Factually! with Adam Conover - How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Went Mainstream with Tara Haelle

Episode Date: October 13, 2021

Fear of vaccination has been around since the first vaccine over 200 years ago. But now the anti-vaccine has grown from a fringe phenomenon to a mainstream movement. How, and why? To help answer this question on the show this week is science journalist Tara Haelle. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the way I don't know what to think I don't know what to say Yeah, but that's alright Yeah, that's okay I don't know anything Hello everyone, welcome to Factually, I'm Adam Conover.

Thank you for joining me once again as I talk to an incredible expert about all the amazing things they know that I don't know and that you probably don't know. My mind is going to be blown. Your mind is going to be blown. We're going to have a great time together. That's been my intro the last couple episodes. Should I change it up? I don't know. I'm figuring it out. I'm trying to evolve with the times, trying to keep the format of the show fresh and interesting. trying to evolve with the times, trying to keep the format of the show fresh and interesting. It's been a while since we've talked about vaccines. You know, months ago, we talked to the drug discovery chemist, Derek Lowe. You can go find that episode in the archives. We talked about the incredible mRNA vaccines that we are using to fight COVID-19, the incredible leap forward in medical scientific understanding that they represent and just basically how fucking cool they are and how they are this incredibly powerful weapon against this disease that is killing so many people.

But unfortunately, the incredible good that these vaccines have done is often overshadowed, especially lately, by the resistance many have had to them. So on this episode, we're going to talk about that resistance. We're going to talk about where it came from and how vaccine resistance has changed over time. The truth is, it's not new. Fear of vaccination goes back a long, long time, back to when people started using vaccines in the first place, in the 18th century.

Back then, instead of vaccination, it was called inoculation. And basically what they would do is they would take some cow pus or the pus from a person who had the disease and they would rub it right in your arm. It was kind of gross. It did work, but it wasn't quite as safe as the vaccines we have today.

It could potentially kill you. And as a result, a lot of people didn't want to get inoculated. Anti-vaccine cartoons from the early 19th century show people getting vaccinated and then sprouting horns or puking a cow out of their mouth. You should go look these up. They're really funny. And not that dissimilar from the anti-vaccine rhetoric we hear today.

The point is, as long as vaccination has been around, there have been people who are really, really opposed to it. But here's the good news. That has not stopped vaccines from changing the world. The vaccines we have today are enormously safe, incredibly safe, and they save two to three million people's lives every single year. Vaccines have been so successful that it is literally hard for scientists to even put into numbers what our world would look like without them.

Here's a quote. The counterfactual world in which vaccines would never have been developed would be so different from ours that an estimate of the impact of vaccines is impossible. They literally cannot calculate how many lives have been saved because our world has been changed overall for the better as a result in countless ways. In other words, in no uncertain terms, vaccines are one of the most profound medical advancements of our time. But still, today, even as we know even more about vaccines than we used to, even as they're safer than ever, even as we have a higher general level of medical education in this country, even now, many reject the truth that vaccines are safe and effective. The anti-vaccination viewpoint has actually gone mainstream. See, until recently, it was

still pretty fringe. Followers of the disgraced anti-vaccine doctor Andrew Wakefield, who lost his medical license for sham research on vaccines and autism, well, they mostly existed on, you know, angry Facebook pages. You know, they weren't really much more popular than flat earthers or other weird, you know, fringe beliefs. But since the pandemic, we've seen the continued popularization and political realignment of anti-vaccination sentiment. Anti-vaxxers, in other words, are now an extremely powerful political force that needs to be reckoned with. But how did that change occur? How did anti-vaxxers go from being a fringe movement to something that, you know, cable news is catering to? Well, this latest

turn for the anti-vaccine movement dates back to 2014, with a measles outbreak at Disneyland, which grew from largely unvaccinated visitors. Now, the vast majority of the public was pissed about this. I mean, a previously eradicated disease had a new outbreak just because of parents who didn't want to vaccinate their kids for spurious pseudoscientific reasons. So a coalition of parents in California pushed a bill to remove all non-medical exemptions from vaccine requirements in schools. Basically, they wanted to strengthen vaccine coverage in California. But in response to this bill, the anti-vaxxers found one weird trick to make their message a lot stronger.

Instead of talking about autism or medical woo-woo stuff, they started using instead the right-wing rhetoric of freedom. They said that this new law was impinging on their rights, and this worked. Right-wing politicians like Rand Paul came out in favor of parents having the, quote, freedom to vaccinate or not vaccinate their kids. And eventually other Republican politicians and donors hopped on board the anti-vaccine express.

But the deepening polarization of the anti-vaccine movement was, of course, supercharged by the COVID-19 pandemic. And now we're starting to see people's opinion of vaccines change depending on which party they affiliate with. And that is not great. For one of the most important medical breakthroughs of our time to become politically polarized, I'm going to say that that is a bad thing. And the ramifications of that are something that we're only just beginning now to work out. So here today to talk to us about this issue, help us work through it and help us figure out what we should do about it is Tara Haley. She's a science journalist and an educator who studies the

anti-vaccine movement. Please welcome Tara Haley. Tara, thank you so much for being here. Thank you very much for having me. I'm excited to be here. So you wrote a piece for the New York Times that I thought was really terrific called This is the Moment the Anti-Vaccine Movement Has Been Waiting For, about how the anti-vaccine movement has changed. It has changed a lot over my lifetime. You used to think of it in relation to measles vaccines, used to be very fringe. And in recent years, it really has started to feel like it's morphing into something

very different and new. So I'd love it, you know, you to fill us in on what that looks like from your view and sort of take us through the history of there's been so much talk about the science of vaccines. We've had a lot of that on this show. But let's talk about the social history of the vaccine and anti-vaccine movement. Yeah, and it's interesting because it both is and isn't something different, which is going to sound contradictory. But I recently was putting together a PowerPoint on the history of the anti-vaccine movement going all the way back to

basically before the smallpox vaccine, which always startles people. I like to tell people that anti-vaccine sentiment preceded vaccines. And how is that that that was? Well, vaccine, the word vacca is cow in Latin, and that's where vaccine came from because the cowpox serum is what they used for the smallpox vaccine. But before we had that, we had smallpox inoculation, which is where we used, it's called variolation, and they would use the actual pus from a real smallpox sore, which was even, it had more risk to do that. But you had people who were anti-variolation, including Benjamin Franklin, actually. He was one of the most famous anti- variolation people and used his newspaper against it until he lost his son and then was sorry and

