Rhet Qualit was just two and a half years old when he was diagnosed with leukemia. It was two thousand and Rhetina's family were living in court Madera, California. It's a little town just over the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco in Marin County. When ratt was first diagnosed with cancer, we lived in the hospital for eight seven nights. Like my wife and I traded every twenty four hours. I mean he was sick, Okay, he couldn't go home or anything. That's Carl Red's dad. Cormadera is the kind
of place you might describe as crunchy. People shop at the farmers market, the organic and many of them also choose not to vaccinate their kids. Carl and his wife, Jody knew vaccination rates were lower there. Rhet's doctors had even warned them about it. The reason Rhet's parents were concerned about this had to do with his cancer. Chemotherapy had wiped out any immunity Red had from previous vaccines and also made him too weak to get new ones.
If he caught something like the measles, he likely wouldn't be strong enough to keep receiving his cancer treatments. Carl and Jodie really started to worry about vaccination rates when Red's older sister was about to go to kindergarten, and one of the biggest fears that we had was that she might bring an illness home from school and it
might get her brother sick. When it was time for my son to go to school, it was really a concern for us to understand how dangerous would it be for him to go to school, meaning how many kids in the school were unvaccinated. The answer to that question was concerning more than six percent of Marine kindergarteners went unvaccinated, about triple the state average. This was allowed thanks to
a state rule that let parents exempt their kids. The Crawbett family solution at the time was to request that RHTT be in a classroom without any unvaccinated kids. The school obliged. We wanted to go to kindergarten, We wanted to go to school. We leant him to be a normal kid um, but it's important that you make sure that everybody around him is vaccinated also. But that was really all they could do. They couldn't protect him outside of school or even on the playground. Carl felt helpless.
You know, we had been asking the school district and parents and everybody, you know, please vaccinate your kids. There was nothing we could really do about it. Then came January. Help Officials fear thousands may have been exposed to the measles at Disneyland and Disney California Adventure last month. Most of those who got the disease were not vaccinated against it. The measles outbreak at Disneyland has proven it's a small world,
after all. Health officials now say twenty six cases in four states have been linked to visits to the park. In mid December, an outbreak of the measles that would eventually infect more than a hundred and forty people across multiple states, Mexico, and Canada have been traced back to Disneyland, the place the outbreak started. Made this news hit especially hard.
There was something horrifying about the idea that you could just be sailing down the musty waters of the Pirates of the Caribbean, singing along with all those mechanical marauding pirates and contracted disease that nobody even remembered existed. When the Disneyland measles outbreak happened, I happened to be watching the story on the news, and um, I was not one of these people that would go out and like blog or or post on Facebook or you know, like
get into the fray or anything. But it just was vira like it hit home. It was so personal to me. And I was reading this story on MPR and I went on and I responded to a news story like in one of the comments and I just wrote, I'm just blown away by the fact that my kid is not allowed to take peanut butter to school because a few kids have an allergy, but yet they don't have to be vaccinated for measles and my kid has cancer. After making that comment, a reporter reached out to Carl,
and then more reporters and more. Pretty soon, Rhett was appearing regularly in local news. I spoke with Rhett recently about that time. My parents told me that the fart from my story than I would be able to help making difference, and talking to the press was a way to do that. At the same time, state lawmakers were mobilizing to craft legislation that would do away with personal belief exemptions from vaccines and hopefully prevent future outbreaks. Soon
Rhett and the legislators would join forces. He would become the face of this bill. He's only in first grade, but seven year old Rhet Crowd made sure, he said to clear message to lawmakers considering a bill that would require children to be vaccinated before they attend public school. Thank you for making sure that's kids like me don't don't get stay at school is a leukemia. A few months after the Disney outbreak, Rhet was cancer free and he finally got his MMR vaccine, but by then they
were all in on the crusade. Carl says that the Disneyland outbreak helped to galvanize people to come out and support vaccination. It was a tipping point. Was definitely the Disneyland measles outbreak. Without question. The school where my kid goes to. When that Disneyland thing happened and we were on the news and things like that, everybody went and got vaccinated. They didn't need the law. And I say
everybody enough. But it wasn't one sided. For all of the support that the Crowd family received, there was also a backlash. The anti vaxtors came out. I mean I remember, I mean they threatened us, They threatened my kid. They I mean they they told lies, the misinformation, They all sorts of stuff right, and and it was scary. If there was one moment in time where became clear that vaccine skeptics were no longer just some irrelevant fringe group
of crunching or in moms, this was it. California is pushed to tamp down the number of people who weren't vaccine their kids. Caused vaccine skeptics to mobilize, and in order to grow, they would need to appeal to a broader audience. Their messaging at this time changed to go beyond just vaccine safety. Suddenly they were talking about choice and freedom and democracy. And this shift would bring in other groups who were worried about things like government overreach.
