Doubt: 'Let's Go to War'

what he is saying controversial. As long as we stand together and be brave and courageous and stand up for liberty and insists on body integrity, there's nothing big Pharma can really do to us. He takes the bag off his head. At this point, as we've seen the last six months, our government is known is not only capable of taking away our liberties, they seem actually kind of excited about it. He's sitting in what looks like a

messy office wearing a blue dress shirt and tie. He pokes fun at lockdowns and social distancing and masks, and even jokes that COVID isn't really a serious disease. And then he moves on to COVID vaccines, and if you're worried about the side effects, don't. This new vaccine will be thoroughly tested to the same vigorous standards as all other vaccines. No fewer than twelve people will be tested for the vaccine that will be given to a billion people.

Other speakers at the conference include Sherry Tenpenny, an osteopathic physician known for her expensive anti vaccine boot camps. There's also wellness guru Dr Joseph mccola and former Minnesota State Senator Dr Scott Jensen. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Spoke just before Schneider, and Andrew Wakefield will give a speech tomorrow. You've heard some of these names before in this series. Some of them are new, but what they all have in common is that they are prominent or up and

coming members of the anti vaccine establishment. This conference is a who's who of the biggest names in the anti vax world. The conference was put on by the National Vaccine Information Center. That's a group that has been questioning vaccine safety since the theme of this year's conference is protecting autonomy and healthcare, but not everyone sticks to that. Some speeches focus on rights and liberty amid the pandemic. Others preached alternative health practices or the ulterior motives of

big pharma. Sometimes the messages even kind of conflict with each other. If you watch the conference, one thing becomes absolutely clear. Speaker after speaker hits on the same point. The pandemic is an opportunity to grow the moon space and they are not going to waste it. We need

all hands on desk. We need everybody to release their fear from their brains, get rid of their mask, so hug people and absolutely say no. We're seeing an inflection of events is bringing our issue to the forefront of Vaccines today are talked about every day, and we've seen this now. The population who are aware of these issues has grown dramatically in the face of coronavirus COVID nineteen.

All of the truths that we've been trying to broadcast for many, many years, Um, there are people hearing it and the impact and those seeds are landing on very fertile ground. That last voice belongs to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Kennedy is the founder of the Children's Health Events, a group that pumps out a whole lot of vaccine misinformation. It is one of the most high profile anti vaccine groups. Kennedy and just talk with a battle cry, and let's

go to war and protect these children. Thank you very much. Let's go to war. If the pandemic is a battlefield. The anti vax ER's are on the march, and they have been gaining ground. They've been winning the hearts and minds of the people in the middle, those who mostly trust vaccines but maybe have some misgivings or questions about

the COVID nineteen shots. People are scared right now and they're looking for answers, and this has given the anti vaccine movement the chance to reach a bigger audience than ever before. In this episode, we're going to look at how this movement gets their message out and why people believe it if they're waging a war. This is a look at the battle plan. I'm Bloomberg News health reporter Kristin B. Brown from the Prognosis podcast This is Doubt.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Was the nephew of JFK. His dad was former Senator and U S. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy. Both his dad and uncle were assassinated when he was a kid. Kennedy is a lawyer, and until more recently, he was best known for a long and impressive legacy of environmental work. Over the past few years, Kennedy has increasingly turned his attention to vaccines. This is a little ironic since his uncle JFK played a big role in

making vaccines routine in modern society. In ninety two, JFK passed the Vaccine Assistance Act, which was really the first national immunization program in the US, giving states federal money to help make vaccines more accessible. These days, Kennedy is working in opposition to his uncle's legacy. Where JFK wanted to give people more access to vaccines, Kennedy spends a lot of his time discouraging people from getting them. Kennedy says the movement was still pretty fringe when he got involved.

