Nobody Should Believe Me - The Current State of Vaccine Hesitancy with Tara Haelle

Episode Date: October 15, 2026

Andrea is joined by science journalist Tara Haelle for a conversation about vaccines, vaccine hesitancy, and the rise of science denialism. They discuss common concerns about vaccine safety, and Tara shares her thoughts on how to approach conversations about vaccines with curiosity rather than judgment. *** Read Tara’s book: https://sites.google.com/view/tara-haelle/books Try out Andrea’s Podcaster Coaching App: https://studio.com/apps/andrea/podcaster Order Andrea’s book The Mother Next Door: Medicine, Deception, and Munchausen by Proxy: https://read.macmillan.com/lp/the-mother-next-door-9781250284273/ View our sponsors: https://www.nobodyshouldbelieveme.com/sponsors/ Remember that using our codes helps advertisers know you’re listening and helps us keep making the show!   Subscribe on YouTube where we have bonus content: https://www.youtube.com/@NobodyShouldBelieveMePod Follow Andrea on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andreadunlop/ Buy Andrea's books: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Andrea-Dunlop/author/B005VFWJPI For more information and resources on Munchausen by Proxy, please visit: https://www.munchausensupport.com/ The American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children’s MBP Practice Guidelines: https://apsac.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Munchausen-by-Proxy-Clinical-and-Case-Management-Guidance-.pdf Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

True Story Media. Hello, it's Andrea, and today we have a very special guest with us. Journalist Tara Haley is back to help walk us through the weeds of science denialism and conspiracy theories. You may remember Tara from season seven, where she introduced us to the wonderful and very useful acronym for the five tactics of science denialism. Flick, say it with me, fake experts, logical fallacies, impossible expectations, cherry picking, and conspiracy theories. And boy does Tara know her way around these bad boys. And today, we are going to talk about vaccines. So buckle up.

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and an immersive 19-speaker AKG surround audio system. This city demands agility, and Optic delivers with precision to make every drive extraordinary. Let's take the Cadillac. Find out more at Cadillac, Canada.ca. Luxury sales claim based on S&P Global Mobility Canadian New Vehicle Total Registrations for calendar year 2025 for the Cadillac definition of luxury. Hi, Tara. How are you? I'm hanging in there. Yeah. It's sort of a whirlwind at all times. It's really hard to keep up with everything.

Before we get off to the races here, can you remind us, who are you and what do you do? Yes, I am an independent science journalist and I specialize. in medical journalism in general, but especially infectious disease, vaccines, various other medical specialties for trade, which means that I write for doctors as well. But I am also the infectious disease beat leader for the Association of Healthcare Journalists, and I used to be their medical studies person, which means that I basically provide training and resources to other health journalists on how to report on infectious disease, vaccines, and medical studies. So I've spent the past, oh gosh, decade and a half reading medical studies and actually understanding what they do, like,

looking for flaws in them, understanding what the limitations of them are, how to assess if they're strong methodologies or not, and then just understanding basic epidemiology. Incredible. And what a skill set to have and what a time to be reporting on such a thing here in 2026? When I started reporting on vaccines about what, 16, 17 years ago, if you had told me what was coming, I don't think, it feels like an alternate universe. I don't know that I would have believed it. Yeah, really in the worst way. And, you know, that was one of my first questions for you is you've been reporting on vaccines for quite some time now. What have you noticed in terms of trends over that time period? Well, I mean, obviously the anti-vaccine movements, and I say movements because it's not really one movement, but the factions have grown in strength, diversity, polarization, and politicization. They have gained a foothold that no one thought that they really could gain. Like, it was the kind of thing where we always sort of, it kind of feels like AI right now, where everyone's like, oh my God, AI is going to become Skynet and it's going to take us.

all over and wipe out the human planet. But nobody really believes it, even though people would say it. Well, okay, maybe some people believe it. But I mean, we say it as though it's a pie in the sky. That's kind of how people talked about the anti-vaccine movement gaining a foothold years ago. It was always a threat. And it wasn't an empty threat. It was a genuine concern. But the idea that one of the leading anti-vaccine activists of our age, literally like Robert Kennedy Jr. I refuse to call him. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., by the way, because his father was an incredible statesman and an amazing politician who did a lot of good, and he does not deserve the legacy of being linked to his father,

in my opinion. But Kennedy has been one of the leading anti-vaccine activists of our age for over two decades. And so to think, you know, years and years ago that he could end up in charge of our vaccine policy at a federal level is mind-boggling, like how far we've fallen and the destruction that he has wrought at, especially the CDC, which is a shadow of what it was. Yeah. So a friend of mine, a wonderful scientist named Jess Steyer, who runs unbiased science, talked recently about how it's like all these different arrows pointing at the body. And they're all sort of like, you know, shooting at the same time. And she was listening what the different arrows were.

