God. You know
that that sort of thing. But no, like yeah, it's
this is built in and like, yeah, you know, very
basic creationist stuff like answers in genesis being like the
highest basting of science, which is like a fake science

(01:21:03):
website touted by creationists and evangelicals. But this also extends
to medical science as well. The same way you believe
they are to six thousand years old, you maybe also
don't believe in like cancer treatment, right.

Speaker 4 (01:21:16):
So to the extent that you can recall if you know,
or you know, if you're willing to share, do you
recall if you were vaccinated as a child?

Speaker 6 (01:21:24):
I was not. No, The first time I got vaccinated
was as an older teenager when I gained medical autonomy
and I was like, hey, I should probably get vaccinated.
Huh okay, Because both like unplugging from these takes time.
Like I think my family got away from this community
when I was like eleven or twelve, but because I'm

(01:21:44):
like the oldest of all my siblings, this was the
most like baked into me more so than my other siblings.
So like, even if you like get away from this physically,
you still have to like mentally detalked. You have to
realize that you were kind of in a cult, and
then you have to like deep yourself, and that like
takes years. So like I didn't like fully disconnect from
this style of Christianity and like, you know, Christianity in

(01:22:08):
general intil like a few years after. So by the
time I was like a you know, middle to older
teenager is when I started to like sort this type
of stuff out, and uh eventually got caught up on
those vaccines. Luckily I never got chicken pox, although people
did throw chicken pox parties when I was a kid,
which I can recall the concept of, especially if like

(01:22:29):
a baby or a toddler or even like you know,
like a like like like a ten year old has
chicken pox. No one else's of course is vaccinated for
this in this whole community. So if someone has chicken pox,
you will not just isolate them, You will actually encourage
other people to like hang out and play together with
the express intent of getting sick yourself as a form

(01:22:50):
of like natural immunization. And I think I was offered
to go to one of these chicken pox parties quote unquote,
I think as like a ten year old or something declined.

Speaker 4 (01:23:02):
Wow, I mean, good on you for at least having
that wherewithal so and you know, Saskatchewan and Canada are
different than the United States and Texas. And medical exemptions,
exemptions of conscience or religious medical exemptions are a big thing.
And there's actually a bill in the state House right
now to expand that sort of thing with regard to vaccines.

(01:23:23):
I mean, was that something that was going on up there?
I mean, was just because were you in a private school,
you were kind of outside of any sort of regime
of accountability.

Speaker 6 (01:23:32):
Yeah, we were in the private school, and I know
people who worked in the private school did like lobbying
in the province to like keep their medical freedom, you know,
intact to make sure the state does not interfere. Though
I do remember when my family moved to the States,
throughout the immigration process, we had to fill out a
lot of those like religious exemption forms because you're supposed

(01:23:54):
to get vaccinated and make sure you're not carrying like
tuberculosis when you immigrate to a new country. But even
even for those, there is like religious exemptions that if
you have enough money you can pay.

Speaker 4 (01:24:05):
For When was this like roughly timeline when you know,
when you were a child, when you're in private school?

Speaker 3 (01:24:10):
Is the broad range?

Speaker 6 (01:24:11):
This is, this is like the knots, right, this is
the early two thousands. Yeah, I mean, like I'm in
my early twenties now.

Speaker 4 (01:24:18):
Vaccine has intency has clearly been a part of certain
conservative Christian congregations for some time.

Speaker 6 (01:24:24):
Something I remember happening kind of because of like what
my parents were involved with at the time is you know,
there's on one side, this whole like theological side of
like not wanting to do vaccines or like unnecessary medical
procedures because of your faith in God. But on the
other hand, kind of around like twenty ten, and like

(01:24:46):
you know, a few years before and after, we started
to really see kind of that aspect along with like
the hippie mom Facebook group aspect kind of collide, right,
and like this healthy you know, like organic natural like
hippie mom thing used to be more associated with like
you know, people on the left, especially in the nineties,

(01:25:06):
and you started to see these two kind of poles
converge around twenty ten. Because this is like what happened
with like my two parents at the time, where like
my dad was more in the theological side than my
mom was kind of more on like the the kind
of like crunchy side of things, and these things like
combined this new breed of evangelical Christianity that you see

(01:25:26):
is like very popular right now with like the tradwife
angle combined with like you know, crunchy like naturalistic organic
stuff that used to be left wing and is now
like very very right wing. You had a very very
like conservative like family values coded which which did not
really used to be the case as much, and that's
kind of like strengthened the anti vacs hold on this

(01:25:49):
like section of the population.

Speaker 4 (01:25:52):
So, I mean, this is incredible. You were part of
a church that basically had connections to Texas by way
of Kenneth Copeland, and you had mentioned, you know, kind
of having a crunchy, more maybe left leaning mom. How
apparent in retrospect was sort of the political nature of
your church was it? Was it particularly political? You had
mentioned lobbying, but you know, lobbying isn't necessarily partisan.

Speaker 6 (01:26:15):
They preached, like Glenn Beck from the pulpit, like very
very conservative, openly conservative like that is like the Christian
godly correct path. I guess like this is where it's
tied in a bit more with some of like the
some of like the Southern Baptist these type stuff right
where you have like anti gay conversion therapy like camps

(01:26:36):
that they can send people to like you No, like
this is very very like Bill O'Reilly, very very Glen
Beck like that was that was the moment, right, this
is this is two thousand and eight. The Antichrist has
just been elected president of the United States, possibly literally
and even though they're up in Canada, this is still
like concern number one on the like the transnational like

(01:26:59):
Christian Christian world. So no, like extremely openly conservative to
the point where it is it is being preached alongside
the words of Jesus and Paul.

Speaker 4 (01:27:09):
You had a front row seat to sort of a
shifting ground because you know, Southern Baptist Christian Christianity is
kind of declining and it has I think has been
supplanted by this quote unquote non denominational, totally set of networks.
You know, there's a there's a term that some scholars
use independent network Christianity where the leaders of the churches,

(01:27:33):
they are non denominational, they're not a part of a hierarchy.
They answer to no higher power other than God, you know,
so their interpretation of God is basically the rule or
or it is the authority.

Speaker 6 (01:27:47):
It's like a post Billy Graham era. Yeah, like networked churches,
but are not part of like a coherent structure. They're
kind of like terrorist cells. Essentially, they offer a very
similarly to like a cell network of terrorists. I'm trying
to remember what the with like the most wild faith
healings I've seen are the thing I think people were

(01:28:08):
faith healed the most for is probably back pain. A
lot of back pain gets faith yield. Of course, there
might be the odd person who's able to claim that,
like you know, a faith healing cured their cancer, who
then probably died three years later of cancer. But you
also get faith held for a bunch of like smaller ailments,
right and so. And someone will walk up to you,

(01:28:30):
put hands on you. You might start convulsing like this
like psychosomatic thing. Sometimes you'll pass out. A lot of
people pass out. It becomes like this performative thing, like subconsciously.
I remember there was there was people they were stationed
where people would pass out with with little I think
they're called modesty blankets, so that when they pass out,
maybe your shirt will come up a little bit and

(01:28:50):
someone will see a little bit of tummy you can
walk over and put the blanket over as you're recovering
from your from your healing session. All this is happening
during like essentially like an acoustic concert. So it creates
a very peculiar vibe of people kind of poorly play
musical instruments as other people like walk through like an

(01:29:11):
auditorium and just start like passing out, and you just
get this pile of bodies, and as as a ten
year old, do you think this is totally normal and fine?
And then you later realize why you're into so much
weird shit. Oops.