In the mid two thousands. He was advocating against mercury polluting rivers and contaminating fish. He says moms would approach after talks he gave worried about the mercury in vaccines. Back in episode two, we talked about those mercury concerns. There is a type of mercury used as a preservative in some vaccines, but this mercury is cleared quickly by the human body. It is not the same as the stuff that was contaminating fish in rivers. But you could

see why this might cause some people to panic. So Kennedy started looking into it because they kept hearing more and more of these stories from moms. The movement at that time, it was so tiny, really, just the people who had been injured by vaccines. I had it actually injuries, that's really I was I would say probably n the mo time, and it was having almost it was having

a zero impact on vacccine rates, on vaccine coverage. He says the movement grew gradually, people came to it as the vaccine schedule expanded, and then later when states tightened childhood vaccination laws. But Kennedy says this year has been different. You know, it's undeniable that the explosive expansion of our movement place after the pandemic. If you've been fighting against vaccines for years, then a pandemic is a great opportunity for your cause. Just think about it. The pandemic hit

in March. It's a new disease there is no vaccine. It spreads rapidly, the world shuts down. By May, former President Donald Trump announces Operation Warp Speed. It's a public private partnership meant to fast track vaccine development. And here's where the window for the anti vaccine groups opens. Trump keeps promising a vaccine by election day in November. The media, who is often skeptical of Trump to begin with, starts pointing out potential problems with that headline, the main one

being that vaccines typically take years to develop. I have no idea how somebody is proposing a shortening of the length. It's length of time it's going to take to test this whatever new vaccine there is out there for both effectiveness and safety. I'm concerned about the safety and the efficacy. These are the two criteria that are a crucial in a vaccine. Vaccine advocates and scientists appear on the news and say they're worried steps in development are being skipped.

In other words, they're putting this idea in people's heads that this vaccine is rushed and potentially unsafe safe, which is okay. Bear development time on these new vaccines was unprecedented, But this all plays right into an argument that anti

vaccine movement was already making For years. This movement has argued that safety issues with vaccines are too often ignored by manufacturers and government regulators were all in cahoots together, and here was the press and scientists pointing to what seemed like an example of this. This messaging had a real effect on people. For example, when vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris said during her debate, if the doctors tell us that we should take it, I'll be the first

in line to take it absolutely. But if Donald Trump tells us I should take that we should take it, I'm not taking it. Support for vaccines among Democrats dropped. Vaccines just became highly politicized at different points, People on both sides of the aisle were basically working in favor of the anti vaccine movement, spreading messages of uncertainty, malfeasance, and fear. At a low point last September, in the run up to the election, about half of Americans said

they wouldn't get vaccinated against COVID. This gave groups like Kennedy's a broader audience, and they took advantage of it. A report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate or c c d H says that roughly a hundred and fifty leading anti vax accounts gained more than ten million social media followers between and December, especially on Instagram and YouTube. Those and other channels have taken some steps to curb misinformation,

including removing some of the movement's biggest names. Kennedy was kicked off Instagram in February, but this hasn't really stopped the broader community of vaccine skeptics from growing. Kennedy calls this censorship in a statement after he was kicked off Instagram. He writes, quote face book, the pharmaceutical industry and its captive regulators used the term vaccine misinformation as a euphemism for any factual assertion that departs from official pronouncements about

vaccine health and safety, whether true or not. End quote. The c c d recently found that since December, while the removal of celebrity anti vactors like Kennedy has caused the movement to lose millions of followers, the growth of the rest of the network has almost entirely made up for that loss. They're just so many more groups of people whose ideas now align with anti vaccine agenda, alternative health purveyors, and Q and on conspiracy theories have joined in.

As of more and more people concerned about government overreach, the states have implemented mask mandates and lockdowns. Kennedy says bringing in these other interests has really helped the movement. He doesn't use the term anti vaccine. He talks about vaccine orthodoxy instead. I think people are saying confluences and

connections with other issues with government coersion. I'm with the erosion of our constitutional rights and of our civil rights who have come into the movement and people who are concerned with other forms of government coerce. I think people are feel like there's something happening that um, there's there are strings being pulled by invisible hands. It turns out so they're sort of our invisible hands pulling the strings,

but those hands belonged to anti vaccine groups. The c C d H says these groups have organized themselves around a master COVID narrative. It's focused on three key messages. COVID is not dangerous, the vaccine is dangerous, and vaccine advocates cannot be trusted. It's a playbook for sewing doubt and it has been used to great effect during the pandemic. We've talked before about how times of uncertainty become fertile

