Endless Thread - Infectious, Pt. 3: Going Viral

Episode Date: May 16, 2019

You can’t tell the story of today’s anti-vaccine — or “vaccine hesitant”— movement without telling a story of technology and social media. Part 3 of our "Infectious" series looks at the spread of anti-vaccine messaging online and how the Internet and social media have made it possible for vaccine-related misinformation and hoaxes to reach further and faster than ever before.

Support for endless thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Mayrotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. Produced by the I-Lap at WBUR, Boston. This is episode three of Infectious, our special series on vaccines. If you haven't already heard episode one, scabs, puss, and puritans, or episode two, the Flintstone Dilemma, you should go listen to those first. Okay, enjoy. Do you guys have any questions before we get started? I don't I don't think so now. We just have our son sleeping, so we'll just roll with that if he wakes up. You know what I mean?

Eli and Jen are Reditors. They're in their 30s. They're new parents. They're from Springfield, Missouri. How old is your son? 20 months. 20 months. Oh, man. We should be having a play date together. If we're ever out in Boston, I'll hit you up. My babies are 21 months, so I feel your pain and you feel mine. Jen and Eli have been together for a while. It'll be 11 years in May. Nice.

Yeah. How would you describe your relationship? That whole cliche of opposites attract, I think, definitely fits our marriage. A prime example of this came up when Eli and Jen first got pregnant. Eli, pro-vaccination. Jen? It still is a subject that makes me nervous because it's not clear. black and white. For some reason, in my head, I really think that the vaccinations are different now

that children receive than the ones I got when I was a kid. Right as they were about to become parents, Jen was pretty nervous about making this crucial decision. And to be honest, it was because of all of the cliche things you see on social media just posted, you know, to make you worried that say vaccinations are horrible. We found Jen and Eli because he said, Eli was posting on Reddit about this disagreement he had been having with his wife, whether to vaccinate and whether that choice was as big a deal as it seemed. I think what a lot of people don't realize is the power of some of the imagery that's just thrown out there. If someone has pictures of a baby that might have passed away and it's

anywhere within the time frame of a vaccination, the facts of the case don't stick with you, the image, the picture, that's what sticks with you. Combined with that imagery, Jen was finding conspiracy theories. I have a friend who used to be a PICU nurse in a pediatric intensive care unit. He shared a video on a whistleblower from the CDC that said that there was a link to vaccinations and autism. And someone had destroyed that evidence. So you know what I mean? To have a friend that has a master's degree in the medical field.

post something like that, you know what I mean? But he was actually... Jen was conflicted, probably even more so because, get this. I'm actually a nurse in an emergency department, a level one trauma center. And I guess the whole time I was pregnant when the conversation came up with coworkers about vaccinations, I would say, I'm not sure if I'm going to do it. There is clearly something going on here. On the one hand, Jen works in a hospital.

She should have all the information she could ever know. need on making this choice. On the other hand, she's getting enough information and imagery on the internet that she is thinking she doesn't want to vaccinate her firstborn child. And Jen is not alone. The stuff she's read that makes her question vaccination is all over the internet. So today, we're going to look at how people like Jen are turning away from vaccination in 2019 and the kind of material online that helps to convince them to do that. Also, why that material is special. spreading at an alarming rate, going viral. 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 Reddit. 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 three, going viral. So far in the series, we've looked at the history of vaccines and vaccine skepticism, also at some of the key arguments that so-called anti-vaxxers make.

Today, we're going to look at one of the main places they make those arguments, the internets. You can find vaccine skepticism on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, weird, random websites, and forums that people visit for parenting answers or other medical information. Yes, some of it's on Reddit, too. But as we've worked on this series, we've heard a lot about one platform in particular. Throughout the internet, in Facebook, for instance. It's a Facebook group that posted on Facebook. Especially on Facebook.

There are tons of people on Facebook all the time. We know this. So when they want more information about vaccines, they poke around in the place they already are. And specifically when it comes to vaccines, bad information is often easier to find than the good information. And the big question is why? Why is it like this? Simple question, simple answer, right? Nope.

