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Welcome back to it could happen here and to episode two of Anti vax America. I'm Stephen Monachelly. Last episode I explored the ongoing measles outbreak that started in West Texas and has since spread to several states across the nation. A big part of that story is the underlying anti vax beliefs that are fueling a decline in vaccination rates across the country, and how the leader of our federal health bureaucracy, our Hearth K. Junior, has helped seed, spread
and embed those beliefs into policy. But behind all that is a deeper history of anti vaccination beliefs in America. And while it is undoubtedly the case that the COVID nineteen pandemic brought anti vaccination beliefs to the forefront of American politics, opposition to vaccines is not new. It's about as old as the technology itself.
It actually goes back to the founding colonies and even the nearly eighteen hundreds when you had people kind of peddling various what they called botanicals as substitutes for mainstream medicine.
That's doctor Peter Hotez. He's a doctor in Houston with a long and impressive list of credentials.
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 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 that occur only among the world's poor. And that's a lifelong passion of mine.
The first vaccination was created in seventeen ninety six by Edward Jenner, who was able to build on prior methods of inoculation, and he was able to create a vaccine for smallpox, one of the deadliest viruses in human history, within a matter of decades, vaccination had become widespread in
the Western world. The United Kingdom passed the Vaccination Act of eighteen forty to provide free vaccinations to the poor, and then passed another act in eighteen fifty three that made it compulsory for infants, and another in eighteen sixty seven that extended the compulsory vaccination requirement to fourteen and added penalties for non compliance that could be cumulative over time.
Resistance to these laws began in eighteen fifty three with a few riots in towns across England, and this eventually formalized into the Anti Compulsory Vaccination League, which contributed literature likening vaccination to a monster and lobbied the British government
to change the laws. Their efforts actually proved successful, and a new law was passed in eighteen ninety eight to remove cumulative penalties and create an exemption for what they termed conscientious objectors, which is the first time that term had ever been used in British law. Parallel anti vaccination movement made similar strides in the United States, and one of the leaders of the British anti vaccination movement even 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,
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 time among certain sects of medicine. Now, these movements didn't neatly fall across political lines in the way that they
largely do today. Progressive and conservative anti vaccination activists were tied together by strongly held beliefs in things like quote unquote medical freedom, sometimes philosophical beliefs around freedom, their spiritual faiths, or in some instances, even anti Semitic conspiracy theories. Consider Eugene carl During, a philosopher and economists, considered one of the founding fathers of German anti Semitism, who argued that Jewish doctors were behind a conspiracy to drum up business
for themselves by promoting vaccination to healthy people. These are all tropes that live on to this day and that someone like do Hotz knows all too well, and because of his advocacy of vaccines, he's often been a target of it.
I'm a scientist, the vaccine scientists, the Jewish vaccine scientists. So they've got me doing this in secret with George Soros or one of the rothschilds that I'm doing it at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Haven't even invited to Davos.
While some of the progressive strain of the historic anti vaccination movement has lived on in the stereotypical hippie naturalist lifestyle culture that is popular in parts of the Northwest, that strain is long and fringe and is kind of extinct at this point. It had its heyday after the sixties and seventies, when a lot of alternative therapies and
medicines were being promoted and embraced. In the West. Most of the anti vaxxers of that variety today have largely been drawn towards more right winging values and have been subsumed by the sort of politics that defines the larger
Make America Healthy Again agenda. The way doctor Hotess sees it, there's a direct line between these old anti vaccine movements 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.
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.
And that's why you get you know, ivermectin which does absolutely nothing for covid, or hydroxychloroquine which has done nothing for covid, or when you heard mister Kennedy talk about vitamin A or as a preventative, or budesini as steroid which does nothing, or clarithromycin and antibiotic does nothing. Whatever, you know, they can buy in bulk and then sell at a profit. That's you know, that's a lot of
the wellness and influencer industry. And so what you have now is that converging thread around that and libertarian politics. And that's what you saw. I think, after you know, we started to debunk the false links between vaccines and autism, they needed a new thing. And this is when you saw here in Texas, this rise in parents requesting vaccine
exemptions around the banner of health freedom, medical freedom. And here's where it became really tough to talk about because it got adopted by the Republican Tea Party in Texas. And so anti vaccine groups started getting pack money, political 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.