ground for rumor and misinformation. Well, sometimes the public health community couldn't provide us with all the answers when we wanted them. They had to take time to study things like masks and how far we distanced from one another. They sometimes messed up the messaging and created more uncertainty and confusion. And they can't say any vaccine is a percent safe and effective. Science is just an inherently uncertain thing,

especially when you're dealing with a brand new virus. In science, there are always going to be gray areas you can't combat yours. People have about COVID vaccines being unsafe or understudied by just saying, look, don't worry, these things are a percent safe. But anti vaccine groups have the luxury of dealing in black and white. COVID is not dangerous,

the vaccine is dangerous. Vaccine advocates cannot be trusted, simple right, I mean, I always say, you try and disprove to me that Bill Gates is a lizard, and there is a conspiracy of lizards to cover up the fact that he's a lizard. And it's impossible because these are non falsifiable hypotheses in the jargon, but they're basically designed to be difficult, if not impossible, to disprove. This is Imran Ahmed, the head of the c c d H. He refers

to anti vaccine groups as a really sophisticated industry. They excel pushing ideas out there that are scary and hard to disprove, but of course they also need to back up their claims with something that looks like a convincing argument. Unlike scientists, anti vaccine groups are perfectly willing to draw conclusions where there aren't any yet. They create spaces online in places like Facebook groups and Instagram stories that seem

to have every answer to your concerns. They make their arguments seem scientific by using lots of hard to part terminology, and then they offer training and education through social media tools designed to convert the merely skeptical into active anti vaxxer's spreading the message. One activist, for example, urged followers to approach new people with easy to verify facts about vaccines, like how many vaccines kids get before getting into the

more controversial stuff. The key one training module in a popular anti vaxx group said, it's a plant that first seed of doubt. Another activists wrote, quote, once we have established some doubt about vaccines, we can move on end quote. Groups even offer advice on how to not waste time on people who are unpersuadable, how to spread the vaccine debate into new groups of people, and how to end

arguments with pro vaccine people. They produced vast amounts of content that's optimized for sharing and to do well on the algorithms for social media platforms, and that's been key to their success, of their ability to weaponize the algorithms um and make the understand the dynamics, the specific dynamics of algorithms that only care about one thing. Engagement, not factualness, not public good, just engagement. We've said up for but it is worth repeating. This is not an organic rag

tag group of concerned citizens. It is a coordinated and sophisticated campaign. It's pr their message is getting through. It's the majority of people, and we we we shouldn't blame the side of science for being overwhelmed by a very well resourced industry of bad folks. Um. I do think that we've been naivea societies in not understanding that there is an organized opposition. This messaging feels especially relevant in a climate where most people agree the government has bungled

many aspects of pandemic response. There are lots of good reasons why these vaccines were able to be developed so quickly. Scientists from around the world worked together with government support, and technology was already in development for similar vaccines. But that's a more complicated explanation than the one anti vaccine groups are pushing. The anti vaxxers argue that politics and profit are being put first, and that leading vaccine advocates

have hidden agendas. For example, billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates has become a memified symbol of all this billionaire creator of Microsoft, of person with a kind of face of

an eternal student with glasses. But what if Bill Gates is actually not as simple as it seems, and now that we are presented with the very problem that Gates has been talking about for years, we will soon find that this software developer with no medical training is going to leverage that wealth into control over the fates of billions of people. In anti vaxx propaganda. You'll even see his names sometimes attached to things he has nothing to

do with. And okay, some of the Bill Gates conspiracies are pretty easy to roll your eyes at, like that he's trying to sterilize the world through vaccines and control the global population. This was literally the plot of a TV series darring John Cusack last year. But for the average person, a lot of misinformation isn't so easily debunked.

Organizations like Kennedy's are savvy. Often, the Children's Health Defense will cite accurate information from news organizations or government agencies, but cherry pick and arrange those facts so that they promote a false narrative. This is really clever because it means that if you try to casually fact check those ideas, it might appear to confirm the misinformation with legitimate sources.