And one new technological innovation would allow this message to spread to people who had never before considered the safety of vaccines. That tool was social media. It would foreshadow what we're living through now, a moment it in which millions of Americans feel they do not trust the government when it comes to public health. I'm bloomberg, youth health
reporter Kristin V. Brown from the Prognosis podcast. This is doubt when the Disneyland outbreak happened, I realized that, you know, right here in the US, we have some serious public health issues as well. Maya Majunder is a health informatics researcher at Boston Children's Hospital. This is a fancy way of saying that Maya is a math person, and at the time of the Disneyland outbreak, she was a grad student at m I T. She focused on studying emerging
infectious diseases around the world. The news of what had happened at Disneyland was sort of a call to action for her. I wanted to dig into the outbreak because it might offer clues to a mystery. Measles was declared eliminated from the US in two thousand by the World Health Organization. They thanked vaccinations for successful eradication, but there were more than six hundred cases. So how was it that suddenly this disease was making a comeback. That's what
may I wanted to find out. Now, let me back up here for a second and say that the overwhelming majority of Americans vaccinate their kids. The CDC says that which is the last year that their state of for more than ninety person of kids got their MMR shot, polio shot, Cappatitis B shot, and chickenpox shot. Even Andrew fields infamous MMR study didn't impact national vaccination rates all
that much. But as Maya and her team began to crack into the numbers, they started to see that national and statewide data obscured what was really happening with vaccination rates. On a smaller scale. Using a whole lot of fancy maths, Maya's group was able to show the vaccination rates among the people who were exposed to the measles in the Disneyland outbreak were way lower than national averages might suggest. The vaccination rates in the communities affected by the Disneyland
outbreak were likely in the ballpark of fifty. Maya would keep on with this kind of research. Years later. Her team would collect county level vaccination rates from forty three states for school year the year of the Disneyland outbreak, and they found that while some counties had really high rates of vaccination and others rates were super low, almost half of the counties they looked at had vaccination rates below I think that was really eye opening for us.
We had certainly many suspicions that this was the case, but it was really I think I opening to be able to see it visualized in a map, just how diverse the vaccination rates were at the county level across the United States. If you're in a community that has a vaccination rate for something like MMR at less than and you're an at risk kid like Rhett, that is a very scary scenario. Might seem like a lot. It's
still the vast majority of kids. But this comes back to an idea that we've discussed earlier in this series. Vaccines take public trust and co operation in order to work. Exactly how many people need to be vaccinated in order for a particular vaccine to work depends on how contagious of virus is and how effective a vaccine is in preventing it. Take the MMR vaccine, perhaps the most controversial
vaccine before the pandemic. The MMR is actually highly effective at preventing measles, mumps, and rebella, but measles is also extremely contagious, So for the MMR to prevent the spread of measles, it requires more than ninety five of kids to be vaccinated against it. But once you look at the numbers, then there's the question of why people aren't vaccinating their kids, and this can get complicated. It's not just because of social media or conspiracy theories or all
of the confusing ingredients that are in vaccines. In fact, it might not really be about any of those things at all. Individual beliefs about vaccines are often rooted in a person's identity and worldview. For example, the vaccine for HPV, which was introduced to the US in two thousand six, quickly became extremely controversial, in part because it's a vaccine to prevent a sexually transmitted disease that is given to
preteen girls. Religious communities were among those that objected to it because they didn't want young women to see it as a licensed to go have sex. Even outside of those groups, many parents felt that way it was just uncomfortable to sexualize their preteen daughters. One of the things that I've discovered over the years is that there are lots of different reasons for vaccine hesitancy, and they usually emerge in different ways in different populations, and vaccine hesitancy
for different diseases looks different. At the time of the Disneyland outbreak, there was a whole lot of other things going on in our culture that might lead someone to question vaccines. Clean living was becoming a thing, and people were paying a lot of attention to everything they put in their bodies. Third wave feminism was encouraging moms to take back power and how they chose to raise their kids. By this point, misinformation about vaccines had also gone mainstream
and even become trendy. Former Playboy Bunny Jenny McCarthy wrote a book blaming the MMR vaccine for her son's autism and quickly became the celebrity face of the movement. She pushed vaccine misinformation on talk shows and magazine spreads. She even appeared ringside with the w w E to promote an organization that falsely claimed vaccines cause autism. Together, the tag team of w w E and Generation Rescue Can and Will lay the SmackDown on a his happen what.