But before we explore the contemporary anti vaccination movement further, we have to turn to history, and before we do that, we're obligated to take a quick ad break. Anti vaccine movements appeared to be gaining steam in the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds, but their progress largely halted when a nineteen oh five US Supreme Court ruling upheld the authority of states to pass and enforce compulsory vaccination laws.
The continued spread of viruses like smallpox, the deadly Spanish flu pandemic, and the outbreak of World War II all spurred advancements in vaccination research and programs to ensure widespread vaccination, and as this science continued to advance, more and more states began to mandate vaccines for public school attendance, as
did employers for their workers. By nineteen sixty three, twenty states required children to be vaccinated before going to school, and by nineteen eighty every state in the nation had a similar law on the books. And as the decades went on, the incident's rates of several diseases dramatically plummeted.
By nineteen eighty, smallpox had been eradicated. But along the way, there were things done in the name of medical science that would undercut the great strides made during that period of time, things that ultimately showed the seeds for some of today's vaccination skepticism.
I think it's important to understand that not all suspicion regarding medicine and doctors, you know, research that not all of this resistance is totally irrational, it's based on experience.
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.
Going back to the time of slavery, enslaved men and women were often the unwilling, involuntary subjects of medical experiments. We have, for instance, a a man named maryon Sims, and they actually put a statue up of him in Central Park in New York that's been taken down since,
who was credited as the father of gynecology. There was a problem in that era before the discovery of germ theory, where whenever women would give birth and there would be vaginal tears, doctors would often sew up the wounds and then there'd be an infection and the woman would die or get seriously ill or infertile. And the infertility and death of slaves meant a loss of property. So in
slavers we're very concerned about this issue. Maryon Sims at some point discovers that if you use silver thread silver sutures when you operate on women who have had these vaginal terrors that the infection doesn't happen. Now, he wanted to prove this. He wanted to perfect his technique, so he did it on enslaved women.
During the COVID nineteen pandemic, Black Americans lagged behind whites in terms of vaccination rates. According to a systemic literature review on the determinants of vaccine hesitancy among Black Americans, vaccine hasn't seen in Black communities. Is rooted in a troubling history of unethical medical experiments, and it persists to this day due to how this group of the population still experiences discrimination, racism, mistreatment, and overall health iniquity.
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 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 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 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, 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
disease progressed. And this went on until the nineteen sixties, and they published results with no professional repercussions, you know, And one thing they proved is that syphilis attacks black people the same way it does white people. If you leave it untreated, the same symptoms developed. The nervous systems of black and white people are the same. But they published these results in ACCLAIM Medical Journal, and the backlash
was not immediate. Eventually, you know, it became a scanned So that really did strike a chord in the Black community that I think to this day we've seen skepticism about white medicine. And again there's valid historical reasons. RFK Junior and the anti vaccination movement have seized on this particular historical atrocity, so doubt about vaccines among Black Americans.
More generally, Children's Health Defense, the anti vax group, previously led by RFK Junior, invoked the Tuskegee Syphlist study in an anti vaccine film called Medical Racism the New Apartheid. But before we talk a bit more about Children's Health Defense and the more recent history of the anti vaccination movement, we've got to take another ad break. Black Americans aren't 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 Not Cause Rachel's Autism directly targets RFK Junior's long held belief about the link between autism and vaccines.
It actually came about after a year of discussions with Robert F. Kennedy Junior explaining to him the evidence showing vaccines don't cause autism, and finally decide to write it all up in a book. And it's about my daughter. So you know, I wear two hats as a vaccine scientist, but also wound up going up against anti vaccine groups 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 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 of the false claims that it was the MMR vaccine the measles, smumps rubella vaccine, and that was actually published in a biomedical journal called The Lancet in the UK.