So we wanted to find someone who has experience with this question. And luckily, there was a someone, arguably be someone, right around the corner. My name is Joan Donovan, and I'm the director of the Technology and Social Change Research Project at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard Kennedy School. And my research is really about disinformation and media manipulation online. You must be busy. Yeah. It seems like everything broke. at once, which is not true. It's been there. It's just never been as powerful and as potent as it

these days. Why? Targeted advertising online has given everyday people the capacity to find people with similar interests and people with specific vulnerabilities. Joan says the anti-vaccine movement online has really taken off thanks to this idea, that you can use technology to find people who might be vulnerable to bad information and feed it directly to them. One of the techniques, if you're not using any pay-for advertising, is to just search out momversation groups. Look at all the places online, message boards, Facebook groups. Sorry, did you say mom-versation? Yes, I did say mom-versation. So these are groups where young parents will get together, share tips and tricks and, you know, how do you make sure

your baby goes to bed on time, how do you potty train. And those groups that are brought together for various reasons become places where parents do discuss the need for vaccines. And it's in these spaces that we see that they're presented with a range of alternatives from products to outright refusal and how to refuse. Also, how to fight, how to win an online battle that escalates real fast with talking points. Even if it hasn't happened to you, you don't have to look far for an example of this experience. You can watch it happen

in places all across the internet or on the ABC television show Blackish, where a mother who is also a doctor gets in a battle online. Didn't mean to offend anyone. I am thankful vaccines have eradicated

so many deadly childhood diseases. Oh, look, we've got a show for They don't know what came vaccines? Uh, well, I am a doctor's. How much are they paying you to poison our kids, Dr. Death? Needle emoji. Bitch, I will drive to New Jersey to fight you, and your ugly kids can watch! On Blackish, it's kind of funny. In real life, it's more serious, but how serious?

So we've been talking about the anti-vax movement as really the only existence. or one of the only examples of a situation in which new moms are being radicalized online. Well, when we think about radicalization, we tend to think of something probably much more pointedly political that has, and in this case, does have life and death consequences. Yeah. And it's troublesome that a word like that might fit here. So does it stand scientifically that very? vaccines cause autism? No. But does that fear cause people to act in different ways? Yes.

Now, when you're making your decisions about what your child is going to eat or drink or ingest or breathe, those are really weighty decisions and parents do need to do a fair amount of research. Yeah. But that's why we have doctors. This is where the problem is, is that we have a belief. belief in the internet as a countervailing network of knowledge. And it's just not true. There is good knowledge on the internet. It is very hard to find. Joan says this is because most of our real scientific information, like the actual studies our collective knowledge is based on, is behind paywalls. But Facebook itself, or really any social media, free baby. We know that there are, you know, pardon the use of the term,

fake news, but literally fake scientific news websites that look very organized, the articles are very well written, but they are not presenting scientific information. Hold up. I want us to put a pin in this idea. Fake scientific news websites delivering well organized but not actually scientific information. Not just fake news, fake science news. And the way people get to that fake science news, well, a lot of these big internet companies have been doing half the work for you. Yeah. So if you were to, and I did this today, take a look at what happens when you type the word vaccine into Facebook. And it comes up with a set of auto fillable categories. And they're all vaccine resistance, vaccine movements, you know, vaccine reeducation. And so they've already really populated those Facebook groups so that you get access to them first.

Another thing about these communities that people find with Facebook's help, once you're in, you're in. A community moderator might even slide into your direct messages. So they really do think about community first. And this is something that I've witnessed time and time again with a lot of my research about recruitment in different movies. is that interaction really matters, right? It really matters that someone reaches out to you and brings you in and wants to learn about you and what your interests are.

