It Could Happen Here - Anti-Vax America: Anti-Vax Genealogy

Episode Date: June 17, 2025

For many years, the threat of measles, a deadly disease that spreads more rapidly than COVID and regularly took thousands of lives a year, had been effectively eradicated in the United States due to the widespread acceptance of vaccination. The death of a child from measles in West Texas was the first in over a decade and it came as a shock to the American medical establishment that is now grappling with a disturbing reality: the chief public health bureaucrat is a bonafide anti-vaxxer. This episode will explore the genealogy of anti-vaccination beliefs in the United States and how they spread into mainstream politics. Sources: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1200696/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8802588/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1123944/ https://time.com/7205900/anti-vaccination-movement-history/  https://historyofvaccines.org/getting-vaccinated/vaccine-faq/vaccination-exemptions https://historyofvaccines.org/blog/timeline-of-vaccination-mandates https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-68106-1_2  https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/rfk-jr-plandemic-funding-1235173801/  https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-02-02/rand-paul-on-vaccines-most-of-them-ought-to-be-voluntary-  https://time.com/5175704/andrew-wakefield-vaccine-autism/  https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2025/the-evidence-on-vaccines-and-autism  https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-bombastic-19th-century-anti-vaxxer-who-fueled-montreals-smallpox-epidemic/ https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/plague-the-red-death-strikes-montreal-feature https://www.cascadepbs.org/2020/05/seattle-always-had-anti-vaxxers-even-during-smallpox https://www.cascadepbs.org/mossback/2025/02/history-vaccine-skepticism-1920s-seattle-rfk-jrSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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or wherever you get your podcast. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here and to episode 2 of Anti-vax America. I'm Stephen Monacelli. Last episode, I explored the ongoing measles outbreak that started in West Texas and has since spread to several states across the nation. A big part of that story is the underlying anti-vax beliefs that are fueling a decline in vaccination rates across the country and how the leader of our federal health bureaucracy, RRFK Jr. has helped seed, spread, and embed those beliefs into policy. But behind all that is a deeper history of anti-vaccination beliefs in America. And while it is undoubtedly the case that the COVID-19 pandemic brought anti-vaccination

beliefs to the forefront of American politics, opposition to vaccines is not new. It's about as old as the technology itself. It actually goes back to the founding colonies and even the early 1800s when you had people kind of peddling various, what they called botanicals as substitutes for mainstream medicine. That's Dr. Peter Hotez. He's a doctor in Houston with a long and impressive list of credentials. I'm a pediatrician scientist. I have an MD and PhD and I'm a professor of pediatrics and molecular

virology at Baylor College of Medicine where I'm also co-director of the Texas Children's Hospital Center for Vaccine Development and also Dean of our National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. And my interest is a lifelong interest in developing new vaccines, particularly vaccines that the big pharma companies have no interest in making because they're vaccines for diseases of poverty. We've made a low-cost COVID vaccine that technology reached 100 million people in India and Indonesia during the pandemic and now vaccines for parasitic diseases that occur only among the world's poor and that's a lifelong passion of mine.

The first vaccination was created in 1796 by Edward Jenner. He was able to build on prior methods of inoculation and he was able to create a vaccine for smallpox, one of the deadliest viruses in human history. Within a matter of decades, vaccination had become widespread in the Western world. The United Kingdom passed the Vaccination Act of 1840 to provide free vaccinations to the poor, and then passed another act in 1853 that made it compulsory for infants. And another in 1867 that extended the compulsory vaccination requirement to 14 and added penalties for noncompliance that could be cumulative over time. Resistance to these laws began in 1853 with a few riots in towns across England.

And this eventually formalized into the Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League, which distributed literature likening vaccination to a monster and lobbied the British government to change the laws. Their efforts actually proved successful, and a new law was passed in 1898 to remove cumulative penalties and create an exemption for what they termed conscientious objectors, which is the first time that term had ever been used in British law. A parallel anti-vaccination movement made similar strides in the United States and

one of the leaders of the British anti-vaccination movement even came to the United States to help co-found one of the anti-vaccination leagues in America. Several states also passed compulsory vaccination laws in the United States, America. Several states also passed compulsory vaccination laws in the United States. Spurring the American anti-vaccination leads to fight in the legal courts, in the court of public opinion, and the legislatures across the country. And they successfully repealed compulsory vaccination laws in California, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Utah, West Virginia, and Wisconsin. But opposing compulsory vaccinations was only one part of the strategy of these early anti-vaccine organizations. Another key plank, which may sound familiar to those of you who follow the news, was the