There was now a sizeable body of scientific research debunking the connection between vaccines and autism, but that didn't seem to matter. More and more people were questioning the safety of vaccines. Maya's research into the outbreak helped confirm what people had already suspected. Vaccination rates were dropping among some groups of people, and now it was clear that this
could pose a real threat to public health. This threat is what moved Rhet and his family to take the stage and lobby for this new bill to ban exemptions in California. And this would kick things up a notch. There's been a lot of changes to um the anti vaccine scene, at least since I started almost eight years ago. We're saying more groups organizing around issues of civil liberties and the idea of vaccines as issues of freedom or
vaccine choice. This is Amelia Jamison and I am a doctoral student at Johns Hopkins University where I study online health misinformation and how it can be used to exacerbate social divides. Amelia has been studying health misinformation for a long time. She started out as an anthropology student at the University of Maryland Center for Health Equity doing field research on vaccine hesitancy, a lot of it focused on
the African American community. There's a big moment in my career where I feel like I realized the imports of online misincussion, and that was after the election, when we were scouring a data set about a Russian Twitter troll. Trolls and we were able to find a failed campaign where they had tried to use vaccines as a wedge
issue to polarize Americans on this issue. Amilia says that these trends first started cropping up after the Disneyland measles outbreak, and this is where we really saw this coalescence around the idea of vaccination as a civil liberties issue. I spent I read thousands of tweets over the trajectory of
the Disneyland measles outbreak. Never published this stuff, but I think we try to figure out what was happening and what kind of discussions are happening, And so I think Disneyland is really important because it drew a lot of attention to this issue that had kind of fallen lay low. Amilia says, this moment actually drew out a lot of public support for vaccines, but the other side of the
argument gained momentum. To the antivaxers kind of felt endangered or imperiled, and then they started to mobilize and help organize themselves in ways that they could pro test this bill. The way vaccinations were talked about on social media also started to change. We followed uh different Facebook pages and a lot of them had different names, like Michigan for Vaccine Choice or California for Vaccine Choice, and so each
at the state level. I think vaccine choice became this new talking point or away to reframe this conversation away from a facts based is this real? Is not real? Especially because there was, in my view, increasing evidence that vaccines don't cause out to them, so that older idea had shifted. The target expanded beyond arguing about the safety of vaccines to questioning whether vaccine laws infringed on people's personal liberties. It was a harder point to argue against.
It began to change the profile of when anti vaxxter looked like it wasn't just Marin Moms anymore. It's hard to really measure how many anti vaxxers there are out there, but most experts would tell you that their numbers are still pretty small. Keep in mind, when I use the phrase anti vax are, I'm referring specifically to activists who are making a concerted effort to spread misinformation about vaccines.
