Anti-Vax America: Soft Eugenics

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 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 zelots alike. 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 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. 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 to fifty nine book on the

Origin of Species. Five years later, sociologists heard Robert Spencer mixed concepts from Thomas Malthus, the economist who proposed that population growth would outpaces 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 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 Francis Galton, coined the 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.

they're going to have more children. And he believed that 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 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 it's called disgenic. People who were disgenic, people who 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,

Well we have eight children, let's have sex. And you 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, as

innovators in science and education. The women want to have a life outside of the hum that they were less fertile, they were having fewer children, and of course what the result would be is you have the unfit out numbering the fit, and that leads to catastrophe society falls apart.

did this happen? Evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence. With no natural predators toin the herd, it began to simply reward those who reproduced the most and left the intelligent to become an endangered species.

of Theodore Roosevelt's, and Walthorpe Stoddard. Stoddard in particular warned 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 just they were just milking the fit for every advance, and that as that became more difficult, that would breed revolution. And in particular thought there was a link to communist revolution.

all eugenicists were inherently opposed to vaccinations. The Nazi regime, which exterminated 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 VAXX beliefs goes deep,

and it reveals a 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 as a product of a process in which the to

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, eugenesis thinking is in resurgence. President Donald Trump himself has said there are a lot of bad genes in our country right now, and that immigrants are poisoning the blood of our country.

like what they were saying. We had in Texas during this period of this panic bat immigration. Late nineteenth early choice centric 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 was saying they're carrying infectious eye diseases, tuberculosis, all of that, and Jewish civil rights scripts had to intervene to stop that.

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.

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, instead of you know, like actively trying to kill children or people that you 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 really sick for 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 virtue 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 ages and 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 vaccine preventable diseases, infectious diseases. Right.

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 eugenics also met up with people 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.

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 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 with it, is when a pathod 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 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 it, quote unquote focus protection. So the idea was supposedly 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 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 lifelong or at least very long lasting. 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 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 the Great 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 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 and April in twenty twenty. And one of the writers or 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 Caldor, who I now hear is involved in the autism you know, vaccine study that RFK

Junior is supposedly organizing. So basically, you know, these these are the idea behind the Great Barrington Declaration, far from being censored and canceled, et cetera, actually found purchase at the highest 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 very influential, and it was discouraged stronger public health measures. I did call this idea eugenesis 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. 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 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 greater than vaccine induced immunity. What they always fail to mention is that a 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.

tsunami and likened it to an epidemic. He claimed that the increasing statistical prevalence of autos is due to environmental risk factors and is something that is sort of induced 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, you know, or people who will never be able to do things like fall

in love or get a job, despite the fact 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 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.

he mentions paying taxes and having a job. 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 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 there's little doubt about that. So parents who have an autistic child, they often blame themselves or they think, wait, 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, 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, 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

in terms of what do you do about autism? And my mind has gone in some fairly dark directions thinking about.

Is it like they there's language about how their child was stolen from them, in other words, as if this autistic child is not their child, rather their idealized version of what their child should be is their real child 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 of 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 as if they are no 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.

and elicited your concern. But he's not the only one. So you also wrote about oprah adjacent television personality, doctor menad Oz.

really important, 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 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 E goes 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, 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 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 beauty thing. Know, the whole idea is, again, health is virtue. You control your health, and if you don't do the right things and become ill, that you're somehow less worthy of healthcare.

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.

so doggedly stuck on between autism in vaccines. But I think those who know their history could easily imagine such a tool being used for other more nefarious purposes, because you know, similar policies were 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 I think people are picking up on and maybe making connections with.

to concede reality. But here's the idea. So it's true that some of them vaccines have not been tested against the strict siline 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 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 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 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 was tested against you know, placebo, when it was a new vaccine against a disease that didn't have a vaccine.

soft eugenics. While it was not a forced sterilization program, 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 that at the time, to instead suffer and

die after being given placebo treatments without their knowledge. Children's health defense while under the leadership of RFK Junior invoked the Tuskegee Syphliss experiment in a recent anti vaccine film 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

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 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 vaxx 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. Until next time.