Endless Thread - Infectious, Pt. 1: Scabs, Pus, And Puritans

Episode Date: May 3, 2019

The problem with being healthy is that you completely forget what it feels like to be sick. In 2019, many people assume that the history of vaccination is recent history -- maybe a few centuries of innovation starting in the late 1700s. The truth is much more convoluted: centuries of ancient customs developing slowly into a cycle of extremes -- scientific innovation followed by fear, rejection, and sometimes, violence. In the first episode of our special series, 'Infectious,' we explore this recurring cycle and how it echoes still in 2019.

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It is 8.30 in the morning on a beautiful but freezing day in Boston, and we are in a graveyard, not just any graveyard, a very old one. Okay, several generations of great 17th and 18th century New England, divines are buried here. This spot is right near Old North Church, like Paul Revere, the red coats are coming, that whole thing. We are gathered around the tomb of the Mather family, as in Cotton Mather, prominent Puritan minister. Increase? Yeah, it's his dad.

Yeah. What's that her name? Cotton, decrease. Degrease. And then we're like, that's just mean. I'm officially marking this as the beginning of an end. Endless Thread's New Great Adventure. Welcome, you guys.

Thanks. All right, so Amory, Josh Paul, you probably know why we're standing at the gravesite of Cotton Mather, the tomb of Cotton Mather and his family, but why am I holding a tiny, crappy Yamaha keyboard? Nobody knows. To serenade, the spirit of Cotton Mather. Tell me if you guys know what this is. Okay.

It sounds really familiar, but... Is it a theme song? It's the theme to Doogie Houser. That's why you asked me if I knew who Doogie Houser. Okay, so my Doogie Houser reference did not go over well with the group, but if you read the history books written by the Conquerors, Cotton Mather was practically the Doogie Houser of colonial times. So Doogie Houser was the child prodigy genius who was a doctor,

played by Neil Patrick Harris on TV, and Cotton Mather was also a child prodigy, just like the fictional child doctor. He graduated from Harvard in 1678 when he was just 15, and Mather had a big impact on Western medicine. According to the version of history, you're most likely to have heard, Cotton Mather was a principled Puritan minister and genius who helped save Boston from a brutal smallpox epidemic by convincing people to adopt variolation, the medical leap forward which paved the way for the massive miracle of modern medicine called vaccination. And that's basically the whole story.

story of Cotton Mather, aka the Dugiehouser of Colonial Times, right, Amory? No. Wrong, Ben. There's a lot of sketchiness you left out there, but... Yeah? Yeah, how deeply do we want to go into that? Get sketchy. Well, I know that he is kind of held responsible for validating claims of witchcraft that

led to the Salem Witch Trials and thus the execution of like 19 people. Correct. Correct. So that wasn't the best move. Yeah. And also the big idea of Mathers that does arguably hold up. This idea of inoculating people to save them from smallpox that he gets credited for, that didn't come from Cotton Mather. The real person we should be thanking if we're going to thank someone is a West African person enslaved under Mather whose real name is lost to history and whose real grave is,

I don't know where it is? I don't think anybody does. But that man, told his enslaver about an old practice from West Africa that the enslaver, Cotton Mather, gets credited for bringing to the colonies. But I guess, credit aside, this was a massive contribution to Western medicine, and it was a dangerous effort that involved a single rogue doctor conducting experiments on toddlers, and a philosophical battle that got Mathers' house firebombed,

raising one of the first real organized efforts that, opposed the whole idea of vaccination. And the reason this is all interesting is that it points to this fact that the story of vaccination and the people who have opposed it goes back way further than a lot of people realize or remember. From Beyond the Grave, Cotton Mather is going to tell us so much about this moment that we're in right now and how we got here and where things are going. But first, I'm Ben Brock Johnson. I'm Amory Severson.

I'm producer Josh Swartz. I'm Sound Guy Paul Vicus. And you're listening to Endless Thread, the show featuring stories. found in the vast ecosystem of online communities called Reddit. We're coming to you from a graveyard that Ben made us go to, but also, of course, from WBUR, Boston's NPR station. We are back from a break, and we're starting with a special series, Infectious, the strange past and surprising present of vaccines and anti-vaxers.

Okay, team, you ready? Our first episode? Scabs, Pust, and Puritans. In the smallpox outbreak in Boston in 1721, how things are going is not great. This outbreak, which arrives from the Caribbean via passengers on a ship called the HMS Sea Horse, is very, very bad. Over half the entire city is hit with the virus. People are dying left and right.

