Anti-Vax America: The Complete Series

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Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode.

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I'm Stephen Monticelli.

I'm a journalist in Dallas and an occasional cool zone media contributor.

You may have seen in the news lately that there's a major measles outbreak centered in Texas.

It started back in January of this year in the West Texas county of Gaines, and it has since spread to at least two other states.

As of this recording, Texas has reported over 700 cases associated with the measles outbreak.

New Mexico has reported over 60.

Oklahoma has reported over 15.

And there are other states that have also reported measles cases that may or may not be linked to this outbreak.

It's the first major measles outbreak in a decade, and it's already taken three lives.

Two unvaccinated children, the first of such deaths in more than 20 years, and one adult.

All were unvaccinated.

At the root of the outbreak are low vaccination rates, which took a sharp downturn after the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, as dubious vaccine skepticism and opposition to vaccines, both mandatory and in general, became a partisan political issue.

It is no coincidence that the low vaccination rate in Gaines County, where the outbreak first began, corresponds with deep red Republican politics.

Measles is a sort of canary in the coal mine.

It's one of the most highly communicable diseases and consequently is among the first to appear in communities with low vaccination rates.

An outbreak in California about a decade ago was eventually stemmed when the state legislature banned vaccine exemptions for school-aged children.

This action spurred response and gave a shot in the arm to a nascent coalition of vaccine skeptics and outright anti-vaccination groups that had previously struggled to get political traction.

By 2020, such groups had gained meaningful amounts of influence in red states like Texas and Oklahoma.

Then came COVID-19, and suddenly a disparate set of groups big pharma skeptics, wellness influencers, health freedom libertarians, and conservative religious groups, to name a few, coalesced in a formidable political force under the banner of the Republican Party, whose politicization of the COVID-19 pandemic served as a sort of ideological cement to unite them.

The logical conclusion of this development is represented in the avatar of RFK Jr., a longtime vaccine misinformation peddler who now sits atop the highest federal government health bureaucracy.

a perch from which he continues to spread debunked anti-vaccination tropes.

Like a proverbial fox in the hen house, RFK Jr.

has repeatedly downplayed the importance of vaccines in the battle against measles and has refused to distance himself from long-debunked anti-vaccination arguments such as that vaccines cause autism.

His influence and the influence of the vaccine skeptic movement, of which he is a central figure, can be seen in responses from local West Texans who have opted for junk palliatives like vitamin A or measles exposure parties.

over vaccination.

The viral spread of anti-vax ideology threatens to pitch us back 100 years in time when thousands of children and adults either died or were disabled every year from diseases like measles, polio, and smallpox.

Research into the side effects of vaccines has repeatedly shown that the risks associated with vaccination are far lower than the risks of an infection, particularly for vulnerable populations like young children, the elderly, and people with suppressed immune systems.

Some people genuinely cannot get vaccines, such as certain newborn babies, and thus are at higher risk should an outbreak of a deadly disease occur.

When 95% of a population is vaccinated in an area, diseases can be entirely removed from circulation.

And that's indeed what happened to smallpox and, for a time, measles.

But the downward trend in vaccination rates, supercharged by the marriage of right-wing politics with anti-vaccination beliefs of all stripes, means that our collective immunity is at risk.

This week, I will be your host on It Could Happen Here as I take you through a five-episode mini-series called Anti-Vax America.

Through interviews with public health officials, vaccine scientists, medical professionals, and historians, I will explore the ongoing measles outbreak and how it serves as a microcosm for where we are, how we got here, and where we could go if anti-vax beliefs continue to become mainstream in the United States.

In the first episode, I will cover the origin of the measles outbreak in Texas, its deadly consequences, the varying responses from public health officials at different levels of government, and the consequence of misinformation being spread at the national and local level.

In the second episode, I will unearth the deep roots of anti-vaccination belief in the United States, how it's changed over time, and why it's basically become synonymous with right-wing politics in our current day.

In the third episode, I will explore the overlap between anti-vax beliefs and the belief in supernatural healing and miracles that is common among a particular movement of conservative Christianity that has tied itself closely to President Donald Trump.

In the fourth episode, I will untangle the twisted history of eugenics and how it's influenced public health and vaccination attitudes, as well as the historical echo of eugenics that can be found in RFK Jr.'s Make America Healthy Again agenda.

And in the last episode, I'll consider what could happen in the United States, what could happen here if vaccination rates continue to plummet and vaccine skeptics like RFK Jr.

continue to dictate public health policy.

But before we get there, a quick outbreak.

Gaines County, The epicenter of the West Texas outbreak, is a largely rural place, home to oil field workers, farmers, ranchers, and several Mennonite communities.

Politically, it's very conservative.

It sits on the Texas-New Mexico border, about 360 miles west of Dallas, where I live.

The largest city in the region, Lubbock, is two counties over.

Lubbock is home to 260,000-plus people and has the largest hospitals in the area.

It was at one of those hospitals that the first child died of measles in over two decades.

As the number of cases in the region began to increase, Lubbock became a central hub for both treatment and the dissemination of public health information.

Weeks before RFK Jr.

or Texas Governor Abbott spoke on the issue, local public health officials and medical institutions were on the front lines in Lubbock.

So my name's Catherine Wells and I am the director for Lubbock Public Health.

And Lubbock Public Health is the city and county county health department in both the city and county of Lubbock, Texas.

I've been in this role for about 10 years now.

We're about 75 miles from Gaines County, which is where kind of the epicenter of this measles outbreak is.

Let's maybe go back all the way to the day that you know it sort of began, the first case came out in January.

So can you take us a little back to that day and what was going on in your world?

And, you know, what were you doing?

And how did you hear about this first case and what your reaction was?

Yeah, we'll actually need to take a couple of days kind of before the announcement.

I first found out about the possibility of measles

that Friday, the 28th.

I have all my dates messed up,

but it's that Friday before the first case was announced.

One of my staff came and told me that we had two children that had been admitted to our local hospital.

So we have the children's hospital for this whole region.

People come, you know, over 200 miles to come to the children's hospital in Luppock.

And she mentioned that there was two children.

The physician thought it might be measles that they were going to send for testing.

So in public health, measles is so rare that even sending somebody for testing is required to be reported to public health.

That physician thought it was measles.

We kind of waited over the weekend.

And then that Monday and Tuesday, I started hearing some rumors that there were multiple measles cases down on the ground in Gaines County, which was interesting.

People were calling and saying, you know, I heard this rumor.

Have you heard this?

And I'm like, nope.

And then all of a sudden,

those two cases or those two cases both tested positive.

And then when we went and started talking to the families and learning more, we realized that those rumors about measles circulating in Gaines County was true.

And there were reports of, you know, multiple individuals that had been sick and measles had probably been there for at least a little bit of time.

And then when we got the confirmed cases, that really just put everything into

really...

you know, moving very quickly, trying to really figure out what was going on for measles.

So at that time,

it was flu season.

And so were you all, was your office preparing, you know, or working on anything else at that time when you had first heard about this first testing and, you know, started hearing about these rumors?

Yeah, I mean, we had increases in flu.

We had increases in COVID.

We actually had some birds that had died that had tested positive with the new avian flu.

You know, just that's a busy time of the year for public health with lots of different reports coming in, lots, multiple reports of pertussis.

And it's not unusual that we have a physician wanting to test for measles

ruling out.

I mean, it happens a couple of times a year, but in my entire career, every time that happened, it always been negative.

So I was kind of thinking that it was one of those cases, especially that Friday afternoon.

Like, oh, this is just a doctor, you know, you know, just wanting to rule something out.

You know, it's probably flu or something else going on with those children.

And so, when you had gotten that confirmation, it was verified that those cases had indeed been measles.

I mean, what was going through your mind at that time?

I mean, that was like,

you know, people have always talked about we're kind of on the edge of seeing more measles outbreaks in the United States.

And it was really kind of an oh, no, oh, crap moment of, wow, this is in our backyard.

Is our department, you know, ready to take this on?

And then also reaching out to Gaines County, which has a much smaller health department and being like, what can we help you with?

Do you guys know what you need next?

You know, they don't have a communications person.

So it was like my staff writing the press release.

for Gaines County to send out to make the notifications about the first measles cases.

So it was just really, what can we do to help them immediately and figure out what the next steps would be with that.

So, since January, cases have been on the rise.

And so, we're in a different place now than just two cases.

Can you just tell us a little bit about where things are now in Lubbock and how medical authorities have responded to the outbreak?

So, initially, you know, all of the cases were

in Gaines County.

The only exposures we were seeing outside of Gaines County was when somebody was seeking medical care and was sitting in, like, say, a waiting room at a physician's office, and then they were exposing other individuals.

But after a couple of weeks, we started seeing spread outside of Gaines County.

So we were seeing more and more cases in those surrounding counties.

And then we started getting cases in Lubbock.

That's 75 miles away.

Over the last three weeks, we've really seen the cases in Lubbock.

increase.

You know, we originally just had a handful.

Now we're up to 41 or 42, and that number will be updated again tomorrow.

So just seeing more and more spread of measles.

And the concern is that public health can't necessarily trace those back to a specific case.

So people that have gone out to the store or gone to a public place have now contracted measles.

So tell me a little bit more about, you know, what efforts have.

taken place and what sort of initiatives have been put into place as measles has has spread?

What does that look like from Lubbock Public Health or any of your partners?

Yeah, so

ours is really, the first one was getting testing set up.

Originally, when this started, all of our testing samples had to go to Austin, which is about a five and a half hour drive.

So working with the State Health Department to get testing capability up here in Lubbock.

so we could quickly identify people.

The next one is really about education, providing information to the physicians' offices, the hospitals about measles, because we hadn't seen it in 21 years here.

So just think about how many physicians have been trained over the last 21 years that never saw a measles case in their residency.

So getting them to feel comfortable about what the signs and symptoms are and really making sure that we were notifying or that they were notifying public health and getting people tested and then doing that contact tracing.

And then the other big ones, vaccinations.

You know, there's two ways to prevent measles.

You know, one is the vaccination that's going to protect you.

And then the other one is avoiding being exposed to measles.

So really getting more and more people vaccinated with pop-up clinics and then running a measles vaccination clinic here at our health department.

Can you tell me a little bit about what the response?

in particular to you know the vaccination clinics being set up has been you know have a lot of people shown up for that?

Has it drawn a lot of new people that are trying to get their children vaccinated?

It's a mix.

I feel that our vaccination clinic here at our health department's been pretty successful in that we're getting people every day coming in to get vaccinated.

And we're seeing people that

were hesitant prior that had chosen not to vaccinate their children kind of with the idea, well, I've never seen measles or mumps or rubella.

So why give my child a vaccine if that doesn't exist?

Now that measles is circulating in the community, they're changing, you know, that thought process and are coming forward to get vaccinated.

Some of the rural clinics have been a lot harder to get people to come in.

I mean, they've stood up clinics and only a handful of people have come in to that clinic that day.

So real mixed response, but I think as public health, it's important for us to be offering the MMR vaccine with as few barriers as possible.

So you were in this position during the COVID pandemic and when that began and all throughout it.

So can you tell me a little bit what it was like working in your role as a public health official at that time and then also maybe whether things are any different today?

Has anything changed?

I mean, I think our community did fairly well.

throughout COVID, given, you know, everything that went on.

I've always believed in just being being honest and talking about what I do know, what I don't know, what the science is showing.

And I think that helped our community get vaccinated and take some of the precautions during COVID.

And I'm kind of taking that same, you know, thought process and that same, you know, leadership style as we're dealing with measles out here.

You know, with measles, it's...

a challenge.

I think people are paying attention to it because it's really impacting children.

Whereas we didn't see

that same impact with COVID.

It's frustrating because we know what the solution is.

When COVID showed up,

nobody in public health and the medical community

knew exactly what COVID is.

With measles, we know what we're dealing with.

And we also have a known solution, which is a vaccine.

So it is frustrating that people are choosing not to vaccinate still.

The other challenges is during COVID, all of our other work for public health got put on hold here with measles.

Our health department's still expected to do all of our other jobs and respond to a measles outbreak, which is really stressful on staff.

I can completely understand that.

And in terms of some stressful things, I understand that just from doing some background research and reading up that your office or maybe even you yourself were subject to some threats or some sort of pretty extreme reactions during COVID.

Is that the case?

And is that still happening?

Thankfully, it's not happening.

During COVID, we did have some very strong opinions and some threats, mostly around when the children's vaccine was released and why we were promoting that.

We've not seen that with measles, which is very good.

I don't want any of my staff to be threatened.

I mean, you always get these random posters on people that post on social media, but they're not even individuals from our community.

Got it.

Okay.

Well, I'm glad to hear that genuinely.

That is a positive change, I suppose.

That is something that's a good difference.

And also good support from our pediatricians and the medical community has been very good and outspoken about the importance of getting vaccinated, which has helped us.

So, where do you see things going from here?

Do you think we'll continue to see more cases?

I know that they're on the rise,

but do you think that will continue?

Or do you have other concerns about potentially other outbreaks of diseases that had been kind of pushed out of circulation coming back?

Yeah, all of the above.

I think in Gaines County in particular, we don't have a good understanding of where we are in the epidemic, like how many vulnerable individuals in that community are still remaining.

So we don't know how long that initial epicenter outbreak is going to last.