Speaker 4 (01:29:23):
Something I also covered in a previous episode in this
series was a quote from the Seattle Public Health commissioner
during a smallpox outbreak in the early nineteen hundreds. He
called Seattle hotbed for anti vaccination and Christian science and
various anti medical cults. So you know, we are kind
of truly like reliving a period of history.

Speaker 6 (01:29:43):
I hate it when times of flat circle. This sucks.

Speaker 3 (01:29:50):
Why should I live in history?

Speaker 15 (01:29:52):
Huh?

Speaker 8 (01:29:54):
I don't want to know anything anymore.

Speaker 4 (01:29:57):
If this is a world where nothing is solved. If
someone once told me time is a flat circle.

Speaker 14 (01:30:07):
Everything we've ever done or will do, we're gonna do
over and over and over again.

Speaker 6 (01:30:12):
Lone Star Man fucking Lone Star Texas. The one thing
I remembered through not being vaccinated as a kid, something
I did develop, and this was like behaviorally ingrained is
a paralyzing fear of rust because you don't have because
you don't have the teton is shot. So even though
we're told God, will you know, keep us safe and healthy,

(01:30:35):
we are also taught you have to stay like ten
feet away from like rust. If you see rust on anything, like,
you have to be on high alert because even though
God should protect you, he might not if you get
a rusty nail, like poking your finger. So rust is
still something I'm like really afraid of despite being vaccinated now,
just because this was ingrained so young, which just kind

(01:30:55):
of shows the kind of like a paradoxical thought press
behind some of this sort of thing where it's okay
if your kids aren't vaccinated, but you also have to
teach them to like never get close to anything rusty
because that could send them to the hospital.

Speaker 3 (01:31:10):
We'll return to my conversation with Gehre after a short
ad break.

Speaker 4 (01:31:24):
So what was it like moving out of this science
skeptic religious community.

Speaker 6 (01:31:28):
It's funny because when I moved away from this like
conservative community in Canada, we moved to Portland, Oregon, which
has its own anti vaccination problem, but from like the
other side. So I was still around a whole bunch
of people and kids who aren't vaccinated, who where there
is frequent measles outbreaks. But it's it's it is more

(01:31:49):
for that like crunchy hippie thing that then is kind
of you know, converged with this evangelical side. But at
that time it's interesting going from you know, one of
these worlds to another. And in some ways the medical
reality did not change that drastically.

Speaker 4 (01:32:04):
Right, But I'm wondering if you agree on this. My
sense is that that form of anti vaccination belief, the
sort of hippie crunchy stuff, it's dying. It's not only dying, yeah,
it has not spread. It has not been turned into
like a program that is far reaching.

Speaker 6 (01:32:23):
Those types of people have either evolved in their beliefs
and have and have caught up with like consensus scientific understandings,
or have married, you know, far right Christian husbands and
have just gone full conservative like they have split in twine.
You are much less likely to now find, you know,

(01:32:45):
someone who would describe themselves as like liberal or like leftist,
who would hold these beliefs if they're like, you know,
like a forty year old mom with like you know,
braids or beads in her hair like that. That's that
is definitely less less likely to have that person beholding
like anti vax beliefs now than it was twenty ten
years ago.

Speaker 4 (01:33:05):
You just gave me the beautiful idea of making sure
I include an audio clip of the anti vax rasta
Christian guy whose videos have been going viral.

Speaker 3 (01:33:16):
Have you seen these at all?

Speaker 10 (01:33:17):
No?

Speaker 4 (01:33:18):
Oh, man, you're gonna love.

Speaker 12 (01:33:19):
This dilation objectively.

Speaker 7 (01:33:34):
Projectively and.

Speaker 12 (01:33:38):
Ojectively jectivity.

Speaker 6 (01:33:48):
Oh that's good.

Speaker 4 (01:33:50):
It really does encapsulate this sort of you know, the
quote unquote conspirituality.

Speaker 6 (01:33:55):
Even the way like Russell Brand has moved the past
ten years. Right, it's a pretty clear example of this
thing we've been talking about. Yes, how he's now this
weird Jesus guy who can't stop raping?

Speaker 14 (01:34:08):
Not good?

Speaker 4 (01:34:10):
Yeah, it is so fascinating that now, yeah, like Maha
is appealing to that that sort of like orphaned set
of people that you're describing who have less of a
political home.

Speaker 14 (01:34:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:34:25):
RFK Junior is similarly to Russell brand as like a
prime example of someone who used to be more of
like a you know, left wing environmental lawyer who is
now Trump's anti autism take away red number forty anti
vax dude. And you know, another thing about growing up
in these communities is like beyond vaccine hesitancy or anti

(01:34:48):
vax beliefs, is also this like anti psychological beliefs, like
like like therapy or like or like psychoanalysis or like
mental diagnosis are framed the same way, like you shouldn't
need real therapy. You can talk to like a Christian
counselor and you can pray and that should be all
you really need. You don't need to go to like
a therapist or a psychologist. Like that delayed my understanding

(01:35:08):
of like being autistic by like maybe fifteen years, which
you know didn't serve younger gear very well in trying
to unpack like social interactions as a as like a
teenager or even like a preteen, because like I, you know,
wasn't even aware of like the concept of like what
autism actually is until so much later.

Speaker 4 (01:35:29):
So you're saying that childhood vaccinations didn't cause your autism.

Speaker 6 (01:35:33):
No, because I was never vaccinated as a kid, and
yet here I am.

Speaker 7 (01:35:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:35:38):
I saw a nice little sign recently that it fooled
me because I read it too quickly. But it said
childhood vaccinations cause adulthood.

Speaker 6 (01:35:45):
That's right, they sure to.

Speaker 4 (01:35:50):
Gair's experience is not unique. There are countless children who
are raised in religious communities that keew medical interventions in
favor of their faith and in the power of God
to heal them. These communities seek exemptions from vaccination requirements
on either religious grounds or on the grounds of what
they call medical freedom. Consider the children who attend Mercy

(01:36:11):
Culture Preparatory, a private Christian school in Fort Worth. After
the Musles outbreak became national news or a port in
the Dallas Morning News highlighted that the school had the
lowest vaccination rate out of any private school in the
state of Texas. And unlike the Copelands, who at the
very least have facilitated vaccinations among their flock even as
they've given contradictory messages from the pulpit, the leader of

(01:36:34):
Mercy Culture was unapologetically thrilled at the news.

Speaker 7 (01:36:38):
Hey, guys, quick video.

Speaker 8 (01:36:39):
I just walked into an empty prep board meeting and
there was these balloons in a surprise gift.

Speaker 7 (01:36:45):
I'm like, what's this going out? And I just found out.

Speaker 3 (01:36:47):
I'm a little behind in the news. I'm a little
slow getting old, but I just.