And it's a really good analogy because that's what it feels like right now. Yeah. It really does. And obviously, we deal with a lot of. science denialism on the show and that causes harm to children. So there's a lot of crossover in our work, which is how we found each other. But I wonder, you know, like just to take a big step back and it feels like a strange time to be asking this question, but also it feels like an important time to really do some soul searching about why this has taken hold the way that it has.

So I wonder, like, from studying this all of these years, you know, more than a decade now, almost two decades, what is anti-vax about? And I think from the spectrum of like full-on anti-vax to like vaccine hesitancy to like just asking questions. Because I think that this is very easy for people like you and I who are science-minded. You're, you know, you're extremely knowledgeable. about how to read papers in a way that I am not. But I mean, you know, both my grandfathers were doctors. Like, I am a person, like, when you look at the spectrum of like how people feel, how parents feel when they're going in those doctors visits about the vaccines. I'm like, yep, we're getting all the vaccine. Like just like an enthusiastic yes for my part, especially because when my daughter was just born, there was a measles outbreak near us. So I was like, oh my God, please. So I ended up vaccinating her early at the recommendation of our pediatrician. and, you know, so I'm a vaccine enthusiast, I would say.

So I think it's very easy to be judgmental and to say all these people are idiots. And I think that's not fair and it's not definitely not productive and it's not helpful. It's also not accurate. Yeah. So give us a more accurate picture than that knee-jerk reaction. Yeah. I mean, we can say it's not fair. But I mean, I think being science-minded people and sticking with facts, it's simply not accurate.

And I think that's really important to point out because a lot of people are going to say, well, I don't care about it whether it's fair or not. Well, do you care about whether it's true or not? Because that, that matters. Basically, attitudes toward vaccines fall along a spectrum, just like attitudes about anything else, really. I mean, you could talk about a lot, you know, how do you feel about about cops? How do you feel about abortion? You know, there's going to be like gradations along the way, right? With vaccines, you've got your vaccine enthusiasts, right? And they tend to be vaccine advocates, right? Then you've got your anti-vaccine advocates. I hate the term anti-vaxxer. I don't use that term. It's a common term, but I don't use it. And I don't use it because I think it muddies the waters. It doesn't, it's not clearly defined and it doesn't, people will throw it around and they'll include people in that label that really don't fit that label. Then you've got what I call vaccine refusers. Like if we were to move from the spectrum of anti-vaccine advocates toward vaccine enthusiasts, you've got vaccine refusers. And that's one of the reasons I don't like the term anti-vaxers, is because, some people will group a vaccine refuser into the anti-vaxxer title.

And when we talk about anti-vaccine advocates just to get super kind of deliberate about this, you're talking about people that are working for Children's Health Defense Fund and the people who are advocating for legislation, advocating for changes to the vaccine schedule that are not based on, you know, evidence-based medicine, et cetera. Yeah, these are people actively involved with organizations. They're showing up at rallies. They could also be influencers on the. online. Maybe they're not showing up at a rally, but they're actively spreading misinformation

intentionally on, you know, on social media. They're at a baby shower party with their friend, and they actively say, you should not vaccinate your baby and let me tell you 15 reasons why. So there's, there's, you know, variations of where they are, but they're actively taking a role in trying to persuade other people not to vaccinate and or limiting access to vaccines for other people. Yeah. Okay. So beyond their own children. they're doing something. Beyond their own children, right. Whereas a vaccine refuser is sort of the quiet person who doesn't vaccinate their kids. And even vaccine refuser is a little bit strong because if you look at the recent newborn deaths in Pennsylvania, one of those families was an Amish family.

I would say that that particular family, there was an article in the Atlantic about them, they weren't even a vaccine refuser in the sense that a refuse implies I was offered it and I explicitly said, no, I do not want it. But you can be a not. non-vaccinator without being a refuser where you just didn't actively take the option to take your child to the doctor and like it just sort of fell by the wayside you just like they're just not seeking medical care in the same way that other parents are when that family was interviewed they basically they weren't anti-vaccine they were just like well we didn't really think about it we just didn't do it there was they didn't feel strongly about vaccines they didn't have strong political beliefs about vaccines they didn't

have strong policy beliefs about vaccines. They were just living their lives and they just happened to not vaccinate. There wasn't an active sort of outside force encouraging them to vaccinate. And so they just didn't. And so I would say that they're not even vaccine refusers. They're more like non-vaccinators. They're one step further along that spectrum, right? And vaccine refusers have all different kinds of reasons. Non-vaccinators have all different kinds of reasons or sometimes don't have reasons. They just don't. Then you get into the selective vaccinators. So those are the people that are a little bit more, it's kind of interesting because a non-vaccinator is usually more removed from everything, whereas a selective vaccinator is much more involved in terms of what they're researching because

they're making an active choice. I want my child to receive the, say, tetanus vaccine, but I don't want them to receive, say, the flu vaccine. They're picking and choosing, or they delay. So they're either selecting or they're delaying. They're saying, I'll get my child the MMR, but not until my child is four years old instead of one-year-old, for example. So that you've got your selective vaccinators and your delayed vaccinator. then you've got your big middle, and this is where most people live. They're like, they go along to get alongs. The doctor says vaccinate.