We're also seeing, you know, as measles gets into a community, it is so infectious that it is going to find all of those little pockets of people that are unvaccinated.

And that's what we're seeing here in Lubbock County:

you know, measles taking hold and finding little pockets and public health's trying to go put out, you know, little fires, trying to make sure that we figured out who's been exposed and who's at risk.

You described, you know, how this is an incredibly infectious disease, and it is, you know, finding all the pockets of people that are vulnerable or not vaccinated.

And so I'm wondering if you can, you know, if there are any examples or, you know, specifics that you could share about how the outbreak is impacting communities or particular communities.

Has it resulted in disruptions in school for children?

Has it

caused any other sort of notable breakdowns breakdowns or sort of pauses in day-to-day regular activity?

In Lubbock,

those breakdowns have been more minor.

That a child, say, that's unvaccinated, has been exposed, and that's requiring that child to sit out from school.

So there is that

element that they're missing those important days of education.

Our bigger impacts here have been around daycares.

We had a large outbreak, or large in the sense that we've had now eight children or eight individuals associated with one daycare, all test positive with measles.

So that's meant that, you know, children have had to be sent home from daycare, which then impacts parents' ability to work and

also impacts, you know.

you know, daycare along with, you know, the number of students there, children having to go home that have been exposed, working a lot to get additional doses of vaccine into a daycare.

So it both impacts the public health system, our healthcare system, because kids need health, but then it also impacts parents because if your child's not in daycare, a parent can't go to work.

So those have been the bigger disruptions.

And then disruptions in our healthcare system that we're now having to do a lot of screen, like you call to make an appointment.

for the doctor and it's kind of like COVID.

Have you been exposed to measles?

Are you vaccinated?

They're asking all those screening questions before people enter our healthcare facilities.

In terms of sort of interactions with the state and their response to this, can you tell me a little bit more about how the state of Texas has responded and partnered with local authorities?

Yeah, so we have a

good working relationship with the state of Texas.

Texas has to do everything differently.

So we kind of have this decentralized system where the state and locals both kind of have their own authority, very independent at the county level.

But the state has offered support to us.

They've helped me bring in temp nurses to be able to assist with vaccine clinics.

They're paying for some additional staff to answer phones.

So we're getting that kind of support.

And then I meet with the state, you know, regularly about what's going on in Lubbock, how Lubbock fits in the context of the rest of this outbreak, and

how we're going to work together to move forward.

We always thought of measles as an airplane right away.

So we would see

somebody travel to a foreign country, come back to the United States and maybe pass measles to a couple of people in their household.

This outbreak is not that.

We're seeing transmission within a community and it's making measles more of a car ride away.

And that's concerning because we have individuals that are susceptible to measles either through too young to be vaccinated, not vaccinated, or some other immune compromised state.

So it's just concerning that we're going to see more outbreaks spreading out into the United States, especially as we're moving into spring and summer where people are traveling and driving through communities that we could just see kind of explode everywhere,

which is my biggest fear.

Yeah, absolutely.

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

Yeah, and I'm talking, I mean, I've talked to many health department directors across the country.

And,

you know, one of the values of local public health is that, you know, all of us local health department directors and those staff, we're coming from these individual communities and our goals to keep our communities safe.

And it really doesn't matter what's happening at the federal level.

It's about

your community, your connections, watching out for this diseases and then convincing your community to do the right thing.

And luckily, we have, you know, 2,500 health departments across the U.S.

and that is their goals.

And hopefully people will continue to trust their local directors.

That is a great point.

And I'm wondering if, is there anything else that you can speak to on

how the distrust that is there can potentially be bridged or, you know, specific things that y'all have done to try to sort of rebuild that trust or establish that trust?

I mean, with us locally, it's making sure that we're talking to our local news and our local reporters and answering the phone call when a concerned parent calls and going through the information we know.

and utilizing our local our local physicians to tell them the story.

Because I think if you can still see it at the local level, you know, people can really understand that this is a risk and really make that right choice to get the vaccine or if they've been exposed to stay home.

We'll hear more from Catherine in just a moment, but first, as we are obligated to do, here's some ads.

So, I do understand there's quite a bit of skepticism towards vaccination, and that's certainly going to be a subject that we're exploring in this podcast.

And at least by the numbers, it shows that in places like West Texas, and particularly more rural areas, even more than a place like Lubbock, that there's pretty low vaccination rates.

Several counties are below the, I guess, what was it, 95% threshold that really helps bring measles out of circulation.

And so, you know, I'm kind of curious, you've been there for over a decade.

And do you have a sense of sort of what the key drivers of vaccine hesitancy are and why so many West Texans choose not to get their children vaccinated?

You already mentioned, you know, the fact that it hasn't been seen for so long.

So it's sort of out of sight, out of mind, maybe.

But are there other drivers that come to mind for you?

Yeah, I mean, I don't think, you know, West Texas is unique from many other communities in the United States.

You know, people are very much influenced by social media and some of our media outlets.

And there's a lot of, you know, scare tactics or misinformation around vaccines and, you know, anything from autism that's been debunked so many times about vaccines causing autism, other misinformation about what's in vaccines and the risks of vaccines.

I mean, every medical intervention, every medication has some type, you know, of risk, but vaccines have been long studied.

And especially when you're looking at the MMR vaccine, we've been using this for 50 years.

And that's why we don't have measles cases or hadn't had measles cases.

But people have really bought into a lot of that information out there.

And it's really hard to combat that.

I've gone and read the stories and I can see how people feel missing, pick up on this, but I just don't know from a public health standpoint how we combat it.

Right, right.

It's a very difficult problem, a challenge that has a long history and has a lot of different factors.

And things are so complex.

It's not a one-for-one.

It's just, it's been a challenge.

But I think out here, I always felt like we hadn't been.

impacted as much from some of these anti-vaccine movements.

I think post-COVID, people, you know, have a mistrust in government or wanting to listen to mandates or recommendations or whatever we call them.

We're just seeing that more and more and that hesitancy

to come through and trust both government, trust the medical system are all concerns.

And that all contributes to these lower vaccination rates.

In a media environment rife with misinformation about vaccines and public health, Catherine's perspective is refreshing and a bit heartening.

Local public health officials like her have done great work to raise the alarm around viral outbreaks, but they're up against a problem that is much bigger than what they can address on their own.

And that's the widespread belief in bogus theories, be they scientific or religious, that undercut the proven science around vaccines.

Much of this misinformation comes from places far from West Texas, like the anti-vaccination group Children's Health Defense, which RFK Jr.

previously led.

It is widely recognized as a major source of online vaccine misinformation, including the debunked allegation that vaccines cause autism.

After the death of a six-year-old child of measles in March, Children's Health Defense released a video interview with the parents, who said they still would not take the vaccine and wouldn't recommend it to other parents.

Here's a clip from that interview in which the Mennonite parents speak in their lowland German dialect.

So when you see the fear-mongering in the press, which is what we want to stop, that's why we want to get the truth out.

What do you say to the parents that are rushing out panicking

to get the MMR for the six-month or failure?

Because they think that child is going to die of measles.

She says they would still say, Don't do the shots.

There's doctors that can help with with measles.

They're not as bad as they're making it out to be.

And also the measles

are good for the body,

for the people.

Because the measles are

infection.

Yeah, they get infection out and

doing

immune system.

They're trying to say that the measles actually helps build the immune system in the long run if they get the measles now.

The immunity that they get from the vacuum from the measles.

But some of what public officials like Catherine have been trying to combat is coming from other medical professionals much closer to home, such as Dr.

Ben Edwards, who appeared in a children's health defense video and has promoted anti-vaccination misinformation on his own podcast, including the recommendation to take vitamin A to treat measles.

an approach that has resulted in several cases of vitamin A toxicity among children diagnosed with measles measles in West Texas.

During their interview with Children's Health Defense, the Mennonite parents of the first child to die of measles actually said they were working with Dr.

Ben Edwards for their treatment.

One video that went viral online showed Edwards, visibly infected with measles at the time, treating patients with measles.

and inhabiting spaces where individuals who were not infected with measles were present.

And this elicited widespread condemnation from the medical community, quite unsurprisingly.

Nevertheless, it demonstrates the sort of attitude of certain medical professionals in the area who have used their platforms and their credentials to sow doubt about the importance of the vaccine.

Making matters worse, RFK Jr.

praised Dr.

Edwards as a, quote, extraordinary healer just one week after Edwards was seen in that video treating patients while himself infected with measles.

While While anti-vaccination beliefs have certainly gone viral in the aftermath of the COVID pandemic, they are by no means new.

Practitioners like Edwards and advocacy groups like Children's Health Defense have been peddling their snake oil for decades.

But the roots of anti-vaccination belief run even deeper than that.

In the next episode of Anti-Vax America, I'll do a deep dive into the history of anti-vaccination beliefs to understand the origins of them, how they've changed over time, and why they've become become embraced in mainstream right-wing politics, which is a change from the sort of bipartisan and even sometimes progressive nature of some anti-vaccination skepticism.

But until then, thanks for listening.

I'm Stephen Monicelli for CoolZone Media, and this is Anti-Vax America.

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Welcome back to It Could Happen Here and to episode two of Anti-Vax America.

I'm Stephen Monticelli.

Last episode, I explored the ongoing measles outbreak that started in West Texas.

and has since spread to several states across the nation.

A big part of that story is the underlying anti-vax beliefs that are fueling a decline in vaccination rates across the country and how the leader of our federal health bureaucracy, RFK Jr., has helped seed, spread, and embed those beliefs into policy.

But behind all that is a deeper history of anti-vaccination beliefs in America.

And while it is undoubtedly the case that the COVID-19 pandemic brought anti-vaccination beliefs to the forefront of American politics, opposition to vaccines is not new.

It's about as old as the technology itself.

It actually goes back to the founding colonies and even the early 1800s when you had people kind of peddling various what they called botanicals as substitutes for mainstream medicine.

That's Dr.

Peter Hotez.

He's a doctor in Houston with a long and impressive list of credentials.

I'm a pediatrician scientist.

I have an MD and PhD, and I'm a professor of pediatrics and molecular virology at Baylor College of of Medicine, where I'm also co-director of the Texas Children's Hospital Center for Vaccine Development and also dean of our National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine.

And my interest is a lifelong interest in developing new vaccines, particularly vaccines that the big pharma companies have no interest in making because they're vaccines for diseases of poverty.

We've made a low-cost COVID vaccine that reached technology, reached 100 million people in India and Indonesia during the pandemic, and now vaccines for parasitic diseases that occur only among the world's poor, and that's a lifelong passion of mine.

The first vaccination was created in 1796 by Edward Jenner, who was able to build on prior methods of inoculation.

And he was able to create a vaccine for smallpox, one of the deadliest viruses in human history.

Within a matter of decades, vaccination had become widespread in the Western world.

The United Kingdom passed the Vaccination Act of 1840 to provide free vaccinations to the poor, and then passed another act in 1853 that made it compulsory for infants, and another in 1867 that extended the compulsory vaccination requirement to 14 and added penalties for non-compliance that could be cumulative over time.

Resistance to these laws began in 1853 with a few riots in towns across England, and this eventually formalized into the Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League, which distributed literature likening vaccination to a monster and lobbied the British government to change the laws.

Their efforts actually proved successful, and a new law was passed in 1898 to remove cumulative penalties and create an exemption for what they termed conscientious objectors.

which is the first time that term had ever been used in British law.

A parallel anti-vaccination movement made similar strides in the United States, and one of the leaders of the British anti-vaccination movement even came to the United States to help co-found one of the anti-vaccination leagues in America.

Several states also passed compulsory vaccination laws in the United States, spurring the American anti-vaccination leagues to fight in the legal courts, in the Court of Public Opinion, and the legislatures across the country.

And they successfully repealed compulsory vaccination laws in California, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Utah, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.

But opposing compulsory vaccinations was only one part of the strategy of these early anti-vaccine organizations.

Another key plank, which may sound familiar to those of you who follow the news, was the promotion of alternative remedies such as homeopathy, which were quite popular at the time among certain sects of medicine.

Now, these movements didn't neatly fall across political lines in the way that they largely do today.

Progressive and conservative anti-vaccination activists were tied together by strongly held beliefs in things like quote-unquote medical freedom, sometimes philosophical beliefs around freedom, their spiritual faiths, or in some instances, even anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

Consider Eugene Carl Düring, a philosopher and economist considered one of the founding fathers of German anti-Semitism.

who argued that Jewish doctors were behind a conspiracy to drum up business for themselves by promoting vaccination to healthy people.

These are all tropes that live on to this day and that someone like Dr.

Hotez knows all too well.

And because of his advocacy of vaccines, he's often been a target of it.

I'm a scientist, a vaccine scientist, a Jewish vaccine scientist.

So they've got me doing this in secret with George Soros or one of the Rothschilds, and I'm doing it at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

I haven't even been invited to Davos.

While some of the progressive strain of the historic anti-vaccination movement has lived on in the stereotypical hippie naturalist lifestyle culture that is popular in parts of the Northwest, that strain has long been fringe and is kind of extinct at this point.

It had its heyday after the 60s and 70s when a lot of alternative therapies and medicines were being promoted and embraced in the West.

Most of the anti-vaxxers of that variety today have largely been drawn towards more right-wing values and have been subsumed by the sort of politics that defines the larger Make America Healthy Again agenda.