Speaker 8 (01:36:52):
Found out we are the number one school in Texas
for least vaccinations. And I guess the news got a
hold of it and they were trying to spin it
like it was some awful thing. But I just want
to congratulate all of the family members of MC Prep
that embrace freedom of health and they're not allowing government

(01:37:12):
or science projects to affect how you live and lead
your life. I know the tire world was shut down
with insanity and people were fired from their job for
forced vaccinations, and freedom is something that we take seriously,
religious freedom, freedom of our health. And so shout out
to MC Prep for being the least vaccinated.

Speaker 4 (01:37:30):
School in Texas.

Speaker 8 (01:37:32):
We'll take it, or as Bercy culture say, we celebrate it,
we'll put it on the board.

Speaker 4 (01:37:36):
State Representative Nate Shatzlin, who is also a pastor at
the church and who has been a featured guest at
Kenneth Copland's annual convention spread a similar message in his
own video that celebrated the news of low vaccination rates
in their private school.

Speaker 3 (01:37:51):
Hey, what's going on? This is state revenue?

Speaker 7 (01:37:52):
Shats on?

Speaker 16 (01:37:53):
I'm standing in front of our Texas state capital and
I was alerted on x from a ex post from
Bud Kennedy. Now you probably don't know who Bud Kennedy is,
but he is a reporter for the Star Telegram in
Fort Worth, Texas. Now Star Telegrams losing followers by the thousands.

Speaker 3 (01:38:11):
It's crazy.

Speaker 16 (01:38:12):
However, he attacks Christians give churches more than almost anyone
else I know. And this post said that Russell Culture Preparatory, which.

Speaker 4 (01:38:21):
Is a private school in my district.

Speaker 16 (01:38:24):
Also happens to be where I send my kids to school.
He said they are the least vaccinated school in the
States of Texas.

Speaker 8 (01:38:33):
Now, I was.

Speaker 4 (01:38:34):
Incredibly concerned for a couple of different reasons.

Speaker 3 (01:38:37):
I was concerned that number one for just finding out.

Speaker 16 (01:38:41):
About this, because the second concern is why haven't we
celebrated this sooner? Look, I am so excited to say
that Mercy Culture Prep is celebrating medical freedom where we
honor the wishes of moms and dads over any type
of health official like Rachel Levine or so called public
health expert like blood Unity.

Speaker 4 (01:39:06):
This brazen lack of concern about the risks of the
spread of measles, which has already killed multiple children, is
concerning for many reasons. One of them is that it
implicitly asserts that it's better for people to be unvaccinated.
Another is that it effectively disregards the risks that vulnerable
people face when diseases like measles spread unchecked. And when

(01:39:26):
infused with this hardened belief that God can miraculously heal
them and also that God makes no mistakes, it can
lead some people like Peter, the Mennonite father of the
first child to die from measles in over two decades,
to believe that getting measles can actually make their communities stronger.
This is basically survival of the fittest style quasi eugenic

(01:39:49):
thinking with the veneer of religion. In the next episode,
we will explore why anti VAXX beliefs and the policies
now being pushed by the leading vaccine denial or RFGA
Junior are effectively eugenic in nature and now the twisted
history of eugenics and racist public health abuses in the
United States has unfortunately buttressed the viral anti vax ideology

(01:40:12):
we are dealing with today. Thanks for listening to episode
three of Anti vax America for It Could Happen Here.
Until next time, I'm Steven Monicelli.

Speaker 3 (01:40:22):
Thanks for listening.

Speaker 4 (01:40:45):
I'm Stephen Monicelli, a journalist in Dallas and an occasional
contributor to Cool Zone Media. And welcome to episode four
of Anti vax America, a special five part mini series
for It Could Happen Here exploring the measles outbreak as
a microcosm for where we are now, how we got here,

(01:41:06):
and where we could be going. Today's episode we'll focus
on the twisted history of eugenics as it relates to
vaccinations and how the current MAHA agenda, as pushed by
RFK Junior, is a sort of echo of eugenic beliefs
of the past. Vaccination hesitancy historically has been framed by

(01:41:29):
opponents to vaccines as a matter of medical freedom, about
the ability to decide what one wants to do with
their own body. It's an argument that we've discussed can
appeal to crunchy granola types and religious zellets.

Speaker 3 (01:41:42):
Alike.

Speaker 4 (01:41:42):
But there's also a darker side to this rhetoric that
reveals an embrace of eugenic ideas among anti vax advocates
who prefer quote unquote herd immunity approaches to outbreaks, which
subordinate the interests of older people, those with disabilities, and
members of minority communities to those who choose not to
be vaccinated. On this episode of Anti vax America, we

(01:42:03):
will dive into the overlapping histories of eugenic thinking and
anti vaccination beliefs to untangle this mess. As we previously
discussed in episode two, vaccinations took off in the eighteen hundred,
shortly after the creation of the first smallpox vaccine in
seventeen ninety six, and so did anti vaccination rhetoric and movements.

(01:42:24):
In parallel, there were a lot of scientific developments going on.
The eighteen hundreds were a heady time in Western science.
There was Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, which was
presented in Darwin's eighteen fifty nine book on the Origin
of Species. Five years later, sociologist Herbert Spencer mixed concepts
from Thomas Malthus, the economists who proposed that population growth

(01:42:46):
withul outpaced food production, with Darwin's theory to coin the
term survival of the fittest and apply it to industrial capitalism,
with the end conclusion that basically those who were on
top were deserving of all of the privileges that they have,
and that those at the bottom were also deserving of
their position in society. In eighteen eighty three, Darwin's cousin

(01:43:08):
Francis Galton, coined to term eugenics in his book Inquiries
into Human Fertility. In its developments, the book proposed to give,
to quote, more suitable races a better chance of prevailing
speedily over the less suitable. To understand a bit more
about Galton's thinking, I spoke with doctor Michael Phillips, who
we heard from in a previous episode.

Speaker 15 (01:43:31):
Galton was in despair that all those improvements in delivery
of healthcare, medical care itself, nutrition, all the humanitarian efforts
to improve the workplace, eliminate child labor, improve factories so
people don't get blown up, etc. What that was doing

(01:43:52):
was it was allowing the unfit, you know, the people
he saw as inferior, to survive past childhood, to survive
into adulthood. They have longer healthier lives. And if they
live a longer lifespan and they're healthier during that span,
they're going to have more children. And he believed that

(01:44:15):
because they are less gifted with intelligence, you know, because
you know, he said history is driven by genius. And
he actually did the first major study on intelligence where
he traced the family histories of what he said were
the gifted men. And he claimed all of this was

(01:44:36):
biological inheritance, you know, everything was biology. And not only that,
but all traits, all traits, were biological work ethic, honesty,
fidelity to your partner, alcoholism, every single trait a human
might have he tied to biology. And he said that
the people with the worst traits that it's called dysgenic

(01:45:00):
people who were dishenic, people had the worst traits, were
now producing large families. And because they were less intelligent,
they gave into their sexual urges more often. They didn't
plan families based on their economic circumstances. They were impulsive,
while we have eight children, let's have sex, and you

(01:45:21):
know if we have a ninth child, well we have
a ninth child. And that meant that those families were
growing exponentially. But the fit who plan their families more carefully,
and you know, the partners are busier. Job creators is
innovators and science and education. The women want to have

(01:45:43):
a life outside of the home.

Speaker 14 (01:45:45):
That they were less fertile, they were having fewer children.