And then they can put you to work. Why does the anti-vax community seem to have such a strong presence on social media? And why don't the pro-vaxxers have seemingly as strong of a presence? Yeah, it's really hard to create a movement for common sense. And Joan says the people who are creating a movement against mainstream medical recommendations, they're making a name for themselves. Social media is a powerful influential tool in the sense that once you become someone who is being listened to,

you feel a lot like a microcelebrity. And that can make you feel pretty important and pretty powerful. And I think we shouldn't downplay the fact that the people who are leaning into this as a movement and as a way to raise awareness are also in themselves becoming celebrities. So it makes you speak more and speak louder. Yeah, and with more confidence. The idea from Joan about how you can't create a movement for common sense,

it's kind of maddening. Of course, folks who are antivacs would argue they are the common sense movement, and that movement is flourishing online. But don't take our word for it. Take the word of the author of a 2017 study called Mapping the Anti-Vacination Movement on Facebook. Probably just a banana. This is Dr. Naomi Smith,

a digital sociologist at Federation University in Australia, where it's time to be thinking about breakfast bananas. That's like I'm making good choices going into the day. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You've got to start it off on a high note because, you know, it all just falls apart around 3 p.m. Dr. Smith has a very specific job. Yeah, so I'm interested.

in the social implications of the internet and how people use, you know, internet communities and information we find online to frame our relationship with our bodies and make decisions about how we live in those bodies and to think through these issues. Can you talk about a finding of the study that the Antibax movement on Facebook, at least, is quote, highly feminized? Yeah. So what we can do with data is when we gather data, we can run all of the first names against years of US census data.

And we can essentially guess with a very high degree of certainty what someone's gender would be. So we did that on the data as an aggregate. And what we found was the overwhelming majority of people who are participants, participating in these communities, liking posts, making comments, are in fact women. So that's what we would call a highly feminized movement. Among the anti-vax Facebook pages that you looked at, there's a pretty high number of shares versus just comments and likes on posts. Yes. So people are sharing this information. We know that for a fact. But what we can't see is where the information goes from those pages, right? So what we're seeing here is kind of the tip of the iceberg.

The spread and reach of anti-vaccination sentiment amongst people's private networks is probably much greater than it seems. We've said before in this series that Reddit appears to be a generally pro-vaccine community, and we actually looked closer at this. One of our colleagues here at WBUR wrote a computer program that pulled data from all over Reddit over a 24-hour period, pulling all posts that included the word vaccine or some form of it in the title or body of the post. And we went through all of the results to assign sentiment. 42% of the posts were just news stories or unrelated. Another 42% were pro-vaccination, and just 16% were anti-vaccination.

Now, it's just a snapshot, but it's supported. what we found anecdotally. Dr. Smith looked at Facebook specifically because in 2017, she found that platform to be a host of buzzing anti-vax communities in ways that other social media sites just weren't.

So Facebook as a platform has everything that these communities needed to thrive. And it isn't necessarily responsible for the growth of the communities. But it did provide them with the right environment for them to flourish and to grow. Does that mean that we could potentially lay at the feet of some of these platforms,

at the very least, the fact that this movement has also had a very, very serious impact in the real world when it comes to convincing people not to vaccinate? Yes. I think what social media has, done is made what might have been a local issue into a global issue because anyone from anywhere in the world can find these Facebook pages and find this information and join these communities in a way that wasn't possible before. There are seven popular pages on Facebook that have been involved in pushing the kind of information that Dr. Smith studied, the kind that gets shared over and over again.

They are natural news. 10 penny on vaccines and current events. Watch against Monsanto. J.B. Handley. Aaron at Health Nut News. Revolution for Choice. And Stop Mandatory Vaccination. Stop Mandatory Vaccination also has a private Facebook group.

You can't participate until you're let in. So we did what any self-respecting outsider trying to join a private club would do. We rolled up to the club like we were on the list. Or rather, endless thread producer Josh Swartz, rolled up to the club and got himself on the list. How'd you get in? Well, that's the thing. I didn't think I would because you have to request to join.