The way Dr.

Hotez sees it, there's a direct line between these old anti-vaccine movements and the modern-day Maha movement, which combines anti-vaccine beliefs with alternative medicine and libertarian mindsets around health freedom into a sort of single bundle of sticks.

There's an older thread that goes back to colonial times, and it has to do with libertarian concepts of what's sometimes called health freedom, medical freedom.

Hey, you can't tell us what to do about our kids.

And now we see that today, right?

You know, with, and this is coming partly out of the health and wellness and influencer industry.

And that's why you get, you know, ivermectin, which does absolutely nothing for COVID, or hydroxychloroquine, which has done nothing for COVID.

Or when you heard Mr.

Kennedy talk about vitamin A or as a preventative or butesinide, a steroid, which does nothing, or clerithromycin, an antibiotic does nothing, whatever they can buy in bulk and then sell at a profit.

That's, you know, that's, that's a lot of the wellness and influencer industry.

And so what you have now is that converging thread around bad and libertarian politics.

And that's what you saw.

I think after we started to debunk the false links between vaccines and autism, they needed a new thing.

And this is when you saw here in Texas this rise in parents requesting vaccine exemptions around this banner of health freedom, medical freedom.

And here's where it became really tough to talk about because it got adopted by the Republican Tea Party in Texas.

And so anti-vaccine groups started getting PAC money, political action committee money, to lobby or educate the state legislature about health freedom, medical freedom, and even provide money for candidates to run on anti-vaccine platforms.

But before we explore the contemporary anti-vaccination movement further, we have to return to history.

And before we do that, we're obligated to take a quick ad break.

Anti-vaccine movements appeared to be gaining steam in the late 1800s and early 1900s, but their progress largely halted when a 1905 U.S.

Supreme Court ruling upheld the authority of states to pass and enforce compulsory vaccination laws.

The continued spread of viruses like smallpox, the deadly Spanish flu pandemic, and the outbreak of World War II all spurred advancements in vaccination research and programs to ensure widespread vaccination.

And as this science continued to advance, more and more states began to mandate vaccines for public school attendants, as did employers for their workers.

By 1963, 20 states required children to be vaccinated before going to school.

And by 1980, every state in the nation had a similar law on the books.

And as the decades went on, the incidence rates of several diseases dramatically plummeted.

By 1980, smallpox had been eradicated.

But along the way, there were things done in the name of medical science that would undercut the great strides made during that period of time.

Things that ultimately sowed the seeds for some of today's vaccination skepticism.

I think it's important to understand

that not all suspicion regarding medicine and doctors, you know, research,

that not all of this resistance is totally irrational.

It's based on experience.

That's Dr.

Michael Phillips, who you may recognize from prior episodes of It Could Happen Here.

He's a historian of race, eugenics, and right-wing politics in Texas.

Going back to the time of slavery, enslaved men and women were often the unwilling, involuntary subjects of medical experiments.

We have, for instance, a man named Marion Sims, and they actually put a statue up of him in Central Park in New York that's been taken down since, who was credited as the father of gynecology.

There was a problem in that era before the discovery of germ theory, where whenever women would give birth and there would be vaginal tears, doctors would often sew up the wounds and then there would be an infection and the woman would die or get seriously ill or infertile.

And the infertility and death of slaves meant a loss of property.

So enslavers were very concerned about this issue.

Marion Sims at some point, discovers that if you use silver thread, silver sutures, when you operate on women who have had these vaginal tears, that the infection doesn't happen.

Now, he wanted to prove this.

He wanted to perfect his technique.

So he did it on enslaved women.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Black Americans lagged behind whites in terms of vaccination rates.

According to a systemic literature review on the determinants of vaccine hesitancy among Black Americans, vaccine hesitancy in Black communities is rooted in a troubling history of unethical medical experiments.

And it persists to this day due to how this group of the population still experiences discrimination, racism, mistreatment, and overall health inequity.

The most famous case of the medical abuse of marginalized people, and it's really entered the folk culture to the point that when I was teaching American history classes at a community college, all the students had heard about this particular atrocity and it was called the Tuskegee Experiment.

What actually happened is that African-American men who got sexually transmitted diseases would go to this medical clinic that had been established and the doctors with this grant wanted to see what the trajectory of syphilis would be if it was untreated.

So these were people who already had STDs and they were given a placebo.

They were given basically a sugar pill rather than penicillin or any other ameliorative care.

And the doctor's mission in their minds was let's find out if syphilis progresses in the same way with African American men as it does with white men.

And so they wanted to see because they knew that syphilis will, untreated, eventually attack the central nervous system.

You'll have seizures, blindness, any number of terrible side effects.

So they would go to the doctor, they would get the placebo, and syphilis will go into remission.

And so the patient wouldn't have the benefit of medical knowledge about how syphilis progresses would think the pill made it better.

And then they would ask them to return and the doctor would come and then he'd record the damage that was happening to the patient's body as the disease progressed.

And this went on until the 1960s and they published results with no

professional repercussions.

And one thing they proved is that syphilis attacks black people the same way it does white people.

If you leave it untreated, the same symptoms develop.

The nervous systems of black and white people are the same, but they published these results in a claimed medical journal, and the backlash was not immediate.

Eventually, you know, it became a scandal.

So that really did strike a chord in the black community

that I think to this day, we've seen skepticism about white medicine.

And again, there's valid historical reasons.

RFK Jr.

and the anti-vaccination movement have seized on this particular historical atrocity to sow doubt about vaccines among Black Americans more generally.

Children's Health Defense, the anti-vax group previously led by RFK Jr., invoked the Tuskegee syphilis study in an anti-vaccine film called Medical Racism: The New Apartheid.

But before we talk a bit more about children's health defense and the more recent history of the anti-vaccination movement, we've got to take another ad break.

Black Americans aren't the only population group that organizations like Children's Health Defense have targeted in recent years.

For decades, the anti-vax movement has sought to recruit the parents of autistic children to their cause by way of the argument that vaccines directly cause autism.

Incidentally, one such parent of an autistic child is Dr.

Hotez, whose 2013 book, Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel's Autism, directly targets RFK Jr.'s long-held belief about the link between autism and vaccines.

It actually came about after

a year of discussions with Robert F.

Kennedy Jr., explaining to him the evidence showing vaccines don't cause autism.

And finally decided to write it all up in a book, and it's about my daughter.

So, you know, I wear two hats as a vaccine scientist, but also wound up going up against anti-vaccine groups because I do have a daughter with autism and intellectual disabilities, and now she's an adult.

And essentially, there's two major threads in the book other than telling the story about Rachel and her family.

And one is the overwhelming evidence showing there's no link between vaccines and autism.

And even within that, there's a lot of subcategories because what happens is anti-vaccine groups keep switching up the concern about a specific vaccine.

And when it gets debunked, then they just switch it up to something else.

I call it biomedical whack-a-mole or moving the goalposts.

So the original assertion came out of the late 1990s.

The false claims that it was the MMR vaccine, the measles-mumps rubella vaccine.

And that was actually published in a biomedical journal called The Lancet in the UK.

The paper was retracted eventually because it was shown to be false.

And also the scientific community responded with large epidemiologic studies showing that kids who got the MMR vaccine were no more likely to acquire autism than kids who didn't.

And similarly, kids on the autism spectrum were no more likely to have gotten MMR than kids not on the autism spectrum.

That should have been the end of it.

But then our friend Robert F.

Kennedy Jr.

came on the scene in 2005 and wrote an article in Rolling Stone magazine claiming, okay, if it's not MMR, it must be the thimerosol preservative that's in vaccines.

And that was also retracted and thoroughly debunked through large epidemiologic studies, even non-human primate studies.

Then it switched up again to spacing vaccines too close together.

We have to green our vaccine ecosystem.

And you saw celebrities like Jenny McCarthy or her husband Jim Kerry walking around in green t-shirts.

It was all phony baloney.

And that was...

debunked and then it was alum in vaccine.

So it became this kind of exhausting exercise.

And each time we were able to successfully refute it.

Founded in 2007, Children's Health Defense represented a formalization of late 20th century anti-vaccination resistance.

Not unlike the anti-vaccination leagues of the late 19th and early 20th century, Children's Health Defense peddles dubious cures like homeopathy and promotes conspiratorial narratives like The Great Reset, which claims that billionaire Bill Gates and others have used the COVID-19 pandemic as a part of a plan to make America a Marxist.

The idea that vaccines cause autism is a part of a larger claim that vaccines can cause injuries among those who receive them, and that our understanding of these injuries is far less than what the science shows.

This notion gained traction in the 1970s and 1980s, when controversy erupted regarding the DPT vaccine for diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus.

A sensational film called DPT, Vaccine Roulette, drew an erroneous link between the vaccine and illnesses of some children who received it.

Two parents of children who received the vaccine formed the National Vaccine Information Center, which exists to this day and was a major source of COVID-19 misinformation.

The controversy around the DPT vaccine led to lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers, leading many of those manufacturers to stop producing the vaccine by the end of 1985.

Because of this, Congress passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act in 1986, establishing a no-fault system to alleviate pressure on vaccine manufacturers and provide an avenue for victims of a vaccine injury to be compensated.

As Dr.

Hotez describes it, a lot of this is overblown.

Yes, there are individuals who can have reactions to vaccines that can cause issues, but the studies around DPT and the notions that it caused these illnesses that these parents were concerned about actually showed that there was no connection.

Nevertheless, it is a reality that some people may face some sort of complications and we can't dismiss that.

But when we stack it up against the side effects of disease and one of those being death, well, it's a pretty easy comparison to make.

Yeah, it's going to be so important to keep up

the education about vaccines.

And one of the things that I've done has been preparing these infographics, which I initially did with a guy named Bill Marsh at the New York Times, who's this brilliant guy who does all these cool graphics for the New York Times.

And he had this really interesting idea that we published in the New York Times in 2020, where you create a box representing 10,000 kids, and two boxes aligned side to side.

One box is what happens if 10,000 kids get, say, for instance, the MMR vaccine versus

the other box, 10,000 kids getting measles.

And, you know, the ones getting the MMR vaccine, you see these tiny little pinpricks of very rare side effects like

allergic reaction or febrile seizures, one in 3,000, that sort of thing.

So maybe there's a tiny little pinprick representing, you know, 3 or 30 kids, as opposed to measles, which, you know, is 20% of kids hospitalized and measles deaths.

And these are large red and black boxes.

I think those kinds of things are helpful because I think one of the problems is the NT vaccine guys, what they'll do is they will exaggerate the frequency of rare, rare side effects and simultaneously downplay the severity of the illness.

And we even heard that before the two deaths, you know, you heard all this rhetoric, oh, measles is just like a benign illness.

And now we've got two deaths, right, here, here in Texas of nice school-aged kids that never had to lose their lives

because the parents, you know, were taken in by the disinformation machine.

The contemporary rise of anti-vaccine rhetoric in the U.S.

can also be tied to the political climate of the early 21st century.

Figures like Congressman Ron Paul, for example, have capitalized on the growing sentiment that government should not interfere with individual medical decisions.

With increasing distrust in government, particularly during the Bush administration, vaccine hesitancy began to align with broader libertarian and some conservative ideologies.

The idea that the government should not mandate personal medical choices further gained traction with the election of President Barack Obama in 2008, adding fuel to the anti-vaccination fire.

And the anti-vax movement began to dovetail with the booming alternative health and wellness industry that eschews Western medicine in favor of natural medicines and holistic approaches.

And often this includes some sort of spiritual element.

This convergence is crystallized in modern figures like Vani Hari, also known as the food babe.

who is a conservative wellness influencer.

She's aligned herself with RFK Jr.'s Maha agenda and promotes the standard goop-like fare, but with a right-wing edge.

The American food industry, for example, or big pharma, for example, are poisoning us, but also you shouldn't get the flu vaccine.

Despite the best efforts of scientists like Dr.

Hotez to debunk key claims that motivate the modern anti-vaccination movement, it has only gathered steam in the last few decades.

In recent years, a number of states have passed new laws allowing for personal exemptions from vaccines.

And because of Dr.

Hotez's public involvement, he's had a front row seat as anti-vaccination beliefs have become part and parcel of Republican politics.

You know, as a physician scientist, the last thing I want to talk about is politics, right?

I mean, I feel that every American has a right to their political views.

That's embedded in our history and our Constitution.

But how do you say don't adopt this stuff because it's going to be so detrimental?

But that's what happened

with the formation of anti-vaccine groups in the 2010s in in texas you started to get the steep rise in parents requesting non-medical exemptions that their kids could get out of being vaccinated for school and it was particularly strong in the same places where people were refusing covet vaccines years later especially in in conservative rural areas of west texas east texas the vaccination rates continue to be strong in our cities of the texas triangle dallas where you are and houston where i am, and San Antonio, and Austin.

But, you know, in the more conservative rural areas of West Texas, East Texas, that's where you saw big declines in kids getting vaccines.

And once you go below a certain threshold, roughly below 90%,

and bam, that you start to see breakthrough childhood infections.

And usually the first one you see is measles.

You can ultimately get all of them, but measles is the first one you see because it's so highly transmissible.

But Texas is not alone.

While immunization rates certainly have plummeted in Republican states faster than they have in Democratic states, immunization rates have fallen in most states since the pandemic.