Good times. Mather is a minister in a Puritan British colony, and in his world, this is just like a regularly occurring horrible thing that happens every few years. And in his particular group of Christians, everyone believes it's just God's will. People might as well be driving their horse carriages around Boston with bumper stickers that say, pestilence happens. There used to be a time when we got infectious diseases and there was nothing we could do other than just kind of live through them or die.

This is Renee. Hello, I'm the Dr. René Najera and I'm the editor of the history of vaccines. Renee Nahara is an epidemiologist and the editor of the history of vaccines, a website studying the global history of vaccination. He knows a ton about the story of terrible diseases and how humanity has figured out ways to fight them. René knows that whatever time period you're talking about how humanity usually fights disease is with a mix of folklore, faith, and hopefully a good bit of scientific knowledge. Cotton Mather is no exception. So Mather is really religious. He also believes in magic,

and he's combining these ideas with the beginnings of real medical science, which tells you a little bit about this time period, when some incredibly important scientific ideas are being worked out, even as organized religion is influencing the very fabric of society in the colonies. Maybe more importantly, though, Mather is spending a lot of time around an enslaved person who knows something that he doesn't.

He owned a slave from Africa, whose name I always slaughter to. It's Onesimus, O-N-E-S-I-M-U-S. This wasn't his real name, by the way. It's just a biblical name that Mather called him. It means useful. And the slave had a big mark on his arm, and Mr. Mather said, you know, what is that mark?

And Onesimus said, They gave us a smallpox so we wouldn't get the smallpox. And that was very interesting to him. He's like, what are you talking about? Mather says, I got to look into this. So he sends out letters all over the world to all of his fellow scholars of European descent, of course. He's like, is this a thing? And they say, yep, yep, yep.

The letters come back and people in Turkey say, oh, yeah, I've heard about this. The Arabs do it all the time. They take a lancet and they lance the pus out of somebody with smallpox and they insert that lancet to somebody's arm or somebody's hand. And then those people, if they get a fever, they do get a little bit sick. But if they don't, if they don't die from full-blown smallpox, they become immune. It's a pretty wild idea. And as it turns out, an ancient one, discovered and practiced in a lot of different cultures.

Taking smallpox scabs or puss and introducing the virus to the virus to the best, body to protect people from getting the full-blown disease. Mather didn't know it yet, but this practice was approaching a thousand years old when he started learning about it. We know this because we started learning about it on Reddit. There's actually a lot of information about vaccines on Reddit, which I think, painting with a very broad brush, we can say, is a pretty pro-vaccine community. Right, but this particular post was a Today I Learned post written by a user named KPM squared. The post was about how in ancient China, people used to blow scabs up each other's noses to avoid getting smallpox, which sounds pretty desperate. Well, we are talking about desperate times, maybe a desperate era.

What do you think this desperate era was like? You know, when we started this episode, I really didn't know. So I did the thing you do, Ben, I googled smallpox. First mistake. Yeah, I saw things you cannot unsee. If you've never seen smallpox, it kind of looks like your skin has been turned into bubble wrap. Like you have thousands and thousands of these really painful looking pustules. And the whole thing just sounds like a nightmare.

I think it was a nightmare. And you don't have to take our word for it. We called up another person who's an expert on smallpox specifically. Gareth Williams is a professor emeritus of medicine at the University of Bristol in the UK. and he wrote a book, The Angel of Death, the story of smallpox. And when it came around and it did every few years, sometimes through trade routes, smallpox could infect 60% of a population. And a third of those people might straight up die.

During a smallpox outbreak, those deaths were a fact of life, everywhere. So let's get in the time machine and go back to 10th century China. in the Gobi Desert. Sandy wind is blowing. There's weird rock formations, the sun's beating down, on two people. One of them is alive, and the other, the other person, is a corpse, a corpse that is about to do something incredible. Really, they do it together. It's an exchange, if you will.

This is how Renee thinks this incredible exchange happened. My personal guess is that somebody died of smallpox. Somebody came upon their body, and the body was desiccated, and they breathed in the dust from the body. And then that person went into some place where there was massive amounts of smallpox. They didn't get sick. And they themselves said, hmm, I wonder if it was because I was somehow protected by the spirit, the dust,

whatever came off of that body who had smallpox. I thought you were going to say that they ate them because they were in the desert and desperate for food. That is actually the plot of my next zombie nod. So please don't ruin it. Okay, this is just a guess, so this scene is a fictitious one. But what we do know is that any discovery of something that might help fight off smallpox in 10th century China was huge. This was a disease of biblical proportions.