backtracked on it and realized that he was wrong. But so the idea of antivariation actually preceded vaccination itself. And then once vaccination came along, it morphed into anti-vaccination. And what I think is really fascinating is that in terms of the arguments that are made and the responses to those arguments, I went through a bunch of newspaper clippings from like the 1890s all the way to the present day. And what startled me is how similar the same arguments are. They make the same exact arguments, you know, purity of what's in it, saying that it makes you sick to get the vaccine and it's healthier not to put this in your body, that natural disease is more appropriate. All the arguments, I mean, obviously they didn't

have a microchip argument in the 1890s, but a lot of the same things that you hear them saying, there's certain sort of misconceptions about vaccines that I like to call, there's like these zombie ideas, which is you kill it and it comes back and you kill it and it comes back. One of those is fertility, like worries about fertility. People have worried about vaccines harming fertility since there was a vaccine. And there's never been a vaccine. And there's never been a vaccine that harms fertility ever. In fact, some of them help fertility by not making miscarriages as likely. Well, and let me say, it seems to me that there must be a strain here of

having the state or any body that has power over you say, you must put this in your body, is just at root an uncomfortable thing. It's unintuitive. It violates many of the values that we have, maybe not just as Americans, but as humans. And so there's a core of it that is like really understandable and I would expect to always exist. Yeah. Well, I mean, we, it feels really, first of all, it's a Paul Offit who is a, he's the co-inventor of the, co-developer of the rotavirus vaccine. And he runs, he's head of infectious disease over at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. And something he says that I often quote is that

vaccination is a fundamentally violent act. You are taking this needle, which causes pain, and it's got stuff in it that you don't understand, and you stick it in your body. If we didn't, you know, your natural inclination to be afraid of that is actually makes sense. It actually is rational until you understand, like natural inclination to be afraid of that is actually makes sense. It's, it actually is rational, um, until you understand like what's going on. Right. Uh, and in some ways it even applies to the hair of the dog idea, right? A little bit of the vacuum, a little bit of the, of the, of the pathogen in order to, to make you less, you know, more receptive, you know, defend better against it. Um, what is changing though? What is different? So the arguments against the state being able to tell you what to do is definitely, that's one of the oldest

streams. In fact, it probably, there wasn't a lot of anti-vaccine or anti-variation sentiment until the state said, you have to do this, because no one would think to do it. And part of the problem was that people weren't getting other health care. And we still see that today when we talk about mistrust of the health care system. OK, so you've got these people over here who are starving and don't have food or they're not getting good maternal care or they're not getting other good health care. But you want to force this other health care intervention on us. Hey, you never came you never came around when my daughter was dying of the other thing, of malnutrition or whatever. Now you're showing up with a syringe and why should I trust you?

Exactly. The thing that has changed is the politicization of it. Now, it's always been political in the sense that the main goal of anti-vaccine activists was to not have the state force them to get it, Right. So that that political goal has not changed. What has changed is the alignment of the politics. It used to be that politics made strange bedfellows. Excuse me. And you had the folks on the left and the right who were anti vaccine and they were fringe on both sides. Yeah. That's how it was just like six or seven years ago. You write about the, the measles outbreak in 2014,

which was the result of people advocating that was in when the big argument was the MMR vaccine causes autism. Right. People have been saying that for years. It's clearly a fringe belief. Then enough people are exposed, you know, are,

are unvaccinated that there's an outbreak at Disney World? Disneyland. Disneyland. What happened was that, funny enough, 2014 had many, many more measles cases than 2015. But the Disneyland outbreak started in December of 2014. So the turning point was December. It was 2015 because that's when all the cases started to spread. And even though we never had as many cases from the Disneyland outbreak as we did from the 2014 outbreaks, there's something sort of mystical and mythical and sort of childhood preservation-ish or whatever about Disneyland, right? Disneyland's the world, it's the happiest place on earth. Nothing bad is supposed to happen at Disneyland. So for a childhood disease that we have a highly effective vaccine for to break out at Disneyland, sort of the heart of what represents everything that childhood is supposed to be about.

I think that sort of hit the psyche of some people in a way that really woke them up to, oh, crap, this vaccine thing is a problem. So it was a common, it was sort of that emotional response. And what that did was get the ball rolling to where you had parents who were saying, well, crap, I don't want my kids to be infected with measles, even if they're vaccinated, and they're the one in 100 kids that the measles vaccine doesn't work in. I don't want measles going through my child who's too young to be vaccinated or who's who can't get a live vaccine because the MMR vaccine is a live vaccine. You know, my kid who has cancer or my kid who has some kind of condition that they can't get this vaccine. I don't want them to be at risk

for measles. So parents started banding together and getting law, trying to get laws passed that required people to there was already laws saying you had to get laws passed that required people to, there was already laws saying you had to get vaccinated to go to school, but a lot of states had personal belief exemptions. So philosophical or religious exemptions, and some of them were more permissible than others, permissive than others. And the one in California was especially permissive. All you had to do was say, nope, I don't believe in it, period. Like you didn't have to get anything. You didn't have to go to a class. You didn't have to write a formal statement. You didn't have to go to the health department. You didn't have to get a notarization. You just had to say, I don't

believe in it, basically. And the parents wanted to get rid of that. And once they, when that, when that had been going on for a while, but this one really gathered steam. And then you had the anti-vaccine activists pushing against it and when they tried to bring up arguments against vaccines from a science perspective it didn't hold water because the science is very clear on vaccines that there was no good argument from the scientific perspective so when they realized that that didn't work they pivoted and like well what can we do to get these these politicians attention and they said well it's my child i get to decide what happens to my child's body that actually got people's attention especially And they said, well, it's my child. I get to decide what happens to my child's body. That actually got people's attention, especially on the conservative side, because this

is 2015. You know, 2010 was when the Tea Party really gained steam. So this is on the tail end of the Tea Party. But this idea of personal freedom, you don't get to tell me what to do, reaction against Obama's election had really taken hold on the right at this time. So the conditions were perfect for the anti-vaccine activists' argument of personal freedom. I get to decide what happens to my body. I get to decide what happens to my child. That meshed really well with the freedom argument that you were already hearing now from the right, especially. So that meshing is basically when the anti-vaccine activists said, OK, we want to get politicians in our back pocket. Where do we start? Going to the right was a

natural place to go. And that's what they did. So because of this happening, we went from a situation where the anti-vaccine advocates were very fringe in both parties and everyone hated them after this Disney outbreak. Like everyone was like, oh my God, everyone's making fun of anti-vaxxers. They don't understand the science, et cetera, et cetera. The term anti-vaxxer, I think was basically coined around that time, right? That's at least when it started popping up. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. No, it's older?