But there was another event over half a decade before social distancing and vaccination cards became household concepts that also informed the Republican Party's embrace of anti-vaccine politics.

This was a particular viral outbreak of measles in California, one that ultimately spurred policy changes that reverberated across the country.

It started happening in the 2010s and really ramped up after there was a large measles epidemic in California, of all places, on 2014, 2015.

And the California legislature shut down vaccine exemptions.

They said, okay, from now on, you want to send your kids to school.

The kids have to be vaccinated.

And I supported that and it solved the measles problem.

But then it produced this health freedom backlash in states like Texas, also Oklahoma, and very very much a red state phenomenon, red being Republican, blue being Democrat.

And that's where you saw

this rise in vaccine exemptions.

You started getting anti-vaccine groups forming.

They were getting PAC money, political action committee money.

And I saw that as really dangerous because now,

rather than being sort of small, underfunded groups, they now had the backing of a major political party and everything that goes along with it in terms of influence and

impact money.

And this gives them a lot of bandwidth and a lot of political clout.

And it's so self-defeating, but there you are.

And so now we're at the point in Texas where we have over 100,000 non-medical exemption requests of various sorts.

That's a lot of kids.

And this doesn't say anything about the homeschooled kids in Texas.

I'm told that we may have as many as 700,000 homeschooled kids, but you might want to document that.

And I don't think we have any idea the percentage of those kids that are not getting their vaccines because they're homeschooled.

Private schools in Texas have significantly lower vaccination rates on average.

And the numbers among homeschoolers, while not precisely known, are likely just as bad, if not worse.

Texas just passed the largest school privatization scheme in the nation through which parents will be subsidized by the state to send their kids to private schools schools or to homeschool them, meaning vaccination rates among school-aged children will likely continue to fall.

The prevalence of homeschooling among left-leaning crunchy alternative types has also contributed to the shift towards right-wing politics as the homeschool movement has deliberately tried to recruit those families and push them towards right-wing politics.

The complete partisan politicization of vaccinations has made communicating the risks of low vaccination rates far more difficult for people like Dr.

Hotez.

How do you thread that needle and say, look, everybody has a right to their political views.

I'm not going there with you.

That's your right as an American citizen, but don't adopt the anti-vaccine stuff because it's so dangerous for your health and the health of your loved ones, the health of your kids.

But it's a tough needle to thread.

And as a result, I, you know, will often, even though I try to bend over backwards, explaining, I don't care about your politics,

for their convenient purposes, I'm treated as a a political figure and portrayed as a cartoon villain or

a scientist in white coat plotting nefarious things.

They have this crazy concept out there they call plandemic.

It's not a pandemic, it's a plandemic that somehow I've been involved with or that I'm profiting from vaccines and secretly working for pharma companies, even though it's the opposite, right?

I make low-cost vaccines that actually showed we could bypass the big pharma companies.

And some of it gets outright absurd.

I mean, there's this whole thread on the internet that says that I'm not even a real person, that

I'm actually being played by Jack Black

and that he's paid for by the CIA.

And it's got these amazing forensic analysis of close-ups of my teeth with Jack Black's teeth and all this and profiles and things.

I mean,

the funny thing is,

the sad thing is the crazier the conspiracy, the faster it seems to travel.

These sorts of conspiracy theories would be laughable if they did not have deadly consequences.

And unfortunately, this sort of public health-focused conspiracism is not new.

In the late 1800s, several Canadian doctors, such as Alexander Milton Ross, insisted that vaccines were the true danger, not smallpox.

Others argued that British doctors were promoting vaccinations to poison poison the French-Canadian community due to nationalistic conflicts.

If you were not in a coma during the COVID-19 pandemic, these ideas should sound familiar.

And in 1920, at the tail end of the deadly Spanish flu pandemic that killed somewhere between 17 and 50 million people worldwide, the Commissioner of Public Health in Seattle, Dr.

Hiram Reed, was dealing with a nasty outbreak of smallpox.

The year prior, the Washington state legislature, facing pressure from anti-vaccination activists, allowed for students to avoid vaccination requirements if their parents objected, effectively ending mandatory vaccination.

Hiram, frustrated with the ongoing resistance to his attempts to vaccinate the public in Seattle, vented in a 1920 annual health report, quote, the number of unvaccinated persons in this city is large, the city being a hotbed for anti-vaccination, Christian science, and various anti-medical cults.

And it is difficult to enforce vaccination, Reed wrote.

For those who are unfamiliar, Christian science is an offshoot of Christianity that was formed in 1879 in New England, and by 1936 was the fastest growing religion in the nation.

Christian scientists typically avoid medical care and rely instead on their belief in the healing power of prayer.

On the next episode of Anti-Vax America, I'll explore the intersection of conservative Christianity, its belief in spiritual healing miracles, anti-vaccination beliefs, and vaccination hesitancy.

We'll talk about how a very influential strain of conservative Christianity that is highly political and has tied itself with Donald Trump is also influencing people's attitudes about vaccination.

Until then, I'm Stephen Monticelli, and this is Anti-Vax America for CoolZone Media.

Thanks for listening.

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The reviews and ratings are in, and Ice Cube's Big Three is the surprise hit of the summer.

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Sounds like you need close all tabs from KQED, where I, Morgan Sung, Doom Scroll so you don't have to.

Every week, we scour the internet to bring you deep dives that explain how the digital world connects and divides us all.

Everyone's cooped up in their house.

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If you are a truly engaged activist, the government already has data on you.

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Listen to Close All Tabs, wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Stephen Monticelli.

I'm a journalist in Dallas and an occasional contributor to CoolZone Media.

And this is episode three of Anti-Vax America, a special five-part series exploring anti-vaccination beliefs in the United States through the lens of the West Texas measles outbreak that has since spread to several other states in the nation and claimed three lives.

One of those lives was the daughter of a man named Peter, a member of a Mennonite community in West Texas.

For Peter, the death of his child was basically God's will.

He did an interview in which he described that if it's God's plan, you know, that is basically what he has to accept.

But he also continued to oppose vaccines, and his wife said that they wouldn't recommend them to other parents.

Now, Mennonites have been singled out in a lot of the coverage about this measles outbreak, given that the outbreak has centered in their community in West Texas.

And there's been a lot of pushback with regard to the idea that Mennonites, broadly speaking, are opposed to vaccinations.

There's nothing explicit in their theology or worldview that opposes vaccinations on principle.

But these are individuals who hold strongly held beliefs regarding their religion, regarding their theology, and what they believe is right for them to do for their families and for their communities.

It's not merely a few sectarian Mennonite communities in the United States that are hesitant to vaccinate their children in this way.

It's actually a much bigger problem among what we could call, you know, some people might say mainstream evangelical Christians.

Others might specifically refer to it as non-denominational charismatic Christianity.

But no matter which way you cut it, there is a clear and observable relationship between conservative Christianity and anti-vaccination beliefs.

Now, as a journalist in Texas, I've done my fair share of reporting on conservative Christianity, particularly the highly politicized strains of it that are popular in the Lone Star State.

and in North Texas where I live.

I didn't grow up in one of these communities.

I'm an outsider.

So to help me unpack how conservative Christianity became so intertwined with this sort of anti-vaccination movement, I brought in a special guest with whom you may be familiar.

Hi, I'm Garrison Davis.

I write about politics, extremism, and how much fun it is to be in the 21st century for CoolZone Media.

So, you know, in terms of what I hope to hear from you, I mean, let's go back to your upbringing.

Tell me a little bit about the community you grew up in and the sort of religious system that you were brought up in.

Yeah, so I grew up in a non-denominational evangelical community that was largely, at least on like the leadership side, was transplanted from Texas to a, well, not a small town because it's actually the biggest town in the in the province, but a

relatively medium-sized city, I guess, in Saskatchewan.

Definitely an interesting mix of like Canadian customs matched with the whole Texas vibe, but definitely the type of like Bible Belts, post fire and brimstone Christianity that came out of Texas was like the dominant form of Christianity, which was like preached from the pulpit and like influenced all other life choices beyond just.

your Sunday morning service or your Saturday night service or your Wednesday night service or your Tuesday morning service,

etc.

So let's dig a little bit more into the character of it.

So, you know, in Texas, we've got, you know, a wide variety of congregations and subsets and non-denominational Christianity is absolutely the fastest growing flavor of Christianity, not just in Texas, but in the United States.

There's some good research about this.

And some people describe it as evangelical.

Some people describe it as charismatic.

Sometimes both both of those descriptions are accurate.

There could be some differences between these types of churches.

Some of them are focused a lot on things like prosperity, gospel.

Others hew maybe towards more Southern Baptists-esque style of preaching and theology.

And some really lean into maybe more like Pentecostal-style beliefs in...

miracles and supernatural power of God to directly intervene in people's lives and things like that.

So, you know, how would you characterize your church and the community that you were a part of?

Like, you know,

was it common for people to talk about spiritual healing or sort of those miraculous interventions?

Totally.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, it was, it was kind of like a Christian chili.

We certainly had some prosperity gospel elements.

You had some like Southern Baptist elements, certainly when it comes to like social views.

But yeah, no, like the spirit healing aspect, huge, huge.

People will get like healed during services.

People would like faint and pass out.

They would like bring in preachers from the States who would go on these big like tours where you're, you know, both trying to like recruit people and then also like offer, offer these like miraculous healing services during these like, you know, five hour long sermons.

So yeah, certainly a Pentecostal element was.

pretty dominant, combined with like, you know, focus on the family type stuff, some Southern Baptist stuff.

That makes sense.

I mean, that tracks with what I expected and the sort of things that I see around here.

Maybe you're familiar with Kenneth Copeland.

Kenneth Copeland is,

how do I say this?

So the main pastor of the church I was from is the uncle of a pastor in Oklahoma who used to run a church called Church on the Move.

And he is very close personal friends with Kenneth Copeland.

And I think I've seen Copeland a few times in person, like dinners and stuff.

He was a pretty regular figure.

He, I believe, preached at the church a few times.

I was younger, but I know my dad's met him through work because my dad worked for the church.

And yeah, so no, very, very Kenneth Copeland-y vibes.

Well, that makes sense because Kenneth Copeland, you know, he's not only the wealthiest pastor in the United States, but he's he's one of the most influential as well.

And definitely in North Texas, where his home base is.

He's got a big church in

Tarrant County, and I've been to his annual convention, which is a

special time.

So I totally understand the vibe that you're talking about then.

And it also illustrates the vast reach of someone like Kenneth Copeland for it to be all the way up in Saskatchewan.

And like the interconnectedness, because like...

The pastor of my old church is American, born in Texas, is currently in America because he's in hiding from Canadian authorities related to a series of court cases and criminal complaints about abuse in this church.

So

he's currently fled and is in hiding somewhere in the U.S., hiding from His Majesty's Royal Court.

Incredible.

Yes.

He's also my step-grandfather.

I'll get back to my conversation with Gare here shortly.

But first, an ad break.

So, before we go any further, we need to talk a little bit more about Kenneth Copeland.

So, he's the wealthiest and one of the most influential pastors in the United States, perhaps the world, but he's also a highly political one.

He's affiliated with the Charismatic Christian Movement, which is one of the fastest-growing, if not the fastest-growing, Christian movements in the United States.

And early on, he lent his support to Donald Trump in Donald Trump's first campaign in 2016.

Three years before that, in 2013, the church led by his daughter, Terry, which is called Eagle Mountain International, was at the center of a measles outbreak.

At the time, the church and its leaders were criticized for preaching against vaccinations.

And even as they set up vaccine clinics at the back of the church when things got really bad, they continued to speak out against vaccinations in this and implying to their flock that they need to place their faith not in medicine but in prayer and in God.

And when the COVID-19 pandemic was first kicking off in America, Kenneth Copeland spoke of the disease as a sort of tool of Satan, but he actually called for vaccinations, interestingly enough.

I execute judgment on you, COVID-19.

I execute judgment on you, Satan.

You destroyer, you killer, you get get out, you break your power, you get off this nation.

I demand judgment on you, I demand, I demand, I demand a vaccination to come immediately.

Yes.

But Copeland's belief in spiritual healing and his ties to the Trump administration seemingly led him to quickly return to his old antics.

He preached that COVID would be over soon because God would destroy it.

COVID-19!

COVID-19!

I'm blowing!

The wind of God!

The wind of God!

On you,

you are destroyed forever,

you are destroyed forever,

and you will never be back.

Thank you, our God.

Thank you that you are our God.

Let it happen, let it happen, cause it to happen.

Cause it to happen.

Over the course of many sermons, Copeland compared the virus to the flu.

He suggested people who attended his services could be healed in person.

And asserted that the president's opponents had, quote, opened the door for the pandemic with their, quote, displays of hate against him.

Later that fall, with the pandemic fully raging across America, Copeland still held his annual conference in Fort Worth, Texas.

In August of 2020, a television news report showed that no one at the conference was wearing a mask.

And in September 2021, Copeland begged his viewers to help him fund the purchase of a new private jet that would allow him to avoid travel restrictions that were still in place around COVID-19 and requiring vaccinations.

He compared those vaccination requirements for flying to the satanic, quote, mark of the beasts.

By the time that I attended Copeland's annual convention in 2023, he had embraced the likes of Mike Lindell, the election conspiracist who has promoted junk cures for COVID while sowing doubts about vaccines.