Speaker 15 (01:45:49):
And of course what the result would be is you
have the unfit out numbering the fit, and that leads
to catastrophe society falls upon.

Speaker 4 (01:46:00):
These sorts of ideas are represented in the satirical two
thousand and six film Idiocracy, which plays out a future
in which stupid people outbreed smart people and society consequently devolves.

Speaker 1 (01:46:11):
As the twenty first century began, human evolution was at
a turning point. Natural selection, the process by which the strongest,
the smartest, the fastest reproduced in greater numbers than the rest,
A process which had once favored the noblest traits of
man now began to favor different traits. Most science fiction

(01:46:35):
of the day predicted a future that was more civilized
and more intelligent, but as time went on, things seemed
to be heading in the opposite direction, a dumbing down.
How did this happen? Evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence.
With no natural predators to thin the herd, it began
to simply reward those who reproduced the most and left

(01:46:58):
the intelligent to become an dangered species.

Speaker 4 (01:47:02):
Having kids is such an important decision.

Speaker 8 (01:47:06):
We're just waiting for the right time.

Speaker 5 (01:47:08):
It's not something you want to rush into.

Speaker 6 (01:47:10):
Obviously, no way.

Speaker 7 (01:47:13):
Shit, I'm putting it again.

Speaker 16 (01:47:17):
To mean, damn kids, thought you was on the pills
and shit, No, must have been Brittany.

Speaker 4 (01:47:25):
Well certainly meant in jest. The fundamental principle of idiocracy
demonstrates the staying power of Galton's eugenic ideas, which became
highly influential in the twentieth century. Within two decades of
the release of his book coining the term eugenics, eugenic
thinking was widespread among white Anglo Saxon leaders of the West.
But before we hear more about that from doctor Michael Phillips,

(01:47:47):
a quick ad.

Speaker 15 (01:47:48):
Break two biggest eugenicists in the early twentieth century. They
were best selling authors Madison Grant, who was a friend
of Theodore Roosevelt's, and Walthorpe Stoddard. Stoddard in particular warned

(01:48:14):
that this was fueling radical politics, that the unfit essentially
were demanding the riches created by the geniuses in the world,
and they were expropriating the wealth they created, and they
were they were just milking the fit for every advance,
and that as that became more difficult, that would breed

(01:48:38):
revolution and sodder. In particular thought there was a link
to communist revolution. As advancements in sanitation and modern medicine
continued in parallel with the spread of leftist thought, eugenicists
were consumed with nightmares of a Malthusian crisis and were
increasingly worried about their position in society. Something in their
minds had to be done to stem the growing tide

(01:49:01):
of unfit masses. Because natural selection in the minds of
the genesis had basically been suspended the force sterilizations were
the substitute for that. Eugenicists were in despair about vaccines,
but there was an organized campaign to ban them on

(01:49:21):
eugenics reasons, because I think they knew politically that would
be unpopular, because there were enough people who realize they
could see the benefits as vaccinations became more common.

Speaker 4 (01:49:33):
In other words, some early genesists were both supportive of
things like for sterilization, but were also opposed to vaccinations
because they believed that vaccinations would allow the weak and
unfit to survive, prosper and multiply. But not all eugenicists
were inherently opposed to vaccinations. The Nazi regime, which exterminated

(01:49:54):
millions of Jews and other people deemed undesirable, also embraced
widespread vaccination against diseases like typhus, even if they actually
rolled back mandatory vaccination laws that had been put in
place prior to the rise of the Nazis. Nevertheless, the
relationship between eugenic thinking and anti vax beliefs goes deep,

(01:50:15):
and it reveals it helpful heuristic for thinking about eugenics. So,
on the one hand, there's a sort of active or
hard eugenics, in which medical authorities or the state forcefully
sterilize and exterminate people who are deemed unfit. And then
on the other hand, there's a sort of passive or
soft eugenics, in which potentially preventable deaths are written off

(01:50:37):
as a product of a process in which the fittest
survive and go on to improve the overall gene pool. Now,
before we go any further, it is important to note
that eugenics has been morally and scientifically discredited so thoroughly
that it shouldn't even be necessary to mention it. But unfortunately,
eugenicis thinking is in resurgence. President Donald Trump himself, I

(01:51:00):
said there are a lot of bad genes in our
country right now, and that immigrants are poisoning the blood
of our country.

Speaker 15 (01:51:07):
That's been an ongoing thing with immigration debates ever since
the late nineteenth century, this idea that certain groups of
immigrants are disease carriers, and that has particularly been aimed
at Mexican immigrants.

Speaker 14 (01:51:24):
That's been an ongoing thing.

Speaker 15 (01:51:26):
And during COVID, Greg Gabbott, who's the governor of Texas,
was saying it was Mexican immigrants, undocumented immigrants, who were
bringing COVID to Texas. At one point he made that accusation,
and it's exactly like what they were saying. We had
in Texas during this period this panic about immigration, late

(01:51:47):
nineteenth early twenties century. Galveston, a medical doctor who was
inspecting people coming into the Port of Galveston who were
Jewish immigrants, and he was rejecting them because he saying
they're carrying infectious eye diseases, tuberculosis, all of that, and
Jewish civil Rights scripts had to intervene to stop that.

Speaker 4 (01:52:10):
Racism, anti Semitism, and eugenics historically have gone hand in hand,
but it hasn't been since the early nineteen hundreds that
people who hold such beliefs also hold so much power
in the state. RFK Junior, a longtime anti vaccination activist
and now head of the United States Department of Health
and Human Services, said in twenty twenty three that COVID

(01:52:32):
was quote ethnically targeted to spare Ashkenazi, Jews and Chinese people. Now,
his make America Healthy Again agenda is absolutely dripping with
soft eugenic thinking. And to unravel all that, I spoke
with doctor David Gorski, a doctor who regularly writes in
a blog called Science Based Medicine.

Speaker 7 (01:52:54):
My name is David Gorsky. I'm a professor of surgery
and oncology at Mayne State University in Detroit.

Speaker 4 (01:53:02):
So, doctor Gorski, you're also a bit of a writer,
and you keep a pretty regular blog in chi Opine
on a number of things, and recently you've written a
couple blog posts about the measles outbreak, the anti vaccination movement.
RFK Juniors Make America Healthy again an agenda, and you

(01:53:25):
know what folks over at the Conspiratuality podcast called soft eugenics,
or perhaps what we could also think of as a
sort of social Darwinist logic or sort of passive eugenics.

Speaker 7 (01:53:38):
You know, a couple of months ago, when I first
came across the episode of Conspiratuality, which was called MAHA's
soft Eugenics, like a kind of like a light bulb
went off in my brain in that it sort of
helped me crystallize things that I had been thinking of
about the anti vaccine movement, but not so much the
rest of Maha, which, you know, let's face it, a

(01:54:01):
mishmash of you know, anti vaccine beliefs, you know, appeals
to nature, anti pharma, a lot of quackery mixed in
with some you know, semi reasonable stuff like you know, yeah, sure, diet, exercise,
it's good for you. I think Measles really epitomizes what
they called the quote unquote soft eugenics, which was basically,

(01:54:24):
instead of you know, like actively trying to kill children
or people that you know whose genes you don't want
passed on, you're basically letting nature do it. And you
hear this a lot when they talk about For example,
one of the most common arguments you'll hear from anti
vaxers about measles is that, you know, if someone gets

(01:54:45):
really sick from measles or dies of measles, they must
have had something wrong with them, They must not have
been healthy. Like that, Measles is harmless if you are healthy.
And of course, you know, there's a whole lot of
appeal to virtu you as far as health goes. In
other words, there's this this belief system that's kind of
embedded in Maha, and it's been around for ages and

(01:55:08):
ages in the alternative medicine crowd, that you know, you
have basically total control over your health. In other words,
if you do the right things, eat the right diet,
you know, take the right supplements, you know, do the
exercise appropriately, you know, you can keep yourself healthy. And
it's even as good as vaccines or better to prevent

(01:55:32):
vaccine preventable diseases, infectious diseases. Right.