And then when you hit that button, there's like an automatic form that you have to fill out. But I did not fill that out. And I just let my request simmer. And then eventually they just let me in. So they have 132,314 likes. There is a lot going on in this group. They've got a whole recommended reading list, and they make sure every new member of the group sees it. It is super organized.

Let us know when you're finished with this content. Wow, it really is like a professional. Facebook's algorithm is a little bit hard to parse, but as near as we can tell, there are hundreds, sometimes thousands of posts on this group's page every day. And they really run the gamut. This one honestly made me really disturbed. It's a cropped or photoshopped Time Magazine. cover. The headline is the poisoning of an entire generation toxic vaccines.

So remember when we were talking with Joan about fake science news? Here it is. The post is an image of a very convincing fake of a Time magazine cover, teasing a story about, quote, toxic vaccines. It links to a piece which is definitely not a Time magazine story or any real scientific reporting. It's a weird website with a bunch of anti-vax talking points. There are also posts of real news stories. For instance, when there was a measles outbreak in Rockland County, New York recently, a local TV station posted a Facebook poll about whether unvaccinated minors should be restricted from public places. A user in this group asked for help swarming the poll.

Another example of this kind of mobilizing was a user saying, Hey, a person I know on Facebook is posting a story in support of vaccination. What points should I make to tell them how they're wrong? She gets a ton of suggestions and comments like this one. I won't light my child on fire to keep theirs warm. So this Facebook group is a mobilization platform and a marketplace for ideas about personal freedom and choice, but it's also an actual marketplace. It's got a link in the main banner image for the group for a whole suite of products you can buy on Amazon,

T-shirts and hoodies with messages like No Forced Shots and Protect Vaccine Choice. One black sweatshirt has a skull, and instead of crossbones, crossed needles. It says, anti-vaxxer, proud and healthy. Wait, go back up. My five-year-old is fully vaccinated. I've tried everything. Detox, diet, naps, supplements, focus training, eye, ear exam, but he can't seem to stay focused in class. Okay. This post really got to me for some reason. Here's a mom thinking her five-year-old's hyperactive issues in class are a result of him being vaccinated. And I get where she's coming from in a way. Moms usually know their kids better than most. And she's really worried that her son has been

injured and changed by a vaccine. But this woman is also coming here for medical advice, a Facebook group. And random people are essentially writing prescriptions. Someone even suggests CBD oil. The guy making all of this possible is the creator of Stop Man vaccination. I call myself an anti-vaccine activist. I'm all right with it. We will hear from him and also from the people who will create Facebook. I have heard concerns expressed to me personally by people who say, you're going to remove that content from Facebook. And the answer is no. Why not? We'll go further down the rabbit hole 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. Radio Lab, Adventures on the Edge of what we think we know. Wherever you get your podcast. There is something powerful about the sound of the human voice, beautifully produced audio, has the unique power to connect and inspire. Tell your organization's story with a custom podcast from City Space Productions, the Creative Studio from WBUR's business partnerships team.

Become a thought leader. Recruit new talent. Reach new audiences. Whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org.org slash creative studio. So we just gave you a brief tour of the Facebook group Stop Mandatory Vaccination. The guy behind that group? My name is Larry Cook.

I live. A Facebook group continues to grow. It was hard to get Larry to talk to us. I don't usually do these because most mainstream media, it doesn't matter what we say. It's just kind of irrelevant. We talked to Larry for a long time. And you're not going to hear all of that. So he may feel like we are not treating him fairly here.

But we're sure as hell going to try. Larry says he tries to treat people fairly too. I do have a very solid. solid rule in my group that everyone is quite aware of, and that is no parent shaming. It's running 105 fever and is lethargic. What should I do? Wrong with you? That person would probably get muted because that's parent shaming. Larry might have rules about protecting people from shaming, but on a lot of the points of contention here, he has pretty strong feelings. He says over and over, for instance,

vaccines do kill babies. It happens every day. That is a true statement. Vaccines can kill The statement, vaccines kill babies is a true statement. It's not a false statement. He also says over and over that the measles just isn't a big deal and that natural immunity, the kind you get from surviving a disease, is the better route to go. Do you think these outbreaks are actually a good thing for our collective immunity? I do.