So, you know, I didn't grow up in one of these communities.

I had been to some megachurch sermons and services in the past.

I knew people who went to places like Gateway Church, which is a huge one here in North Texas, very politically involved.

And their founding pastor was just implicated in, you know, child sex abuse.

Many such cases.

Many such cases.

And as an outsider, in my mind, I directly link sort of belief in spiritual healing with

vaccine hesitancy.

Yeah.

Because, you know, there's, there's this sense that, well, if God can heal you, why would you need to rely on something like a vaccine?

But also that, you know, you need to place your faith in God more than man or the government.

It's more that thing.

It's that by electing to get a vaccine, that demonstrates that you do not have faith in God.

Like,

it's more so like a larger theological issue beyond just like, you know, we don't trust the science.

Like, I trust God more than the science.

It's that like, even electing to do that demonstrates this deeper, like more core belief that you do not have the faith in God that is adequate in order to like take care of you, your body, and whatever he may have planned for you.

Perhaps that includes getting measles and you'll, you'll work through that maybe or not, you know, as we're seeing now in Texas a lot.

But yeah, like it's not just about like medical skepticism, science skepticism.

It is this deeper aspect that more relates to someone's like individual relationship and faith in God.

So when you were growing up, I mean, did you pick up at all on this sort of skepticism with regard to...

not, you know, I guess modern science broadly, but also medical interventions?

Totally, totally.

Yeah.

No.

I mean, like literally this, the school that I went to, which was, which was a part of this church, like I was, I was, I was taught from an, from like an American creationist curriculum for like the first, I guess, like seven grades called ACE.

There was big ACE conferences that, that like the teachers and my dad would travel to the States for every year.

But yeah, like this stuff is literally like taught to all the kids because in order to go to this church, you have to also send your kids to the school.

You are raised in this and like you have no choice in the matter.

And that just becomes like what is real.

Like that just is reality.

Like

it's not that there's like an alternative to that.

It's like

a nine-year-old kid, like that just is what the world is.

Like what you're reading those textbooks, that just is truth.

It's very isolated environments.

Like you aren't really fully aware that there's like an alternative to that.

And if there is, it's like, what's the word?

We didn't even use words like like atheist.

I think secular was was maybe the word that was maybe the the word that they use like you you can't you can't like listen to like secular music or like be aware of like you know like sec like secular culture because it's satanic or it can lead you away from god or it's a distraction from god you know that that sort of thing but no like yeah it's this is built in and like yeah you know very basic creationist stuff like answers in genesis being like the highest bastion of science uh which is like a a fake science website uh touted by creationists and evangelicals but this also extends to medical science as well.

The same way you believe the earth is 6,000 years old, you maybe also don't believe in like cancer treatment.

Right.

So, to the extent that you can recall, if you know, or you know, if you're willing to share, like, do you recall if you were vaccinated as a child?

I was not, no.

The first time I got vaccinated was as an older teenager when I gained medical autonomy.

And I was like, hey, I should probably get vaccinated, huh?

Geez, okay.

Because both like unplugging from these takes time.

Like, I think my family got away from this community when I was like 11 or 12.

But because I'm like the oldest of all my siblings, this was the most like baked into me more so than my other siblings.

So like even if you like get away from this physically, you still have to like mentally detox.

You have to realize that you were kind of in a cult and then you have to like deprogram yourself.

And that like takes years.

So like I didn't like fully disconnect from this style of Christianity and like, you know, Christianity in general until like a few years after.

So by the time I was like a, you know, middle to older teenager is, is when I started to like sort this type of stuff out and eventually got caught up on those vaccines.

Luckily, I never got chickenpox, although people did throw chickenpox parties when I was a kid, which I can recall the concept of, especially if like a baby or a toddler or even like, you know, like a, like, like a like a 10-year-old has chickenpox.

No one else is, of course, is vaccinated for this in this whole whole community.

So if someone has chickenpox, you will not just isolate them.

You will actually encourage other people to like hang out and play together with the express intent of getting sick yourself as a form of like natural immunization.

And I think I was offered to go to one of these chickenpox parties, quote unquote.

I think as like a 10-year-old or something, declined.

Wow.

I mean, good on you for at least having that wherewithal.

So, and you know, Saskatchewan and Canada are different than the United States and Texas.

And medical exemptions, exemptions of conscience or religious medical exemptions are a big thing.

And there's actually a bill in the state house right now to expand that sort of thing with regard to vaccines.

I mean, was that something that was going on up there?

Or I mean, was it just because were you in a private school, you were kind of outside of any sort of regime of accountability?

Yeah, we were in the private school.

I know people who worked in the private school did like lobbying in the province to like keep their medical freedom, you know, intact

to make sure the state does not interfere.

Though I do remember when my family moved to the States, throughout the immigration process, we had to fill out a lot of those like religious exemption forms because you're supposed to get vaccinated and make sure you're not carrying like tuberculosis when you immigrate to a new country.

But even for those, there is like religious exemptions that if you have enough money, you can pay for.

When was this like roughly timeline?

When, you know, know, when you were a child, when you were in private school, was the broad range.

This is, this is like the knots, right?

This is the early 2000s.

Yeah, I mean, like, I'm in my early 20s now.

Vaccine hesitancy has clearly been a part of certain conservative Christian congregations for some time.

Something I remember happening kind of because of like what my parents were involved with at the time is, you know, there's on one side, this whole like theological side of like not wanting to do vaccines or like unnecessary medical procedures because of your faith in God.

On the other hand, kind of around like 2010 and a few years before and after, we started to really see kind of that aspect along with like the hippie mom Facebook group aspect kind of collide, right?

And like this healthy, you know, like organic, natural, like hippie mom thing used to be more associated with like, you know, people in the left, especially in the 90s.

And you started to see these two kind of poles converge around 2010 because this is like what happened with like my two parents at the time where like my dad was more in the theological side and then my mom was kind of more on like the the kind of like crunchy side of things and these things like combined this new breed of evangelical christianity that you see is like very popular right now with like the trad wife angle combined with like you know crunchy like naturalistic organic stuff that used to be left wing and is now like very very right wing you know very, very like conservative, like family values coded, which did not really used to be the case as much.

And that's kind of like strengthened the anti-vax hold on this like section of the population.

So, I mean, this is incredible.

You were part of a church that basically had connections to Texas by way of Kenneth Copeland.

And you had mentioned, you know, kind of having a crunchy, more maybe left-leaning mom.

How apparent in retrospect was sort of the political nature of your church?

Was it particularly political?

You had mentioned lobbying, but you know, lobbying isn't necessarily partisan.

They preached like Glenn Beck from the pulpit, like very, very conservative, openly conservative.

Like, that is like the Christian, godly, correct path, I guess.

Like, this is where it's tied in a bit more with some of like the

Southern Baptist-y type stuff, right?

Where you have like anti-gay conversion therapy, like camps that they can send people to.

Like, no, like this is very, very like Bill O'Reilly, very, very Glenn Beck.

Like that was, that was the, the moment, right?

This is, this is, you know, 2008.

The Antichrist has just been elected president of the United States, possibly literally.

And even though they're up in Canada, this is still like concern number one on the like the transnational like Christian Christian world.

So no, like extremely, openly conservative to the point where it is it is being preached alongside the words of Jesus and Paul.

You had a front row seat to sort of a shifting ground because

Southern Baptist

Christianity is kind of declining and it has, I think, has been supplanted by this quote-unquote non-denominational

set of networks.

There's a term that some scholars use, independent network Christianity, where the leaders of the churches, they are non-denominational.

They're not a part of a hierarchy.

They answer to no higher power other than God.

You know, so their interpretation of God is

basically the rule or it is the authority.

It's like a post-Billy Graham era.

Yeah, of like networked churches, but are not part of like a coherent structure.

They're kind of like terrorist cells,

essentially.

They operate very similarly to like a cell network of terrorists.

I'm trying to remember what like the most wild faith healings I've seen are.

The thing I think people were faith healed the most for is probably back pain a lot of back pain gets faith healed um

of course there might be the odd person who's able to claim that like you know a faith healing cured their cancer who then probably died three years later of cancer But you also get faith healed for a bunch of like smaller ailments, right?

And so someone will walk up to you, put hands on you.

You might start convulsing.

It's like this like psychosomatic thing.

Sometimes you'll pass out.

A lot of people pass out.

It becomes like this performative thing, like subconsciously.

I remember there was people, they were stationed where people would pass out with little, I think they're called modesty blankets, so that when they pass out, maybe your shirt will come up a little bit and someone will see a little bit of tummy.

You can walk over and put the blanket over as you're recovering from your healing session.

All of this is happening during like essentially like an acoustic concert.

So it creates a very peculiar vibe.

People kind of poorly play musical instruments as other people like walk through like an auditorium and just start like passing out and you just get this pile of bodies.

And as a as a 10-year-old, you think this is totally normal and fine.

And then you later realize why you're into so much weird shit.

Oops.

Something I also covered in a previous episode in this series was a quote from the Seattle Public Health Commissioner during a smallpox outbreak in the early 1900s.

He called Seattle a hotbed for anti-vaccination and Christian science and various anti-medical cults.

So, you know, we are kind of truly like reliving a period of history.

I hate it when time's a flat circle.

This sucks.

Why should I live in history, huh?

I don't want to know anything anymore.

This is a world where nothing is solved.

Someone once told me time is a flat circle.

Everything we've ever done or will do, we're going to do over and over and over again.

Lone star, man.

Fucking lone star, Texas.

The one thing I remembered through not being vaccinated as a kid, something I did develop, and this was like behaviorally ingrained, is a paralyzing fear of rust

because you don't have, because you don't have the tetanus shot.

So even though we're told God will, you know, keep us safe and healthy, we are also taught you have to stay like 10 feet away from like rust.

If you see rust on anything, like you have to be on high alert, because even though God should protect you, he might not if you get a rusty nail like poking your finger.

So rust is still something I'm like really afraid of, despite being vaccinated now, just because this was ingrained so young, which just kind of shows the kind of like a paradoxical thought process behind some of this sort of thing, where it's okay if your kids aren't vaccinated, but you also have to teach them to like never get close to anything rusty because that could send them to the hospital.

We'll return to my conversation with Gare after a short ad break.

So what was it like moving out of this science skeptic religious community?

It's funny because when I moved away from this like conservative community in Canada, We moved to Portland, Oregon, which has its own anti-vaccination problem, but from from like the other side.

So I was still around a whole bunch of people and kids who weren't vaccinated, who were there is frequent measles outbreaks.

But

it is more for that like crunchy hippie thing that then is kind of, you know, converged with this evangelical side.

But at that time, it's interesting going from, you know, one of these worlds to another.

And in some ways, the medical reality did not change that drastically.

Right.

But I'm wondering if you agree on this.

My sense is that that form of anti-vaccination belief, the sort of hippie, crunchy stuff.

It's dying.

It's not only dying.

Yeah, it has not spread.

It has not been turned into like a program that is far-reaching.

Those types of people have either evolved in their beliefs and

have caught up with like consensus scientific understandings or have married, you know, far-right Christian husbands and have just gone full conservative.

Like they have, they have split in twine.

You are much less likely to now find, you know, someone who would describe themselves as like liberal or like leftist who would hold these beliefs if they're like, you know, like a 40-year-old mom with like, you know, braids or beads in her hair.

Like that's, that is definitely less, less likely to have that person be holding like anti-vax beliefs now than it was 20, 10 years ago.

You just gave me the beautiful idea of

making sure I include an audio clip of the anti-vax Rashtra Christian guy whose videos have been going viral.

Have you seen these at all?

No.

Oh man, you're going to love this.

objectively lowering my number,

objectively worshiping about the

normality again.

Oh, that's good.

It really does encapsulate this sort of, you know, the quote-unquote conspiratuality.

Even the way, like, Russell Brand has moved the past 10 years, right?

It's a pretty clear example of this thing we've been talking about.

Yes.

How he's now this weird Jesus guy who can't stop raping.

Not good.

Yeah.

It is so fascinating that now, yeah, like Maha is appealing to that, that sort of like orphaned set of people that you were describing who have less of a political home.

Yeah.

RFK Jr.

is similarly to Russell Brand as like a prime example of someone who used to be more of like a you know left-wing environmental lawyer who is now Trump's

anti-autism takeaway red number 40 anti-vax dude.

And, you know, another thing about growing up in these communities is like beyond vaccine hesitancy or anti-vax beliefs is also just like anti-psychological beliefs, like therapy or like psychoanalysis or like mental diagnosis are framed the same way.

Like you shouldn't need.

real therapy.

You can talk to like a Christian counselor and you can pray and that should be all you really need.

You don't need to go to like a therapist or a psychologist.

Like that delayed my understanding of like being autistic by like maybe 15 years, which, you know, didn't didn't serve younger gare very well

in trying to unpack like social interactions as

like a teenager or even like a preteen because like I wasn't even aware of like the concept of like what autism actually is until until so much later.

So you're saying that childhood vaccinations didn't cause your autism?

No, because I was never vaccinated as a kid and yet here I am.

Yeah, I I saw a nice little sign recently that it fooled me because I read it too quickly, but it said, childhood vaccinations cause adulthood.

That's right.

They sure do.

GARE's experience is not unique.