For example, they claim to participate in the trial for the Maderna vaccine had become really sick after being vaccinated, but they failed to mention he quickly recovered and has actually become a vocal advocate for the vaccine. There assembling devastating information warfare from conventional ideas news articles, but when put together in the right way they can be. They can be incredibly persuasive and making people do harm for themselves, which is what what not taking a vaccine is. And

then we live a pandemic. Okay, so this group of people spreading vaccine misinformation is organized, well funded, and aided by a global pandemic and finding an audience. But that doesn't fully explain how it ends up convincing our relatives or friends to not get vaccinated. It's not like people just google anti vaccine content. Please. The way it ends up in front of our mom or our dad is more carefully choreographed than that. And how this happens is

no accident. So we believe that a lot of it starts and WhatsApp or tell gram or this type of messaging services, and it's only then from those services it is being pushed to Twitter, Facebook and other social media or the digital media. This is Simon pon Tech. He monitors social media to see how misinformation spreads as part of the Vaccine Confidence Project. In the first episode of Doubt, we heard from Heidi Larson, the head of the organization.

Simon is the guy on the ground. My background is in the study of misinformation, information, politics, and trying to understands pushing what narratives, why they might want to push these narratives. Simon says, misinformation often starts with private messaging services and then is unwittingly shared by people who aren't

necessarily part of the orchestrated campaign. When we say misinformation here we're talking about conspiracy theories like Bill Gates trying to use vaccines to sterilize people, or vaccines altering your DNA. This is stuff intended to cause confusion. One hiccup for Simon because that he knows where these messages first gained traction, but it's hard to figure out their exact origins or

who's crafting them. So it's basically sometimes we just get a new narratives that's just come out of the blue, and they just suddenly become really popular. And so, for example, more recently, we were seeing that someone is pushing in narative about COVID ending the civilization. The Vaccine Confidence Project is working to set up experimental listening tools to try and understand how misinformation travels between private and public social networks.

The hope is to set up what is essentially an early warning system to limit the spread, stopping misinformation before it has a chance to go viral. Like Kennedy, Simon points out that all kinds of groups are now jumping into the vaccine fight. For example, um, these would be people who believe in natural medicine, so they usually motivated by very strong belief that vaccines are not natural. And

it's not just vaccines that they don't trust. It's GMO and and and any other modern technologies, and they very strongly believe that is it's a kind of not natural thing and we should avoid it as much as possible. When these groups rebrand anti vaccine information, it can become

part of their platform. If you're a politician and your basis suddenly saying vaccination is an assault on their freedoms, well then it's likely you're going to start pushing that idea too, in order to stay in your voters good graces. It's now not just healthy issue. It is a very political issue. So we we kind of going out of this space where you would only have you know, two or three players. Now it's more complex, and obviously people trying to make money on it, but then people who

are trying to gain political capital here as well. There are lots of different reasons why people would want to put misinformation out there. It can be used to score political points or sell things like vaccine information classes or bogus COVID treatments. Often it has little to do with actual concern about vaccines. Sometimes people weaponize misinformation simply in order to cause division. Genuinely, they're trying to polarize populations.

So there is no common ground, there's no shared values, and people are unable to come to any sort of agreement, and that is a big problem. Simon says that misinformation campaigns are nothing new, but there's a reason why your friend or family member suddenly spouting conspiracy the areas when that was something they were never in due before. A lot of people are asking questions about the moment we're living in, and anti vaxers are just better at giving

them answers. Are we're doing a terrible job with engaging with hesitant audiences. We we just, like, I think, the minute that people express any doubt, we just put them into this bucket. All right, you must be anti vactor and and that is kind of like a stigma and people hate it. We need to say, hey, right, it's fine, it's fine. You have some doubts like I'll help you exactly the same way the antivactors are doing. That's what they're doing. Come here to join us. Will will explain

this all to you. You will get a full understanding. I don't think we're doing that. I think what we're doing is not good enough, and that that's that's that's the essence of the problem. Kennedy agrees. He says the real reason people are coming to him for answers is that they feel their concerns just are being addressed anywhere else.

