Endless Thread - Infectious, Pt. 2: The Flintstone Dilemma

Episode Date: May 3, 2019

There was a time when the measles were common enough to be a source of comedy on TV shows like "The Flintstones." So how did we go from joking about the measles to reports on the news about a growing international measles emergency? In the second episode of our "Infectious" series, we embark on a search for truth, aided by a renowned pediatrician and several prominent anti-vaccine activists. Along the way, we look at how vaccines actually work, fallout from the swine flu pandemic, and the highly controversial -- but unproven -- link between vaccines and autism.

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Produced by the ILAP at WBUR, Boston. Hey, this is episode two in our special series on vaccines, Infectious. If you haven't already heard episode one, scabs, pus, and puritans, you should go listen to that. Okay, enjoy. If you want to understand whether something was a big deal, see if you can find it in pop culture. Wilma, let's go, honey.

The plane leaves in an hour. Believe it or not, Fred Flintstone, the goofy caveman in a tie, can help us really get the measles. Not contract it, but understand its impact before there was a vaccine for it. What's wrong, Wilma?

O'Bellas? Oh, it can't be. You were both all right this morning. There was a time when Fred Flintstone was ubiquitous, and so were the measles. at least common enough that they were a regular plot point in your average sitcom, with about the same stakes that a sitcom usually has.

You'll have to stay with Barney at his house for a few days to we get over them. Measles are very contagious. Oh, this is awful. Is it, though, Wilma and Fred and the gang had to miss a cake-baking competition, which is a pretty far cry from this. Now to this story this morning, the World Health Organization says, Measles cases rose 300% worldwide in the first three months of 2019. Measles is extremely contagious and can be deadly.

That is from the show CBS this morning. So which is the measles? A minor inconvenience and source of comedy in the Flintstones or a growing, deadly international emergency. You may be shocked to learn. There's a bit of a disagreement about this. It's not a friendly disagreement. And we know this because we've talked to this guy.

My name is Del Bigtree. I'm the CEO of the informed consent action network. And this guy, who is talking about that guy. He's a virulent anti-vaccine activist. I just find him awful. He inspires people. Awful or not, we need to hear from voices across the spectrum. Because we are witnessing a resurgence of an incredibly contagious disease in America and beyond that is unprecedented.

It's a vaccine prevent. disease that might not seem that scary. But if you talk to the official organizations whose solemn mission it is to protect the health of Americans and global populations, a lack of vaccination like this, even for things like the measles or the flu, which we will also talk about, is a crisis. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have now confirmed more than 700 cases across 22 states. That's despite the disease having been declared.

eradicated in the U.S. in the year 2000. This disconnect between jokes on the Flintstones and news reports that are frankly scary. This is a dilemma. So our mission right now is to better understand how vaccines work, what anti-vaxxers believe, and why in recent years there's been a disagreement over the reality of vaccination in the modern world. I'm Ben Brock Johnson. I'm Amory Severson. And you're listening to Endless.

thread. The show featuring stories found in the vast ecosystem of online communities called Reddits. We're coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR station, and we're bringing you a special series. Infectious. The strange past and surprising present of vaccines and anti-vaxxers. Part two, the Flintstone Dilemma. All right. So first, let's get a little reminder on how vaccines work. because Amory, you and I sort of operate on the basic level of understanding of vaccines that I think most people have. Let's talk to a guy who is way less basic. Hello, doctor. How's Philly? Philly's good. You know, we're 3 and O.

Three and no, baby. Dr. Paul Offutt is clearly a Phillies fan, but he's also a huge proponent of vaccination. He's a believer in their power to help humanity avoid catastrophe at the individual level, at the community level, and at the global level. And he's a professor of pediatrics at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and the director of the Vaccine Education Center. So it's a center that we created about 20 years ago to try and provide accurate, up-to-date scientific information

about vaccines for the public and the press. Well, let's send Dr. Off at a meatball right over home plate. Why do we make vaccines? What vaccines do is they give you an immunity that will protect you, like a protective shield, so that when you're then exposed to viruses or bacteria, you've already gotten an immune response, which then enables you to fight off that infection

so that you don't have to pay the often high price that comes with those natural infections. I wish that we could come up with a word different than natural because there's nothing good about this. Mother Nature has, in her mind, an interest in killing you. And so I'm not sure why she has such a great reputation because, you know, left to her own devices, she will kill you.