Okay, you get them vaccinated and you don't think anything more of it. That's it. That's where most people live. That's where most people have always lived. And what changed was the pandemic. A lot of people didn't even know that there was an anti-vaccine movement. It was like the idea of not vaccinating wasn't even in their head space until the pandemic brought up the issue of do you get vaccinated and started spreading information. And we've had a lot of

carryover of the distrust of the COVID vaccine leak over into child vaccines where people who had never thought twice about child vaccines before are now questioning child vaccines after what happened during the pandemic and the explosion of attention on vaccines. So the go along to get along the sort of norming of vaccination, which is where vaccination is strongest. Some of that has shrunk because of the way the pandemic put a spotlight on vaccines. A little bit further along with that is they're the people that kind of are the peanut gallery people. They're the, of course I vaccinate my child.

Why wouldn't you? They're a little bit more than they go along to get alongs. They're not actively advocating for vaccines, but they think the people who aren't vaccinating are kind of crazy and weird and they don't understand what's going on. They're the ones that pass casual judgment on social media. But they're not necessarily thinking about all of the reasons why. people are falling into that. Exactly. It's sort of a casual, well, why wouldn't you vaccinate? That's dumb. And honestly, a lot of people live there too because they just, they haven't had reason to learn about

why people might have concerns. And they are often the targets of the anti-vaccine advocates who are like, you guys are the stupid ones. You haven't been educated. From there, you start getting into more of the vaccine advocates, right? The people who speak up and there's very, you know, some of them are actively devoting their lives to doing this. Some of them are more like, you know, I'll share information on my social media feed, but I'm not going to get into arguments with people. Some people are like, I'll share the information and I'll argue to a point, but I'm not going to make, you know, so even within these different categories, there's sort of gradations of it. And I do think it's really important that even as I'm telling you what these different categories are, the underlying

values that drive where people fall is also very different. The anti-vaccine advocates, there's a whole bunch of different kinds. There's the ones who are believing in the naturalistic fallacy, the idea that anything you put in your body that isn't natural, like from nature directly is bad and harmful. There's the autism parents who say that their children developed autism from vaccines, even though I don't think there's been any condition more studied than autism when it comes to vaccines. And we definitively know that there is absolutely no connection. And in fact, nothing you can do to a child after it's born is going to give it out. It's it all happens before birth. You've got the religious individuals. And that's a tricky one

because no single religion right now actually advocates against vaccines. There is no religious bar on vaccines. All of the major world religions, they've had their world leaders, like even the Pope has come out and said, not the current Pope, but in the past, basically said, yes, aborted fetal cell lines were used to develop this vaccine. but this vaccine now protects people from dying and two wrongs don't make a right. So just because it was developed using immoral methods doesn't mean you shouldn't take advantage of using the benefited offers in saving your child's life, basically. So, I mean, we have like, you know, various religious figures over the years, over the past 30

years have come out. But what does happen is within little pockets in groups, a particular individual church will have a strong anti-vaccine sentiment. or people will say it's against God. And this argument is as old as anti-vaccine itself. People going all the way back to, you know, if God wants to take my child based on having a disease, then that's God's right, basically. I shouldn't be thwarting God's will. That's an ancient argument. You've also got the people who just fear that the vaccine side effects. They like the idea of a vaccine, but they want a quote-unquote, safer vaccine. Well, you can't have, there's no such thing as any

intervention that's risk-free. Any drinking water has risk, right? You can't make a perfectly 100% safe vaccine. It doesn't exist. And so they worry that the side effects, that the potential harms of a vaccine outweigh the benefits. And so you've got like all these different underlying values that drive a lot of that. Some people buck the trend because they're anti-authoritarianism, right? So there's a lot of different flavors to all of this. And then finally, the third element I haven't discussed is cognitive biases, where the, information that people receive and they take in is influenced by their background, by the automatic cognitive responses that they have to seeing information, the way it's presented,

who they get it from. All of these different things influence how they take in a message and the particular vulnerability they have at a particular moment when information reaches them, how it jibes with other information they have. All of those things play a role and those can become sort of what I call cognitive traps that let people fall into the misinformation where they mean well. They want to do the best for their children. Honestly, every single person along this line usually, obviously, Andrea Shaw and our outliers are going to be different. But typically, if we're looking at the big scheme of things, I'm going to say people along this whole spectrum, they all think they're doing what's best for their children, right? And so whether or not they fall