There are countless children who are raised in religious communities that eschew medical interventions in favor of their faith and in the power of God to heal them.

These communities seek exemptions from vaccination requirements on either religious grounds or on the grounds of what they call medical freedom.

Consider the children who attend Mercy Culture Preparatory, a private Christian school in Fort Worth.

After the measles outbreak became national news, a report in the Dallas Morning News highlighted that the school had the lowest vaccination rate out of any private school in the state of Texas.

And unlike the Copelands, who at the very least have facilitated vaccinations among their flock, even as they've given contradictory messages from the pulpit, the leader of Mercy Culture was unapologetically thrilled at the news.

Hey guys, quick video.

I just walked into an MC Prep board meeting and there was these balloons and a surprise gift.

I'm like, what's this going out?

And I just found out, I'm a little behind on the news.

I'm a little slow, getting old,

but I just found out we are the number one school in Texas for leased vaccinations.

And I guess the news got a hold of it and they were trying to spin it like it was some awful thing.

But I just want to congratulate all of the family members of MC Prep that embrace freedom of health and they're not allowing government or science projects to affect how you live and lead your life.

I know the entire world was shut down with insanity and people were fired from their job for forced vaccinations.

And freedom is something that we take seriously, religious freedom, freedom of our health.

And so shout out to MC Prep for being the least vaccinated school in Texas.

We'll take it.

Or as Mercy Cultures say, we celebrate it.

We'll put it on the board.

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

Hey, what's going on?

This is state rep Nate Shatzlin.

I'm standing in front of our Texas state capitol, and I was alerted on X from an X post from Bud Kennedy.

Now, you probably don't know who Bud Kennedy is, but he is a reporter for the Star Telegram in Fort Perk, Texas.

Now, Star Telegram's losing followers by the thousands.

It's crazy.

However, he attacks Christians and churches more than almost anyone else I know.

And this post said that Mercy Culture Repertory, which is a private school in my district, also happens to be where I send my kids to school.

He said they are the least vaccinated school in the state of Texas.

Now, I was incredibly concerned for a couple of different reasons.

I was concerned that, number one, we're just finding out about this, because the second concern is, why haven't we celebrated this sooner?

Look, I am so excited to say that Mercy Culture Prep is celebrating medical freedom where we honor the wishes of moms and dads over any type of health official like Rachel Levine or so-called public health expert like Bud Kennedy.

This brazen lack of concern about the risks of the spread of measles, which has already killed multiple children, is concerning for many reasons.

One of them is that it implicitly asserts that it's better for people to be unvaccinated.

Another is that it effectively disregards the risks that vulnerable people face when diseases like measles spread unchecked.

And when infused with this hardened belief that God can miraculously heal them, and also that God makes no mistakes, it can lead some people, like Peter, the Mennonite father of the first child to die from measles in over two decades, to believe that getting measles can actually make their communities stronger.

This is basically survival of the fittest style quasi-eugenic thinking with the veneer of religion.

In the next episode, we will explore why anti-vax beliefs and the policies now being pushed by the leading vaccine denier, RFK Jr., are effectively eugenic in nature, and how the twisted history of eugenics and racist public health abuses in the United States has unfortunately buttressed the viral anti-vax ideology we are dealing with today.

Thanks for listening to episode three of Anti-Vax America for It Could Happen Here.

Until next time, I'm Stephen Monticelli, and thanks for listening.

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The reviews and ratings are in, and Ice Cube's Big Three is the surprise hit of the summer.

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Be honest, how many tabs do you have open right now?

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Sounds like you need Close All Tabs from KQED, where I, Morgan Sung, Doom Scroll so you don't have to.

Every week, we scour the internet to bring you deep dives that explain how the digital world connects and divides us all.

Everyone's cooped up in their house.

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Driverless cars are going to mess up in ways that humans wouldn't.

Listen to Close All Tabs, wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Stephen Monticelli, a journalist in Dallas and an occasional contributor to CoolZone Media.

And welcome to episode four of Anti-Vax America, a special five-part miniseries for It Could Happen Here, exploring the measles outbreak as a microcosm for where we are now, how we got here, and where we could be going.

Today's episode will focus on the twisted history of eugenics as it relates to vaccinations and how the current Maha agenda, as pushed by RFK Jr., 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 zealots 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 1800s shortly after the creation of the first smallpox vaccine in 1796, and so did anti-vaccination rhetoric and movements.

In parallel, there were a lot of scientific developments going on.

The 1800s were a heady time in Western science.

There was Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, which was presented in Darwin's 1859 book on the origin of species.

Five years later, sociologist Herbert Spencer mixed concepts from Thomas Malthus, the economist who proposed that population growth would outpace food production, with Darwin's theory to coin the term survival of the fittest and apply it to industrial capitalism, with the end conclusion that basically those who were on top were deserving of all of the privileges that they have, and that those at the bottom were also deserving of their position in society.

In 1883, Darwin's cousin Francis Galton coined the term eugenics in his book, Inquiries into Human Fertility and 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 Dr.

Michael Phillips, who we heard from in a previous episode.

Galton was in despair that all those improvements in delivery of health care, medical care itself, nutrition, all the humanitarian efforts to improve the workplace, eliminate child labor, improve factories so people don't get blown up, et cetera.

What that was doing was it was allowing the unfit, you know, the people he saw as inferior, to survive past childhood, to survive into adulthood, to have longer, healthier lives.

And if they live a longer lifespan and they're healthier during that span they're going to have more children

and he believed that 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 was called dysgenic, people who were dysgenic, 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.

Oh, 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 to plan their families more carefully.

And the partners are busier, job creators, is innovators in science and education.

The women want to have a life outside of the home, that they were less fertile.

They were having fewer children.

And of course, what the result would be is you have the unfit outnumbering the fit, and that leads to catastrophes.

Society falls apart.

These sorts of ideas are represented in the satirical 2006 film Idiocracy, which plays out a future in which stupid people outbreed smart people and society consequently devolves.

Natural selection, the process by which the strongest, the smartest, the fastest reproduced in greater numbers than the rest, a process which had once favored the noblest traits of man, now began to favor different traits.

Most science fiction of the day predicted a future that was more civilized and more intelligent.

But as time went on, things seemed to be heading in the opposite direction.

A dumbing down.

How did this happen?

Evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence.

With no natural predators to thin the herd, it began to simply reward those who reproduced the most and left the intelligent to become an endangered species.

Having kids is such an important decision.

We're just waiting for the right time.

It's not something you want to rush into, obviously.

No way.

Oh, shit, I'm pregnant again.

Shit!

I got too many damn kids.

Thought you was on the pills and shit.

Hell no.

Must have been thinking of Britney.

Brittany?

No, you...

Well, certainly, meant in jest, the fundamental principle of idiocracy demonstrates the staying power of Galton's eugenic ideas, which became highly influential in the 20th century.

Within two decades of the release of his book coining the term eugenics, eugenic thinking was widespread among white Anglo-Saxon leaders of the West.

But before we hear more about that from Dr.

Michael Phillips, a quick ad break.

The two biggest eugenicists in the early 20th century, they were best-selling authors, Madison Grant, who is a friend of Theodore Roosevelt's, and Lothorpe 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 milking the fit for every advance.

And that as that became more difficult, that would breed revolution.

And Sauter, in particular, thought there was a link to communist revolution.

As advancements in sanitation and modern medicine continued in parallel with the spread of leftist thought, eugenicists were consumed with nightmares of a Malthusian crisis and were increasingly worried about their position in society.

Something in their minds had to be done to stem the growing tide of unfit masses.

Because natural selection in the minds of the eugenicists had basically been suspended, the forced sterilizations were the substitute for that.

Eugenicists were in despair about vaccines, but there wasn't an organized campaign to ban them on eugenics reasons, because I think they knew politically that would be unpopular, because there were enough people who realized they could see the benefits as vaccinations became more common.

In other words, some early eugenicists were both supportive of things like forced sterilization, but were also opposed to vaccinations, because they believed that vaccinations would allow the weak and unfit to survive, prosper, and multiply.

But not all eugenicists were inherently opposed to vaccinations.

The Nazi regime, which exterminated millions of Jews and other people deemed undesirable, also embraced widespread vaccination against diseases like typhus, even if they actually rolled back mandatory vaccination laws that had been put in place prior to the rise of the Nazis.

Nevertheless, the relationship between eugenic thinking and anti-vax beliefs goes deep, 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 fittest survive and go on to improve the overall gene pool.

Now, before we go any further, it is important to note that eugenics has been morally and scientifically discredited so thoroughly that it shouldn't even be necessary to mention it.

But unfortunately, eugenicist 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.

That's been an ongoing thing with immigration debates ever since the late 19th century this idea that certain groups of immigrants are disease carriers and that was particularly been aimed at mexican immigrants that that's been an ongoing thing and during covid greg abbott who's the governor of texas was saying it was Mexican immigrants, undocumented immigrants who were bringing COVID to Texas at one point.

He made made that accusation.

And it's exactly like what they were saying.

We had in Texas during this period, this panic about immigration, late 19th, early 20th century in 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 were carrying infectious eye diseases, tuberculosis, all of that.

And Jewish civil rights groups had to intervene to stop that.

Racism, anti-Semitism, and eugenics historically have gone hand in hand, but it hasn't been since the early 1900s that people who hold such beliefs also hold so much power in the state.

RFK Jr., a longtime anti-vaccination activist and now head of the United States Department of Health and Human Services, said in 2023 that COVID 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 Dr.

David Gorski, a doctor who regularly writes in a blog called Science-Based Medicine.

My name is David Gorski.

I'm a professor of surgery and oncology at Wayne State University in Detroit.

So, Dr.

Gorski, you're also a bit of a writer and you keep a pretty regular blog blog in which you opine on a number of things.

And recently, you've written a couple of blog posts about the measles outbreak, the anti-vaccination movement, RFK Jr.'s Make America Healthy, again, agenda, and what folks over at the Conspirituality podcast called soft eugenics.

Or perhaps what we could also think of as a sort of social Darwinist logic or sort of passive eugenics.

You know, a couple months ago, when I first came across the episode of Conspirituality, which was called Maha's Soft Eugenics, like kind of like a light bulb went off in my brain in that it sort of helped me crystallize things that I had been thinking of about the anti-vaccine movement, but not so much the rest of Maha, which, you know, let's face it, a mishmash of, you know, anti-vaccine beliefs, you know, appeals to nature, anti-pharma, a lot of quackery mixed in with some, you know, semi-reasonable stuff like, you know, yeah, sure, diet, exercise, it's good for you.

I think measles really epitomizes what they called the quote-unquote soft eugenics, which was basically 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-vaxxers about measles is that, you know, if someone gets really sick from measles or dies of measles, they must have had something wrong with them.

They must not have been healthy.

Like that measles is harmless if you are healthy.

And of course, you know, there's a whole lot of appeal to 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 in the alternative medicine crowd that, you know, you have basically total control over your health.

In other words, if you do the right things, eat the right diet, you know, take the right supplements, you know, do the exercise appropriately, you know, you can keep yourself healthy and it's even as good as vaccines or better to prevent vaccine preventable diseases, infectious diseases.

Right.

So I think that's a great way to understand the differences here.

You know, we're not talking about the hard, active eugenics of the past, which was epitomized by the Nazi regime and their quote-unquote final solution.

And also, you know, you're in the good old US of Aga 100 years ago.

Right.

You know, or even, you know, in the lingering sterilization regimes that continued up until, you know, the later 20th century, which were, you know, sort of originally rooted in this idea that we should be culling people out of the reproductive pool who have these undesirable traits or are you know considered to be unfit in some way.

So that that's not what we're talking about.

We're talking about this more let nature take its course survival of the fittest type mindset.

I don't know if it's a resurgence or it's just continuing to gain in popularity.

There's a recent conference.

It's been one of two conferences that have happened in Austin, Texas, where a lot of these quote-unquote liberal eugenicists also met up with people who are in the pronatalist 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.

I mean, there's a lot of that around, too, and that's not soft eugenics.

That's like straight up eugenic.

Right.

And so there's a continuum, you could say there's this spectrum.

And, you know, these things are not disconnected, but they also can be understood as somewhat discrete phenomenon or ideologies or belief systems.

And so you did write a little bit about one specific document that

I hadn't been particularly familiar with called the Great Barrington Declaration.

Can you talk about that?

Okay, so.

I can't believe it's like four and a half years ago now, but way back in early October of 2020, three scientists were brought together by a far right-wing

activist named Jeffrey Tucker, who was associated with a right-wing think tank at the time called the American Institute for Economic Research.

The idea behind the document was,

all of these measures to control COVID are like, you know, destroying the economy.

So what we should really do, supposedly based on science, but not really, as I'll get into, is to let the virus spread among quote-unquote young and healthy, or, 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.

Herd immunity, for those not familiar with it, is when a

pathogen is so prevalent in the population 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 and small outbreaks, but it just can't spread further.

If you don't know much about infectious diseases, including COVID, it sounds like not unreasonable given that there wasn't a vaccine back then.

The other part of it is what they call quote-unquote focus protection.

So the idea 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 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, 20% 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 knew then that coronaviruses are very good at doing.

So that it was expected that, you know, new variants would come up and that 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 a COVID infection would not be long-lasting and that the virus would mutate and

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 2020.