You know, just an extent, anybody who asked me about vaccines has already about what aga of vaccines is already kind of laws, some faith in you know, the traditional structure of um. You should trust your doctor, or you should trust A D S D. You should trust F D A and and you should not think for yourself. This is the thing that really gets to me. There is an opportunity to address the concerns of the people in the middle, But the camp that is doing it

best is the anti vaxers. Anti vaccine misinformation campaigns are definitely sophisticated, and social media has enabled them to reach a lot of people in a highly targeted, effective and inexpensive way. But people who believe all of this misinformation, they're more open to it because they're not getting what they need from other sources. For people like Kennedy, that makes it a lot easier to win them over. So now that we've covered how this misinformation gets out there,

we're going to discuss why people believe it. Matt Moda is a professor at Oklahoma State University who studies this exact thing. He says, there are two types of people who come to believe misinformation. The first group are people who have basically already decided misinformation is true. They are instead rationalizing their first arriving at the conclusion at which they want to arrive, and then finding evidence that backs

it up. But that's thankfully a relatively small group of people. However, they have a big public reach in heart because of social media. And then there's a second group, and that one is way bigger. These people come across misinformation, often by chance and often because of that first group is spreading it. And so, you know, the key thing that we have to remember here is that because the people who create and share misinformation are rationalizing because they're very

motivated to believe a particular thing. They'll often use the language the imagery, etcetera of science. They will draw on scientific studies, they will refer to people who are experts in a particular field, who might have a doctor prefix or a PhD suffix with their name in order to build their case. And to those of us who might not follow these issues very closely. Being exposed that misinformation may be somewhat compelling, in part because it seems on

some level scientific. Matt says that a lot of people in the second group might be motivated to believe it for similar reasons to the people who create it. For example, they might also be suspicious of the government or health authorities and therefore more willing to buy in. But that's not always the case. Some people will fall prey to misinformation just by being exposed to it. This is perhaps

especially true over the past year. In a pandemic where so much is unknown, people may be willing to latch onto conspiracy theories and misinformation in order to fill that information void, in order to be able to believe something that just kind of puts the matter to rest, irrespective of its veracity. Once someone believes a conspiracy theory. It's hard to shake them out of it. Matt says, just

throwing a bunch of facts at them probably won't work. Okay, If say there's a rampant conspiracy theory circulating on the Internet and a bunch of news organizations published fact checks on that conspiracy, you probably won't change the minds of most believers, and you also risk exposing more people to the misinformation. I've thought about this a lot while making this podcast. Talking about misinformation runs the risk of exposing people to it, but it's also important to talk about

all of this in order to address it. That's why Matt says one way to fight misinformation is to make it harder to find. Social media platforms have taken steps to this effect during the pandemic. They've kicked people like Kennedy and del Brigtree off of their platform. If you make it harder for misinformation to spread, especially on mainstream platforms, fewer people will see it. I should know here that Facebook and Google both did not respond to interview requests

for this podcast. Both companies have continued to get a lot of flak for how they're handling misinformation. Facebook, for example, kicked Kennedy off Instagram, which owns but didn't remove him from Facebook itself, and they didn't remove his organization from either platform, making it easy for his ideas to still spread On Facebook. Kennedy just directs people to his organization's website. But booting people off your platform doesn't solve the whole problem.

It just limits the spread. Anti vaccine activists have already moved on to newer platforms where anyone can easily find their content, and it doesn't change the fact that people will still encounter misinformation through friends and family members post things on mainstream sites or texted to them. There was rampant rumormongering before Facebook, and that is probably never going to change. A much better way to reach people is not to fact check or to debunk, but instead to

meet them where they are. What Matt means by this is we have to figure out why people believe vaccine misinformation and then address their specific point of view rather than just apply them with facts. And to give you an example of this with the MMR vaccine, we know that people, based on our research, who are high in what we call moral purity, the types of people who view their body as a temple, who strongly value bodily sanctity who don't want to put something foreign into their body.