Oh, anti-vaxxer is very old. Anti-vaxxer has been around. I don't even know when it started. It's, I mean, it predates my entry into studying this. It probably predates, it probably predates 2000. Well, that was the first time, that was the first time I heard it, I think, was in 2015. And that's part of the point is that a lot of people, I remember a friend of mine who lives in Houston. I went and visited her in like 2013 or 2014. And I was talking to her about what I did. because at that time, I was already writing

about the anti-vaccine movement. And she was in finance, you know, did nothing related to that. And we were talking just casually. I mean, she was a college friend. And I was talking about how I talked to anti-vaccine parents. And she said, to what? And I said, anti-vaccine parents. She says, what do you mean anti-vaccine? I mean, I said, well, they don't want to vaccinate their kids. She says, that doesn't make any sense. Why would you vaccinate your kids? She had never even heard of this phenomenon. Like the idea that you wouldn't vaccinate had not like it was totally off her radar, but it was very much still. I mean, it was around.

It existed. And the term anti-vaxxer existed. I don't use the term anti-vaxxer very often because I think it's a term that people have their own definition for, and it's got a lot of negative connotation. It understandably has negative connotation. It's used as a derogatorily. Yeah, it's used as a, yes, it's used pejoratively, but it also is nonspecific. A lot of people refer to anti-vaxxers, they mean anybody who doesn't vaccinate. And I don't refer to, to me, an anti-vaxxer, a proper quote unquote anti-vaxxer is an anti-vaccine activist who not only doesn't

vaccinate their kids, but who is actively going to legislatures and legislators and trying to lobby against vaccines or vaccine mandates or anything to that effect and who goes out on the street and does public demonstrations. That's an anti-vaxxer to me. who goes out on the street and does public demonstrations. That's an anti-vaxxer to me. That's separate from a vaccine refuser, which is a person who does not vaccinate and will not vaccinate,

but they don't talk to anybody about it. No one even knows it unless they talk to them, right? Their doctor knows about it, but that's it. To me, that's not an anti-vaxxer. That's just a vaccine refuser. And then you have the vaccine hesitant or the vaccine resistant. So vaccine hesitant are the ones that are, they have some questions. They're uneasy.

Maybe they partially vaccinate. Maybe they're selective vaccinators. And the vaccine resistant, which are a little bit somewhere between hesitant and refuser, right? So there's, it's very much a continuum. And to me, anti-vaxxers are at the far end of the continuum, which is why I don't use the term because some people use it to conclude the entire continuum. And that becomes problematic because it's alienating. If you're someone who's vaccine hesitant, you have genuine questions and you feel like your questions are valid. You're not going to respond very well if someone says, oh, well, you're just a stupid anti-vaxxer. Well, boom,

you just lost them. They're not going to listen to you now. Yeah, because you called them the name. And I want to come back to all those different spectrums of people. But let's just jump back to the history real quick. So we had this thing where anti-vaccine advocates were – I mean, I used to do content about how it was stupid to not believe in vaccines. It was one of the many pseudoscientific beliefs that, you know, to the extent that I'm as part of the skeptic community or the rational, you know, like that sort of, I do that sort of media. You see people make a YouTube video about how dumb it is to not believe in vaccines. Now we should trust science and yada, yada.

It was a very fringe position, like believing in, I don't know, you know, laying on hand. Yeah. Flat earth. It was like a flat earth type thing. Right. But then after 2015, you're saying they started organizing and sort of joined the what? Like like political culture war in a way. keep in mind, if people can put their minds back into 2015, at that point, Twitter had been around for what, maybe eight years, I think, and about the same for Facebook. I can't remember the exact dates that either started, but those technologies were, they were in full swing. People were fully using them on a regular basis, but they were just, I don't remember when Facebook groups was introduced, but Facebook groups was relatively new somewhere around 2014 or so. So you at the same time that you had this outbreak that was causing parents to mobilize against those who wanted stricter vaccine laws, you had this upswing of use of social media to organize. So they were already organized in their small groups,

but they were much more siloed. And now you had this national movement where they were able to communicate much more effectively and get their message out more effectively, just like everybody was. I mean, every fringe group got, this also affected white supremacy, for example. White supremacy became much more mainstream when it become much easier to get that message out there on social media. There's some really great analyses that Renee DiResta, she's a Stanford scientist who's done some phenomenal, she would be a great guest on this, actually. She's done some phenomenal analyses. We're looking at how, like, who was talking to who on Twitter in 2015, basically. And you see this overlap between the conservative sphere and the anti-vaxxer sphere. There was already a strong

anti-vaxxer presence on social media, but again, it was more fringe. And this let them, it sort of like sort of melded together. There's a really cool visualization in an article she did for Wired where you can actually see the overlap visually. Yeah. And so obviously, you know, the internet, we know how, you know, effective social media, especially algorithm driven social media has been at spreading misinformation. Vaccines are a prime example. You know, I did for my last live hour of standup I took on the road. I did a show, I was doing a show called Mind Parasites, and I talked about how the YouTube algorithm, you know, I did a little test where I did a search for flu vaccine on YouTube. And, you know, the first thing that popped up was a UCLA five minute video. Hey,

here's why the flu vaccine works. Here's why it's effective. And then every single recommended video or at least the top couple were, you know, anti-vax, you know, and I'll say these were activists by your definition. So true anti-vax misinformation. And then once you clicked on that, every single recommended video. Oh yeah. YouTube is insane that way. And these videos were hours long. And this was around the time that anti, sorry, pro-vaccine people or scientists, right? Like, like true health professionals were, were finding they couldn't even post on YouTube because that was the effect. They post five minutes of the truth and then their audience is bombarded with hours of lies

of people just sitting in front of microphones, talking for hours on end about how vaccines will kill you. Now I did that show in 2019. I actually wanted to film it to be a special. And then I couldn't film it because of what happened? The COVID pandemic, right? And now I'm like, should I film that? I'm literally wrestling with, should I film that show now? Right. Should I go take it out on the road? Now that things are opening up a little bit again, should I, should I rent a theater and film the show? And I'm like, well, I've got a problem now because my chunk about vaccines is kind of out of date because the entire anti-vaccine movement has completely transformed in the year since in the couple of years since I did that segment. So tell me how that's happened.