And one of the writers or the scientists who wrote the Great Barrington Declaration is now our director of the NIH, Dr.

J.

Bhattacharyo.

The other was Dr.

Sunetra Gupta in England.

And then there was, of course, Martin Kaldorf, who I now hear is involved in the autism

vaccine study that RFK Jr.

is supposedly organizing.

So basically,

the idea behind the Great Barrington Declaration, far from being

censored and canceled, etc.,

actually found purchase at the highest levels of government in the U.S.

and the U.K.

The Boris Johnson government and Donald Trump administration both

listened to these scientists.

And I mean, Great Barrington Declaration writers actually got to meet with Trump at one point, I believe in July.

And it was unfortunately very influential and discouraged stronger public health measures.

I did call this idea eugenicist at the time, although maybe you can argue if it's soft eugenics or social Darwinist.

I mean, maybe more social Darwinist given that, oh, well, it's kind of like, screw the old people who will die of this.

You know, seemed to be part of the attitude behind it.

You know, we throw up this focus protection kind of as an afterthought, you know, where the main idea is just to, you know, let the virus spread and people will be okay.

And this is the same sort of idea that I heard again and again years and years before with the measles.

And in fact, if you go back to 2015, which was

after the Disneyland measles outbreak and during the holidays of 2014 that took part in the early part of 2015, 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 the price of getting post-infection immunity can be,

besides just being sick, could involve the risk of complications, neurologic damage, or even death.

Right.

And so, in a way, there's a sort of moralization around health in that, you know, it's something that individuals have to be personally responsible for.

And as you said, if they succumb to an illness like measles, it is sort of an indication that maybe they were unfit in some way or unhealthy.

And this dovetails with something you also wrote about, RFK Jr.'s recent speech, in which he talked about autism and described it as a tsunami and likened it to an epidemic.

He claimed that the increasing statistical prevalence of autism is due to environmental risk factors and is something that is sort of induced by human behavior as opposed to that

statistical prevalence being a result of improvements in diagnostic tools that more accurately measure a phenomenon.

And he also portrayed autistic people as a sort of burden on society.

And, you know, we're 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 Jr.'s speech was and, you know, how you made that connection?

Well, look at what the very first thing he said about people with severe autism.

Okay.

What did he say?

He said, they'll never pay taxes.

They'll never have a job.

And then, oh, they'll never go on a date.

They'll never play baseball.

You know, it's, what are the first two things he mentions?

Paying taxes and having a job?

This is straight up useless eaters rhetoric.

Useless eaters was basically a term that the Nazis used

for people with severe

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 80% 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 to 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,

if they keep doing all this stuff and failing to find

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?

My mind has gone in some fairly dark directions thinking about that.

Right, right.

And there's little discussion of what autistic people think or want.

No, it doesn't matter to them at all, really.

In fact, they're almost entirely dismissive of what autistic people themselves think.

Exactly.

And there's also a total disregard for the value of difference and the contributions that people who are Autistic have made to society that perhaps they might even correlate with the fact that they're Autistic.

So there's this total erasure of not only what an entire group of people actually want for themselves as advocates for themselves, but also their value,

not just as a group of people, but as individuals as well.

To add to that, let's go back to around 2007, 2008, when Jenny McCarthy was the face of the anti-vaccine movement.

So like one of the things she said after, you know, supposedly after her son Evan got vaccinated was that, quote unquote, the light went out of his eyes.

And then you hear this a lot when parents realize their children are showing the signs of, you know, the early signs of autism.

Is it like

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 being, you know, children with mental illness, you know, have been taken over or they're 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.

Yeah, that is certainly a new development.

Just something we've discussed on previous episodes is the deeper history of anti-vaccination belief.

or hesitancy that goes deep in American history.

You know, for almost as long as vaccines have ever existed.

It has rarely ever been enshrined in law and policy in the way that it is now being done.

And so we've talked about one of these people, high-level government officials, RFK Jr., whose statements have

drawn your attention and elicited your concern, but he's not the only one.

So you also wrote about Oprah, adjacent television personality, Dr.

Mehmet Oz.

Yes.

Well, Dr.

Oz actually sort of surprised me a little bit, but then in retrospect, not really.

So I'm surprised there wasn't more commentary about this.

But when he gave his brief little acceptance speech after having been confirmed as the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which is the part of HHS that administers you know, Medicare, Medicaid, Affordable Care Act, it's like really important.

You know,

huge programs.

When he said, basically, it is your patriotic duty to take care of yourself, you know, to be healthy.

And then he goes, oh, and it feels better as well.

But, but he said it's your patriotic duty to take care of yourself and be healthy because then you draw less.

I'm paraphrasing because I don't remember exactly what he said, but because you pull less from the pool, you know, which interestingly echoes exactly, almost exactly, other than the patriotic duty part, what RFK Jr.

said when Bernie Sanders asked if health care was a human right.

As you recall, RFK Jr.

did his best not to answer.

Like, you know, he dodged and weaved around the question.

And then he brought up the example of 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 health care basically because an addiction gave you cancer because you know what he neglects to mention is just how addictive you know tobacco and nicotine are and as a former addict himself you know i found that striking the but but coming back to the whole patriotic duty thing 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 health care.

Right.

And there's an interesting thread there in that some eugenicist thinkers, at least American ones, were somewhat concerned about the idea that vaccinations could prevent the weak or the unfit from being culled naturally.

Oh, yes, definitely.

Yeah.

So there is some linkage here, even if these are somewhat discrete ideas.

And, you know, you also quoted something from a Dr.

Oz speech back in 2013.

You pulled a video that had been resurfaced in recent years.

And Oz said, people don't have a right to health if they're uninsured.

And so it's not like what he's saying is kind of new for him.

He's been saying things like this for a while.

And the idea that, you know, there's this national body that we all have a duty to sort of be healthy cells of.

is something that there's a long history of that sort of thinking and policy.

Yeah.

Yes, the Volk.

I mean, I couldn't help but think of Nazis and the Volk.

Quick aside, for those who don't know, the Nazi idea of the Volk has a few elements to it.

Not only does it relate to racial and cultural homogeneity, but it also conceives of the nation as a sort of body composed of cells, one that must be cleansed of unfit or unhealthy cells in order to become perfect.

In other words, a dutiful member of the Volk would prioritize their health as a sort of patriotic or nationalistic duty and would participate in eugenic programs to eliminate the unfit.

You know, I'm not saying this is straight up Nazi or anything like that.

It's just that these sorts of themes have echoed through, you know, not just eugenicist movements, but

nationalist and authoritarian movements.

And there's this concerning development RFK Jr.

has proposed basically creating like a national database or registry of people with autism.

And if it's not just autism, maybe other disorders like ADHD.

And if you read reports that interview people with autism or similar disorders, they are very concerned by this for the reasons that you just described.

So the creation of this database could be framed as a way to improve our ability to understand this hypothetical linkage that they are so doggedly stuck on between autism and vaccines.

But I think those who know their history could easily imagine such a tool being used for other more nefarious purposes because, you know, similar policies were passed in Germany in the 1930s to sort of 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, that is certainly something that I think people are picking up on and maybe making connections with.

As you mentioned, a lot of autistic people don't want to be on this database.

And as a result, I've read reports in the news of parents are asking that their child not be given a diagnosis of autism so that they don't end up in the database, which could artificially cause

the prevalence of autism to level off and start to decline, at which point RFK declares victory.

We'll hear a bit more from Dr.

Gorski after a quick ad break.

There's a recent proposal out of RFK's HHS that intends to provide placebo vaccines during testing for all quote-unquote new vaccines.

So, the idea is the vaccines in the childhood schedule have, quote-unquote, never been tested against placebo control.

Although, ironically, it's funny.

I read an article the other day where they did admit that the COVID vaccine for children was indeed tested against a placebo control.

I'm kind of surprised they conceded that, but I guess sometimes they have to concede reality.

But

here's the idea.

So it's true that some of the vaccines have not been tested against the strict saline placebo control that they want.

But there are a number of reasons for that.

The primary reason is ethics.

So let's go back.

So if 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 placebo when it was a new vaccine against a disease that didn't have a vaccine.

I'm wondering if you agree with this, but it does sound like this proposal, if it were to be implemented in a way that involves vaccines for existing diseases that have already been treated with vaccines, if there were placebos introduced into this testing.

And like you said, there was a random percentage of people that were given a placebo.

I mean, to me, it recalls like a soft version of a Tuskegee experiment.

Yeah, I've been meaning to make that analogy, but you beat me to it.

As we discussed in a prior episode in this series, the Tuskegee syphilis study was a horrifically unethical, racist, and eugenic experiment that helped seed a long-standing distrust of vaccines and medical authorities, particularly among minority communities in the United States.

And it straddled the intersection of hard and soft eugenics.

While it was not a forced sterilization program, 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 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 Jr., invoked the Tuskegee syphilis experiment in a recent anti-vaccine film that they specifically promoted to Black Americans to encourage vaccine skepticism.

And now the former leader of that organization is proposing an approach to vaccines that is eerily reminiscent of the sordid Tuskegee experiment.

In the post-COVID world, vaccination rates are on the decline and anti-vaccination beliefs are spreading in tandem with eugenicist 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-Vax America, I'll explore some of the worst case scenarios that could unfold if the proponents of the Maha agenda get their way.

I'm Stephen Monticelli.

Until next time.

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Welcome to the final episode of Anti-Vax America, a special miniseries from It Could Happen Here.

I'm your host, Stephen Monticelli, a journalist in Dallas and sometimes contributor to CoolZone Media.

Over the past episodes, we've explored the origins of the current measles outbreak, the historical roots of the anti-vaccination movement, the overlap between vaccine hesitancy and conservative Christianity that upholds a strong belief in spiritual healing, and the eugenic implications of contemporary anti-vax ideology and the Maha movement.

In this episode, we'll explore the future.

Could the United States see a massive return of viral outbreaks?

How would a nationwide collapse in vaccination rates impact our public health?

And what are we to make of the rise of alt medicine and whether that could continue to spread if people like RFK Jr.

elevate these hucksters into national figures?

These are not just academic questions.

If vaccination rates continue to decline, we could see the return of diseases like polio, which had been eradicated in the United States for decades.

In recent years, there have been cases of polio found in wastewater and one confirmed case of a man with polio in an unvaccinated community in New York.

And experts warned that these isolated incidents could spread into larger outbreaks.

And these concerns are well-founded, particularly given that RFK Jr.

has said as recently as 2023 that early batches of polio vaccines cause cancer.

something that has never been demonstrated in the research.

Vaccination is the most effective tool we have to prevent the spread of communicable deadly diseases.

Without widespread vaccination, we face the very real possibility of devastating public health crises.

And the resurgence of diseases like measles and polio and smallpox and more would put our most vulnerable populations at risk.

especially the elderly, the immunocompromised, and others who cannot be vaccinated.

We don't have a crystal ball that will allow us to see into the future, but as the anti-vaccination movement grows, it is clear that the risk of large-scale outbreaks is increasing.

And if we don't correct the course soon, we could see a public health disaster unlike any we've seen in recent history, perhaps even worse than COVID, which took more than 1.1 million American lives.

In this episode, we will explore what could happen here in the United States if the anti-vaccination movement continues to get their way.

As as I conducted interviews with medical doctors and public health experts featured in this series, I asked them all the same question: Where do you see this going?

Each had their own answer, and all of their answers pointed in the same direction.

Here's Catherine Wells, the head of public health in Lubbock, the largest county in West Texas, where the measles outbreak began.

I do worry that

we are going to see other vaccine-preventable diseases.

You know, measles is the most highly infectious, but for all of those people that are becoming infected with measles, you know, they'll be immune, but that doesn't mean they're immune from mumps and rubella and other vaccine-preventable diseases that could easily enter a community with lower vaccination rates.

And those can come next.

So, I mean, that is concerning.

Measles is sort of like a canary in the coal mine when it comes to vaccination rates.

It's the first sign of a collapsing system.

Here's Dr.

Peter Hotez, the vaccine scientist in Houston.

You know, with the formation of anti-vaccine groups in the 2010s in Texas, you started to get the steep rise in parents requesting non-medical exemptions that their kids could get out of being vaccinated for school.

And it was particularly strong.

in the same places where people were refusing COVID vaccines years later, especially in conservative rural areas of West Texas, East Texas.

The vaccination rates continue to be strong in our cities of the Texas Triangle, Dallas, where you are, and Houston, where I am, and

San Antonio and Austin.

But

in the more conservative rural areas of West Texas, East Texas, that's where you saw big declines in kids getting vaccines.

And once you go below a certain threshold, roughly below 90%,

and bam, that you start to see breakthrough childhood infections.

And usually the first one you see is measles.

You can ultimately get all of them, but measles is the first one you see because it's so highly transmissible.

It's the most transmissible virus we know about.

So measles is kind of the, whatever you want to call it, the early biomarker of a problem with your vaccination system.

And unfortunately, now it's just tearing through West Texas in the panhandle, and now it's in four states,

all more or less in the Great Plains area of the country, right?

It's the Panhandle in West Texas at the southern end of the plains, but into adjoining areas of New Mexico, then going up into Oklahoma and now Kansas.

And my worry is that this is a very large,

probably much larger than is actually being reported.

I mean, I don't see this thing wearing down anytime soon.