The goal is to fight back against Mother Nature. And we've been doing that ever since we crawled out of ocean to land. I mean, we live now 30 years longer than we did 100 years ago because we fight back against Mother Nature, because we purify our drinking water, you know, because we have better sanitation, because we have vaccines, because we have antibiotics.

Those are all in attempts to fight against Mother Nature. And since Offit is a Philadelphia Phillies fan, Is there a baseball analogy, like a Phillies analogy, in that the way that vaccines work is you kind of train your team by having them play a terrible team so that they know how to win? Right. Or a spring training where you play games that don't count so that when you play the games that do count, that you're ready. Swing a shot to center field. Hit well. It's nice that Dr. Offutt is willing to play ball with us on silly analogies. Oh, my God. Sorry, it was too easy.

But Dr. Offit is the real deal if you're pro-vaccines. He actually developed the vaccine for rotavirus, the serious stomach virus that kills a lot of infants around the world. Still, Dr. Offit says he understands why parents would have questions about vaccines. First of all, I would say I think most parents do have a reason to be skeptical. I think you should be skeptical of anything you put in your body. I mean, we're asking parents of young children today to, in the first few years of life, give vaccines to prevent 14 different diseases,

which can mean as many as 26 inoculations during that time. It can mean as many as five shots at one time to prevent diseases that most people don't see. Using biological fluids, most people don't understand. Vaccines have been a victim of their own success. So I think being skeptical of anything you put in your body is reasonable. I think where you run into a wall are those parents who basically are conspiracy theorists. They listen to what you're saying. They hear about the studies that you're talking about.

And they don't believe the science. They don't believe the data. They think that public health officials and doctors are in some level working against them. And I think there's no way to argue against that. Well, it is tricky, right? I mean, some of this does, I will admit, as a father who's fully vaccinated his children so far, some of this stuff does resonate with me, right? Like, I look at the overprescribing of opioids that has led to the opioid epidemic or even the overprescribing

of something like riddle. for instance, what I deem is an over-prescribing of that drug. And it seems fair to say that sometimes we overdo it with our treatments and the pharmaceutical industry has something to do with that. Is it possible that this has ever happened with vaccines? No, I think what you say makes abundant sense. There are many examples, and you just listed a couple, where modern medicine has gone too far. We're in the name of doing good. We do more harm than good. So how does that or does that in any sense apply to vaccines? I don't think it does.

I think that when we've created vaccines, it's been for the purpose of preventing diseases that caused an enormous amount of suffering and hospitalizations and death. And I think that the record of vaccines has been remarkable. So Dr. Offutt believes, even with all the challenges in the health care industry, it's far better to have a bunch of vaccines and be vaccinating as many people as possible than the other way around. Right. But since he knows that part of getting people,

vaccinated is battling fears about vaccines, he is willing to take on the criticisms. Like one of the popular criticisms about vaccinating for the measles, which, as Fred Flintstone taught us, has been characterized at times as more of an inconvenience than a deadly threat. And the anti-vaxxer argument here is that so-called natural immunity, aka surviving a disease, is stronger and more effective than vaccine immunity. As in, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, but what comes closer to killing you makes you even stronger. Yes. No, I think that is true. I mean, so I was born before in 1963, therefore I had, like everyone born before 1963, measles. So I had natural measles when I was a child.