Larry believes some of this stuff because he's heard a lot of anecdotal evidence. We have plenty of parents. Again, in my Facebook group, walking, talking, making eye contact baby to the pediatrician, got vaccinated, ran a high fever, screamed bloody murder. That's their brain swelling up. Arched their back, fell into a deep sleep, woke up, could no longer walk, could no longer talk, could no longer make eye contact, start banging their head against the wall, started toe walking, and within a couple months are diagnosed with autism. Larry clearly has a flock, but he's also part of that flock. And so when this stuff comes on his page,

as long as it's not parent-shaming or what he deems to be incorrect or otherwise BS, he lets it ride. So what about that fake time magazine cover we saw with the link to the fake science news story? Do you remember that particular post that I'm talking about? Do you know if that's one... Well, I guess it doesn't really matter if you remember it per se.

but based on the description of it, does that feel like something that you would want removed from your page or no? I'd have to look at it and stuff and they'd do it for it. Sounds like Larry's got his hands full. He does, actually. He even has an assistant. And three years ago, he quit his day job. Is this a full-time thing for you? It is full-time. How are you able to support it or fund the work that you do?

It's a good question. combinations. So not YouTube anymore. To push back against what it deemed problematic content, the company made moves to stop paying certain creators advertising revenue on their videos. It also started putting Wikipedia links to more accurate information below videos that it deemed to be pushing incorrect information. Larry also got booted from GoFundMe. So his way of making money is controversial.

But Larry still has a bunch of revenue streams. referral links like those Amazon shirts we were talking about, also teaching other people, many of whom are from this anti-vaxxer community that Larry has built. Remember when Joan was talking about recruitment? And then they can put you to work. Larry's not just recruiting anti-vaxers to the cause. He has figured out a way to pay himself for the recruiting. So how does Facebook feel about all of this?

Well, it took us a really long time to get someone on the phone to talk about it. And what do you know? When we did, they had a whole new policy to tell us about. They also had many, many new negative headlines in the news about data collection, password, security holes. The list goes on. But you got to give them this. When Facebook finally arranged a time for us to call, they picked up. Hey, Monica, it's Ben Johnson. How are you? Hi, Ben. I'm doing well. How are you? I'm Monica Bickert, and I lead policy management at Facebook.

Man, that seems like a tough job. Well, there's a lot to think about in terms of keeping our community safe, and every day is new and interesting. What made Facebook want to take a closer look at these groups that were pretty active on its platform? Well, first I want to clarify that what we're doing on Facebook is not about the anti-vax movement. What we're trying to do is stop the spread of misinformation hoaxes that are about vaccines. A lot of people would say that clearly a lot of the information being spread around in these groups is verifiably false. Full stop. Some content that people share about vaccines is misinformation that's verifiably false.

So where we see that sort of misinformation on Facebook, we are taking steps to combat it. Okay. What steps? Let's go through it. Specifically, what we're trying to do is make sure that, we are not surfacing those hoaxes or groups or pages that share those hoaxes in search results on Facebook. Monica also says they're going to start making the correct information easier to find. So if somebody sees one of these hoaxes on Facebook, they also are seeing information that can lead them to credible sources where they can learn more about vaccines.