Over the course of human history, smallpox has killed around half a billion people. Ben, you and I have literally never seen anything like this in our lifetimes, so it's really hard to conceive of. True. What isn't hard to imagine is the length to which people would go to avoid the disease. So it makes sense that this person in the Gobi Desert who maybe inhaled some dead guy pixie dust and lived to tell the tale through a smallpox outbreak might lead other people to say, we got to get us some dead guy pixie dust. Which led to the ancient Chinese practice of drying out smallpox scabs, grinding them up, and blowing them up each other's noses with straw.

Much like cocaine, I guess, without the euphoria. Emery, would you be cool with me blowing some old scabs up your nose to protect you with smallpox? I got a straw right here. I'm ready. No, it's going to be a no from me, dog. Fine. Nonetheless, this is one form of something called variolation. It's an early way to make people immune to diseases. And China appears to have been one of the very first places humans started doing it. This is a very important piece of our story.

For reasons we're about to tell you. Back to the time machine so we can skip over a bunch of stone. The Rise of the West. The Dark Ages, lots of wars. A couple of plagues. Bring out, Chiddy! The Renaissance, Leonardo, Mona Lisa. Hmm, not bad.

The quote-unquote New World with lots more war. also more smallpox, which did a ton of damage to indigenous populations in the Americas. And we're back at Cotton Mathers House in Boston, where he is reading these letters that have come in from all over the world, full of wild stories. There was a lady for noble. Her husband was, and she saw this being done to members of the deputies. This was also happening in other places at the time. In Sudan, for example, parents of someone with smallpox would wheel and deal with other parents who wanted. to varialate their kids. That was called buying the smallpox. So Mather takes all this information, and he's like,

all right, let's do this. Let's start getting rid of smallpox in Boston with variolation, the predecessor to vaccination. Mather finds one physician, Zabdi al-Boyllston, who's willing to try this risky experiment. Not a lot of volunteers come in right out of the gate. So they do it to enslaved people, who hadn't already been variolated back in Africa.

Also, their own children, some of whom are toddlers. Problematic for sure. Pretty soon, though, an even bigger problem pops up for Boylston and Mathers operation. The people they are enslaving and their own kids don't have a choice. But the other Puritans in Mathers community, even in his own congregation, are like, wait a minute. Your slave told you about this? Also, this smallpox outbreak is God's will. You know that.

And you want to do what with old scabs and smallpox postules? Religious authorities got in on it as well for the same reasons of maintaining body purity, that the body was pure the way it was designed, and why should we mess with something that's natural? So take blatant racism, add in some squeamishness around scabs, stir in some puritanical beliefs.

What do you get? You get the society of physicians' anti-inoculators, led by the only person in the city of Boston, who was technically an MD at the time. 11,000 people, one real doctor. William Douglas was the doctor's name. And Douglas starts this group. They meet in coffee shops around the city.

They become very vocal. Finally, you get a bomb thrown into Mather's house, which lands, by the way, in a room where his nephew is recovering from inoculation. Mather had some things to say about the reaction to his effort. He's like, Dear Diary. I never saw the devil so let loose upon any occasion. People who made the loudest cry had a very satanic fury acting them.

Their common way was to rail and to rave, and to wish death or other mischiefs to them that practiced or favored this devilish invention. The fire bomb thrown into Mather's house malfunctioned. It never exploded. And despite the best efforts of the Society of Physicians' Anteastern, Inoculators, Mather and Boylston's experiment becomes the first ever number-supported clinical trial in Western medical history, which is standard procedure now. They're tallying up the people they save, the people they unintentionally kill, and the other people

in the city who get smallpox and live or die. And then finally, they decide to send all of this information to the big boss. He sends it off to the Queen of England, saying, here's our report from their colonies. Your Majesty, this is what we did. And look, like, not a lot of people got smallpox, actually, you know, who were inoculated, varioated. And the British government then says, all right, everybody, all the colonies, now everybody's going to get this variolation. A mandatory policy from the crown to the colonies. This doesn't go over great in pre-revolutionary War, Boston.