promotion of alternative remedies such as homeopathy, which were quite popular at the time among certain sects of medicine. Now these movements didn't neatly fall across political lines in the way that they largely do today. Progressive and conservative anti-vaccination activists were tied together by strongly held beliefs in things like quote-unquote medical freedom, sometimes philosophical beliefs around freedom, their spiritual faiths, or in some instances even anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Consider Eugene Karl Doering, a philosopher and economist considered one of the founding fathers of German anti-Semitism, who argued that Jewish doctors were behind a conspiracy

to drum up business for themselves by promoting vaccination to healthy people. These are all tropes that live on to this day and that someone like Dr. Hotez knows all too well. And because of his advocacy of vaccines, he's often been a target of it. I'm a scientist, a vaccine scientist, the Jewish vaccine scientist. So they've got me doing this in secret with George Soros or one of the Rothschilds that I'm doing it at the World Economic Forum in Davos. I haven't even been invited to Davos. While some of the progressive strain of the historic anti-vaccination movement has lived

on in the stereotypical hippie naturalist lifestyle culture that is popular in parts of the Northwest, that strain is long and fringe and is kind of extinct at this point. It had its heyday after the 60s and 70s when a lot of alternative therapies and medicines were being promoted and embraced in the West. Most of the anti-vaxxers of that variety today have largely been drawn towards more right-wing values and have been subsumed by the sort of politics that defines the larger make America healthy again agenda.

The way Dr. Hotez sees it, there's a direct line between these old anti-vaccine movements and the modern day Maha movement, which combines anti-vaccine beliefs with alternative medicine and libertarian mindsets around health freedom into a sort of single bundle of sticks. There's an older thread that goes back to colonial times and it has to do with libertarian concepts of what's sometimes called health freedom, medical freedom. Hey, you can't tell us what to do about our kids. And now we see that today, right? And this is coming partly out of the health and wellness

and influencer industry. And that's why you get, you know, ivermectin, which does absolutely nothing for COVID, or hydroxychloroquine, which does nothing for COVID. Or when you heard Mr. Kennedy talk about vitamin A as a preventative or butasinitis steroid, which does nothing, or clarithromycin, an antibiotic does nothing. Whatever they can buy in bulk and then sell at a profit, that's a lot of the wellness and influencer industry. And so what you have now is that converging thread

around that and libertarian politics. And that's what you saw, I think, after we started to debunk the false links between vaccines and autism, They needed a new thing. And this is when you saw here in Texas, this rise in parents requesting vaccine exemptions around this banner of health freedom, medical freedom. And here's where it became really tough to talk about because it got adopted by the Republican Tea Party in Texas. And so anti-vaccine groups started getting PAC money, Political Action Committee money,

to lobby or educate the state legislature about health freedom, medical freedom, and even provide money for candidates to run on anti-vaccine platforms. But before we explore the contemporary anti-vaccination movement further, we have to return to history. And before we explore the contemporary anti-vaccination movement further, we have to return to history. And before we do that, we're obligated to take a quick ad break. I'm Jake Hanrahan, journalist and documentary filmmaker. Away Days is my new project, reporting

on countercultures on the fringes of society all across the world. Live from the underground, you'll discover no rules fighting, Japanese street racing, Brazilian favela life and much more. All real, completely uncensored. This is unique access with straightforward on the ground reporting. We're taking you deep into the dirt without the usual airs and graces of legacy media. Awaiday showcases what the mainstream cannot access. Real underground reporting with real people, no excuses. For the past decade I've been going to places I shouldn't be, meeting people I shouldn't know.

Now you can come along too. Listen to the your way days podcast reporting from the underbelly on the iHeart radio app, apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast hell and gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Catherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. I have never found her and it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there.

Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. OpenAI is a financial abomination, a thing that should not be, an aberration, a symbol of rot at the heart of Silicon Valley. And I'm going to tell you why on my show show Better Offline, the rudest show in the tech

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Anti-vaccine movements appeared to be gaining steam in the late 1800s and early 1900s, but their progress largely halted when a 1905 U.S. Supreme Court ruling upheld the authority of states to pass and enforce compulsory vaccination laws. The continued spread of viruses like smallpox, the deadly Spanish flu pandemic, and the outbreak of World War II all spurred advancements in vaccination research and programs to ensure widespread vaccination. And as this science continued to advance, more and more states began to mandate vaccines for public school attendance, as did employers for their workers. By 1963, 20 states required children to be vaccinated

before going to school. By 1980, every state in the nation had a similar law on the books. And as the decades went on, the incidence rates of several diseases dramatically plummeted. By 1980, smallpox had been eradicated. But along the way, there were things done in the name of medical science that would undercut the great strides made during that period of time. Things that ultimately sowed the seeds for some of today's vaccination skepticism.