Well, originally, anti-vaccine sentiment focused on childhood vaccines. Right. We the only thing that we ask all adults to do on a regular basis as far as vaccines is to get your flu shot. And flu shot was never, it was required for certain hospitals, but other than hospitals, no one ever made you get a flu shot, right? The military and hospitals, and that was it. So there wasn't a big push for everyone to get it in the sense that they felt this obligation because they were going to lose something if they didn't get it. There was, you know, there was, and our flu shot uptake was, it was moderate, like about half of people get flu shots that we want getting

flu shots, right? So most anti-vaccine sentiment focused on schools and school entry and kids getting their recommended vaccines because we have about, I don't remember now, about 12 or 13 vaccines that we recommend for kids to get over the course of their childhood. And that's where all the focus was. So what we see now, the reason we see such a big upswing now is because this is the first time since the smallpox vaccine that we have said we want every single individual to get vaccinated. And right now it's not children yet, but it will be very soon. By the end of this year, maybe early next year, from six months to 99, 105, whatever, we want every single individual who's over six months old to be vaccinated. That has not happened since

the smallpox vaccine. And that's the smallpox vaccine period is where you see so many, when you go back and look historically, that's where you see the same arguments that I'm talking about as seeing today. Because once we stopped giving the smallpox vaccine, once we eradicated smallpox and we didn't have to worry about it anymore, we were no longer requiring adults to get vaccinated. So we didn't have – and so a lot of this is simply scale. A lot of the change is scale. But you're saying with the smallpox vaccine, we saw similar arguments being raised against it, except the smallpox vaccine, that campaign worked so effectively that we wiped out smallpox. And now the only sample is sitting in a lab somewhere. It's like one of the great success stories of human medicine, period, throughout history. Smallpox, incredibly deadly, incredibly transmissible disease

that's literally been killing people since the Middle Ages. And now we have rendered it functionally extinct. And only because we got enough people to take the vaccine. And now you're saying, hey, well, on the flu vaccine, on a good year, it's 50%. That's about as well as we're doing with COVID-19 with the COVID vaccines. We're up to maybe 60 percent, depending on the state. But so so what is the difference between, you know, the COVID vaccine and smallpox, where we've had a mass mobilization of we've got this incredible vaccine.

It's available everywhere. We've got the messaging out there. What you know, is it the existence of this movement? Has that played a big part in it? There's a lot of it's really hard to compare because first of all, just one thing you mentioned, highly transmissible, right, with smallpox. It's worth pointing out that the transmissibility of smallpox and the transmissibility of COVID right now with Delta is almost identical. Wow. People may not realize that. Yeah, smallpox, it's called the R0 number. It's called the reproduction number. And the reproduction number for smallpox, I just looked it up when you were talking, and it's about 3.5 to 6, which means that on average, every person who gets infected with smallpox would infect an average of 3.5 to 6. Now, that means that on average, every person who gets infected with smallpox would infect an

average of 3.5 to six. Now that means that these five people over here might infect no one, whereas these five people over here might infect 30 people or something, you know, it works, it evens out. But that's approximately the same range that we're seeing for, well, actually more really for Delta, we're seeing a higher number. So you could actually say that with Delta in particular, the number is higher for Delta than it is for smallpox. But there's a couple of substantial differences. One is that with smallpox, you can see smallpox from a distance. And you can literally like, I mean, it's a very ugly disease. It's a horrific and disfiguring disease. So you can see from a distance that someone is sick from it. People have sores on themselves, right?

Right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's horrific. I mean, anybody, I would say tell people to Google image search it, but they, I mean, be prepared if you do because it's pretty horrific. Yeah. It's a very, they're very upsetting images. So it's a lot easier to say, oh, I don't want that person with smallpox. You know, you can't hide that you have smallpox. People aren't saying, oh, I'll get it, but I'll be fine because I'm young and healthy. It's like, no, you'll get horrible sores all over your face.

You don't want that to happen to your beautiful face. Actually, believe it or not, you would think. But when I looked back and I was pulling up those newspaper articles, no, there were people saying, I don't want to get the smallpox vaccine because I don't I think it think it'll like, I don't think it'll, they would say, I think it'll cause smallpox. And I would rather get the natural smallpox because I'll be fine because it's not that bad. You did actually have it. That's one of the things that's so remarkable. It's a little bit disturbing. When I looked back at those, literally every single thing that you hear people saying about COVID today has been said about smallpox, except like I said, except the microchip thing because that word didn't exist.

Every single thing. There are no new arguments under the sun. The difference is honestly scale. That's the biggest difference. Scale and the fact that we're now wanting to give it to everybody. Another difference, though, is with smallpox, we knew that smallpox was eradicable. Another difference, though, is with smallpox, we knew that smallpox was eradicable. There are certain requirements that you need to be able to eradicate a disease to wipe it from the face of the planet.

And those include the fact that you have to be able to identify all the cases of it. We can't identify all of the cases of COVID because of so many asymptomatic cases or cases where they have such a mild one that they never get tested and they might have a cold. Another requirement is that it can't have an animal reservoir. In other words, you can't, smallpox only infected humans. It didn't infect anybody else but humans. I see. Measles also does not infect anybody else but humans. So we could eradicate measles. But with coronaviruses, we know already, of course, this most likely originated from a bat. With coronaviruses, we know already, of course, this most likely originated from a bat. We know that other animals can have.

We've infected dogs. We've infected cats. We've infected ferrets, hamsters. I thought I saw deer. I don't know, but I believe it. I mean, there's lots of animals that can have coronaviruses. And so we won't be able to eradicate COVID because it can always hide out in an animal and come back. It's the same reason we won't ever be able to eradicate flu. It's just not possible because it can hang out in an, we'll never eradicate Ebola, right?

Because it has an animal source. So there's a lot of differences and it's really hard to compare them in that regard. But when it comes to arguments against the vaccine, there's not a lot of difference. comes to arguments against the vaccine, there's not a lot of difference. It seems, though, that COVID-19 specifically has like supercharged this existing anti-vaccine movement in some way that has really interfered with the vaccine effort. And so how did that happen? That happened through a combination of being able to take over the Republican Party so that it became a part of mainstream messaging. We didn't have mainstream messaging coming from the right. Again, it was fringe, right? Once they were able to sort of, they meaning the anti-vaccine activists, once

they were able to sort of co-opt this message that already had such salience on the right, then they were able to worm their way in with different conservative lawmakers. And it became a part of the Republican platform, basically. I see. And it's part of this. I mean, right now we see, you know, you look at Rick DeSantis right now in Florida. Rick DeSantis, on the one hand, is saying the vaccine is highly effective and you should get this vaccine.