My daughter, on the other hand, who's in her mid-20s, was inoculated with measles vaccine. The quantity of antibodies in my circulation, antibodies specific against measles, in my circulation, is probably three times greater than hers. But we're both protected against measles. And in fact, the measles vaccine was so effective that we eliminated measles by the year 2000. So I had to suffer the price of natural infection. Fortunately, I didn't die. But I could have been one of the 500 people that died every year from measles before there was a vaccine. Another really important thing to remember is that risk isn't equal for everyone. There's a section of the population here made up of people who have compromised immune systems,

pregnant women, cancer patients, the elderly newborn babies. Measles is much more dangerous for them than it is for the average person. Was it super frustrating to have to write a book called Bad Advice or why celebrities, politicians, and activists aren't your best source of health information? Actually, it was cathartic. That book was cathartic. I think the frustrating books were things like autism's false profits or deadly choices, how the anti-vaccine movement threatens you all. Those were more difficult. It's hard. It's really hard to get good

information out there. Scientists like Offit were really trying to get good information out there in 2009 when a pretty scary pandemic was spreading across the globe. Ben, remember influenza A virus subtype H1N1? Okay, how about if I let Larry King and his suspenders say it, as if they're giving an answer on Jeopardy? What is swine flu? Oh yeah, I remember when people were freaking out about the swine flu. So do I. Now, most people think of vaccines as an important but low-key preventative measure, a shot you get when you're a kid that prevents some sort of vague threat. But vaccines can also be an important defense against a disease spreading in real time, some kind of outbreak, epidemic, or pandemic. Ah, the three sizes of public health catastrophe.

Fun size, not fun size, and definitely least fun size. Exactly. I actually found this fact on Reddit and ended up doing some more reading on it. Smallpox, which we talked about, in the last episode a lot, has been effectively eradicated. But the disease could be used as a biological weapon, and that is scary enough that the United States and the World Health Organization store hundreds of millions of smallpox vaccine reserves. Speaking of which, in 2009, health officials were trying to quickly manufacture a vaccine to slow down swine flu, after the virus jumped from pigs to humans in Mexico and spread really fast.

One of those officials was Dr. Renee Nahara, our vaccine history expert from episode one. Yes, hello. How are you guys? Renee, nice to have you back. So the year is 2009, and we are in the middle of a pandemic. If you remember, H1N1 came out of the Southwest United States or Northern Mexico, depending on who you ask. And it went around the world in a matter of weeks. It was something to behold. And I was actually giddy because as an epidemiologist, that's what I live for.

I didn't necessarily want people to die, but, you know, this was quite the experience. So yes, maybe Renee was a little bit overexcited about a pandemic, but he's a dorky scientist. A dorky scientist who had just helped create a program at the Maryland Department of Health that was newly relevant. The year before that in 2008, we implemented a program called the Maryland Resident Influenza Tracking Service or tracking system, where we got people to tell us every week if they were sick with the flu or not. This kind of real-time medical surveillance, as it's called, collected from volunteers online, it was the first of its kind, and it helped health officials understand how H1N1 was spreading. Estimating the number of H1N1 deaths is tricky.

But in the first year, numbers range from 150 to 575,000 people. Swine flu is the example of how disease can explode in a global population in a matter of weeks when the population hasn't been protected by vaccines. And this specter of a global pandemic is what a lot of doctors think about when they are giving you shots. While you are thinking about a slightly painful inconvenience that stops an invisible threat, a disease that you've never really seen in the world, thanks to vaccines. Renee's experiences working on health surveillance around. around the time of the H1N1 pandemic

are an important reminder of one of the reasons why there is a battle over vaccines. Because eventually, an H1N1 vaccine was developed and distributed, and it was an important tool in stopping a large-scale health threat. It just didn't get delivered in time to help everyone. He was loving, affectionate, funny. This is Cerise Marotta, talking about her five-year-old son, Joseph. We always used to say he was like this little old man

in this little child's body. And, you know, he would commonly put his hands on his hips and just kind of come out with whatever statement of the day he had, you know, and I would kind of follow that up with a question, and he would look at me like, oh, mommy, like, you know what I'm talking about. Don't act surprise. So he was very entertaining. And in 2009, Joseph was healthy, Serice says,

which is why she didn't make too much of it when his teacher called home one day saying that Joseph had thrown up on the bus. He was pretty lethargic, so Cerise called his pediatrician, who suggested taking him to urgent care. The situation escalated slightly at every turn. Doctors couldn't figure out what was going on with Joseph. He had had his flu shot, but the flu vaccine that year didn't include protections against the H1N1 strain.