I don't know why. I mean, who to thunk it? And while Renee says there are other examples of resistance to variolation, this is kind of a crucial plot point in the story of vaccination, because in some ways you see the roots of two familiar ideas. Well, number one, the government is not going to tell me what to do with my own body. And number two, you know, discrediting the science and saying, no, no, there's no evidence for this. You know, he got the idea from a slave. What do they know?

He got the idea from the Arabs in Turkey. What do they know? Skepticism of authorities, xenophobia, racism, vaccination resistance, is so American, it almost hurts. But setting those other problematic reactions aside for a minute, Cotton Mather and Zabdiel Boylston forced people to be inoculated through a medical procedure. They killed some of those people in that process. So it is possible that we need to take a closer look at other leaps forward, and the fights that start popping up between the people creating vaccines

and the people who are skeptical of them. Which is exactly what we're going to do. In a minute. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But, but we do also like to get into other kinds of stories. Stories about policing or politics. Country music. Hockey.

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Ben, my time-traveling buddy. I'd like to invite you on a trip. Where are we going and will there be snacks? Does milk count as a snack? If so, allow me to bring us now to the end of the 1700s to a field in the English countryside populated by a physician named Edward Jenner and a bunch of beautiful milkmaids.

You had me at milk. Oh, good. Okay. Well, here's Renee Nahara again. He says that Jenner, who would go on to become a huge name in the scientific community for this, Jenner notices something about these milkmaids. These milkmaids supposedly have it going on. He noticed that they were pretty. And he notes this in his notes, you know, these fair maidens whose face is not at all reflective of ever having smallpox because it left you with some disfigurations.

And he's kind of like, what is all that about? So he gets inquisitive. This is pretty weird to think about. The idea that the population of this part of the world, maybe many parts of the world, were so ravaged by smallpox that people without scars on their face would be unusual. But that's what we're talking about.

And Jenner picks up on it. And he notices that they all get this disease from the cows called cowpox. But it's not bad at all. It's maybe a fever, maybe a little bit of a rash on the arms and the hands where they've been touching the cows. But that's it.

And so he does a quick survey. You know, he becomes an epidemiologist right there. And he says, okay, you, did you have cowpox? Yes. Did you have smallpox? No. And he goes down the line. And everybody who had cowpox did not develop smallpox.

Lightbulb moment, right? Next, Jenner does what any logical person would do. Find and convince a vulnerable test subject to participate in a secret medical experiment. And so he hires a young boy by the name of James Phipps. And he says, you know, to the father of the boy and to the boy, he says, hey, I'm going to give James the cowpox pus.

Then get this. I'm going to expose him to actual smallpox and see what happens. Lucky, lucky James. Yeah, he did not. There was no institutional review board. There was no ethics panel to look in on this. And he does it. And he keeps it a secret, by the way, because if he kills James,

he's done for it. So he gives James the cowpox with a lancet in his hand. James gets a little bit of a fever, but gets, you know, other than that, nothing bad happens. He gives James smallpox and nothing happens, meaning that it totally neutralized the smallpox. And so Dr. Jenner is like, whoa, I'm onto something here. He immediately writes a letter to other medical friends to the medical. Society in Britain. Of course, they were a little bit horrified that he did it, but on the other side, on the other hand, they were like, whoa, what are you talking about? So they decide to do more

experiments like this, and every experiment after that is successful. Boom Shaka, the world's first vaccine is born. Science 10, smallpox zero. Game over, right? Well, yeah, about that. Just like Cotton Mather's experiments, Dr. Jenner's idea of sticking cow diseases into humans, got just a little bit of blowback. Just a little. And look, I get it. Ben, if you were to blow your nose into a handkerchief and come up and try to wipe it on me,

I would not only be thoroughly grossed out, I would be mad. Fair. And now having seen what smallpox looks like and knowing what it did to communities, if someone came to me back then and said, I'm just going to stick some of that disease in you to try to protect you from that disease,

I'd say hell no. And if they said, no, no, no, Emery, it's fine. It's like that disease, but it's actually a cow disease. How does that make it better? This is a very, very weird idea. So maybe not shocking that it got some weird response. If you look at some of the cartoons at the time, they had people turning into cows as warnings of what could happen

if you got generous cowpox vaccine. no evidence of anybody turning into a cow. You know, but people claim that these things happen. I compare a lot to people who see UFOs, you know. They claim that they saw UFO and I'm not, I wasn't there. You know, I saw a person turned into a cow. Well, how does that work? Well, you weren't there.