into that sort of that cognitive trap of believing the misinformation and being persuaded that the vaccines are dangerous for their children, you know, it's not like they're a bad person. They've been misled. The propaganda is really strong. And I think we have to keep in mind that the average everyday person walking along the street is not critically thinking all the time. That's not that they're, that's not what they do. They're making a living and they're making dinner and they're picking up their kids from schools. And it's not that they're incapable of critical thoughts. Some of them might be, but a lot of them have never been taught critical thought, right? But critical thoughts not built into their day-to-day thinking, like many of your listeners would automatically sort of, any claim that

comes across their desks, they're going to be like, well, let me analyze whether this is actually true or not, right? That's not what normal people do. Right. We're the weirdos. Right. I think all the time that there is so much information coming at all of us. You and I are both old enough to have lived and have memories before the internet when it was like.

The analog years. Yeah, like Encyclopedia Britannica, go look up, you know. like vaccine in the V volume, you know, like on us, like anybody younger than us is like, what are you talking about? Card catalogs, baby. I know how to use a card catalog. Yeah, like the Dewey Decimal System, baby. That was how it worked. But like we have not cut up cognitively human beings. So like the amount of information that comes out as in our ability to process it. And so I think like a lot of this misinformation is well dressed up as real information, as real science. They got charts.

They got graphs. They got citations. They're citing in some cases, right? Like, you know, PubMed articles and peer-reviewed research and, like, you know, who are those peers and what are their incentives, like is a whole other question. But that's just not something that most people have the ability to sort through on a daily basis. And, you know, one of the things that you wrote about in your book that I think and that, you know, we talked to, I talked to Dr. Paul Offutt for our upcoming season recently. And he's obviously a vaccine hero. and sort of philosopher king of medicine.

But like, you know, is that vaccines are, you know, PR-wise, vaccines are a victim of their own success. And that's true for public health in general. One of the problems is that when public health is working, nobody notices, right? We didn't all talk every day. We didn't go to a party and talk about how safe our food was until diarrhea lettuce came along. Right? Now we're all talking about how unsafe our food was. we still, as a whole, the idea that our food supply was relatively safe and that outbreaks were

isolated and periodic and usually managed very quickly, we took that for granted because we didn't have a reason to think about what wasn't there, right? If it's not in front of you, you don't think about it. And so if you don't see people dying of measles, if you don't see people dying of diphtheria, Christ, a child recently died of diphtheria, you know, people don't even know what that is. They don't even, you know, that's in the T-DAP and the D-TAP shots, the T-Tenis, diphtheria pertussis. They probably have heard of pertussis, whooping cough, and they've heard of tetanus. Everyone's heard of tetanus. But they don't know what the heck diphtheria is, and diphtheria is terrifying. It like freezes, you can't eat. It freezes your, it paralyzes your throat. If you don't know it exists,

you don't know to fear its return, I guess. And again, this was something, you know, Dr. Offutt was hospitalized in a polio unit and talks about that as such a experience that sort of shaped his worldview and a memory from his childhood. And, you know, one of my parents, really close friends walked with a cane because he had polio as a child. And like those folks, you know, the boomer generation, which is last generation that sort of has memories of polio, obviously we're losing them and we're losing that awareness of what that disease actually did to children. And just that they all lived at a time when these childhood diseases that have now, we now have vaccines for were much more common. And they got those diseases and they got the mumps.

And they got like I think about how that memory is lost. In, inside kind of the same way that I think, you know, which sadly have been thinking a lot about recently, as I'm sure many people have, that our memories of fascism have been lost, right? Both of my grandparents. Don't even have you started. Yeah, I mean, like, and I think they're related. You know, it's like both of my, both of my grandparents, you know, my grandfather on my dad's side was from Ireland and my grandmother was British and they both lived in the UK during the war and my grandfather was a doctor for the RAF and my grandmother worked at Bletchley. And like, they had memories of the war and being in Europe during the war. And I just think about, you know,

they obviously died many years ago. And I just sort of think like, oh, we're getting further and further away from like what Nazism really was. And you've seen that taboo get less and less and less, like 20 years ago. If you did something Nazi-ish, for instance, a salisian, or something of that nature. It's like people would shun you or out the out into the field, you know, and it's like, and it just like. And it wasn't just every day. Do you know that there were motorcycle bars where if someone walked in wearing a swastika,

the bar as a whole ejected that individual? Like this was true across all areas of society. Right. Did not matter your political affiliation. Did not matter your sort of beliefs otherwise. We were all like every movie sort of had, if it wasn't explicitly, about World War II. It was sort of like allegorically about World War II. It was like Nazis, bad guys, fascist, bad guys. Oh my God. My son and I just like watch just lose that, you know.