But even though their numbers are small, they're very loud, and their messaging reaches people who are maybe just a little bit skeptical of vaccines or distrusting of doctors or the government, and these people are where the problem is. The numbers of these people in the middle appear to be large and growing. Often they are also primed by
other points of view to believe in conspiracy theories. Public health officials and the small numbers of extreme hardcore anti vaxxers are basically locked in a battle to win these people over. And these people don't ever need to refer to themselves as anti vaxxers for that battle to be lost. All they need to do is decide to not vaccinate their kids or not to vaccinate themselves against COVID nineteen. Amelia says, one big reason why this movement has continued
to grow is that it has strong leadership. There's this idea that anti vaccs are all these parents and they're like mothers with children. But I think it's important to recognize that there are these there's leaders in this or a movement, and some of them represent organizations that have been pretty active for quite some time actually, and they're very influential, things like the Actually I don't want to say their names because I don't want to controw Okay,
Amelia doesn't want to name names, but I will. Which is getting at here is that a large amount of vaccine misinformation is actually spread by a small number of people. One study Amelia did in nineteen found that more than half of Facebook advertisement and spreading misinformation about vaccines were funded by just two anti vaccine groups, including one lead by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Yes that Kennedy. These messages seemed like they were homegrown, grassroots social media posts, but
in reality they were carefully orchestrated advertising campaigns. The people behind these posts were well organized and heavily funded, and
also just really savvy. I think the one strategy was really understanding their audience and their audiences needs, so they're able to craft a message that's appealing, but then also use online tools such as targeted advertising to reach that audience really effectively, so that with a few hundred dollars you could transform and advertisement into thousands of impressions, which means you're reaching people who want to see your cause, and then you can link them to off platform websites
that you've created. Um, we see people using this just to share more information, but also to fundraise or to sell products or promote events, so after they see that ad, they can be led to a variety of different sites for variety of means. Amelia found the efforts by Facebook
to crack down on vaccine misinformation sometimes backfired. Pro vaccine content would more often get taken down the way social networks approach This has changed since the study, especially amid the pandemic, and we'll get to that in the next episode. But for a long time, these groups were very good innovating. Whatever restrictions social networks put in place to stop them, misinformation ran rampant. It was hard to tell sometimes what
was true. Amelia says. The other thing is that these powerful, well funded anti vaccine groups, we'll just change their messaging if it runs into roadblocks. And I think it's also interesting to realize that as we move towards fact checking as a way to limit this kind of information of freedom of a vaccine freedom or vaccine choice argument is less able to be fact checked, right, it kind of escapes that realm because it's not about facts. It's more
about a belief or an opinion. It's not just that they changed their messaging. These groups have also co opted the language of other social movements. And then like in that way, you can also position yourself in this trajectory of other great um civil rights battles throughout history, like women's liberation or um civil rights. So so you can see some of that rhetoric actually reappearing. You could see this happen in real time in the aftermath of the
Disneyland measles outbreak. The bill Rett had supported was making its way through the California legislature. At that time. A pair of researchers found that Twitter hashtag organizers were publishing nightly trends and tips videos on YouTube containing instructions on what to tweet to advance the cause. But soon the bill was advancing out of committee and becoming that much closer to being passed. When that happened, the researchers found
that the more pseudoscience the messaging was suddenly changing. It was becoming more about health freedom and choice. As the messaging coming from these highly organized anti vaccine groups shifted and broadened, other groups also belonged onto the issue. So add together one part well funded anti vaccine group, one part homegrown concerned from parents, and a chorus of outrage from anti government sympathizers and you get a giant, confusing
info dump, which is exactly the point. In general. I just feel like the anti vactors haven't really learned how to leverage online tools to reach this audience that is receptive, and they're doing it much more efficiently than some of the people who are working for public health. And this messaging can be really compelling. It is easy to fall
for it. Amilia says at times in her research, she's even found herself confused by all the misinformation, like I've looked at a lot of it, and it's pretty effective. Like that, I've sometimes they're like, oh wow, I didn't know this, and I go down my own grabbit hole trying to figure out, like what's true, what's not? Where did this evidence come from. I'll admit, while working on this podcast, I have a time has found myself in
that situation too. One night, I got so caught up reading about the chickenpox vaccine that I completely burned my dinner on the stove. But at the end of the day, Amelia and I both start from a place of trust in vaccines and medicine and science, but mistrust of romant and drug companies is just so widespread at this point, and if that's the place you're starting from, you're probably more receptive to ideas that anti vaccine groups are pushing.