Luckily, the proof was in the pudding, which in this case was people actually getting the vaccine and realizing, hey, this is. is way better than getting smallpox. And vaccine, the word vaccine, comes from the Latin word for cow, vaca. And so... Oh, yeah. That's how we get vaccine. Oh, my gosh.

I took Latin, and I didn't not make that connection. Yeah. And this gets back to a guy named Louis Pasteur. I don't know if you've heard about him. Good old Louis Pasteur. And just to play some more word association, Pasteur, Pasterized milk. It's not Latin, but I got that one. Gold Star.

And yes, we can thank Louis for extending the shelf life of lots of food with pasteurization, but we care about Mr. Pasteurized Milk for one of his other discoveries. In 1885, he made a vaccine for rabies. Which involved Pasteur inoculating people with dried out bunny brains and implementing one of the most brutal science lab protocols of all time. the one where if you got rabies by accident in his lab, you had to be shot in the head. Point is, Pastor made a vaccine for rabies that had a massive impact. Like, lots of people died of rabies for a really long time, and it was horrible.

He made a vaccine, and since then, very few people in the Western world have died of rabies. Though it is still a problem in parts of the world where vaccines are less accessible. But what's nuts about this early era of vaccine, is that even while we were all figuring out how to create and manufacture them, we didn't fully understand a lot of the fundamentals of how they actually worked at a molecular level. We had a lot of theories about why vaccines worked, but we also just didn't understand things. Like just for instance, if you don't effectively store certain vaccines,

they might grow bacteria on them, and that is going to be very, very bad for you to put into your body. And that happened. Vaccines got contaminated. They were given to people. and they had terrible reactions to those vaccines. Predictably, but also somewhat understandably, people reacted to those bad reactions badly.

Some people were like, wait, the cure is worse than the disease. And so you have, again, the rise of the Anti-Vacconation Society of America. You have the rise of Anti-Vaxine League in Europe who say, look, these diseases are not a big deal. They're all a right of passage for our children. so why even chanced it with the vaccine? Do you think it's fair to say that there's like always a reaction to the innovation? Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely.

And you see it, you see it with all sorts of technology throughout history. And in fairness, I suppose some of that mania is connected to real problems. Yeah, yeah, because you do see some problems from technology. and from science, right? The, well, remember, line from Jurassic Park is, you guys asked yourself if you could do it. Yeah, but your scientist were so preoccupied with whether or not they could

that they didn't stop to think if they should. Ben, I'm just going to go out on a limb here and say that we should have gotten rid of the global scourge of smallpox. Nah. No, and we did, by the way, in 1980. But what we could call the Jurassic Park mantra here is connected to the feelings of people

who, right now, think that we're overdoing it when it comes to vaccines. Right. And if every era of innovation and disease prevention has a negative reaction, today's reaction has roots in a much more recent past.

This is according to Elena Conis. She's a professor at UC Berkeley and she's the author of a book called Vaccine Nation, America's changing relationship with immunization. And to fully understand the anti-vaccine or Vax hesitant sentiment in America today,

Elena says we need to look at the 50s, 60s, and 70s. In the 1950s, we had our first polio vaccine that was developed and released to the public in 1954. A dramatic announcement is made. A virus that causes polio has been successfully grown inside chicken eggs. And the polio vaccine came in response to a national epidemic of polio that seemed to have been getting worse and worse every year. Polio outbreak. That was the ominous headline which faced the city of Hull on October 5th, 1961. And people were desperate to stop this disease that caused cases of horrific paralysis and children, sometimes confined children to a lifetime in an iron lung.

470 emergency requests for iron lungs have been met. You are listening to the breath of life as it is pumped by these tank respirators called iron lung. People wanted that vaccine desperately, and when that vaccine was developed, the rate of uptake and acceptance of the polio vaccine was just astounding, astounding. And rates of polio plummeted in this country. And immunization officials watching this said, huh, that's interesting. I wonder if we can do that for other diseases.

Some of the other diseases government officials were looking to fight with vaccines, like measles, mumps, and rubella are all highly contagious and pose serious risk. but they are nowhere near as devastating as polio. So demand for those kinds of vaccines was lower. But a good number of people did get the MMR or Measles Mumps Rebella vaccine when it hit shelves, and officials noticed something. In places where everybody gets vaccinated,

outbreaks of things like measles don't happen anymore. So maybe it's a good thing to encourage states, or at least cities, to pass laws requiring vaccination against polio, against measles for kids to enroll in school. And that really is where all of the struggle lies. If these vaccines were all optional, I don't think we would be seeing the struggles that we're seeing today. We would be seeing a lot more infection, however.