I think it's important to understand that not all suspicion regarding medicine and doctors, you know, research, that not all of this resistance is totally irrational. It's based on experience. That's Dr. Michael Phillips, who you may recognize from prior episodes if it could happen here. He's a historian of race, eugenics, and right-wing politics in Texas. Going back to the time of slavery, enslaved men and women were often the unwilling, involuntary subjects of medical experiments. We have, for instance, a man named Marion Sims, and they actually put a statue up of him in Central Park in New York that's been taken down since, who was credited as the father of gynecology. There was a problem in that era before the discovery of germ theory, where

whenever women would give birth and there would be vaginal tears, doctors would often sew up the wounds and then there'd be an infection and the woman would die or get seriously ill or infertile and the infertility and death of slaves meant a loss of property. So, enslavers were very concerned about this issue. Marion Sims at some point discovers that if you use silver thread, silver sutures, when you operate on women who have had these vaginal tears, that the infection doesn't happen. Now, he wanted to prove this,

he wanted to perfect his technique, so he did it on enslaved women. During the COVID-19 pandemic, black Americans lagged behind whites in terms of vaccination rates. According to a systemic literature review on the determinants of vaccine hesitancy among black Americans, vaccine hesitancy in black communities is rooted in a troubling history of unethical medical experiments.

And it persists to this day due to how this group of the population still experiences discrimination, racism, mistreatment, and overall health inequity. The most famous case of the medical abuse of marginalized people and it's really entered the folk culture to the point that when I was teaching American history classes at a community college, all the students had heard about this particular atrocity and it was called the Tuskegee experiment. What actually happened is that African-American men who got sexually transmitted diseases would go to this medical clinic that had been established,

and the doctors with this grant wanted to see what the trajectory of syphilis would be if it was untreated. So these were people who already had STDs and they were given a placebo. They were given basically a sugar pill rather than penicillin or any other ameliorative care. And the doctor's mission in their minds was, let's find out if syphilis progresses in the same way with African-American men as it does with white men.

And so they wanted to see, because they knew that syphilis will untreated eventually attack the central nervous system. You'll have seizures, blindness, any number of terrible side effects. So they would go to the doctor, they would get the placebo, and syphilis will go into remission. And so the patient wouldn't have the benefit of medical knowledge about how syphilis progresses, would think the pill made it better. And then they would ask them to return, and the doctor would come and then he'd record the damage That was happening to the patient's body as the disease progressed and this went on until the 1960s

And they published results with no professional repercussions You know and one thing they proved is that syphilis attacks black people the same way it does white people. If you leave it untreated, the same symptoms develop. The nervous systems of black and white people are the same, but they publish these results in a claim medical journal and the backlash was not immediate.

Eventually, you know, it became a scandal. So that really did strike a chord in the black community that I think to this day, we've seen skepticism about white medicine. And again, there's valid historical reasons. R.F.K. Jr. and the anti-vaccination movement have seized on this particular historical atrocity to sow doubt about vaccines among Black Americans more generally. Children's Health Defense, the anti-vax group previously led by R.F.K. Jr., invoked the

Tuskegee Civilist Study in an anti-vaccine film called Medical Racism, The New Apartheid. But before we talk a bit more about children's health defense and the more recent history of the anti-vaccination movement, we've got to take another ad break. I'm Jake Hanrahan, journalist and documentary filmmaker. Away Days is my new project, reporting on countercultures on the fringes of society all across the world. Live from the underground, you'll discover no rules fighting, Japanese street racing, Brazilian favela life and much more.

All real, completely uncensored. This is unique access with straightforward on the ground reporting, we're taking you deep into the dirt without the usual airs and graces of legacy media. Awadey showcases what the mainstream cannot access. Real underground reporting with real people, no excuses. For the past decade I've been going to places I shouldn't be meeting people I shouldn't know. Now you can come along too.