Rick DeSantis is also saying, no, you're not going to require my hospital employees to get vaccinated. I mean, how do you, I don't know how to make sense out of that, right? Like that is a very confusing public health message. So you're saying that, yes, this is highly effective and this will stop the spread of this disease, but you're also saying we're not going to require people to get it because it's their freedom to decide not to get it, ignoring the fact that they're, you know, you hear this my body, my choice stuff, right? It's not your body. It's your body that gets the vaccine, but it's not just your body at risk.

It's every body that you can, I mean, if you're going to go live in a cave somewhere, go be my guest and skip the vaccine. But if you're going to participate in society and interact with other bodies, then you are posing a risk to them. So the combination of that being able to sort of take over a political party, once it took over a political party, we like to think that we're rational human beings who all make decisions based on reason. case. We all make decisions based on a combination of factors and rational thinking is a part of that. But we have a lot of emotional thinking and we have influences from all different kinds of cognitive biases. I could list a dozen cognitive biases that play a role in our decision making. And part of the problem is that when something becomes a party message and a party affiliation message, it becomes part of our identity. So instead of it becoming a belief system in this idea of I believe in science, I don't believe in science, it's more that you, you know, to attack the idea of,

to say that you have to get vaccinated comes across as an attack on your identity, who you are as an individual. The moment someone feels attacked as an individual, that's a problem. And this happened to my own family. My sister didn't want to get the vaccine at first. She was eventually going to get it. She said she was definitely going to get it eventually, but she didn't want to get it early on. And it caused some friction in the family because we wanted to get together as a family and my husband's immune compromised. So we couldn't until she was vaccinated. And she tried to accuse me of trying to force me. She said that I was forcing her to do something with her body. She started, you know, calling out this HIPAA bullshit saying, oh, you're, you're, you're violating my medical privacy. I'm like, for fuck's sakes,

Beth. No, I'm not. It's so funny that everyone has discovered this word HIPAA and then is using it to mean this thing. It does not mean. Absolutely. I was like, I was like, Beth, you know what I report on for a living. Okay. I hope she never hears. HIPAA for the record, HIPAA for the record. I just want to make, so our, our listeners know what it means. What exactly, because I've heard this word used before in professional contexts. What is, what does HIPAA privacy actually mean? HIPAA privacy refers to the, let me get the exact name, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. And it was signed into office in 1996 under Bill Clinton. And it says that a person who is a health care provider or who has access to health care provider records, such as a receptionist, that they are not allowed to share private health care information about a patient.

It does not mean that I, some random person on the street, I can ask you anything. I can say, have you had cancer before? Okay. I'm not violating for someone to say that it's violating HIPAA to ask if they're vaccinated. Okay. Then it's also violating HIPAA to say, have you ever had the flu? Have you ever had cancer? Oh my gosh. Did your grandfather die of cancer? Are you driving drunk right now? Is there alcohol in your bloodstream? Yeah, none of that is violating. So the whole idea that telling someone to get vaccinated or asking them if they are vaccinated is a violation of HIPAA is just laughable. It makes no sense. So but then my sister was saying that I was trying to, you know, it was her body and I was telling her what to do with her body. And I'm like, OK, frankly, Beth,

I don't actually give a shit if you are vaccinated. I give a shit if my husband is protected from you if you come to this gathering and you're sick and you don't know it. Like if it just came down to worrying about whether somebody else was going to die or not. I mean, I don't want someone to die. But if they're going to choose, it's kind of like, I mean, this is not the greatest example. But if you're going to choose to do cocaine in the privacy of your own home, and I can tell you not to do cocaine, but you're still going to do cocaine, and you eventually overdose on cocaine. Okay, that's a tragedy. That's a shame. You shouldn't have done it.

But you didn't hurt – you didn't make somebody else snort up cocaine at the same time. And you still hurt other people. You probably left behind people who love you and care about you. So I'm not suggesting that there's no harm done, but it's not like you're forcing other people to snort cocaine by you snorting cocaine. Okay. But whereas when you bring a viral load to the wedding, you are bringing a viral load to the wedding. You are releasing all those viral pen, you know, those particles are. And I think that's something that people have a hard time with. I think they have a hard time with the idea of, I feel okay. Therefore I don't pose harm to you. And that's something that people have a hard time with. I think they have a hard time with the idea of I feel okay, therefore I don't pose harm to you. And that's bullshit. You can be pre-symptomatic.

You don't have a single symptom yet. And you are expelling viral particles that could kill somebody. Yeah. Well, a good way to think about this. We live in Texas where the governor gives, he cares a lot more about six week old embryos than he does about six year old children. OK, and and we have two kids, seven, 11, and I withdrew them from school because they can't. They were too young to be vaccinated. They there was no requirement for teachers to be vaccinated. The governor wouldn't allow masks to be allowed to be required in schools. So even if they wore a mask, I know no one around them is wearing a mask necessarily. I took them out of school for two reasons. One,

I didn't want them getting infected. But most importantly, I didn't want them bringing it home to my husband, their father and infecting him. Because can you imagine that child going through life knowing they killed daddy? Yeah, I didn't want to risk putting my kids in the situation of knowing that they killed their father by accident. I couldn't live with myself forcing them to live with that. Yeah. And I say that with the knowledge that we are privileged enough to be able to withdraw our kids from school.

There are millions of parents right now who are terrified and taking the same risk that I was able to take myself out of. And they're living with that every day. And they are terrified that that's going to be the situation that they're in. But the morphing, though, I mean, it's a terrible dilemma to be in. But the morphing of this issue into being a, you know, another bit of partisan warfare, right, that it sort of fell into. I often think of the, you know, these issues, you know, the partisan divide in

America as being like a gutter, like when you're bowling, and this is not the metaphor I always use, but I'm using it today. Like there's like the gutters, they're the gutters when you're bowling, right? And like, if it falls into them, it's stuck there, you know, and it can't get back out. Like, it's like a trough that we are, that we, you know, these issues swirl around. And, you know, if you're trying to educate somebody on something else, like flat earth is not part of that. Right. And I can, I can have a conversation with a Republican or a Democrat about flat earth generally. But if once it falls into that, into that trough, into that gutter, you're stuck. And that has had, I think, really terrible impacts on this discussion. And I want to talk about what those are,

but we got to take a quick break. So we'll be right back with more Tara Haley. How about that segue? Okay. We're back with Tara Haley. So look, now we're in a situation where, you know, the anti-vaccine movement has gone from, again, a few fringe activists who, you know, are all followers of this one weird disgraced British doctor and the autism link. And we can, you know, skeptics can can break it down and make YouTube videos about them. And but it's a fringe movement. Right.