Speaker 4 (01:55:35):
So, I think that's a great way to understand the
differences here. You know, we're not talking about the hard
active eugenics of the past, which was epitomized by the
Nazi regime and their quote unquote final solution.

Speaker 7 (01:55:51):
And also, you know, you're in the good old us
of AGA.

Speaker 4 (01:55:54):
Years ago, right you know, or even you know, in
the lingering sterilization regimes that continued up until you know,
the later twentieth century, which we're you know, sort of
originally rooted in this idea that we should be calling
people out of the reproductive pool who have these undesirable
traits or are you know, considered to be unfit in

(01:56:17):
some way.

Speaker 3 (01:56:18):
So that's not what we're talking about.

Speaker 4 (01:56:20):
We're talking about this more let nature take its course,
survival of the fittest type mindset. I don't know if
it's a resurgence or it's just continuing to gain in popularity.
There's a recent conference, it's been one of two conferences
that have happened in Austin, Texas where a lot of
these quote unquote liberal eugenicists also met up with people

(01:56:41):
who are in the pro natalist movement. And then there's
this overlap with people who are kind of dabbling in
race science or trying to resuscitate old ideas that are
basically you know, eugenic in nature with regard to some people,
you know, being smarter by genetic basis.

Speaker 7 (01:57:01):
I mean there's a lot of that around too, and
that's not soft eugenics, that's like straight up eugenic.

Speaker 4 (01:57:07):
Right, And so there's a continuum, you could say, there's
this spectrum, and you know, these things are not disconnected,
but they also can be understood as somewhat discrete phenomenon
or ideologies or belief systems. And so you did write
a little bit about one specific document that you know,
I hadn't been particularly familiar with, called the Great Barrington Declaration.

Speaker 3 (01:57:29):
Can you talk about that?

Speaker 7 (01:57:31):
Okay, So I can't believe it's like four and a
half years ago now, but way back in early October
of twenty twenty three, scientists were brought together by a
far right wing, you know, activist named Jeffrey Tucker, who
was associated with a right wing thing tank at the
time called the American Institute for Economic Research. The idea

(01:57:54):
behind the document was, you know, all of these measures
to control COVID are like destroying the economy. So what
we should really do, supposedly based on science but not really,
as I'll get into, is to let the virus spread
among quote unquote young and healthy, you know, those who

(01:58:15):
are not at high risk, so not the elderly, not
those with pre existing conditions that make them high risk
for severe disease complications and death from COVID. Just let
it spread to reach what they call, you know, quote
unquote natural herd immunity heard immunity for those not familiar

(01:58:36):
with it, is when a pathogen is so prevalent in
the population and that so many people have developed what
they call natural immunity, but the more appropriate term is
post infection immunity. You know, immunity after having been infected
to the point where you know a sufficient proportion of
the population is immune and the virus doesn't spread much

(01:58:59):
like if you have a sufficient proportion of the population
vaccinated the virus, you know, you might get sporadic cases
in small outbreaks, but it just can't spread further. If
you don't know much about infectious diseases, including COVID, it
sounds like not unreasonable given that there wasn't a vaccine
back then. The other part of it is what they
call quote unquote focus protection. So the idea is supposedly

(01:59:23):
that you could protect those at high risk while letting
the virus circulate, which are pretty incompatible because how are
you going to you know, how are you going to
keep these high risk people from coming into contact with
people who could have the virus, unless you like quarantine
them all or something like that, which again would be

(01:59:43):
impractical because you know, it's what twenty percent of the
population at least. The other problem with this idea is
for there to be natural herd immunity. I hate that term,
but I'll use it just because it's what they use.
A couple of conditions are necessary. First, post infection immunity
has to be life long or at least very long lasting.

(02:00:06):
The second is, in other words, that the virus can't
be mutating to avoid immunity, which we all know now
and even new then that coronaviruses are very good at doing.
So that it was expected that you know, new variants
would come up and they could evade even post infection
immunity in terms of like influenza. That's why the flu

(02:00:28):
vaccine has to be updated, you know, every year, because
the strains mutate, and the rise of the delta wave,
the omicron wave, et cetera kind of showed that people
getting infected again and again that you know, post infection
immunity for COVID was not long lasting, so basically maybe

(02:00:48):
Barrington Declaration was, you know, giving up more than anything
else in order to let people make money again. And
it never would have worked because even back then, we
had every reason to expect that post infection immunity after
COVID infection would not be long lasting, and that the
virus would mutate and you know, come up with new

(02:01:12):
strains that could bypass pre existing immunity from previous infections. However,
this idea was very influential, and in fact, the Great
Barrington Declaration was kind of late in the game because
the idea of just letting the virus spread to achieve
natural herd immunity was being pushed as early as March

(02:01:34):
and April in twenty twenty. And one of the writers
are the scientists who wrote the Great Barrington Declaration is
now our director of the NIH, doctor J. Bodichario. The
other was doctor Senatragupta in England. And then there was
of course Martin Cauldorf, who I now hear is involved

(02:01:54):
in the autism you know vaccine study that RFK Junior
is supposedly organizing. So basically, you know, these these the
idea behind the Great Barrington Declaration, far from being censored
and canceled, et cetera, actually found purchase at the highest

(02:02:15):
levels of government in the US and the UK, the
Boris Johnson government and Donald Trump administration both. You know,
listen to these scientists and I mean Great Barrington Declaration
writers you know, actually got to meet with Trump at
one point, I believe in July, and it was unfortunately

(02:02:36):
very influential and discouraged stronger public health measures. I did
call this idea eugenicist at the time, although maybe you
can argue if it's soft eugenics or social Darwinist. I mean,
maybe more social Darwinists, given that, oh well, it's kind
of like screw the old people who will die of this,
you know, seem to be part of the attitude behind it.

(02:02:59):
You know, we throw up this focused protection kind of
as an afterthought, you know, where the main idea is
just to you know, let the virus spread and most
people will be okay. And this is the same sort
of idea that we that I heard again and again
years and years before with the measles, you know, and
in fact, if you go back to twenty fifteen, which

(02:03:21):
was you know, after the Disneyland measles outbreak, and during
the holidays of twenty fourteen that you know took part.
In the early part of twenty fifteen, you would see
a lot of anti vaccine activists going on and on
about how if you just keep yourself healthy, measles is
not a danger, that natural immunity to measles is far

(02:03:42):
greater than vaccine induced immunity. What they always fail to
mention is that the price of getting post infection immunity
can be besides just being sick. Could it involve the
risk of you know, complications, neurologic damage, or even.