Listen to the your way days podcast reporting from the underbelly on the iHeart radio app, apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast hell and gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Catherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband

at the cold case. They've never found her and it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten be able to answer for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

you get your podcasts. Open AI is a financial abomination, a thing that should not be, an aberration, a symbol of rot at the heart of Silicon Valley. And I'm going to tell you why on my show show Better Offline, the rudest show in the tech industry, where we're breaking down why open AI along with other AI companies are dead set on lying to your boss that they can take your job. I'm also going to be talking with the greatest minds in the industry about all the other ways the rich and powerful are ruining the computer.

Listen to Better Offline on the iHot Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you happen to get your podcasts. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops call this Taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple.

Cops believed everything that Taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season One, Taser, Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad.

Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season One, Taser, Incorporated, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes one, two, and three on May 21st, and episodes four, five, and six on June 4th. Add free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. ["Dreams of a New World"] Black Americans aren't the only population group

that organizations like Children's Health Defense have targeted in recent years. For decades, the anti-vax movement has sought to recruit the parents of autistic children to their cause by way of the argument that vaccines directly cause autism. parent of an autistic child is Dr. Hotez, whose 2013 book, Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel's Autism, directly targets R.F.K. Jr.'s long-held belief about the link between autism and vaccines. It actually came about after a year of discussions with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., explaining to him the evidence showing

vaccines don't cause autism, of discussions with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. explaining to him the evidence showing vaccines don't cause autism and finally decided to write it all up in a book and it's about my daughter. So, you know, I wear two hats as a vaccine scientist but also wound up going up against anti-vaccine groups because I do have a daughter with autism and intellectual disabilities. And now she's an adult. And essentially there's two major threads in the book, other than telling the story about Rachel and her family. And one is the overwhelming evidence showing there's no link between vaccines and autism. And even within that, there's a lot of subcategories

because what happens is anti-vaccine groups keep switching up the concern about a specific vaccine and when it gets debunked and they just switch it up to something else, I call it biomedical whack-a-mole or moving the goalposts. So the original assertion came out of the late 1990s and the false claims that it was the MMR vaccine, the measles, mumps, rubella vaccine. That was actually published in a biomedical journal called The Lancet in the UK. The paper was retracted eventually because it was shown to be false.

Also, the scientific community responded with large epidemiologic studies showing that kids who got the MMR vaccine were no more likely to acquire autism, then kids who didn't. Similarly, kids on the autism spectrum were no more likely to have gotten MMR than kids not on the autism spectrum. That should have been the end of it. But then our friend Robert F. Kennedy Jr. came on the scene in 2005 and wrote an article in Rolling Stone Magazine claiming, okay, if it's not MMR, it must be the thimerosal preservative

that's in vaccine. And that was also retracted and thoroughly debunked through large epidemiologic studies, even non-human primate studies. And it switched up again to spacing vaccines too close together. We have to green our vaccine ecosystem. And you saw celebrities like Jenny McCarthy or her husband, Jim Carrey, walking around in green t-shirts. It was all phony baloney. And was debunked and then it was alum in vaccine. So it became this kind of exhausting exercise and each time we were able to successfully refute it. Founded in 2007, Children's Health Defense represented a formalization of late 20th century anti-vaccination resistance. Not unlike the anti-vaccination leagues

of the late 19th and early 20th century, children's health defense peddles dubious cures like homeopathy and promotes conspiratorial narratives like the Great Reset, which claims that billionaire Bill Gates and others have used the COVID-19 pandemic as a part of a plan to make America a Marxist. The idea that vaccines cause autism is a part of a plan to make America a Marxist. The idea that vaccines cause autism is a part of a larger claim that vaccines can cause injuries among those who

receive them and that our understanding of these injuries is far less than what the science shows. This notion gained traction in the 1970s and 1980s when controversy erupted regarding the DPT vaccine for diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus. A sensational film called DPT Vaccine Roulette drew an erroneous link between the vaccine and illnesses of some children who received it. Two parents of children who received the vaccine formed the National Vaccine Information Center, which exists to this day and was a major source of COVID-19 misinformation.

The controversy around the DPT vaccine led to lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers, leading many of those manufacturers to stop producing the vaccine by the end of 1985. Because of this, Congress passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act in 1986, establishing a no-fault system to alleviate pressure on vaccine manufacturers and provide an avenue for victims of a vaccine injury to be compensated. As Dr. Hotez describes it, a lot of this is overblown. Yes, there are individuals who can have reactions to vaccines that can cause issues. But the studies around DPT and the notions that it caused these illnesses that these parents were concerned about actually showed that there was no connection.