We just watched Indiana Jones, um, the first one, the Raiders of the Lost Ark. And I had forgotten that like the Nazis were the bad guys like in that. Yeah. And that movie was what, 1981 or something? Yeah. And like you have, you have older teenage kids. I have little kids. So I'm watching all of the like Disney movies. And like those two are sort of all about fascism. Like, if you look at the bad guys, it all like, Jafar and, like, you know, it's like, it's like, they're all sort of fascist coded. And we've just, like, lost that. And I think in a similar way that, like, when you lose touch with the human memory of those horrors, when you lose touch with the human memory of children being hospital, like regular, just on a regular

basis, such like children in the community, just like kids in your, in your class, like, being hospitalized with these horrible childhood diseases, parents losing children from those diseases. You know, this is not long ago in history, but I think we have really lost the human memory of childhood diseases where at least we, I didn't grow up with it, but at least my parents did. So my parents talked about it. And I think we're just so far removed. Well, and there's other elements here. First of all, with the fascism thing, people don't even know what, like they know the word Nazi is bad. And I know that Nazis are bad. But they don't necessarily know what fascism is. So they might know that it's bad to say these people are like Nazis,

but they don't realize why or how those people actually are like Nazis. I mean, I've done a lot of trying to educate people about these are the 14 characteristics of fascism. And if you go down the list, the U.S. ticks off just about every one of them right now. So when I say that the people in charge right now are fascist, I'm not just throwing it on a label or saying they're like Nazis. They literally are playing the same playbook. It's not a slur. It's a description. Exactly. And one of the things that we're seeing with vaccines, you've got survivorship bias, right? I had chickenpox as a kid. I survived. Most people who get chicken pox survive, right? These days, but once upon a time, not everybody who got chicken pox did survive. And we have that same problem with measles.

You'll see graphs that anti-vaccine activists will share showing the death rate of measles and how over time it'll show you like in 1963 when the vaccine was introduced, it will show you that the measles' deaths were already dropping dramatically before 1963. That's true. They were, because we were getting better at providing the supportive care that enabled children to survive. What that graph doesn't show you is the cases of measles. If you look at a graph that shows the cases as opposed to the deaths, there's a precipitous drop. Like, it's very sudden. And with that drop is a drop in disability, a drop in deafness, a drop in encephalitis, a drop in healthcare costs, a drop in beds being taken up by kids who have measles that could be used for other things that people need,

since health care is not an unlimited resource. And a drop in what we now know is immune memory. Measles actually wipes out a lot of the immune cells that remember how to fight other diseases. So for the two to three years after you have a measles infection, your body doesn't know how to fight other diseases. It once knew how to fight. It actually wipes out some of those memory cells. So you have all these. And then that doesn't even get to subacute therosing encephalitis, which is panencephalitis, S-S-S-C-P-E, which is sort of what I call Alzheimer's for kids. It's a progressive, degenerative disease that are neurological from a dormant measles virus. It's very rare. It's like, I don't know, two out of 5,000 kids or something. But it's scary as heck because it doesn't even come along

until like five years after you had measles. And once, if you do develop it, you do not survive. No one ever survives SSPE. So those are things that we don't know about, right? On top of that, we've got the severity of the disease has changed so that once upon a time, babies died of pertussis much more easily than they do now. Now we have lots of ways to keep them alive. That doesn't mean that pertussis is a better disease or it's okay to get it now. It's still terrifying. It's still expensive. It still uses resources. It can still have long-term effects. So not only are we dealing with the loss of the memory of the disease, but we also take for granted the ability that some of these diseases don't feel as bad as they once were, which is why you have some people saying like, oh, my kids should get the disease so they can get natural immunity. They don't realize what that, you know, the kinds of long-term effects that can happen or they take for granted that there still are people who die of measles.

Maybe not as many people die as measles as they did before, but they still do. die of measles like these two newborns up in these two babies in Pennsylvania recently did. Yeah. And by the way, yes, one of them really did die of measles. We can get to that later if you want, but there's a whole discussion about that. Speaking again about this little microgeneration that we're in, we're in the too early for the shingles vaccine, too late for the chickenpox vaccine. And I've had shingles twice. And, you know, I got a really whopping case in my late 30s. And my kids got the chickenpox vaccine. And I'm I'm like, yeah, like, chickenpox was totally a part of our childhoods. People would have chickenpox parties.

So they could just be like, get it, get it over with. So you have that immunity because that was the only way that you would get immunity was to get it back then. But I'm like, it could be so short-sighted to say like, okay, if you get chickenpox, it's not a big deal. Well, that's true. But you also like can then get shingles later in your life, which can be an extremely big deal. And you can develop long-term pain conditions.