Five more days went by. More tests, more waiting. And I'll tell you, he was being his typical little self because he kept asking me for red Gatorade, and they wouldn't give it to him, and he was mad. And he said, why can't I have red Gatorade, mommy? And I said, I'm sorry, but the doctor doesn't want you to have it right now. Later that day, Joseph's blood pressure suddenly plummeted.

They put him on a ventilator. We were having a conversation about Halloween costumes, and I was standing next to his bed, and all of a sudden he coated right in front of the same. front of me. And the last part of his treatment, I was in there holding his hand talking to him and they were doing chest compressions on him. And finally, you know, after 30, 35 minutes, the attending physician just turned to me and said, I am so sorry. I never had a full appreciation of how dangerous these vaccine preventable diseases could be until it happened to me. There's

millions of people out there who are just like I was before October 18th, 2009. It doesn't mean that they're not educated. It doesn't mean they're not good parents, protective parents. It just simply means that for some reason or another, that information hasn't come across their radar screen. These days, one reason someone might not know how important vaccines are for preventable diseases is this guy. My name is Dell Bigtree. I'm the CEO of the informed consent action network. Dell Bigtree is Dr. Paul Offutt's competition.

And yes, that was Offit you also heard earlier talking about Dell. He's a virulent anti-vaccine activist. I just find him awful. The reason Offit feels this way, maybe, is that Dell is an example of how, no matter how much work Offit does to share the science behind vaccines, science that proves vaccines are safe and effective. Anti-vaxxers like Dell will always try to poke holes, to doubt, to flat out reject. Coming up, we hear the anti-vax movement's greatest hits.

Now that's what I call vaccine hesitancy volumes 1, 2, 3, and 4. It's a box set. 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, sex, of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. And hopefully make you see the world anew.

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Okay. We are about to dive into the arguments of anti-Baxers. And we should say the argument begins with the term antivaxor itself. Vaccine hesitant, selective vaccinator, vaccine resistant, these are all terms that some people prefer. Antivaxor is really just a common catch-all. Dr. Renee Nahara says he thinks of there being three different kinds of antivaxers. The first one are the people who don't know better

and they're reasonably afraid of a vaccine adverse reaction. So in questioning those risks, which one is best for me? in my child. The second kind of antivaxer is a little bit more complex. It's the one who should know better. So these are your wake fields of the world who have a medical degree or a science degree. You have an obligation to explain to your patient the benefits and the risks of the treatment and the option to opt out. And they totally misinterpret or misunderstand the information that they're reading or they're absorbing. And then you have the showmen.

You have the people that are making money off of this who may or may not know that they're in the wrong. They may or may not know that they're lying. But they do a lot of lying. And they're doing so for monetary gain. Hey, everybody, Dell Bigtree here with the high wire. Well, the newspapers are going crazy. They're the ones that have the websites that sell you the natural supplements

to detox you from vaccines. They're the ones that sell the bleach enemas for autistic children to try to cure them from being off. autistic. And of course, they're not mutually exclusive. You know, you may have overlap of all three at some point, but they're out there. We are about to hear from a man who might be part showman, part person who should maybe know better. True. And Renee also mentioned Wakefield in there, as in Andrew Wakefield. And we got to talk about his study. Sure. So if there was a kind of medical paper patient zero of the debate over vaccines in our current era, it's this study from 1998 in the U.K.

by a gastroenterologist named Andrew Wakefield. And it drew a connection between vaccines and autism, which over the last several decades has seen a huge rise in diagnosis. This study has been thoroughly debunked by the medical community. It's straight up bad science. People even discovered Wakefield's research was funded by people suing vaccine makers. So a clear conflict of interest there. And Wakefield has been stripped of his credentials.