Nevertheless, it is a reality that some people may face some sort of complications, and we can't dismiss that. But when we stack it up against the side effects of disease and one of those being death, well, it's a pretty easy comparison to make. Yeah, it's going to be so important to keep up the education about vaccines. One of the things that I've done has been preparing these infographics, which I initially did with a guy named Bill Marsh at the New York Times, who's this brilliant guy who does all these cool graphics for the New York Times. And he had this really interesting idea

that we published in the New York Times in 2020, where you create a box representing 10,000 kids, and two boxes align side to side. One box is what happens if 10,000 kids get, say, for instance, the MMR vaccine versus the other box 10,000 kids getting measles. And, you know, the ones getting the MMR vaccine, you see these tiny little pinpricks of very rare side effects like allergic reaction or febrile seizures, one in 3,000, that sort of thing. So maybe there's a tiny little pinprick representing, you know, three or 30 kids as opposed to measles,

which, you know, 20% of kids hospitalized and measles deaths and these are large red and black boxes. I think those kinds of things are helpful because I think one of the problems is the anti-vaccine guys, what they'll do is they will exaggerate the frequency of rare, rare side effects and simultaneously downplay the severity of the illness. We even heard that before the two deaths. You heard all this rhetoric, all measles is just like a benign illness.

Now we've got two deaths right here in Texas of nice school-aged kids that never had to lose their lives because the parents, you know, were taken in by the disinformation machine. The contemporary rise of anti-vaccine rhetoric in the U.S. can also be tied to the political climate of the early 21st century. Figures like Congressman Ron Paul, for example, have capitalized on the growing sentiment that government should not interfere with individual medical decisions. With increasing distrust in government, particularly during the Bush administration, vaccine hesitancy began to align with broader libertarian and

some conservative ideologies. The idea that the government should not mandate personal medical choices further gained traction with the election of President Barack Obama in 2008, adding fuel to the anti-vaccination fire. And the anti-vax movement began to dovetail with the booming alternative health and wellness industry that skews Western medicine in favor of natural medicines and holistic approaches. And often this includes some sort of spiritual element. This convergence is crystallized in modern figures like Vani Hari also known as the food babe who is a conservative wellness

influencer. She's aligned herself with RFK jr.'s Maha agenda and promotes the standard goop like fare but with a right-wing edge. The American food industry for example or Big industry, for example, or Big Pharma, for example, are poisoning us, but also you shouldn't get the flu vaccine. Despite the best efforts of scientists like Dr. Hotez to debunk key claims that motivate the modern anti-vaccination movement,

it has only gathered steam in the last few decades. In recent years, a number of states have passed new laws allowing for personal exemptions from vaccines. And because of Dr. Hotez's public involvement, he's had a front row seat as anti vaccination beliefs have become part and parcel of Republican politics. Now, as a physician scientist, the last thing I want to talk about is politics, right? I mean, I feel that every American has a right to their political views. That's embedded in our history and our constitution. But how do you say, don't adopt this stuff because it's going to be so detrimental? But that's what happened. With the formation of anti-vaccine groups in the 2010s in Texas, you started to get these

steep rise in parents requesting non-medical exemptions that their kids could get out of being vaccinated for school. It was particularly strong in the same places where people were refusing COVID vaccines years later, especially in conservative rural areas of West Texas, East Texas. The vaccination rates continue to be strong in our cities of the Texas Triangle, Dallas where you are, and Houston where I am, and San Antonio and Austin. But in the more conservative rural areas of West Texas, East Texas, that's where you saw big declines in kids getting vaccines.

And once you go below a certain threshold, roughly below 90%, then bam, that you start to see breakthrough childhood infections. And usually the first one you see is measles. You can ultimately get all of them, but measles is the first one you see because it's so highly transmissible. But Texas is not alone. While immunization rates certainly have plummeted in Republican states faster than they have in Democratic states, immunization rates have fallen in most states since the pandemic.

But there was another event over half a decade before social distancing and vaccination cards became household concepts that also informed the Republican party's embrace of anti-vaccine politics. This was a particular viral outbreak of measles in California, one that ultimately spurred policy changes that reverberated across the country. It started happening in the 2010s and really ramped up after there was a large measles epidemic in California of all places on 2014-2015. And the California legislature shut down vaccine exemptions. They said, okay, from now on, you want to send your kids to school, your kids have to

be vaccinated. And I supported that and it solved the measles problem. But then it produced this health freedom backlash in states like Texas, also Oklahoma, and very much a red state phenomenon, red being Republican, blue being Democrat. And that's where you saw this rise in vaccine exemptions. You started getting anti-vaccine groups forming. They were getting PAC money, political action committee money. And I saw that as really dangerous because now, rather than being sort of small underfunded groups, they now had the backing of a major political party and everything that goes along with it in terms of influence and PAC money.