And like, I had the post-trapetic neuralgia for years. and still comes back every once in a while. Don't recommend. I'm going to be like, I am desperate to get the shingles vaccine. So it's like, yeah, I think there's like, it's again, it's stripping data of context, which I think anti-science movements are very good at. Weather is just turning to fall over here in Seattle. So I have been reorganizing my closet,

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And remember that shopping our sponsors is a great way to support the show. So you wrote a wonderful book that is the book that people should read instead of Emily Oster, and we'll get another separate episode to talk about Emily Oster. I will rant and rave about Emily till Kingdom Come. Oh my gosh. She is stuck. I mean, I mean, she's not as bad as RFK Jr., but she mixes fact and facts. fiction and doesn't, she thinks she knows more. Yeah, well, another day. Yeah. So we won't go down that

particular rabbit hole today, though. The listeners, I'm sure, would be into that. So we'll have you back on to talk about that. But so in the informed parent, you talk about vaccines and vaccine hesitancy, vaccine concerns, kind of those people in the middle that you were talking about who are thoughtful about it, but maybe have some concerns because they're being thoughtful. Which is totally normal. Totally normal to say, hey, you want to stop. a needle in my healthy child? Why? What's in that needle? That's a completely reasonable question to ask. Yes. Yes. Again, in that spirit of respecting people and the paradigms that they might find themselves in, can you walk through kind of some of the really common, as you said, quite reasonable concerns

that people have about both vaccines and sort of the question of, I think the question of the vaccine's schedule, because I found that part of the book really illuminating. Because of course, like, I realized when I was reading that section of the book, I was, like, oh, I have no more questioned my own biases as a very pro-vaccine person than an anti-vaccine advocate has questioned theirs, right? I'm like, I grew up in doctors, families, like, was always just like, never asked why. I'm just like, yeah, I don't want my child to get that disease. Like, give them all the pokes, you know? So it's like, I have no more questioned my own biases than other folks have questioned there. So I thought.

this was a wonderful part of the book. Can you kind of walk us through the questions about side effects, preservatives? We already kind of talked about autism, but there are some other diseases that people will try to sort of link to vaccine. So can you kind of walk us through some of those common concerns? Yeah. The most common, I would say the most common sort of reasonable concern that a lot of people have is what I call the too many too soon. Not just I, it's commonly called the too many too soon argument, right? Which is, oh my gosh, you're getting too many of those shots too early in a baby's life and they're going to over, they worry it's going to overwhelm the immune system in some way. You get multiple vaccines. They've reduced the number of shots. They've combined a lot of

the vaccines so that you have multiple vaccines and a single shot, which is nice. But I think there's at least three shots at that two-month visit. And so it's a reasonable concern. Oh, my gosh, you're loading my child up with all this stuff. And the reason that we know that's not an issue. There's two separate reasons. One reason is we've tested it, right? That's the important reason, is we've actually gone through and said, okay, we tested the hepatitis B vaccine with randomized controlled trials way back before it was approved. Then after it was approved, we watched the safety of it. Then we did trials combining just the hepatitis B vaccine with another vaccine. So that's three, so the D-TAP itself is three vaccines. Then there's the HEPB, then there's,

that's five vaccines in one shot. So the HEPB was originally tested by itself. Then the HEPB was tested with a separate polio shot. Then they combined them. And each one of those steps had multiple trials along the way and post-surveillance trials, like after it was approved. Then they combined them with like, okay, here's the hepie polio vaccine shot and here's the D-TAP. Okay, now we take those together. Now we combine those. And you know what I'm saying? So each one of these was iterative along the way, right? It's not like they just suddenly decided, hey, let's take these three vaccines and give them to kids all at the same time. They tested that extensively before they did it. And they did it for every single one. So the vaccine schedule, the immunization, the immunization,

schedule that is still currently at the moment on the CDC website, although Kennedy would rather have it otherwise. And the one that the AAP endorses an ACOG and the American family physicians and all, that is like a very carefully constructed jenga that made out of a whole bunch of different trials over many, many years to make sure that it was both the safest and the most effective way to protect children. Like the goal is you want to protect these children from these diseases as early as possible because any time that they're not protected, they can be exposed to that disease. So you want to get it to them early, but you don't want to get it to them so early that their immune systems aren't able to mount the response to them or that their immune

systems are blunted or prevented from mounting a response, which is slightly different. That's what happens with the measles vaccine. The reason we get the measles vaccine at 12 months instead of earlier like the others is because the maternal and antibodies that children have from when they were born, the sort of passive antibodies of their mother or the gestating parent, those antibodies are still there. And if the antibodies are still there, giving them the measles vaccine, the immune system is like, meh, we don't need to make more. We got some. But they don't know, you know, but what they got is the mother's ones that are eventually going to fade, right? So you have to take those kinds of things into account.