These people tend to be more likely to not want to vaccinate their children against MMR. And you know what we do to try to reach those people is to say, look, we totally get it. A vaccine is quite literally putting a foreign substance into your body, and we understand why that might be discomforting. But you know what else is a foreign agent entering your body and doing harm to your children. Measles, moms and rubella. Those are diseases that

we can prevent with the vaccine. This means that there actually is something we can do about vaccine hesitancy. We need to change how we think about people who have these hesitations and how we talk to them. There is no silver bullet, there's no one size fits all approach, because there's no one size fits all reason why people

accept vaccine hesitant views. I write about this kind of stuff a lot, but it can be hard to understand how people really wind up here in a place where they wonder whether Bill Gates is trying to track them, or whether the government is secretly putting out a vaccine that isn't actually safe I didn't really start to get any of this until I'm at Deborah. In mid December, I got an email with a subject that read, are

there tracking chips in COVID nineteen vaccines? So this is a well worn COVID conspiracy theory, the justice that Bill Gates conspired to put microchips into coronavirus vaccines in order to track who gets one. There are a bunch of videos floating around out there suggesting this. They all do something we've seen elsewhere in the anti vaccine playbook. Videos will mash up news footage and commentary from Bill and Melinda Gates in a selective and suggestive way. This reader

had obviously seen one of them. What struck me about the email, though, was how earnest it aimed. I run a weekly COVID Q and A at Bloomberg. We're readers right in with their questions about the pandemic, and I tracked down experts to answer them. The author of this email was a woman named Deborah Shuffler. It seemed like she was genuinely confused and looking for answers. I wrote back immediately and told her it was not true. There are definitely not tracking chips. In any COVID vaccines, And

then I asked if I could call her up? Hi? Can you hear me? Hi? Kristin, how are you doing today? Good? How are you doing? Debora is fifty. She lives in Newberry Park, California, a little town about forty minutes from l A. Debra's two kids are grown. She lives with two cats, a dog, and an iguana named Dino. Debra says, the iguana is king of the condo. Let's put it this way. The pecking order is iguana and then the

mail cat. Everybody respect those two mail cat respects like Guanna and then everybody else fleas, I mean not with fleas, but they run away when the iguanas around, they're kind of like, ah yeah. Since the pandemic started, Deborra has been extremely cautious. She's older and has some health issues, so she feels like she just can't be too careful. She doesn't order to take out or even see your kids that often. If someone has to come into her home to do her pairs or something like that, she

makes them take off their shoes just in case. And she gathers all the information she can about COVID. She keeps a running list of it in a word duck that is a hundred and seventy three pages long and counting. She admits she's a little obsessed. I'm just afraid of it. I'm just afraid of it. It's terrifying. Information is power, Yeah, it's it's a fear of the unknown. Is is pretty frightening, and when you have the information on how to counter it, then you know what to do. So for the past year,

every day, Deborah has collected information about COVID. She reads mainstream news sites like Bloomberg and The New York Times. She gets newsletters from a bunch of places like Joseph Marcola, one of the doctors that presented at the anti vaccine conference we mentioned earlier, and the National Vaccine Information Center. That's the group that hosted the anti vaccine conference, but Debora told me she thought their names sounded official. She

didn't realize the group was generally against vaccines. Debora says she does this to feel like she's doing something to protect herself. Sometimes she could sniff out bad information when she came across it, like the rumor that COVID is really caused by five get Internet that seems fake, but sometimes she would find herself unsure, which is how she

wound up sending that email to me. Early on there was talk about huh, and I guess you would call it conspiracy theory, but there was talk about Bill Gates and inserting a tracking chip in the actual vaccines, and I I did a double take on that one, thinking Wow. I was curious to talk with Debrah because the Bill Gates conspiracy seemed pretty obviously fake to me. I wanted to understand what made it seem plausible to her. Devor says the YouTube video she first saw about this let

her think about the movie Divergent. That's a dystopian sci fi film series from I call it Divergent. You can't let them find out about you. They're always watching and the first Divergent in the series, they had an injection that made people like robots and they could control them. You know, you watch movies and things and then you apply it to life. I wouldn't want to track your chip put in me. And maybe it's an irrational fear from her movie, but I just don't think that anyone

should have the right to track us. But the movie was just what god her thinking about it. Then she did some research. I saw a picture of the world's tiniest microchip, and it was the size of a grain of salt. They actually took a picture of it with salt. If it was possible to have one that's small, that means that injecting it would not be so far fetched. It's actually smaller than the microchip that you would put

in a cat. Debora didn't believe it was necessarily true, but once she saw how tiny microchips can be, the conspiracy theory seemed at least possible to her. I should say here that tens of thousands of people shared this video on Facebook. Local news broadcasts also covered the fears, and when Debora mentioned this, it occurred to me that my cats are micro chipped, and I actually have an r F I D chip implanted in my own hand

that I got while reporting on body hackers. That's another story, though, but the point is, it's not like the idea of putting microchips into living things is that outlandish anyway. Debor reached out to me and eventually also checked out snopes dot com, a website she trust the bus Urban Legends. After that, she felt confident the conspiracy was false. There's a microchip on each bile or on each inject or whichever. I've read that sense, but not in the actual shot itself.