The paper was retracted eventually because it was some to be false, and also the scientific community responded with large epidemiologic studies showing that kids who got the MMR vaccine were no more likely to acquire autism than kids who didn't, and similarly, kids on the autism we're no more likely to have gotten MMR the kids not on the autism spectrum.
That should have been the end of it. But then our friend Robert F. Kennedy Junior came on the scene in two thousand and five and wrote an article in Rolling Stone magazine claiming, Okay, if it's not MMR, it must be the thimerosol preservative that's in vaccine, and that was also retracted and thoroughly debunked through large epidemiologic studies, even nonhuman primate studies, and its switched up again to spacing vaccines too close together. We have to green our
vaccine ecosystem. And you saw celebrities like Jenny McCarthy, your husband, Jim Carrey walking around in green t shirts. It was all phony boloni and that was debunked, and then it was alum in vaccine. So it became this kind of exhausting exercise, and each time we were able to successfully refute it.
Founded in two thousand and seven, Children's Health Defense represented a formalization of late twentieth century anti vaccination resistance. Unlike the anti vaccination leagues of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Children's Health Defense pedals dubies cures like homeopathy and promotes conspiratorial narratives like the Great Reset, which claims that billionaire Bill Gates and others have used the COVID nineteen pandemic as a part of a plan to make
America Marxist. The idea that vaccines cause autism is a part of a larger claim that vaccines can cause injuries among those who receive them, and that our understanding of these injuries is far less than what the science shows. 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 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 Act in nineteen eighty six, establishing a no fault system to alleviate pressure on vaccine manufacturers and provide an avenue for victims of a vaccine injury to be compensated. As
doctor Hotez describes it, a lot of this is overblown. Yes, there are individuals who can have reactions to vaccines that can cause issues, but the studies around DPT and the notions that it caused these illnesses that these parents were concerned about, actually showed that there was no connection. Nevertheless, it is a reality that some people may face some
sort of complications and we can't dismiss that. But when we stack it up against the side effects disease and one of those being death, well it's a pretty easy comparison to make.
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 he had this really interesting idea that we published in The New York Times in twenty twenty where you create a box representing ten thousand kids and two boxes aligned
side to side. One box is what happens if ten thousand kids get saved, for instance, the MMR vaccine versus the other box ten thousand kids getting measles, and you know, the ones getting the MMR vaccine. You see these tiny little pinpricks of very rare side effects like allergic reaction or febrill seizures one and three thousand, that sort of thing. So maybe there's a tiny little pinprick representing you know, three or thirty kids as opposed to measles, which you know,
twenty percent of kids hospitalized in measles deaths. And these are large red and black boxes. I think those kinds of things are helpful because I think one of the problems is the anti vaccine guys. What they'll do is they will exaggerate the frequency of rare, rare side effects and in simultaneously downplay the severity of the illness. And we even heard that before the two deaths. You know, you heard all this rhetoric all measles is just like
a benign illness. And now we've got two deaths right here in Texas of nice school age kids that never had to lose their lives because the parents, you know, were taken in by the disinformation machine.
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
with broader libertarian and some conservative ideologies. The idea that the government should not mandate personal medical choices further gain traction with the election of President Barack Obama in two thousand and eight, adding fuel to the anti vaccination fire, and the anti vax movement began to dovetail with the booming alternative health and wellness industry that excused Western medicine in favor of natural medicines and holistic approaches, and often
this includes some sort of spiritual element. This convergence is crystallized in modern figures like Vonnie Hare, also known as the food Babe, who is a conservative wellness influencer. She's aligned herself with RFK Junior's Maha agenda and promotes the standard Goop like fare, but with a right wing edge. The American food industry, for example, or Big Pharma for example, are poisoning us. But also you shouldn't get the flu vaccine.
Despite the best efforts of scientists like doctor Hotes to debunk he claims that motivate the modern anti vaccination movement, it has only gathered steam in the last few decades. 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.