And then, of course, the safety. Like if one vaccine has the potential to cause a fever, does that mean that two vaccines could make a bigger fever? Well, we know now that that's not the case, but that is something that we didn't know that before, right? So you have to consider all of those different pieces that have been constructed from literally thousands of studies across the world over decades, right, in order to get where we are. So when people worry about whether it's too many too soon, they don't realize just how much work and research has gone into constructing that. So that's the one side of the argument. The other side of the argument is what you're getting in a vaccine. So a vaccine essentially has two things in it. One, some piece of that vaccine or like a protein

of it or the actual whole bacteria that's been inactivated or the virus, which has been sort of defanged in some way, even if it's still alive or weakened, or a protein of that virus or some instructions in the case of a DNA or an MRI virus, some instructions for making a protein. So something that relates to that original disease that enables the immune system to see it and say, whoa, you don't belong here. Let's get rid of you. And so, but it's small enough that it's not going to cause any actual issues. Either if it's a piece of the vaccine or it's inactivated or it's defanged, then it wasn't going to hurt you anyway. But the immune system doesn't know that. The immune system is trained to attack, right? So the immune system is going to build up the fences, the antibodies,

against whatever that protein or that inactivated virus or that weakened virus or that killed bacteria is. The thing that it's recognizing is called an antigen. So the one, the most important part of a vaccine sort of like, I guess you would call it the active ingredient sort of of a vaccine is the antigen. The thing that the immune system recognizes and says, you don't belong here, I'm going to make some antibodies to kick your ass. The other stuff that's in the vaccine is everything to make that work well, which is either preserving it, keeping the formulation stable so it doesn't get, doesn't degrade or mix in the wrong way. And sometimes an adjuvant. An adjuvant is another potential ingredient that

can be in there, which increases the effectiveness. It basically, the adjuvant is kind of like a messenger that waves a red flag in case the immune system wouldn't otherwise see the protein. Like the HPV vaccine, for example, I think has an aluminum adjuvant in it. I believe so. So if the immune system didn't notice the proteins of the HPV virus there, the adjuvant is sort of this like caller, right, saying, hey, immune system, check it out, bad guy over here. And so that's what the adjuvant is. It basically enhances that immune and sort of spurs it into action. So those are the things that are in these vaccines and that when people say they're worried that it's too much too soon, what they would be, they may not

realize that they're talking about this, but what they're talking about is those, antigens, right? So then we look at how many antigens there are in a vaccine. Not very many when you consider all the antigens that we're exposed to every day because that vaccine, you know, a vaccine might have, I don't know, five, ten antigens. There's actually Paul authored a fantastic paper years ago over a decade ago in pediatric where he actually adds them all up and you can look at the total. You know, the actual number of those antigens, when you compare that to all of the allergens, for example, that are in the air, the pollen, the random bacteria that's in the water that you drink, all the weird shit that's in your breast milk, whatever, you know, all these other

things that the body has to be regularly protecting against. The body is assaulted even as a newborn by thousands, millions of other antigens each day. What's in that vaccine is a drop in the bucket. Yeah. And then you're going to say, oh, but then why do you get a fever or why do you have cough. Why do you have these reactions to the vaccine? Well, those reactions are the immune system working. That's the immune system saying, whoa, hold up. We took care of those antigens with no problem, but you look like a bigger problem. Let's ramp up the fever. Let's make those antibodies fast. A fever is actually heating up the body to make the antibody production faster and more efficient. You know, when you get a stuffy nose, that's the immune system saying, let's create a bunch of mucus

so we can wash out this shit because we don't want it in our bodies. When you sneeze, that's your body saying get this shit out of here, right? Like all of those different things that you're getting that are vaccine reactions, that's the immune system saying, get out of here. You know, we don't want you here. We're trying to make these antibodies against you. And you don't get that with a lot of the other antigens because the immune system just sort of handles them, unless you have allergies.

That's a whole other conversation. But so the too many too soon is the one I spend the most time on because it touches on understanding all of that, right? How the immunization schedule is constructed, understanding why the, level of antigens you're getting in those vaccines is not as dangerous as it sounds like, why you get those adverse effects, those systemic effects that, you know, some kids will get. You also have people who worry about what I call the naturalistic fallacy or what is called the naturalistic fallacy. And that's the idea that I don't want to put something foreign in my body. Well, and what I tell people,