It seems fair to say or fair to predict. Over the 60s and 70s, a lot of state laws like this got passed. But at the same time, there were other massive shifts happening in the U.S. Anti-war demonstrators protest U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War in mass marches, rallies, and demonstrations. As you probably know, the 60s and 70s also saw the rise of the counterculture and social movements that questioned authority and pushed back against authority, demanded more answers and self-empowerment and questioned the kind of technological optimism driving the country at the time.

That man in his quest for knowledge and progress is determined and cannot be deterred. One of these movements was the feminist movement, and an outgrowth of that movement was the women's health movement. And women's health activists were asking questions like, why aren't doctors telling us all of the risks of the procedures and medications that they're always prescribing and recommending? Why are they treating us as if we can't think for ourselves? we need to look at the research ourselves, make our own decisions, and become empowered about our bodies. And they started asking questions that in time,

they ended up applying to the experiences of their children as those children got vaccinated. This, this growing group of parents who have been emboldened to be skeptical, who see things happening in their own family and are asking legitimate questions about vaccination. This is how we get to right now. Not a Rockland County where a second local state of emergency has been issued over the measles outbreak.

Two major Southern California universities under quarantine. Washington State has declared a public health emergency there. The World Health Organization cites hesitancy to vaccinate. It's very hard to change people's minds. Turns out science is no match for its greatest foe. Idiots. The parent decides whether their children get vaccinated or not. That is it in a nutshell.

We've been through this long history of crazy medical experiments, innovations, and reactions to that weird groundbreaking science. And now the weirdos aren't the scientists. They're the people questioning the scientists. So we need to hear from some of those people. My name is Dr. Sherry Tenpenny. I'm the founder and president of Tenpenny Integrative Medical Center in Cleveland, Ohio. We feel unheard. I really believe in freedom of choice.

I believe that the separation between me and my government needs to be at the level of my skin. And I need to have the right to refuse being injected with something that could harm me permanently or even kill me. Thank you. I'm not interested in that. So you can kind of hear where Dr. Sherry Tenpenny is coming from, right? I mean, we just laid out the history of how we got to hear. Of course, Sherry also says things. like this.

It's so Nazi Germany, and I hate to use that word, but it's so mingala. The healthcare industry's goose steps to vaccinate, vaccinate, vaccinate, vaccinate, vaccinate. More from Dr. Tenpenny and all the other people who question the science and the whole shebang when our special series, Infectious, continues. Endless Thread is a production of WBUR, Boston's NPR station, in partnership with Reddit. Iris Adler is our executive producer, and when we asked her to edit our vaccine series, she said, Hold my Cosmo. Mix and sound design by Paul Vicus, who doesn't like to argue about vaccines, but loves...

Photoshop battles. Michael Pope is our advisor at Reddit, and when we asked him if he's up to date on his shots, he said... I'm a toddler. Josh Swartz is our producer, and when he needs to take a break from thinking about vaccines, he looks at pictures of Pups on Swings. Shout out to Redditor Thorium 230 for that today. learned post about Louis Pester's crazy rabies lab protocol. By the way, you can listen to the next episode in our series,

The Flintstone Dilemma, right now. It is in our feed. We've got much more coming, so please go to Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app and smash that subscribe button. Also, here's a totally bonkers thing that happened, like, right as we were preparing to put these two new episodes into your feed this week. A cruise ship full of Scientologists

off of the coast of St. Lucia got quarantined because, yep, there was a case of measles on board. The story we have been reporting on about vaccines and anti-vaxxers is huge. And unlike the cruise ship full of Scientologists, it is on the move. So, listen, we want to hear from you. Call 857-244-0338. That is 857-244-0338. And leave us a voicemail. With any burning vaccine-related thoughts, ideas, questions, concerns, a story you saw that you want us to cover, personal reaction to the episode, just call 857-244-0338.

And who knows, maybe we'll feature you in an upcoming episode. On Reddit, we are endless underscore thread. If you want to contribute art for an upcoming episode or give us a juicy story tip so we can tell it like we did today, hit us up there. My co-host and producer is Amory Sievertson. I'm senior producer and host Ben Brock Johnson. I'll let myself out.