And it was a physician, scientist. The last thing I want to talk about is politics, right. I mean, I feel that every American has a right to their political views. That's embedded in our history and our constitution. But how do you say, don't adopt this stuff because it's going to be so detrimental. But that's what happened with the formation of anti vaccine groups in the twenty tens in Texas.
He started to get these steep rides in parents questing non medical exemptions that their kids could get out of being vaccinated for school. And it was particularly strong in the same places where people were refusing COVID vaccine. Years later, especially in conservative rural areas of West Texas East Texas. 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 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.
But Texas is not alone.
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 outbreak of measles in California, one that ultimately spurred policy changes that reverberated across the country.
It started happening in the twenty tens and really ramped up after. There was a large measles epidemic in California, of all places, on twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen, and the California legislature shut down vaccine exemptions. They said, Okay, from now on, you want to send you kids to school,
the kids have to be vaccinated. And I supported that and it solved the measles problem, but then it produced this health freedom backlash in states like Texas, also Oklahoma, and very much a red state phenomenon read being Republican, blue being a Democrat, and and that's where you saw these derise in vaccine exemptions. You started getting anti vaccine
groups forming. They were getting pack money, political Action committee money, and I saw that as really dangerous because now rather than being sort of small, underfunded groups, they now had the backing of a major political party and everything that goes along with it in terms of influence and PAC money, and this gives them a lot of bandwidth and a lot of political clout, and it's so self defeating, but
there you are. And so now we're at the point in Texas where we have over one hundred thousand non medical exemption requests of various sorts. That's a lot of kids. And this doesn't say anything about the homeschool kids in Texas. I'm told that we may have as many as seven hundred thousand homeschooled kids, but you might want to document that, and I don't think we have any idea of the percentage of those kids that are not getting their vaccines because they're homeschooled.
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 rates among school as children will likely continue to fall.
The prevalence of homeschooling among left leaning, crunchy alternative types has also contributed to the shift towards right wing politics, as the homeschool movement has deliberately tried to recruit those families and pushed them towards right wing politics. The complete partisan politicization of vaccinations has made communicating the risks of low vaccination rates far more difficult for people like doctor Hotez.
How do you thread that needle and say, look, everybody has a right to their political views, going there with you that you're right as an American citizen, but don't adopt the anti vaccine stuff because it's so dangerous for your health and the health of your loved ones, the
health of your kids. But it's a tough needle to thread, and as a result, I, you know, will often, even though I try to bend over backwards explaining I don't care about your politics, for their convenient purposes, I'm treated as a political figure and portrayed as a cartoon villain or you know, a scientist and white coat plotting nefarious things.
You know, they have this crazy concept out there they call plandemic now that it's not a pandemic, it's a plandemic that somehow I've been involved with, or that I'm profiting from vaccines and secretly working for pharma companies even though it's the opposite, right, I make load cost vaccines that actually showed me could bypass the big pharma companies.
And and some of it gets outright absurd. I mean, there's this whole thread on the Internet that says that I'm not even a real person, that I'm I'm actually being played by Jack Black, and that he's paid for by the CIA, And it's got these amazing you know forensic analysis of close ups of my teeth with Jack Black's teeth and all this profiles and things. I mean, the funny thing is the said thing is the crazier the conspiracy, the faster it seems to travel.
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 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 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 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
rewrote for those who are unfamiliar. Christian Science is an offshoot of Christianity that was formed in eighteen seventy nine in New England and by nineteen thirty six was the fastest growing religion in the nation. Christian scientists typically avoid medical care and rely instead on their belief in the
healing power of prayer. On the next episode of Anti Vacs America, I'll explore the intersection of conservative Christianity, its belief in spiritual healing miracles, anti vaccination beliefs, and vaccination hesitancy. We'll talk about how a very influential strain of conservative Christianity that is highly political and has tied itself with Donald Trump is also influencing people's attitudes about vaccination. Until then,
I'm Stephen Mamaicelli and this is anti vaxx America. For Cool Zone Media, Thanks for listening.
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