She also says that Facebook is going to stop auto-completing search results. when people start to type things into Facebook search bar. We are not going to do what I call search typehead, which is where we sort of finish the word for you by suggesting what the pager group would be. We're not doing that for pages or groups that have these hoaxes shared within them. And again, I want to emphasize what we're not covering here,

what we're not talking about, is people sharing their personal experiences or their opinions about vaccines. Of course, this is a problem when those personal experiences are part of what's driving the overall spread of misinformation, right? These are mom-versation groups, after all, or maybe parent-versation groups, to be fair. If there hadn't been a measles outbreak or a couple of measles outbreaks, do you think your company would have updated its policy? Yes. This is something that we've been working on, misinformation we've been working on for years,

and health-related misinformation has been a part of that for a long time. the past few months, we've been focused specifically on vaccines. But this is an issue that we've cared about for a long time, and we'll continue to iterate to get it right. However, Monica and Facebook iterate, they've got a tough road to hoe. We have to at least say that. Because when we ran this policy by Larry... Well, you know, it'd be great if Facebook media pressure... Also, this Facebook policy of not banning stuff, but just kind of deep-sixing it, is one that is also used by Reddit and other tech companies that basically don't want to get into deciding what is and is not okay to say. We're in free speech Merca, after all. But what if free speech Merca is

actually creating a public health crisis in America? And what if Facebook really is kind of a potent driver of anti-vax information? Do you feel like Facebook shares some of the blame for the outbreaks that have occurred? We're certainly a place where people, uh, people, talk about vaccines and we know that people have shared these hoaxes or misinformation on Facebook, but at the same time, we are doing a lot to make sure that we are educating people to make informed choices. So is that a yes, no, maybe? What is that? We're certainly a place where people come to talk about vaccines and we know that people will,

when they do that, sometimes share misinformation. We're continuing to work on this and we're committed to getting it right. So I'm going to call that a yes, but we're trying to fix it. Does that seem right to you? Look, Facebook, what happens on Facebook mirrors what happens in the offline world. So just like people talk about this offline, they're going to talk about it online. Monica's right. The internet is a reflection of the offline world.

But Dr. Naomi Smith, our Facebook researcher, she says there are two big differences. Speed and reach. So information moves faster on the internet than it does by word of mouth. it takes no time at all for something to go viral and to reach thousands and thousands of people. So the behaviour hasn't changed is the mechanisms by which the information spreads so fast and so wide. That has, I think, made the anti-vaccination community able to influence public discussion so strongly. So here's a question. What if it's too late?

What if the damage has been done? What if even after it's changed its policy, tweaked its algorithms just so, Facebook can't put the genie back in the bottle? Think about Larry for a second. He just used the tools that tech companies gave him. And now spreading these ideas online is his livelihood. Here's a sampling from Larry's online course. You share this link anywhere and someone purchases this book, then you get that affiliate money. And it's also important that you have revenue coming.

and sending out emails is definitely one way of creating revenue. And those three combined can give you huge viral social traction. Whether he's on Facebook or somewhere else, Larry Cook's recruiting more people to spread the message. More people who might one day be just like Larry, one of Joan Donovan's so-called micro-celebrities. Another one of those celebrities you heard from in the last episode of our series, Dr. Sherry Tenpenny. What are your thoughts on vaccines? How much time do we have? Dr. Tenpenny runs the Tenpenny Integrative Medical Center in Cleveland, Ohio,

which prioritizes alternative treatments for its patients, like herbs and acupuncture over pharmaceutical ones. She also runs online courses that help people get up to speed on her version of the story on vaccination. The Mastering Vaccine Info Boot Camp course is now officially open for enrollment. The idea is to gird you for battle at the dinner table or at the PTO meeting or wherever because Dr. Tenpenny believes... The vaccine industry will do anything to manipulate any of the numbers

so it makes their outcome be favorable to vaccines, which takes me back to a famous quote by Mark Twain that figures don't lie but liars figure. How did Dr. Tenpenny get here? Well, just like our expecting mom redditor, Jen, she used to have a job in a place where vaccination came up all the time. She ran the emergency department at a regional hospital in Ohio. Sherry's shift away from mainstream medicine came in the fall of 2000. She went to a conference in Washington, D.C., put on by the National Vaccine Information Center,

which is not as official as it sounds. It's a non-government-affiliated organization that advocates against mandatory vaccination. And I sat there for four days, listening to parents and doctors, MDs, listening to PhD researchers and scientists, listening to all of this information being put forth about problems associated with vaccination. And I came home and I thought, no, wow, how did I miss that? Dr. Sherry Tenpenny's been pushing back hard against traditional recommendations for vaccination and doing her own digging ever since.