To where now it's a part of partisan politics and our partisan divide, at least here in America. And that seemed really harmful to me because, you know, when you've got Tucker Carlson, you know, on TV talking about how, you know, people shouldn't have to take vaccines and stuff like that. It's not just that that message is being spread to a whole new group of people. I think that's bad enough. I think it also creates a really bad counter reaction from the other party, because now I've started to see more and more people saying like, oh, the whole reason we have an outbreak now is because of these Republicans and everybody who's not vaccinated. I see tweets from friends of mine saying, everyone who's not vaccinated, you know, I see tweets from friends of mine saying everyone who's not vaccinated should go fucking die.

I hate you all. You know, you're all you're all Trumpists, you know, that sort of thing. I'm exaggerating a little bit, but not by much. Not by much. Not by much. I've seen it myself. And that that's not actually true, is it? Like, it's not the case.

It's not true. It's not true. And it's not helpful. I mean, it's not the case. It's not true. It's not true. And it's not helpful. I mean, it's, it's funny, I appeared on MSNBC last Sunday morning, where I talked about this. And I talked about the fact that while there are people out there who are these vaccine refusers, or anti-vaxxers that are never going to get vaccinated, there's still a huge swath of people that have genuine questions that either want to get vaccinated and genuinely have not had the opportunity opportunity or they lack

true access. And I define true access as including the ability to go to a health care professional that they trust and say, I am worried about X, Y, Z. And then the health care professional being able to answer those questions. That is part of access. And not everybody has that. And what was really sad is when the MSNBC folks tweeted out that video, every single response except one, and to be fair, I knew that one person,

every single response was like, oh, no, you're making excuses for them. They all want to kill us. It was all the, and it was from the left, right? It's from the viewers of MSNBC. And it was really frustrating because, you know, what it does is it collapses everybody into this one bucket. And then when you start, you know, there's a lot of people out there who hate Trump who are not vaccinated. And why aren't they vaccinated? I could give you a dozen reasons. Maybe they are afraid of the side effects, not because they're just a wimp and afraid

of the side effects, but maybe they work three jobs and all three of those jobs are hourly jobs. And, you know, Joe Biden, be damned, their employer is not going to give them time off because it's an hourly job. Or maybe they're a single mom and they've got four kids, including two under the age of two, and they can't afford to have your mom. You can't afford to be sick when you're a mom. You're fucked if you're sick and you're a mom and you're a single mom and you don't have anyone to help you. Right. Or maybe they live in an area that is seriously where you have to drive. People are like, well, there's pharmacies everywhere. No, there's not. There's a thing called pharmacy deserts. Go look it up. Go get on your happy little Google and type in pharmacy deserts. OK, because there are people who live an hour from a pharmacy. And I'm sorry,

but you got to give me a really damn good reason to drive an hour somewhere to put myself in pain. Okay. So, you know, there are, there are reasons. And then you have all these people who they might really want to get vaccinated, but they, you know, look at the black community, right? The black community, I know that they know how serious this disease is. When I go into a store here in Texas, it's only the white people who aren't wearing masks. Okay. If I go into a store, anybody in that store who's Hispanic or black, they're wearing masks, they take it seriously. So then if you say, well, why is it lower in, you know, why is vaccination lower in the black population? Well, let's look at the history of medical racism. How many ways have we fucked over

black people in the medical system over the past 250, 300 years? Let me count the ways. So it's understandable that they, and they also have less access to people that they trust in the healthcare system. Yeah. You can't entirely disentangle hesitancy from access because part of hesitancy is not having your questions answered. And part of access is having someone who can answer your questions. So in some cases they might have access, but still have hesitancy. That's a different story. In some cases they might have zero hesitancy, but they don't have access.

And in a lot of cases they don't have either. Yeah, and it's just not having someone that you trust. And we have not made the effort to have a trusting person, a trusted person go around to eat. I have a really good personal example of this. If I can share, um, uh, you know, my, my partner, Lisa has, uh, has chronic pain. And so we have had a masseuse come to our house, you know, once every couple of months to help her with that. You know, she has sort of like tendon nerve pain stuff. It's really helpful. Um, wonderful woman

who, you know, we have a relationship where she's been coming a couple of years, but of course, during the pandemic, she couldn't come. But the first time we had her come visit after things got a little bit better in L.A., you know, we were like, oh, she vaccinated. We're not really sure she came. And Lisa, you know, are you vaccinated? And she said, oh, I'm not really sure. Not yet. I'm a little bit frightened of it, you know.

And after she left, we talked about like why that would be. And it's like, you know, she after she left, we talked about like why that would be. And it's like, you know, she's, she's an immigrant. She's not a, you know, she, she's not a English as a first language speaker, you know, she, who knows how much access she has to medical care, who knows what, you know, she's not maybe, she's not watching MSNBC, right? Like what, what is the, you know, how, how much is that message getting out there in the media? Is this someone who has access to care and someone who the government has specifically been trying to reach? Right. When was the last time that she had access to a doctor? And but then what happened was we had her come back a month later and she said she had been vaccinated because Lisa had spoken with her and said, oh, I got the vaccine and I was a little bit sick for a day, but it was fine.

And she said, oh, after you told me that, that made me feel better. And I went and got it because someone who she trusted had said, it's really important. And I want it for you because I want you to be safe and it's not that bad. And we simply don't have a medical system that has gone and provided that to people. To give you another example, my dad is, he didn't vote for Trump, but that's because he didn't vote for anybody. And I told him I would just, you know, he would never see his grandchildren if he voted for Trump and he knew I wasn't pissing around. But, but he does watch Fox News and he has a lot of friends that are in the sort of Fox News, Trump supporting demographic. He's a Vietnam veteran and so forth and so on. And he said

before the vaccine was out, well, I'll just wait for you, Tara. When you get the vaccine, I'll get it. That was what he told me. And he did. In fact, ironically, because my parents are over 65, but I have a high risk condition and so does my husband. My husband and I got vaccinated on the exact same day that my parents did. And it was interesting because the reason they were willing to get vaccinated, my mom is a nurse. She was going to get vaccinated no matter what. But my husband or my father, well, that's a Freudian slip if there ever was one. had me as a daughter and I had spoken to him about this, he was going to get vaccinated. Incidentally, some of his friends that are in that same demographic who did vote for Trump, they're connected to me on Facebook. They texted me and said, hey, where can I get the vaccine and how can I get it? Now, what about his other Trump supporting friends who may not have because