Speaker 4 (02:04:00):
Death right And so in a way, there's a sort
of moralization around health in that, you know, it's something
that individuals have to be personally responsible for, and as
you said, if they succumbed to an illness like measles,
it is sort of an indication that maybe they were
unfit in some way or unhealthy, And his dovetails with

(02:04:24):
something you also wrote about RFK Junior's recent speech in
which he talked about autism and described it as a
tsunami and likened it to an epidemic. He claimed that
the increasing statistical prevalence of autism is due to environmental
risk factors and is something that is sort of induced

(02:04:46):
by human behavior, as opposed to that statistical prevalence being
a result of improvements and diagnostic tools that more accurately
measure a phenomenon. And he also portrayed autistic people as
a sort of burden on society in you know, or
people who will never be able to do things like
fall in love or get a job, despite the fact

(02:05:09):
that there are countless examples of people with autism or
under the umbrella of what we call autism, doing exactly
those things. And there's this undercurrent of rhetoric that you
sort of describe it as an echo of something. I
hadn't heard this term before, but I'm familiar with the
idea of it, or rather the way in which it

(02:05:30):
was deployed, the idea of quote unquote useless eaters. And so,
can you just walk us through sort of what your
reaction to RFK Junior's speech was in you know, how
you made that connection.

Speaker 7 (02:05:44):
Well, look at what the very first thing he said
about people with severe autism. Okay, what did he say?
He said, they'll never pay taxes, they'll never have a job.
And then oh, they'll never go on a date, they'll
never play baseball. You know, it's what are the first
two things he mentions paying taxes and having a job.

(02:06:07):
This is straight up useless eaters rhetoric and useless eaters
was basically a term that the Nazis used, you know,
for people with you know, severe you know, neurologic conditions
or diseases that made it such that they would require
lifetime care and would never contribute to society. So that
was the echo. I think that echo was pretty clear

(02:06:29):
describing them that way. Now, the other interesting thing about
the eugenics angle, there's a very strong denial of what
we know thus far about autism, which is that it's
like roughly eighty percent genetic. You know, you can argue
over the exact figures, but it's predominantly genetic. I think

(02:06:50):
there's little doubt about that. So parents who have an
autistic child, they often blame themselves or they think, way,
if it's genetic, that means it must be me and
or my partner, you know, which if you're thinking in
terms of the whole health is virtue thing, you know,

(02:07:11):
if there is something about you that is not changeable,
mainly your genetics, and that you know, no amount of
exercise or you know, living right is going to change.
It's easy to fall into denial of that and seek
to blame something else. So there's that, And you know,

(02:07:34):
one of the things I'm kind of afraid of is
that if it becomes undeniable, you know, if they keep
doing all this stuff and failing to find, you know,
any real evidence that an external exposure is causing autism,
and they're forced to reckon with autism being primarily but
not exclusively, but primarily genetic, where does that lead you

(02:07:56):
in terms of what do you do about autism? And
my mind has gone in some fairly dark directions thinking
about that, right.

Speaker 4 (02:08:06):
Right, And there's little discussion of what autistic people think
or want.

Speaker 7 (02:08:13):
No, it doesn't matter to them at all. Really, In fact,
they're almost entirely dismissive of what autistic people themselves think exactly.

Speaker 4 (02:08:21):
And there's also a total disregard for the value of
difference and the contributions that people who are autistic have
made to society that perhaps they might even correlate with
the fact that they're autistic. So there's this total erasure

(02:08:41):
of not only what an entire group of people actually
want for themselves as advocates for themselves, but also their value,
you know, not just as a group of people, but
as individuals as well.

Speaker 7 (02:08:52):
To add to that, let's go back to around two
thousand and seven, two thousand and eight, when Jenny McCarthy
was the face of the anti vaccine movement. So like
one of the things she said after, you know, supposedly
after her son Evan got vaccinated, was that quote unquote,
the light went out of his eyes. And then you

(02:09:15):
hear this a lot when parents realize their children are
showing the signs of you know, the early signs of autism.
Is it like they there's language about how their child
was stolen from them? In other words, is if this
autistic child is not their child, rather their idealized version
of what their child should be is their real child

(02:09:38):
or their quote unquote normal child. This is some really
ancient stuff in that, you know, I don't know if
you there's the whole idea of the changeling myth, in
which you know, the idea being, you know, children with
mental illness, you know, have been taken over or their changelings,
they are no longer what they were before it's almost

(02:09:59):
as if they are no long longer human. I mean,
the dehumanization that you hear from the anti vaccine movement
about autism has long been horrific, and it's just that
up until now, most people have not heard that rhetoric,
and now they're hearing it from a high government official,
and it is becoming federal health policy.

Speaker 3 (02:10:22):
Yeah, that is certainly a new development. Is something we've.

Speaker 4 (02:10:26):
Discussed on previous episodes is the deeper history of anti
vaccination belief or hesitancy that goes deep in American history.
You know, for almost as long as vaccines have ever existed,
it has rarely ever been enshrined in law and policy.

Speaker 3 (02:10:45):
In the way that it is now being done.

Speaker 4 (02:10:48):
And so we've talked about one of these people, high
level government officials, RFK Junior, whose statements have drawn your
attention and elicited your concern.

Speaker 3 (02:10:58):
But he's not the only one.

Speaker 4 (02:11:00):
So you also write about oprah adjacent television personality, doctor
men at Oz.

Speaker 7 (02:11:06):
Yeah, well, doctor Oz actually sort of surprised me a
little bit, but then in retrospect not really. So I'm
surprised there wasn't more commentary about this. But when he
gave his brief little acceptance speech after having been confirmed
as the Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services,

(02:11:28):
which is the part of HHS that administers you know, Medicare, Medicaid,
Affordable Care Act. It's like really important, you know, huge programs.
When he said, basically, it is your patriotic duty to
take care of yourself, you know it, to be healthy.
And then he goes, oh, and it feels better as well.
But he said, it's your patriotic duty to take care

(02:11:51):
of yourself and be healthy because then you you know,
draw less. I'm paraphrasing because I don't remember exactly what
he said, but because you pull less from the pool,
you know, which interestingly echoes exactly almost exactly, other than
the patriotic duty part what RFK Junior said. When Bernie
Sanders asked if healthcare was a human right, as you recall,

(02:12:14):
RFKA Junior did his best not to answer, you know,
he dodged and weaved around the question, and then he
brought up the example of a someone who smokes cigarettes
for decades and then develops lung cancer and is now
drawing from the pool. He was like, very you know,
emphasized drawing from the pool as if that person does

(02:12:36):
not deserve healthcare basically because an addiction gave you cancer.
Because you know, what he neglects to mention is just
how addictives, you know, tobacco and nicotine are. And as
a former addict himself, you know, I found that striking.
But coming back to the whole patriotic duty thing, you know,
the whole idea is, again, health is virtue. You control

(02:12:57):
your health, and if you don't do the right things
and become ill, that you're somehow less worthy of healthcare.

Speaker 16 (02:13:06):
Right.

Speaker 4 (02:13:07):
And there's an interesting thread there in that some eugenesis thinkers,
at least American ones, were somewhat concerned about, you know,
the idea that vaccinations could prevent the weak or the
unfit from being called naturally.