And I'm worried about really prolonged measles epidemic to the point where we could even lose measles elimination status in the U.S.

if it goes on a full year.

Between 2023 and 2024, we've had a four-fold rise in measles epidemics outbreaks.

We've had a six-fold rise in whooping cough pertussis cases.

We've had polio appear in the wastewater in New York State.

So we're already trending in the wrong direction.

Even before this current administration, because of all the anti-vaccine sentiment rhetoric out there, now you throw on top of it efforts to actively dismantle our vaccine ecosystem.

And I can only imagine what's going to happen.

I really worry about the widespread return of all these childhood illnesses, just like we're seeing now with measles.

I mean, we're looking at the potential of sustained transmission going on for months and months to the point where we could lose our measles elimination status.

And then it goes on from there because measles is the most highly transmissible.

I worry about the same with whooping cough vertosis.

I worry about even potentially polio returning.

And not only in the U.S., because, you know, as we both know, the U.S.

is very good at exporting its culture.

We export our music.

We export our movies.

I worry about exporting this stuff.

And I worry about the impact on Latin American countries, on low- and middle-income countries in Asia and Africa.

and in Europe as well.

So a complete unraveling of our vaccine ecosystem and global goals.

And that really gives me a lot of pause for concern.

And on that note, a quick ad break.

It's probably safe to assume that the majority, if not the entirety, of the audience of this show grew up in a time when vaccinations were widely embraced and considered beneficial.

That also means that most of us have never lived during a time when children and adults were regularly disabled or killed by diseases like smallpox or polio.

In the 20th century, 300 million people were killed by smallpox.

In the 1940s and 1950s, polio killed nearly half a million people worldwide annually and paralyzed hundreds of thousands.

But both of those diseases were effectively eradicated decades ago.

The last person living in an iron lung, the medical device that keeps people who were paralyzed from polio alive, died in March of 2024.

And even measles, which is considered a relatively less dangerous illness, was routinely deadly before vaccination was widespread.

There was a time when thousands of Americans died from the disease every year.

All of that was due to the creation of vaccine policy and infrastructure over time.

But now, RFK Jr.

and the Maha movement threaten to tear all that down and send us back in time.

Here's Dr.

David Gorski.

I'll start with vaccines and then I'll try to move more to Maha.

So with vaccines,

what I think we're seeing is the systematic,

intentional dismantling of federal vaccine infrastructure and policy.

This whole call for placebo-controlled trials,

if they define new vaccines as any new vaccine, it will mean that there will be no new vaccines approved until until it's changed, which would at the earliest be after Trump is out of office.

If they define it as just new vaccines for diseases that don't have vaccines, it might be less of

an issue.

Either way, though, contrary to what they claim they want to do, which is increase public confidence in vaccines, it will almost certainly have the opposite effect.

I recently wrote, I think, yeah, it was last week's post.

I wrote about a study that modeled what would happen with certain percentage declines in vaccine uptake for four different vaccines, including the measles vaccine, of course.

And it estimated, you know, some pretty catastrophic numbers if, for instance, vaccine uptake declined even 10% or 50%

over the next 25 years.

You know, millions of cases, thousands of deaths.

You know, in other words, going back to basically the way it was before the measles vaccine was licensed in the early 1960s.

You know, sure,

you can complain that, you know, the model was somewhat simplistic, but if anything, I think it was probably conservative because they used a lot of conservative assumptions.

We could well be heading for that sort of future, although it takes a while for things to change even with

this sort of radical action that RFK Jr.

is taking.

And likely we would not see the worst effects really take off until after Trump's out of office, assuming he leaves office in 2029.

So, you know, it'll be left to his successors to deal with the mess.

And it's always easier to destroy than it is to rebuild, obviously.

Now, the interesting counterpoint to Maha saying, oh, we must increase the gold standard science applied to vaccines and make the standards for approval and licensure, you know, much more stringent.

The exact opposite is what they're talking about for things like stem cell therapies,

the vast majority of which are unproven and often very expensive.

A lot of other wellness treatments and that sort of a thing.

So we could be seeing a lot less novel pharmaceuticals and vaccines being approved because the anti-pharma suspicion will be such that the bar for approval will be higher, arguably too high.

I realize that in the past, I once argued that

maybe our bar for approving some drugs was too low, but that was more based on the various accelerated approval programs that had come into being in the years before that, where I thought that perhaps the follow-up after the initial accelerated approval was not adequate.

At the same time, it could become more and more like like the Wild West when it comes to everything else.

We could very well have the equivalent of

the traveling snake oil salesman going across the plains in their cart and selling their various liniments.

I'm not exactly sure what that would look like.

I do know that, for instance, it's already pretty much like that for a lot of quote-unquote stem cell therapies that have never really been demonstrated to be effective and safe.

And

the same randomized clinical controlled trials that they demand, you know, for vaccines.

One thing I have little doubt of is that public health is going to be degraded significantly over the next four years.

And how we recover from that, I don't know.

I'm struggling with the idea of what can be done to resist it or slow it down, given that, you know, the entire Republican Party doesn't seem to want to put any sort of checks on this administration.

And, you know, if we were to have some other sort of major pandemic, either a new virus that breaks through or a return of some disease that was once out of circulation, there's no real guarantee that

deaths or widespread

illness or disability as a result of those possible events will even spur spur a reaction in a way that would set us on a path back towards confidence in public health and vaccination.

You know, the outcome of COVID was, you know, it's quite clear that COVID was sort of an accelerant for a lot of the anti-vaccination beliefs that had long been incubating in

our public discourse and broad distrust of public health.

entities in general.

And like you said,

Trump's successor will be left to clean up whatever mess is made.

And, you know, it's possible that Trump's successor could be someone like J.D.

Vance.

Yes, it could.

Or someone who shares this affinity for

quasi-eugenic statements or beliefs, or this general disregard for the consequences of a sort of social Darwinist approach to public health.

And so, you know, we don't want to overstate the risks and be doomsayers.

But on the other hand, there's this real potential for the return of, you know, God forbid, something like polio or a breakthrough avian flu.

You just reminded me, polio was one of the diseases modeled in that study, and the results was it coming back and hundreds or even thousands of cases of paralytic polio.

Right.

And we live now in a time in which it's always been the majority of people who have never had someone in their family who was was in an iron lung.

But we live in a time now where the historical memory of that is somewhat lost because it's not even in the popular consciousness.

It's not something that is featured

in media.

You used to read books or watch films or even in television.

There would be examples of something like that, someone who had been impacted by polio and whether they were left disabled

and had less use of their limbs or

if they ended up in an iron lung, that was something at least people were aware of the risk.

And it's kind of parallel to something another public health official I spoke with talked about how there's been like two decades of doctors who went through their residencies never even seeing a case of measles.

And so now we're having to sort of re-educate not just our doctors, but really the whole population.

And that's a massive undertaking.

We'll hear a bit more from Dr.

Gorski right after this outbreak.

You know, one of the things that anti-vaxxers like to do is to try to claim that, oh, back before the vaccine, people didn't think measles was a big deal.

And they will point to that famous episode of the Brady Bunch that...

I don't know if you ever heard of where all the kids got the measles and it was, you know, played mainly for laughs.

You know, like they're all happy about being home from school and they're not very sick.

They just have little dots painted all over them because I guess that's how they showed them having the measles.

Boy, this is the life, isn't it?

Yeah, if you have to get sick, sure can't beat the measles.

That's right.

No medicine.

Inside or out.

Like shots, I mean.

Don't even mention shots.

Yes!

Measles, measles,

measles.

Well, all the kids have now had the measles.

So have I.

Well, I had them years ago.

Looks like the Brady's are finished with the measles there was also an episode of the flintstones that played believe it or not that played the measles for laughs and there was an episode of the donna reed show from the 50s they would point to like those and go oh they didn't consider measles a big deal well if you read the actual medical and public health literature you know they did and you know there were hundreds of thousands of confirmed cases a year, maybe millions of cases a year, and at least averaging about four or five hundred deaths a year, which doesn't sound like a lot, but in anything having to do with children, that's a lot of death because we don't expect children to die.

Children should not die.

They usually, you know, it's not like elderly people where, you know, it's expected that that's when, you know, the body starts giving out and people are reaching the end of their lives.

Children death rate should be low.

That's what, that's why we look at you know, childhood cancer and there was such an effort made, you know, over from like the 50s on to try to decrease the rate of death from childhood cancer.

And, you know, the results have been pretty spectacular.

About 85%

of children with, you know, cancer live, which, you know, before it was, you know, a pretty small number.

And the funny thing is, the number of childhood cancers is very small compared to a lot of other things that cause death.

We viewed it as sufficiently important to try to do something about it.

At least we did.

The question of whether we will continue to, because anti-chemotherapy and various cancer nonsense tends to go right along with Maha.

And the other thing, for instance, when RFK Jr.

made his, one of his statements, it was, was it in early March, I believe, or it was in March sometime, about, you know, where, where everyone was like, oh, he said the MMR works and is the best way to to stop the spread of measles.

Yes, but,

you know, instead of the traditional messaging that would come out of the CDC, which would be, you know, get vaccinated, you know, MMR is the best way to, you know, put a stop to this.

Please, please, parents, get your kids vaccinated.

Instead, what he sort of said is, yes, the vaccine, you know, vaccination is good.

You know, best way to stop the outbreak.

But then he buries it, instead of baffling with bullshit, it's more like burying it in bullshit.

He talks about, you know, vitamin A, supposedly, to treat measles.

He talks about how children die with measles rather than of measles,

which should sound very familiar because they pulled the same rhetoric out for COVID.

And the idea being that only the children who were already sick were harmed by measles and that, you know, your middle-class, healthy children are not in any danger.

You know, one way to look at the anti-vaccine movement, besides the eugenicist undertones,

sometimes not even undertones, one way to look at it is as a purity cult.

You may remember the whole pure blood thing from a few years ago, like those who are not vaccinated, refusing to mingle with those who are, who are, you know, whose blood has somehow been contaminated by the vaccine.

It's the same as, and think of how much of alternative medicine involves quote-unquote detoxification.

I like to call it ritual purification because it's like more of a religious religious concept than it is actually a medical concept.

And look at how treatment of quote-unquote vaccine injury involves something like chelation therapy to pull the evil heavy metals that are supposedly causing autism out of you.

So the idea that you have control of your health if you only make your terrain and your body hostile to microbes through your superior lifestyle.

The one example of this that I like to point out, and the best retort to it it that I like to point out, comes from about 2009, if I recall right.

It was Bill Maher on his HBO show,

and

Bob Costas was the guest.

And he was going on about how, you know, this was around the time of the H1N1 flu pandemic.

And he was going, you know, he was going, he was going on about how he didn't need the flu vaccine because, you know, his terrain was so hostile to the flu because, you know, of his superior lifestyle caused me to roll my eyes, but

and that if he were on an airplane with people coughing with the flu, he would not get the flu.

What did Costas say to him?

I love this retort.

He said, oh, come on, Superman.

Bob Costas could have easily used a different word in his retort, given the eugenic tendencies of the modern anti-vaccination movement.

And the word I have in mind is ubermensch.

But But I digress.

If the ubermensch of the anti-vax movement like RFK get what they want, we will live in a world where preventable communicable diseases run rampant, the deaths of children are justified as either a part of God's plan or a survival of the fittest herd immunity strategy, where snake oil and beef tallow salesmen are heralded above doctors and scientists, and where only the strongest will survive at the expense of the weak.

Diseases long thought defeated could return, and our ability to address new viruses will be diminished if RFK Jr.

successfully dismantles what remains of our public health bureaucracy.

And he's doing it at a steady clip.

In other words, the future may end up looking a lot like the past, more than it already does.

And that's terrifying.

The last time deadly pandemics, religious fervor and resistance to medical science, and eugenic policies all coincided historically with global trade breakdowns, things did not work out so well for anyone involved.

And unfortunately, if I've taken one thing away from my exploration of anti-vax America, it's that things will likely have to get worse before they get better.

It's really hard to get people unstuck from their beliefs.

Despite more than 1 million Americans dying of COVID, The reaction to pandemic restrictions combined with the anti-vaccination movement's convincing misinformation around vaccines radicalized many people against vaccines and public health measures in general.

Before I recorded this final statement, the Texas State House voted to advance a bill that will expand the ability for parents to seek exemptions for child vaccination requirements for school.

And this is happening as a measles outbreak is ongoing.

And things aren't looking good, but there is at least one sliver of hope that I've found.

As my conversation with Gare illustrates, it's possible for people who grew up in communities where vaccinations are avoided or where there is no belief in them to get out of those communities and to get themselves vaccinated.

And as my conversation with Catherine Wells illustrated, it is also possible for people who had been hesitant to get their children vaccinated for something like measles to be spurred into action.

given reporting around an outbreak.

But the question that ultimately remains is whether enough people will have their minds changed and embrace what the science tells us we should do.

Given Dr.

Gorski's astute observation that the anti-vaccine movement is somewhat like a purity cult, and Gare's comment that escaping their anti-vax upbringing was sort of like escaping a cult, unfortunately, I think we will have to temper our expectations for how quickly we can extricate our nation from this deep, dark place that I call anti-vax America.

I'm Stephen Monticelli.

Thanks for listening.

Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

It Could Happen here is a production of CoolZone Media.

For more podcasts from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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