they're not talking? I'm not saying like I am single handedly vaccinating Trump supporters in Texas. But, you know, the point is, it doesn't have to be. I've had lots of friends who have said, there was one friend of mine who said, Oh, my God, Tara, my best friend, she said she hasn't gotten vaccinated. I couldn't believe it. What do I do? And she's like, Will you talk to her? And I said, Sure, set up a zoom. And we did we set up a zoom with her and me and her best friend. And I sat there and said, What do you want to know? And because I, you know, she didn't know me, but she knew that my best, you know, we had mutual friends. And so she trusted her friend's friend and she was able to see me and I was able to explain things. She not only did she then go and get vaccinated, but she also vaccinated her son and her sister got vaccinated

and her parents got vaccinated. You know, it goes on. And so, and I'm not saying you're going to convert everybody you talk to, but a lot of people do just need someone to talk to. They need that reassurance. They need someone to listen to them and say, I'm worried about this. And you need to be able to say, you know, you're not crazy or stupid for worrying about this. Let's talk about what you worry about. Yeah. Cause they're their own personal person. They have their, they've had their own experience with, you know, maybe they, they have distrust the medical industry because they had a bad experience. Maybe they're the type of person who literally, you know, I had friends in New York city who had not gone to see a dentist in 10 years, even though their teeth were falling out of their heads because they didn't have access

to, uh, they didn't have insurance of any kind, right. Someone who just has not been able to have any access at all. Maybe, you know, maybe they are, but maybe they're frightened of needles, you know, or maybe they. Or maybe that person in New York who didn't go to the dentist had a really bad experience with the dentist and they're terrified of the dentist now. Yeah. And that's a valid thing. It's like something that we have to, you know, we have this expectation that we can just blast a message out and everyone needs to automatically do the right thing because we say so. message out and everyone needs to automatically do the right thing because we say so. But like, you know, one thing you learn once you start working with people is you gotta go to them one-on-one.

If all it took to get people, if all it took to get rid of obesity in America was to tell everybody to eat less and move more, then we wouldn't have any obesity. That clearly doesn't work. For lots of reasons that doesn't work. That's also shitty advice. That tells you absolutely nothing about what you actually need to do. If all it took to quit smoking was to say, hey, don't smoke, it's going to cause lung cancer.

Yeah. I mean, you know, and I'm not that's not a great example, because to be fair, there's a lot of people who very much want to quit smoking and have tried many times and not been successful at it. So it's, you know, but the point is that with any kind of health behavior, you've got barriers to it. And, you know, and in general, another thing is when they say like, oh, all these people who are unvaccinated are the ones who are carrying on the pandemic. Yes, the low vaccination rates do make it easier for the vaccine to move through the population. But keep in mind that there are children under 12 who are going to school right now who can't be vaccinated. And they are certainly keeping this pandemic going. And that's not their fault.

And then you have people who are fully vaccinated, but they have weakened immune systems or they get exposed to a big enough dose of Delta. Delta is a really powerful variant that they get sick anyway. So, you know, it's not just it's not like every single vaccinated person is stopping the disease and every single unvaccinated person is willfully continuing it. I mean, it just, that's not the reality. It's, man, it's just part of how, like, you know, this is really, the more you look at it, the more this is like an overall societal failure, you know, that we invented. like an overall societal failure, you know, that we, we invented, we invent, we've talked about on this show, my interview with, with Derek Lowe, uh, back when the, you know, the vaccines were

first rolling out about like how they work. And like, these are like such an incredible marvel of engineering, the mRNA vaccines. They're phenomenal. They're like, they're like one of the, they're like as big a deal as going to fucking space. You know, we discovered, we discovered DNA, They're like as big a deal as going to fucking space. You know, we discovered we discovered DNA. We discovered DNA. And now, decades later, here we are. We figured out a way to selectively use that knowledge to create a perfect, like instantaneous, you know, response to a path instruction booklet for our own cells to produce an antibody or, you know, produce an immune response to defeat a deadly disease within, you know, a year of it popping up. We have a, we have this incredible

response to it. Like what it's, it's amazing. And yet we don't have the social tools, the social fabric. We don't have the, we don't have the social structure. We have the NIH, you know, we've got this incredible, you know, body that, that comes up with the vaccine, but. We don't have the we don't have the social structure. We have the NIH. You know, we've got this incredible, you presenting sort of what's going on in the US. And then there was another speaker of what's going on in Germany. And then there was another speaker of what's going on in Japan. And what really struck me was the similarity.

Like the guy in Germany mentioned that Russia Today was putting out bad information that people were believing. And I was like, holy shit, that's what they're doing here too. And the guy from Japan was showing images of anti-maskers who were publicly demonstrating. And that blew my mind i was like wait what in japan there's people on the streets protesting so yeah that's wild yeah that i mean now to be fair it's not the the issues in those places is not partisan it's not a it's not a political left right issue but they still have

these problems it's it's different fault lines, if you will, and I don't know how widespread it is, but it fascinated me that this, which tells you that some of this has to do with the underlying society and our social institutions and our social psyche and the way we interact, you know, the individualism of the Americans, our sense of exceptionalism and individualism and bootstrapping and I'll do things my way-ness plays a role. But there's also something underlying human about this, or else we wouldn't see this in so many societies. Because I mean, Japan's an extremely communal society. Germany is a very socialistic sort of like, you know, caring about society.

Japan is a society where I visited, I might have told this story on the show before, but I visited Japan and I was walking around carrying some trash and I was like, where's the trash cans? Where's the trash? I don't see any trash cans on the street. Where do I do this trash? And I asked a friend who lived in Japan and he said,

oh, well, they don't have street trash cans because in Japan, everyone carries their trash home with them and throws it out at home in order to fight littering. And I was like, that is how communal the society is where like, people are like, I got to do my part and bring my, bring my potato chip bag home with me to throw out in my own trash can. Like it's a whole society of people who, when they get on the subway car, they move into the middle of the car. They don't go, they don't stand on the doors like we do here in New

York or LA. I had the same experience in Germany where I was like, where do I go throw away the trash? Well, they don't have a trash. They have where the paper goes, where the plastic goes, where the organic food stuff goes and where the aluminum goes. And then they have everything else, which isn't very much at all. So, you know, same idea of this, like really regimented, you do what you're told. So how do we, let's just end here. How do we, how do we fight it? You know, especially for folks who, as you say, maybe have a, have a relative who doesn't want to get vaccinated or just want to engage more productively with, you know, people

who are vaccine hesitant online or in their own communities, right? If you want to help get your own community vaccinated, what can, what can people at home do about it? So, so first of all, pick your battles, which is to say that you're not going to convert everybody. Just like a teacher's not going to save every soul in their classroom, you know, find the people who are actually receptive to talking to you and pick your battles. Okay. And your battle is not with the person who said over my dead body, okay? Go talk to someone else. And after you've, you know, then listen. This is the hardest part, to be honest, because we all think we know the right answers. Listen to what their questions and concerns are. Ask them questions. Can you help me understand what you're worried about? Can you help me understand, you know, what's the scariest thing about this for you? What worries

you the most? And just keep asking. Don't interrupt them and say, oh, but wait, don't do that. Be respectful. Listen to them. Don't mock them. Don't blame them. Don't shame them. Don't even sigh.