After 18 years and 30,000 hours worth of research, I would stand up against any mainstream pro-vaccine person and their research any day. And Sherry shares her message on her website and with her 220,000 followers on Facebook. She's a vaccine debate microcelebrity with a big old bullhorn and she's not afraid to use it. Just like our stop mandatory vaccination guy, Larry Cook. Sherry and Larry's brand of anti-vax rhetoric is, working for them. Their networks are getting bigger. And just as Joan said, as their networks get bigger, these micro-celebrities are getting bolder. This includes Del Bigtree. Remember him from our last episode? The TV producer who made a documentary about a supposed cover-up at the CDC. He's in this same boat.

Hey, everybody, Del Bigtree here with the High Wire. Well, the newspaper is going crazy because I decide to wear a yellow star of David in solidarity with the Hasidic Jewish community in Rockland County that had been quarantined. Okay, hold on. If you like us were a little shocked to hear this comment, it is time to talk about Nazis. Del was wearing the yellow patch star of David on his sleeve to stand with the Orthodox Jewish community in Rockland County, where the religious group's own resistance to vaccines has helped to lead a bad measles outbreak there. But the imagery here is absolutely hearkening back to persecution of Jewish communities that started a thousand years ago and was most infamously used by Nazis in Germany.

And the suggestion is that forcing people and communities to vaccinate or shaming them for not vaccinating is tantamount to fascism. This is a common refrain among people who are anti-vax, vaccine-resistant, or vaccine-hesitant. It's connected to these trials after World War II in Nuremberg that led to what is the Nuremberg Code of Medical Ethics. Basically, this agreement that humans would not experiment on other humans in some of the terrible ways that the Nazis did. The suggestion here is that nudging or incentivizing people to vaccinate today is kind of like

forced experimentation on humans like the stuff the Nazis did. Comparing the pro-vaccine community to Nazis is problematic at best, and to some, it's super offensive. But the comparison is everywhere. Sherry's on this tip too. It's so Nazi Germany, and I hate to use that word, but it's so, it's so Mengala. It's so the health care industry's goose steps to vaccinate, vaccinate, vaccinate, and when is it going to stop? Well, it's probably not going to stop as long as people keep calling each other Nazis, which is part of the problem, right?

At the end of the day, the more polarized this debate gets, the worst off everyone is. On the one hand, you have vaccination skeptics spreading information all over the internet, convincing people to not vaccinate, which is helping to create outbreaks of the measles right now. And on the other hand, you have people on the pro-vaccine side calling for fines and other punishments for people who are anti-vaxxers. So both sides are raising the stakes. And when the stakes get raised, the debate gets uglier. Remember Paul Offit, the pro-vaccine voice.

and pediatrician from Children's Hospital of Philadelphia who was in our last episode. Well, there's a part of his story we haven't told you yet. Is it true that you have a list of the names of people who have threatened you and you've given that list to your wife? Right. Well, yeah, I have the, I save the hate mail that I get either snail mail or email, and I have a folder. It's called hate mail.

My wife knows where that is, right? Why does she know where it is? So, in case anything happens to me. she'll at least have a place to start looking. This debate is really heated and not always a real dialogue, no matter how some of us try to create that dialogue. And again, a lack of real dialogue is really bad for people who are trying to make really important choices

about how to take care of their families, their children, choices that have a real impact on other children and other families. So let's go back to Jen and Eli, are redditors who are trying to choose what to do about their son not long after he was born. Jen was still on the fence, but Eli was on a mission. As a matter of fact, I still have the Google Doc, this full presentation of, hey, Jen, this is why we shouldn't be so scared to vaccinate our kid.