This gives them a lot of bandwidth and a lot of political clout. It's so self-defeating, but there you are. Now we're at the point in Texas where we have over 100,000 non-medical exemption requests of various sorts. That's a lot of kids. And this doesn't say anything about the homeschooled kids in Texas. I'm told that we may have as many as 700,000 homeschooled kids, but you might want to document that.

And I don't think we have any idea of the percentage of those kids that are not getting their vaccines because they're homeschooled. Private schools in Texas have significantly lower vaccination rates on average, and the numbers among homeschoolers, while not precisely known, are likely just as bad, if not worse. Texas just passed the largest school privatization scheme

in the nation, through which parents will be subsidized by the state to send their kids to private schools or to homeschool them. Meaning vaccination rates among school age children will likely continue to fall. The prevalence of homeschooling among left leaning crunchy alternative types has also contributed to the shift towards right wing politics as the homeschool movement has deliberately tried to recruit those families and push them towards right-wing politics. The complete partisan politicization of vaccinations has made communicating the risks of low vaccination rates far more difficult for people like Dr. Hotez. How do you thread that needle and say, look, everybody has a right to their political views. I'm not going there with you.

That's your right as an American citizen, but don't adopt the anti-vaccine stuff because it's so dangerous for, for your health and the health of your loved ones, the health of your kids, but it's a tough needle to thread. And as a result, I, you know, will often, even though I try to bend over backwards, explaining, I don't care about your politics, for their convenient purposes, I'm treated as a political figure and portrayed as a cartoon villain or a scientist in white coat plotting nefarious things. They have this crazy concept out there they call plandemic. It's not a pandemic, it's a plandemic that somehow I've been involved with or that

I'm profiting from vaccines and secretly working for pharma companies, even though it's the opposite, right? I make low-cost vaccines that actually showed we could bypass big pharma companies. And some of it gets outright absurd. I mean, there's this whole thread on the internet that says that I'm not even a real person, that I'm actually being played by Jack Black and that he's paid for by the CIA. And it's got these amazing forensic analysis of closeups of my teeth with Jack Black's teeth and all this and profiles and things. I mean, the funny thing is the sad thing is the crazier the conspiracy, the faster it seems to travel.

These sorts of conspiracy theories would be laughable if they did not have deadly consequences. And unfortunately, this sort of public health focused conspiracism is not new. In the late 1800s, several Canadian doctors such as Alexander Milton Ross insisted that vaccines were the true danger, not smallpox. Others argued that British doctors were promoting

vaccinations to poison the French Canadian community due to nationalistic conflicts. If you were not in a coma during the COVID-19 pandemic, these ideas should sound familiar. And in 1920, at the tail end of the deadly Spanish flu pandemic that killed somewhere between 17 and 50 million people worldwide, the Commissioner of Public Health in Seattle, Dr. Hiram Reid, was dealing with the nasty outbreak of smallpox. The year prior, the Washington state legislature, facing pressure from anti-vaccination activists, allowed for students to avoid vaccination requirements if their parents

objected, effectively ending mandatory vaccination. Hiram, frustrated with the ongoing resistance to his attempts to vaccinate the public in Seattle, vented in a 1920 annual health report. Quote, the number of unvaccinated persons in this city is large. The city being a hotbed for anti vaccination, Christian science, and various anti medical cults. And it is difficult to enforce vaccination, Reed wrote. For those who are unfamiliar, Christian science is an offshoot of Christianity that was formed in 1879 in New England and by 1936 was the fastest growing religion in the nation. Christian scientists typically avoid medical care and rely instead on their belief in the healing power of prayer. On the next episode of Anti-Vax America, I'll explore the intersection of conservative Christianity,

its belief in spiritual healing miracles, anti-vaccination beliefs, and vaccination hesitancy. We'll talk about how a very influential strain of conservative Christianity that is highly political and has tied itself with Donald Trump is also influencing people's attitudes about vaccination. Until then, I'm Stephen Monacelli, and this is Anti-Vax America for Cool Zone Media. Thanks for listening. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media.

For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. I'm Jake Hanrahan, journalist and documentary filmmaker. Away Days is my new project, reporting on countercultures on the fringes of society all across the world. Live from the underground, you'll discover no rules fighting, Japanese street racing,

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