And I think one of the big arguments for the anti vaxus community is they're like, I've done my research, I'm an informed consumer, And they have spent a long time, probably more than the average person, looking at information and research about vaccines. Because it's true, vaccine side effects do happen, some of them are pretty severe. It's just that on the whole, we believe that vaccines are safe and effective
and it's best that everybody gets vaccinated. But I think it's really challenging to combat that and be like the information like, because you've taken this upon yourself to do this research, and it's I think it's really hard to tell people like, no, don't do that, just trust in whatever we tell you to do. Amelia remembers back in November she went to an anti vaccine rally on the Mall in Washington and it was cold, and there was just a bunch of moms there with their kids, and
there was just a whole day's panels. Weren't the speakers, and they were up there talking about different things but if you walk through the crowd, there were a lot of people who had made t shirts or posters about their vaccine injured child, And I think that's where you start to see the human face of this movement. Amelia says that as someone who spends our time researching Internet misinformation, this human side isn't something she gets to see. It
really her home for her. So there really are people who are struggling with something and they're looking for answers, and they're not finding them through traditional sources, and this is a community that's giving them answers. Okay, so I've got a big, fat disclaimer for you here. We've made what some people might view as a sort of controversial decision. There's a big question about how to report on this stuff without accidentally spreading misinformation. I cannot stress enough that
these ideas are sticky. Talking about them at all does risk sending someone else down the rabbit hole. And as we have discussed in this series, the media has played a big role in the past in spreading misinformation about vaccines. But it also seemed hard to discuss how people come to hold their beliefs about vaccines without talking to those people about what they think what follows is not an endorsement of those beliefs. I cannot say this enough. Vaccines
are overwhelmingly safe. This isn't even a point of debate. There is no debate. What this is is a recognition that this is a confusing topic. I'll also say that it was really tough to get people who are truly against vaccines to talk to me. There is a real sense among this group of people that they have been shamed and mocked by the press. But a group of parents in New Jersey, one dad and a bunch of
moms were nice enough to chat with me. It was striking to me how similar a lot of their stories were. Now we're going to hear from just one of those moms. I have four fool. Let me start. I have four children. So for me, it started out when I had my first and it took us a long time to have our first um and you know, suddenly I was looking at his first year of life. He was getting twenty six vaccines. She means twenty six doses of different vaccines here,
which to me was like, that is insane. This is Kristin McNair. Until recently she lived in New Jersey, and actually used to be a brand strategist for pharmaceutical companies, but now she's studying to be a nurse in North Carolina. She told me she's really fascinated by the human body, and in particular, the immune system. And she immediately brought up a point you hear from parents both in the
anti vaccine community and sometimes outside of it. It was the sheer number of vaccines that first made Kristen do a double take. So I went back and I said, I'm a healthy person. I didn't have all of these vaccines. Why is it now that my children are required to have so many more vaccines than than they used to? But it was really important for me to understand the why behind it. UM. I have a really awesome pediatrician and we talked things through and I said, well, what
are the ones that are required? Why are the ones are not? Do I have to do it on your schedule? Um? And he wanted to know where I was coming from. Why, And I said, you know what, putting so many things into my child's body doesn't make a ton of sense to me. That aren't necessary. Um. And if they aren't necessarily explained to me, why for Kristen this is where the doubts started. In the past few decades, the number
of vaccines that kids get basically tripled. When I was a kid, you definitely didn't get a chicken pox back scene, You just got the chickenpox. Parents had parties to expose their kids to the chicken pox intentionally so they could just get it over with already. Originally, vaccines were intended as a way to treat epidemics like smallpox. It was only over time that they became a regular part of public health programming and gradually grew to include diseases that
are less deadly. Nowadays, kids get vaccines for illnesses that don't really seem that serious to people. But it's important to remember that even the chickenpox does kill some people, it can also cause serious complications like shingles later in life. But I heard similar stories like this from a lot of the moms I talked to. The number of vaccines
gave them pause. A lot of researchers I've talked to in reporting this podcast also mentioned this that hesitancy has grown as a vaccine schedule for kids also has and those changes have occurred alongside other trends in our society. Like fucking preservatives and food and questioning medical advice more generally, I mean, we all google what our doctor tells us to get a second opinion. Christen says our first pediatrician was unwilling to have conversations about vaccination with her. This
is another common theme. She had questions and she felt like she couldn't get answers to them. In vaccine skeptic Facebook groups, often parents inquire about pediatricians that won't force vaccines on them. This is a tough balancing act for doctors. You want to steer your parents towards the best decision possible, but not totally ice them out. Kristen asked people in a mom's Facebook group if they knew of any doctors who would be willing to hear her concerns. She eventually