But the reverberations from his study continue. And Wakefield is still kind of a darling in the group of people who are opposed to current standards of vaccination, even at the highest levels. The beautiful child went to have the vaccine and came back and a week later got a tremendous fever, got very, very sick, now is autistic. President Trump met with Wakefield before he was elected, and Wakefield attended Trump's inaugural ball.

Granted, recently, the president did something he never does. He changed his tune. They have to get the shot. The vaccinations are so important. This is really going around now. They have to get their shot. The president's news statements are surely an effort to slow down the spread of the disease among people who aren't vaccinated.

Still, the idea that autism and the measles mom's rebella vaccine are connected persists. Renee Nahara has an idea about why. The autism diagnoses happened more or less around one year of age, you know, when the child is developing and it's starting to have their first words, starting to walk. And that's around the time that you do the well child checks and you get the MMR vaccine. And so you have these folks who went and did, as they should, get their children vaccinated. But then a couple of weeks later, a couple of months later, the child is not developing as expected. and they get the diagnosis of autism and where do they look for the blame, the vaccine?

Del Bigtree has a different theory, and his theory is part of why he has such a packed schedule. I am busier than I ever dreamed I'd be at 18 years old. He used to be a producer on the CBS television show, The Doctors. The Doctors TV show, 4MDs, bringing you your daily dose of the latest medical information. Imagine if the Dr. Oz show and Dr. Phil's show had a baby together,

and the baby was like The View. But with doctors. Right. Del Bigtree was a producer on that show. And one day, he got pitched this story about how vaccines might cause autism. Dell didn't take it too seriously. Well, because it had already been settled.

I mean, the doctors covers mainstream medical thought, and as far as everyone was concerned, vaccines are safe and effective, and we said it all the time. And the stories around autism and vaccines have been debunked. And so moving on. But then, Dell says, he heard from the

source again. And this time, the source said a whistleblower was going to come forward to out-corruption at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one of the main institutions tasked with vaccine safety. But when Del took his pitch to the powers that be

at the doctors, he says the show's connections to the CDC and the pharmaceutical industry became a problem. And so I was just told, move on, find another story. But I followed it, and I continued to watch. And two weeks later, sure enough, Dr. William Thompson, these posts start coming online where he's admitting to having committed scientific fraud

with five other scientists at the CDC. So Del decided he would cover it. And he's made it his life. He left his job at CBS and teamed up with Andrew Wakefield, the disgraced British doctor. Former doctor. Yes, former doctor. Dell actually made a whole documentary with him. It's called vaxed, from cover-up to catastrophe.

Parents should be able to count on federal agencies to tell them the truth. In spite of Big Tree in Wakefield's efforts to dramatize the CDC whistleblower stuff, there's just not any there there. Qualified researchers have studied the documents Dr. Thompson provided and debunked his claims. Thoroughly. There is still no proven link, between vaccines and autism, and there was no evidence of any type of scientific fraud or cover-up.

Not to mention the fact that Dr. Thompson himself says the benefits of vaccines far outweigh the risks. Still, anti-vaxxers like Dell keep repeating this idea. The vaccines can cause harm. They go so far as to call them a catastrophe. Could you see that catastrophe could be interpreted as maybe too dramatic of a word? Over 100,000 children born in America this year are going to be on the autism spectrum. Many of them will be wearing diapers as adults. We are going to grow the autism population by millions by the time my child that's 10 years old ends up being in his 20s and my daughter 5.

Yes, that is a catastrophe. Also, to address the statement that the data shows that vaccines are overall safe, I'm one of the first people that's not taking their word for it. I'm reading the studies and I'm telling you they are not clicking data. One of the people that's not taking their word for it. So Dell is reinforcing a theory about vaccines and autism that even after over 100 different studies, including a recent one involving 650,000 children in Denmark,

has not been proven. It is tricky because we don't know what causes autism. just that there's never been a proven link to vaccines. But alas, this claim won't go away. And that has consequences, both for people who choose not to get vaccinated because of it, and also for the autism community, because anti-vaxxers are basically saying, these vaccine-preventable diseases, not that bad,

but autism? Awful, horrible, the worst. We went on Reddit, and we posted to the autism subreddit community to get their reaction on this. And the reaction was swift and strong. Most of the responses, many from people with autism or families affected by the disorder, captured a sentiment shared by Reddor Nerd 3.0. These folks would rather let their children die of horrible diseases than be like me.