And it wasn't necessarily like the science behind the vaccination. There were a whole lot of other circumstances that I kind of pulled into this research. Eli was collecting all the evidence he could. He looked at the Andrew Wakefield study linking autism and vaccines and how it had been debunked. He looked at research from Japan where the measles mumps and rebella vaccine had been discontinued but the autism incidents hadn't gone down.

And a lot of times when you were to dig a little bit deeper, you would see like this medical doctors like on the extreme fringe of the entire medical world and you look at some of the websites they're associated with and you go deep enough into the rabbit hole and then you start to wonder why anybody would take any of it seriously. We go in for the appointment, just sitting there, waiting,

and I remember I just turned to Eline, I'm like, you're sure we want to do this, right? This is the right choice. And he was very confident and was like, yeah, absolutely. Then he got the shots, and of course it's awful. Anytime you have to give an injection to a child, you know, they scream and they're sad and all that.

But I know we did it and we made it through. How'd you feel when it was done? I think some relief after he was consoled. But Ann, too, I was just watching him pretty closely, you know. Jen and Eli watched their son closely, but he did just fine, and he's still fine, but it's hard. You have another kid on the way, right? We do. Do when?

The end of August. Congratulations. Thank you. Are you going to vaccinate them? We are. It sounds like you're still having this conversation. I won't call it a debate, but it sounds like you guys are still trading information about this.

Yeah, and we do. That's why I said, you know, at the beginning, I wouldn't sit here and say that I'm pro-vaccination. I would not be the person to convince anyone People who are pro-vaccine would say that Jen and Eli made the right choice. No thanks to the internet. But there are lots of people going the other way. People who are choosing not to vaccinate.

And in the real world, those choices are starting to have big consequences with measles outbreaks popping up around the country and the world. An Israeli flight attendant is now in a coma after getting the measles. She's in the ICU in a hospital near, Tel Aviv. In the next episode of Endless Threads special series, Infectious, we go to one of the places that's been rocked by the measles, Clark County, Washington. I have a lot of emotions about it, but happy is not one of them. This is a nightmare. We're going to look at why a lack of vaccination there and a preponderance of misinformation are being blamed for the outbreak.

The story of vaccines and anti-vaxxers is huge, and it's personal, which is why we want to hear from you. Call 857-244-0338 to leave us a voicemail with any burning vaccine-related questions or experiences you want to share, like Erica from Chicago. There's one relatively small but still very valid population that I feel gets forgotten in the vaccine debate, and that's people who can't get vaccinated, not the people that don't want to, but literally can't. Or Daryl from Pennsylvania. I don't agree with mandatory vaccination for everything. Some of the stuff they're vaccinating for is just crazy. Or you could be like Nick from Arizona, who left us more than just one message.

You guys, Nick from Arizona, message number 12. Trying to wrap this up, I just want to get out of it as much as I can for you. Call 857-244-0338 and tell us what is on your mind as you listen to infectious. And who knows? Maybe we'll feature you in an upcoming episode. Endless Thread is a production of WBUR, Boston's NPR station in partnership with Reddit. Josh Swartz is our producer and he uses social media for videos of animals doing stuff. Iris Adler is our executive producer and she thinks fake science news stories have a confusing perspective.

Mix and sound design by Paul Vicus who thinks social media is part of our boring dystopia. Michael Pope is our advisor at Reddit who's currently recruiting listeners for his very niche pod. It's mostly music friends people might play at a party or just with friends around. We've got much more coming, so please go to Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app and smash that subscribe button. 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. And hey, by the way, a big thank you to WBUR colleagues Dave Moore and Ali Jarmanning, who helped us pull and understand data from Reddit. Our developers and digital production team over here are top-notch.

Shout out to the six-word reviews, by the way. Some dedicated listeners have been leaving us on Apple podcasts like C. Pellegrin, who said, Endless Thread, more like Endless Awesome Sauce. Couldn't agree more. My co-host and producer is Amory Sieverts. I'm senior producer and host Ben Brock Johnson. I'll let myself out.