found one, so we would have those conversations. I had a child that had allergies, so that created issues also, So ultimately, what I ended up do mean was saying, Okay, these are not vaccines that I'm willing to give my child for this reason, A, B and C. And then with these vaccines, let's talk it through m M R Nisle, Moms and Rebella it's three vaccines in one I wasn't comfortable with that. Kristen was actually different from the rest of the New Jersey parents I talked to, and that
she was willing to give her kids some vaccines. One pair and I talked to actually moved from New York to New Jersey, which has more relaxed laws, partly in order to avoid vaccinating their kid. Kristen talked with her doctor about a few concerns. She says she was worried about mercury in the MMR vaccine, even though it doesn't contain mercury, and she was conflicted on whether it seemed like there was some kind of link between the MMR
and autism. She told me then when she was pregnant with our first child, she remembers those conversations circulating and I remember watching very specific a video and this is when I was doing my research, you know, thirteen years ago now of a woman who are twins, and you know, you watched those twins developing up until the age of two two and a half, and they both went and got the vaccine on the same day, and you see a week later that her one child is starting to
act completely different and then you do see is it the vaccine? I don't know. She wound up giving the MMR to all of her kids, just split into three separate vaccines. There isn't really good evidence to support this idea, but she wanted to wait and see if her kids would have an allergic reaction to each of the individual shots. There's concern from experts that messing with the prescribed vaccine schedule leaves kids vulnerable to illness for longer and could
lead to more spread of disease. But it's better that parents vaccinate their kids on their own terms rather than not at all. For parents like Kristen, breaking up multi shots into individual ones helps them feel more in control. I think being informed and not just going in and saying, okay, this is the protocol that we give babies when they're born and for the next eighteen years of their lives. That didn't make sense to me. I'm their mom. I feel like I should know why it's happening. I'm not
against vaccines at all. I think there's a place for certain ones, but I also think some of them are not things that would give my children. And there's three or four that I feel very strongly about that the side effects, for the potential side effects or the things that are written on the warning label, the risk of that to me is just not worth it. The other thing that was different about Kristen was that in her own life she actually had an example of why people
should give vaccines. One of my friends chat children, Um had brain cancer, and we were talking about how his immune system is so um suppressed. And when she goes out in public, she doesn't worry. She worries about her son, but she also worries about the people who have made choices that she can't control. And she wasn't necessarily talking
about vaccines at that time. It was just things that they let their children do or so here she is trying to protect your son um, who was at the time was very sick, and they were living who he was exposed to. And I had this thought to myself that was, Okay, I'm having this discussion in my head about what vaccines I'm going to give my children. But at the same time, I don't want to ever put somebody else's children at risk because of a decision that I made. And I do think it's part of our
responsibility to take care of everybody within reason. I think you have to be comfortable with it. One thing that became clear from my conversations with Kristen and all of the New Jersey parents was that efforts to take away their choice to decide whether or not to vaccinate their kids really spurred them to action. New Jersey tried to tighten its vaccine laws in and Kristen was out there protesting.
You were seeing vaccinators and non vaccinators coming together um to go because they all kind of felt the same way whether whatever your choices are, it should be my choice. On June, California Governor Jerry Brown signed rhet Spill into law. It was only six months after the Disneyland outbreak. Rhet and his campaign had one people told me that my story was one of the main reasons to bill passed so quickly, and that is really exciting to me that I was such a big part in helping something that
was so important. Rd as twelve. Now, he's been cancer free for years and he's mostly just a normal middle school kid, but he says the past year has him thinking about all of these things again as a cancer survivor, his risk of having severe illness if he contracts COVID nineteen, it's still a bit higher than other kids this age. Now that COVID has happened and we have vaccines and that a lot of people aren't like say that they won't be getting either, that there they don't trust it.
It's now another it's an issue again, and I think that now I am thinking about it and how if we don't it's a lot of people who don't get vaccinated. It's not gonna end this pandemic. And that's a problem. The opposition from anti vaccine advocates wasn't enough to stop RT spill. New outbreaks of disease would spur other states to follow California's lead. There were more than twelses of the measles that year. Washington, New York, and Maine all
placed new limits on vaccine exemptions. This made vaccine skeptics grow louder than ever. Oregon in New Jersey would both fail to pass their own versions of new laws. At the end of vaccines were clearly in the headlines again, but the debate about vaccines reached a larger scale than ever, and this is something that vaccine proponents and skeptics like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Agree on I Think you Know, It's undeniable that the explosive expansion of movement place after
the pandemic. Next time on Doubt, anti vaccine extremists pounced on the pandemic to take their movement mainstream. 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 Levy is the head of Bloomberg Podcasts. Be sure to subscribe to Prognosis 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, See you next time. The pretty Part in Them