Don't roll your eyes. Okay? Don't give them any indication that you're doing anything but listening to everything they say. Then try to understand what are their biggest concerns. Sort of narrow it down. Why are those their biggest concerns? Maybe they're trying to conceive and they've heard people say that this is going to harm their fertility.

That's a really scary thing, trying to put yourself in the position of trying to conceive. That's a very vulnerable place to be as a wannabe parent. And it's understandable that you don't want to do anything to screw that up. You're already probably not drinking and probably not doing other things that are fun just so that you can conceive. And then ask them, where did you hear about those concerns? You want to get a sense of where they're getting their information because that's going to help you know what other information they might hear about later. It also tells you what kind of information they trust so that you can try and counter it with information from similar types of sources. So while you're doing this, you want to validate their feelings. You don't have to validate their

reasons. You don't have to say, oh, that's a really good reason not to get the vaccine. But you can say, wow, I really understand how much this is bothering you. I can see why this worries you so much. You can acknowledge their reasons for their mistrust and validate their feelings. And then use questions to, you know, once you've learned all you can about their beliefs and attitudes by asking these questions, use those questions to direct it toward addressing their concerns. Well, would you be, would you feel more comfortable if you knew that the vaccine did X or didn't do Y? Like, would that make a difference to you? Can I give you some information on this?

Would you be willing to look at something that I was going to provide to you? And then how, you know, what sources do you trust? If they don't trust the CDC, don't give them something from the CDC. That's not going to matter to them. Yeah. You know, if, you know, what sources do they feel comfortable getting information from and share the media type? Do you prefer, do you want to read a scientific article? Do you want me to give it, do you want me to hit you with the hard stuff and pull up the MMWRs from CDC? Do you want studies or do you want an article? Like, do you trust the New York Times? If they

don't trust the New York Times, you're going to have to go look for something from somewhere else, right? Do you want memes? Do you want graphics? Do you want videos? Do you want me to give you a YouTube video? And you're right. YouTube videos are problematic

because of the way the algorithm works. You follow that algorithm enough, a deep enough rabbit hole, you're going to end up in some place far worse. There's some good ones out there. There's some good ones. Yeah. And then focus on their main concerns.

Don't try and throw the kitchen sink at them. You're not trying to convince them every single possible myth out there is wrong. You want to focus on what they're worried about. And if they switch, if they change their mind, okay, well now I'm not worried about that, but I'm worried about this. Okay. Then fine. Then move to that concern. That's not unusual. That's not necessarily moving. They might have many concerns and use facts, but use them sparingly. Just throwing facts at somebody like you're throwing darts at a board is not going to do jack shit if you're not pairing it with like emotional stories and salience and personal experiences. And, oh, I was worried about that, too. Let me tell you what happened when I got my vaccine.

Or, oh, my gosh, my friend so-and-so also has that weird autoimmune condition you just mentioned, and she did get her vaccine. Why don't I ask her what happened with her? Using those personal stories, keep it simple, but don't dumb it down. Adjust according to what they're taking in. And you also want to focus on safety and appeal to their values. It doesn't matter what your values are. Your values do not matter at all their values are what matter you want to appeal to what their values are if you can use humor and they they respond well to that use humor explain why you care like why are you taking the time to talk to them because you give a shit right yeah um offer to help them if the issue is that they're working three jobs and they're worried that they can't take off or they've got child care issues, say, hey, how about this? You know what? If you end up having to take off work, I will pay for your electric bill this month. And why don't I watch your kids tomorrow?

Just don't even worry about if you're going to have the side effects or not. I'm just going to watch them no matter what so that if you don't have side effects, you can chill out and get a day to yourself anyway. You offer to help them. Do what you can. And then finally, don't reinvent the wheel. Find good articles and graphics to share. You don't have to make all this shit up yourself. Okay. Google, look for stuff, ask friends and family, go on Facebook and say, Hey, vaccine friends. I have a friend who's uneasy about this. What, show me your best articles, you know, find the good stuff and keep a folder that you do. So those are my steps.

The most important thing though, even more important than the article is just being a friend and being a loved one saying, saying, Hey, I got the vaccine and, and here's how it went for me. And here's why, here's how I feel about it. And just being that, being that presence is like, you know, it doesn't always work, but it is, this is how you convince anyone of anything. Yeah. And if there's times when you don't, I mean, I've heard people say, you know, it doesn't always work, but this is how you convince anyone of anything. Yeah. And if there's times when you don't, I mean, I've heard people say, you know, I won't allow someone who's vaccinated to come into my office and I don't blame them. I don't want someone who's not vaccinated coming into my house, but I don't say it like, well, if you're not vaccinated, you can't come to my house.

I say it like, I really want you to come over and hang out, but you know, I have got vulnerable people in this house and I know that you're trying to be safe, but I can't guarantee that you're not going to be infected and not realize it. So I just don't feel comfortable having you over until I know that you have that protection. There's ways to say that that are a little bit nicer than just, oh, you're not vaccinated. Fuck off. Well, Tara, thank you so much for coming on to talk to us about this. This has been awesome. I really appreciate it.

Yeah, this has been fun. Thank you for having me. Well, thank you once again to Tara Haley for coming on the show. I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. If you want to support the show, just a reminder, you can buy books by our incredible experts at factuallypod.com slash books. That's factuallypod.com slash books. And your purchases

do go to support this show and your local book store. That is it for us this week on Factually. I want to thank our producers, Chelsea Jacobson and Sam Roudman, our engineer, Ryan Connor, Andrew WK for our theme song, the fine folks at Falcon Northwest for building me the incredible custom gaming PC that I'm recording this very episode for you on. You can find me online at adamconover.net or at Adam Conover, wherever you get your social media. Hey, until next week, we'll see you next time on Factory. Thank you so much for listening. That was a HeadGum Podcast.