There are a lot of people like Dell who still just smell something rotten despite the facts they're presented with. There are a lot of arguments that people use to criticize vaccines, but we have heard a few of them over and over again as we've worked on this series. Emery, you remember we were going to do vaccine hesitancy volumes 1, 2, 3, and 4? The unsupported claim that vaccines cause autism was volume 1. Let's do another one. Volume 2. Vaccines are full of toxins.

Here's Dr. Sherry 10penny of the 10 Penny Integrative Medical Center, one of the leading anti-vax voices. We're injecting all kinds of foreign material into humans, including aluminum and a little bit of mercury still remains in the vaccines. And we know from scientific literature that injected aluminum, the body handles injected aluminum in a very different way than ingested aluminum. Ingested aluminum, you say? Yes, you have ingested aluminum.

It's the most common metal found in nature. It's in the air we breathe, the food we eat, the water we drink. And while Dr. Paul Offutt over at the Vaccine Education Center agrees that there is a difference between injecting aluminum and ingesting it, there's logarithmically so much more aluminum that you ingest that you actually have far more aluminum in your circulation because of what you eat and drink than you would ever get from vaccines. And again, this, by the way, is from one of the Vaccine Education Center's many informational videos. As for the mercury claim, couple things. The mercury that these days is only in seven,

Some versions of the flu vaccine is different than the kind of mercury that is in your average tuna salad. And your body gets rid of the vaccine mercury a lot faster than tuna salad mercury. Another argument made by the anti-vaccine or vaccine hesitant folks has to do with safety testing for side effects. Here's Sherry Tenpenny again. The gold standard in medical research is the double-blind placebo-controlled clinical trial. Vaccines have never been subjected to placebo-controlled trials. So vaccines have never truly, authentically been tested for safety. As we mentioned earlier, Dr. Paul Offutt has actually developed a vaccine.

So we asked him about this. Well, first of all, there are placebo tests, and I'll tell you how they're done. Initially, we did the studies in experimental animals and then went from that to sort of so-called phase one, phase two, phase three trials that ended in a prospective placebo-controlled, 70,000 person, 11 country, 4-year-old. year, $350 million trial to prove that vaccine was exactly what it was claimed to be. Of course, it was placebo controlled. It would have to be. Otherwise, we wouldn't know whether or not the vaccine was working. Okay. So, the vast majority of medical professionals and scientists here agree that, yes, they do double-blind placebo testing. There is no proven link between vaccines in autism, and they are not toxic. So why are we still in this moment? In short, this is a danger

potentially deadly disease that's on the rise, and it's our own fault. That's from MSNBC. People like Del Bigtree say, I listen to virtually every news anchor saying the deadly measles disease that is deadly. If that was the case, why was the Brady Bunch making a joke out of it? Boy, this is the life, isn't it? Yeah. If you have to get sick, you sure can't beat the measles.

That's right. No medicine. Inside or out. Like shots I mean. Don't even mention shots. Yich. There was never a sitcom that made fun of cancer. There's never a sitcom that's made fun of AIDS.

But we did make fun of measles at one point. Why? Because we weren't afraid of it. Dells got us back to the Flintstone dilemma. If the measles used to be a sitcom joke, how come right now it is being represented as no joke? Anti-vaxxers would point to this disconnect as proof that it is being blown out of proportion.