It makes more sense to me because they want to track the actual vials or the actual shots so that they know the quality of the product. This is true. Each vaccine label does have a tracker on it in order to keep tabs on all those vaccines shipments and make sure they're not expired. After we talked, Debora says this rumor no longer bothered her on social media. You're not really unless there's an actual quotation of a study or something, you can't really be sure it's accurate, you

know what I'm saying. I try to, you know, consider the source. That's what I try to do. But the email about Bill Gates was not the last email I got from Deborah. She continued to send me misinformation. She encountered. Some of it actually concerned her. Other stuff she thought sounded fake, but figured I might find it interesting. Life almost seems like a rumor whackable for Deborah. Just as quickly she quashes one piece of misinformation, another one appears

that makes her question the reality of the moment. We're living in and all of this just makes it hard for her to decide whether or not to get vaccinated. What's interesting to me about Deborah is that she's one of those people who is perfectly in the middle when it comes to this debate. A true COVID nineteen vaccine fencitter, Debora fully vaccinated her kids and says she really trust the advice of her own doctor, but she's had some

concerns about vaccines before. Emails from Joseph Mrcola made her regret giving her kids Gardasil, the vaccine to prevent HPV, and she no longer gets the flu shot after reading something else from him, Deborah says she mainly stopped getting the flu shot because she doesn't trust drugmakers. Trusting them is a hard thing to do for many people. Sure, they make life saving medicines and vaccines, but they also

do aim to make money off of them. The second time we talked in mid February, she told me she probably would get vaccinated. The bottom line is, I have underlying conditions, so it is going to be offered to me, and I probably will opt for it because it's a pretty frightening thing. And here in California and in southern California. In my area alone, since January one, we've had twenty six deaths and it's a small area. Towards the end

of January, she sent me another Facebook conspiracy. This one featured a doctor who took a scientific paper wildly out of context and suggested people might die months after vaccination. It really concerned her. She wrote me a few times about it, saying it was the main thing making her hesitant to get vaccinated. Then she found a Reuter's article debunking it, and she had to make a call. Does

she believe the spacebook doctor or Reuter's. First of all, I had never heard of the doctor before, but Reuter's is much more how do I put it, reputable source. So I just kind of weighed the two, you know, in my mind, it it just what makes sense. In the end, Debora decided it just seemed more likely that what the video was saying was false, and her own doctor had also told her there was no reason for her to worry about getting the vaccine. In late March,

I got another email from Deborah. She had gotten her first shot. My shoulder was sore for I would say probably two days, but I was a little llergic for like maybe the first day to two days. Maybe I'm really uh more relieved, and I'll be even more so after the second one. At least this time information triumphed over conspiracy, deborra is just one person, though it's a whole other game. When you're trying to convince an entire community to get vaccinated. There's just more than what's true

or not to consider. History, generational trauma, and how we talk about science all gets folded into that conversation. I don't like to have to throw tuskegee in your face in an order for you to understand that black lives matter, and they don't have to be marching in the street to matter. They may be in a hospital that matters too. I think of what I'm saying to you, that these institutions have a history of abuse in the name, but I'm here to help you in the name of science.

Now you want me to trust this science, that's next time I'm doubt. Doubt is written and reported by Me christ and v Brown Top Foreheads is our senior producer. Molly Nugent is our associate producer. Our theme was composed and performed by Hannis Brown Special Thanks to Bloomberg editors Tim Annette and Rick Shine. Francesco Levie is the head

of Bloomberg Podcasts. Be sure to subscribe to problem Osis if you haven't already, and if you like our show, please leave us A review helps others find out about the show. Thanks for listening. To see you next time.