Speaker 7 (02:13:23):
Oh yes, definitely. Yeah, So there is some.

Speaker 4 (02:13:27):
Linkage here, even if these are somewhat discrete ideas. And
you know, you also quoted something from a doctor Oz
speech back in twenty thirteen. You pulled a video that
had been resurfaced in recent years, and Oz said people
don't have a right to health if they're uninsured. And

(02:13:48):
so it's not like what he's saying is kind of
new for him. He's been saying things like this for
a while. And the idea that, you know, there's this
national body that we all have a duty to sort
of be healthy cells of is something that there's a
long history of that sort of thinking and policy.

Speaker 7 (02:14:07):
Yeah, yes, the whole I mean, I couldn't help but
think of Nazis and.

Speaker 15 (02:14:13):
The whole.

Speaker 7 (02:14:16):
Crick aside.

Speaker 4 (02:14:16):
For those who don't know, the Nazi idea of the
vulcan has a few elements to it. Not only does
it relate to racial and cultural homogeneity, but it also
conceives of the nation as a sort of body composed
of cells, one that must be cleansed of unfit or unhealthy.

Speaker 3 (02:14:32):
Cells in order to become perfect.

Speaker 4 (02:14:34):
In other words, a dutiful number of the Vulcan would
prioritize their health as a sort of patriotic or nationalistic duty,
and would participate in eugenic programs to eliminate the unfit.

Speaker 7 (02:14:47):
You know, I'm not saying this is straight up Nazi
or anything like that. It's just that these sorts of
themes have echoed through you know, not just eugenicist movements,
but nationalist and authoritarian movement.

Speaker 3 (02:15:04):
And there's this concerning development.

Speaker 4 (02:15:07):
RFK Junior has proposed basically creating like a national database
or registry of people with autism and if it's not
just autism, maybe other disorders like ADHD. And if you
read reports that interview people with autism or similar disorders,
they are very concerned by this for the reasons that
you just described. So the creation of this database could

(02:15:30):
be framed as a way to improve our ability to
understand this hypothetical linkage that they are so doggedly stuck
on between autism and vaccines. But I think those who
know their history could easily imagine such a tool being
used for other more nefarious purposes, because similar policies were

(02:15:51):
passed in Germany in the nineteen thirties to sort of,
you know, identify these people and categorize them and then
eventually do what they did with them. So, you know,
for all those sorts of reasons, and you know also
the fact that we're living at a time in which
American citizens and legal residents are being sent to a
foreign prison colony as is certainly you know something that

(02:16:15):
I think people are picking up on and maybe making
connections with.

Speaker 7 (02:16:19):
As you mentioned a lot of autistic people don't want
to be on this database, and as a result, I've
read reports in the news of parents are asking that
their child not be given a diagnosis of autism so
that they don't end up in the database, which could
artificially cause, you know, the prevalence of autism to level

(02:16:42):
off and start to decline, at which point RFK declares victory.

Speaker 4 (02:16:47):
We'll hear a bit more from doctor Gorski after a
quick ad break. There's a recent proposal out of rfk's
HHS that intends to provide placebo vaccines during testing for

(02:17:10):
all quote unquote new vaccines.

Speaker 7 (02:17:13):
So the idea is, the vaccines in the childhood schedule
have quote unquote never been tested against placebo control. Although
ironically it's funny I did. I read an article the
other day where they did admit that the COVID vaccine
for children was indeed tested against a placebo control. I'm
kind of surprised they conceded that, but I guess sometimes

(02:17:33):
they have to concede reality. But here's the idea. So
it's true that some of the vaccines have not been
tested against the strict saline placebo control that they want,
but there are a number of reasons for that. The
primary reason is ethics. So let's go back. So, if

(02:17:54):
you have a new vaccine that is for a disease
that has never had an approved vaccine before, yes, it's
tested against a placebo control. This has been the case
for a very long time. However, if you have a
new vaccine for a disease that already has a vaccine
that's been approved as safe and effective and is the

(02:18:16):
standard of care, it is completely unethical to do a
randomized study where you know one third to half of
the participants will be randomized to a group that does
not get the standard of care treatment as in, you know,
the vaccine or the standard of care preventative. In that case,
the only ethical way to test the new vaccine against

(02:18:38):
the disease for which there's already a vaccine is to
test it against an existing vaccine and then make sure
that it is at least not inferior or preferably better. So,
if you trace back the lineage of all the vaccines
on the childhood vaccine schedule, if you go back to
the first vaccine against the disease that was approved, it

(02:19:02):
was tested against you know, placebo when it was a
new vaccine against a disease that didn't have a vaccine.

Speaker 4 (02:19:09):
I'm wondering if you agree with this, but it does
sound like this proposal if it were to be implemented
in a way that involves vaccines for existing diseases that
have already been treated with vaccines, If there were placebos
introduced into this testing, and you know, like you said,
there's a random percentage of people that were given a placebo.

(02:19:31):
I mean to me, it recalls like a soft version
of a Tuskegee experiment.

Speaker 7 (02:19:37):
Yeah. I've been meaning to make that that analogy, but
you beat me to it.

Speaker 4 (02:19:44):
As we discussed in a prior episode in this series,
the Tuskegee Syphlist Study was a horrifically unethical, racist and
eugenic experiment that helped seed a long standing distrust of
vaccines and medical authorities, particularly among minority communities in the
United States, and it straddled the intersection of hard and
soft eugenics. While it was not a forced sterilization program,

(02:20:05):
the intent of the experiment was to test the eugenic
hypothesis that racial groups were differently susceptible to infectious diseases,
and that's because they basically believed that black people had
different nervous systems than white people and that they were
not the same. And they also allowed black men who
could have otherwise been treated for syphilis, which there were
treatments for it at the time, to instead suffer and

(02:20:28):
die after being given placebo treatments without their knowledge. Children's
health defense while under the leadership of RFK, Junior invoked
the Tuskegee syphilist experiment in a recent anti vaccine film
that they specifically promoted to Black Americans to encourage vaccine skepticism,
and now the former leader of that organization is proposing
an approach to vaccines that is eerily reminiscent of the

(02:20:50):
sordid Tuskegee experiment. In the post COVID world, vaccination rates
are on the decline, and anti vaccination beliefs are spreading
in tandem with eugenesis thinking. The rhetoric of the leaders
of our top health bureaucracies recall chilling episodes in recent history,
ones that we would rather not repeat. But because we

(02:21:11):
have history as a guide, it is not impossible for
us to imagine what could happen if things continue to
trend in the direction we are already headed, so on
the next episode of Anti vax America, I'll explore some
of the worst case scenarios that could unfold if the
proponents of the Maha agenda get their way. I'm Stephen Monchelli.

Speaker 3 (02:21:31):
Until next time.

Speaker 4 (02:21:53):
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

(02:22:14):
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 vaxx ideology and
the MAHA movement. In this episode, we'll explore the future.
Could the United States see a massive return of viral outbreaks,

(02:22:37):
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

(02:22:57):
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.

Speaker 3 (02:23:15):
Community in New York.