People who believe in the current standards of vaccination would argue almost the opposite, that the sitcom jokes of yesteryear are proof of something so ubiquitous and actually terrible that pop culture included it because that's exactly what pop culture does. It deals with real issues of the day humorously or not. Also, today's growing numbers of people opting out of vaccination is proof that at a fundamental level we've forgotten how bad things used to be and how much worse they can get. The measles is serious,

and widespread resistance to vaccination makes us all more vulnerable to diseases that are so much worse. Dell says, be Greg from the Brady Bunch, be Fred Flintstone, the caveman in a tie who's just annoyed that Wilma can't bake a cake for the competition.

Whatever you do, don't be afraid of the measles. Dr. Paul Offutt says, do be afraid. Well, the nightmare scenario is happening. I mean, we already now have a number of measles cases this year in the United States in 2019. That's more than anything we've had in 20 years. It's certainly surpassed last year.

Get to a few thousand cases of measles, and you're going to start to see children dying of measles again. And it just is enormously frustrating to me. I mean, why do we have to keep learning this lesson? Why is it that children have to suffer in order for us to understand this? Why are they the ones who have to pay the price for our ignorance? It's really hard to watch. I mean, this is why we created the center 20 years ago to avoid exactly what's happening now. What is happening now is tough to explain.

Let's go back to Cerise for a minute, whose son Joseph died of H1N1 at five years old. She's now the chief operating officer of families fighting flu, a nonprofit that works to educate families on how deadly the flu can be. The idea is to get as many people vaccinated as possible each flu season in hopes that no one has to go through. through what she and her family did. Facebook has been a good information-sharing tool for families fighting flu. So in October of 2017, on the 8th anniversary of Joseph's death,

Ceres posted a video to the group's Facebook page, telling Joseph's story. I don't know about you, but I'm glad vaccines exist. They are life-saving. She got some comments of support, but others were what I'll politely call as very enlightening. We won't be as polite. Farm a whore, one person wrote. May every word and every intention she speaks come back to destroy her, wrote another. This is horrible.

It is also proof of this very fundamental thing that is happening now. Despite all of the information out there, there is a basic disagreement between these two groups on reality. Anti-vaxxers want proof. Scientists do studies. Those studies come out. anti-vaxxers say the studies are suspicious, and it goes on and on. Dr. Offutt says there is a controversy, just not the one anti-vaxers think.

It certainly is a cultural controversy, and for that reason, I think it needs to be confronted as a cultural controversy, but it's not a scientific controversy. And I think what people like Sherry, Tenpenny, or Del Bigtree, try and do is they try and make it as if it is a scientific controversy. And a big part of the reason that this basic disagreement over reality persists, is, well, the internet. Remember the internet? But what if my son? What if your son? What if your mother?

Yep. The internet is the thing that makes this current moment different from the early days of vaccine resistance. We like to think of the internet as ephemeral. But at the same time, when you put something on the internet, it is basically there forever. On the internet, it is not about how accurate your information is. It is about how much noise you can make and how many people you leach. My name is Larry Cook. I live in Los Angeles and I run the brand Stop Mandatory Vaccination.

That brand includes a website, a Facebook group that has over 162,000 concerned parents in it, and it continues to grow by several hundred per day. In our next episode, we're going to take. a look at the spread of misinformation online, how it's reinforcing beliefs and opinions in the debate over vaccines, and how it's fueling a growing public health crisis that seems like it's about to reach a fever pitch. Endless Thread is a production of WBUR Boston's NPR station in partnership with Reddit. Josh Swartz is our producer and he says that when it comes to vaccines, there are

No Stupid Questions. Iris Adler is our executive producer and when she's heard that Wilma Flintstone got the measles, she said, That's insane. Mix and sound design by Paul Vicus, who says working on this series is his butter and Reddit. Michael Pope is our advisor at Reddit who calls the return of the measles. Retro-futurism.

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 right as we were preparing to put these two new episodes into your future. 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 857-244-4-4-4-3-3-8. That is 8-57-244-4-4.

0.0338. 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.

Thanks to Redditor Demon Sora 883 for this week's artwork. Do not mess with Wilma and Betty when they have the measles. 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 Sieverts. I am senior producer and host Ben Brock Johnson. I'll let myself out.