Speaker 4 (02:23:17):
An expert warned that these isolated incidents could 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

(02:23:38):
the most effective tool we have to prevent the 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 in polio and smallpox and
more would put our most vulnerable populations at risk, especially

(02:24:00):
the elderly, the immunal compromised, and others who cannot 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

(02:24:21):
any we've seen in recent history, perhaps even worse than COVID,
which took more than one point one 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

(02:24:43):
asked them all the same question, where do you see
this going? Each had their own answer, 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 out break began.

Speaker 5 (02:25:03):
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

(02:25:25):
community with lower vaccination rates, and those can come next.
So I mean that is concerning.

Speaker 4 (02:25:33):
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 scientists in Houston.

Speaker 13 (02:25:46):
You know, with the formation of anti vaccine groups in
the twenty tens in Texas, you started to get these
steep rides and 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

(02:26:09):
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

(02:26:31):
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 transmissible. It's
the most transmissible virus we know about. So measles is
kind of the whatever you want to call it, the

(02:26:54):
early biomarker of a problem with your vaccination system. And unfortunately,
it's just tearing through West Texas in 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 the

(02:27:16):
Plain's been into joining areas in Mexico, then going up
into Oklahoma and now Kansas. And 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 even

(02:27:39):
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 fourfold rise in measles epidemics outbreaks.
We've had a sixfold rise in whooping cough for Tessa's cases.
We've had polio up here in the wastewater in New
York State, already trending in the wrong direction even before

(02:28:04):
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, just like
we're seeing now with measles. I mean, we're looking at

(02:28:25):
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 ptossis. I worry about even potentially
polio returning, and not only in the US, because you know,

(02:28:45):
as we both know, the US is very good at
exporting its culture. 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 me a lot of pause

(02:29:07):
for concern.

Speaker 3 (02:29:08):
And on that note, a quick ad break.

Speaker 4 (02:29:22):
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 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 polio. In the

(02:29:43):
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, but both of those diseases were effectively eradicated
decades ago. The last person living in an iron lung,

(02:30:03):
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 thousands of Americans died from the disease every year.
All that was due to the creation of vaccine policy

(02:30:24):
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 7 (02:30:38):
I'll start with vaccines, and then I'll try to move
more to MAHA. So the 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

(02:30:59):
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

(02:31:19):
be less of an issue either way, though, contrary to
what they claim they want to do, which is, you know,
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

(02:31:43):
for four different vaccines, including the measles vaccine, of course,
and it estimated, 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

(02:32:06):
measles vaccine was licensed in the early nineteen sixties. You know,
you sure 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, even

(02:32:29):
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 successors to deal with the mess.

(02:32:50):
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,

(02:33:14):
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

(02:33:37):
be such that the bar for approval will be higher,
arguably too high. I realized 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

(02:33:59):
the follow allow 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

(02:34:21):
various lineaments. 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

(02:34:43):
I have 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 the of what can be done to resist
it or slow it down that you know, the entire
Republican Party doesn't seem to want to put any sort

(02:35:05):
of checks on this administration.

Speaker 3 (02:35:08):
Mm hmmm.

Speaker 4 (02:35:08):
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

(02:35:29):
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 sort

(02:35:50):
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 someone like JD. Van's, Yes,

(02:36:15):
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, we don't want to
overstate the risks and be doomsayers. But on the other hand,

(02:36:40):
there's this real potential for the return of you know,
God forbid something like polio or a breakthrough Avian flu.

Speaker 7 (02:36:48):
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.

Speaker 4 (02:36:59):
Right, 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,

(02:37:21):
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

(02:37:42):
of the risk. And it's it's kind of parallel to
something another public health official I spoke with talked about
how there's you know, 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.

(02:38:03):
And that's a massive undertaking. We'll hear a bit more
from Doctor Gorsky right after the sad Break.

Speaker 10 (02:38:19):
You know.

Speaker 7 (02:38:19):
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

(02:38:40):
just have little thoughts painted all over them because I
guess that's how they showed them having the measles.

Speaker 6 (02:38:45):
Boy, this is a life, isn't it. Yeah, if you
have to get sick, she can't beat the measles, that's right.

Speaker 16 (02:38:51):
No medicine insider out like shots on me don't even
mention shots.

Speaker 7 (02:38:56):
Yeah, measls.

Speaker 6 (02:39:01):
Metals.

Speaker 15 (02:39:02):
Well, all the kids have now had the measo so
far than years ago. Looks like the Brady's are finished
with amazing.

Speaker 7 (02:39:09):
There was also an episode of The Flintstones that, believe
it or not, they've 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 of thousands

(02:39:29):
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 like elderly

(02:39:51):
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 Oh
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 to decrease the

(02:40:11):
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 is very

(02:40:32):
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 chemotherapy
and various cancer nonsense tends to go right along with

(02:40:52):
MAHA and the other thing.

Speaker 11 (02:40:54):
You know.

Speaker 7 (02:40:54):
For instance, when RFK Junior made his one of his
statements that was 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

(02:41:15):
would come out 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

(02:41:37):
it in bullshit. He 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,

(02:41:58):
your middle class, healthy 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 that were not vaccinated refusing to

(02:42:20):
mingle with those who are. 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

(02:42:42):
how treatment of quote unquote 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 this that I like

(02:43:05):
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 guest,
and he was going on about how, you know, this
was around the time of the EAH one N one
flu pandemic, and he was going you knowing, he was

(02:43:27):
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 Pastas say to him?

(02:43:48):
I love I love this retort? He said, Oh, come on, superman.

Speaker 4 (02:43:55):
Bob Costas could have easily used a different word in
his retort given the eugen tendencies of the modern anti
vaccination movement, and the word I have in mind is
uber mensch.

Speaker 3 (02:44:07):
But I digress.

Speaker 4 (02:44:09):
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 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

(02:44:30):
and scientists, and where only the strongest will survive at
the expense of the week. Diseases long thought defeated could
return in Our ability to address new viruses will be
diminished if RFK Junior successfully dismantles what remains of our
public health bureaucracy, and he's doing it as a steady clip.
In other words, the future may end up looking a

(02:44:51):
lot like the past, more than it already does.

Speaker 3 (02:44:55):
And that's terrifying.

Speaker 4 (02:44:56):
The last time deadly pandemics, religious fervor, and resistance to
medical science 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 VAXs America, it's that things

(02:45:19):
will likely have to get worse before they get better.
It's really 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

(02:45:39):
public health measures in general. Before I recorded this final statement,
the Texas State House voted to advance a bill that
will expand the ability for parents to seek exemptions for
trial vaccination requirements for school. And this is happening as
a measles outbreak is ongoing, and things aren't looking good,

(02:46:02):
But there is at least one sliver of hope that
I've found. As my conversation with Gear illustrates, it's possible
for people 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

(02:46:24):
also possible for people who have been hesitant to get
their children vaccinated for something like measles to be spurred
into action 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 Gorskey's astute observation that the anti

(02:46:48):
vaccine movement is someone like a purity cult and Gear's
comment that escaping their anti VACS 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.

Speaker 3 (02:47:08):
I call anti vax America. I'm Stephen Monicelli. Thanks for listening.

Speaker 2 (02:47:15):
Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
from now until the heat death of the universe.

Speaker 6 (02:47:21):
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.

Speaker 2 (02:47:29):
Check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to podcasts.

Speaker 6 (02:47:34):
You can now find sources for It Could Happen here,
listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

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