this kind of goes hand in hand with the people who are like, my child should get the disease naturally, right? I believe that they should get the disease naturally and fight it. And the answer to both of those is the same, which is that disease is what's in the vaccine. That is natural. Yeah, that's exactly what, it's exactly what we're doing here. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's the idea. That's where this all came from, right? That going back to the first vaccine, the smallpox vaccine, that's how we figured out would work, right? The original smallpox inoculation, before we had the smallpox vaccine, we had the smallpox inoculation, which was literally taking like a really weak, you know, a little tiny, tiny bit of that smallpox and intentionally giving it to people. It was a

essentially like the original chickenpox parties, right? Yeah. It's funny because during the pandemic, I don't remember, I have this tweet somewhere, but there was a guy who said, I have an idea. Why don't? Instead of us doing a vaccine, we just take a small weak part of the disease and inject that into people instead. And we're like, oh, you're so anti-vaccine that you wrapped right around to being

pro-vaccine. And so when you talk about it being unnatural, well, it's no more unnatural than the disease itself. And then you could say, oh, well, I don't want all, I don't want the adjuvants. Okay, well, the adjuvant is most often aluminum and you consume aluminum every day. It's in the environment. And it is also a natural element, by the way. Okay, well, I don't want the preservatives that are in there. Well, do you want to eat food without getting sick? Because you already consume all those preservatives. I mean, unfortunately, for some people, the answer is, no, give me raw milk, but that's a whole other. Right. Yeah. But even those people, they eat a burger when they go to the,

You can't tell me that. It's impossible to remove yourself from. Yeah, there's very few people that are truly doing the raw food movement and growing stuff in their backyard. Oh, there's some people out there. Yes, they are. But they're not the bulk of people who are refusing vaccines. And so, you know, all of those arguments kind of fall apart in that way. And now when I'm talking to people who actually have these concerns, I don't necessarily present it the way that I am right now.

This is me telling you things and you're listening because you are open to listening to these things. when you talk to someone who actually has these concerns, I don't tell them anything. I ask them things. I ask them what their concerns are. I ask them what questions they have. I say, have you thought about the fact that? Did you know that? Even when I'm telling them something, I'm doing it in the form of a question, right? Yeah. Yeah. What are your worries? What, you know, and what I'm trying to find out is what are the values that sort of underlie where they are, right? Well, what values do they have? And then I try and connect those values to shared values. So I'm not telling them all this stuff. But I mean, I'm telling, you mean, your audience is going to know most of what I just said anyway.

I mean, that's pretty fine. It's great because I think like it actually does, again, to the question of like, yes, I know how vaccines work on the basic level. But again, because I haven't questioned my own, you know, my own biases around this, which is basically that I trust evidence-based medicine and I'm not, you know, even despite having had negative experiences with doctors, because I don't think that you can be a woman on this earth without having some negative experience with doctors, like basically trust what my doctor tells me. And like, that's my worldview. So it's like, I do think it's really helpful to kind of walk through it. So that if you meet someone in the wild, you can have that conversation with them. The other thing,

I think that was really interesting about, you know, that you mentioned in the book was this difference between, because I did not, I did not actually realize the way that these things were delineated. So side effects from vaccines versus adverse events versus what's in the vaccine compensation fund. Because I think this was actually fascinating to read about and I did not know this. So can you walk us through because I think people really collapse all of those things, right? So can you kind of walk us through like what the differences are between a documented side, effect, something that ends up in the adverse effects database, and then something that a parent might seek compensation for a vaccine injury. An adverse event is anything adverse, negative,

bad that happens after an intervention. In this case, vaccines, but it could be true for any intervention. It could be after a surgery. It could be after taking Tylenol. Okay. So an adverse event is you took the vaccine, you did the thing, you wonder by the surgery, and this thing happened. that could be a side effect, which is something that was due to the vaccine or the surgery or the medication or whatever. It could also be a random thing that happened to happen like you got in a car accident. And it's totally unrelated. For example, when I do, when I'm reading studies, any study that took place between basically 2020 and like 2023 or so, every single one of those studies has COVID-19 listed as an adverse event. These are cancer studies.

These are vaccine studies. these are like surgeries. You know, the surgery didn't give them COVID-19. Now, it is possible they caught COVID-19 in the hospital. But I mean, the medication, the chemotherapy did not give them COVID-19. But it's documented because it is an adverse event that happened afterward. And you have to rule out whether or not those adverse events were side effects or not. So you can't rule them out if you haven't collected the data on them.

So an adverse event is something that happens that's bad after you get the vaccine. A side effect is something that's unwelcome or bad that you get after the vaccine that is due to the vaccine. And that is because of something in the vaccine in the way it works. So fever is the most common example, right? Fever, headache, nausea. I remember I felt like shit after I got the first COVID vaccine. I came home and I crashed and I felt sort of nauseated and had a headache and a fever for a day. Some people react really strongly to the flu vaccine.

They always feel like crap when they get the flu vaccine. Yeah, those are side effects. Those are adverse events that are linked to the vaccine. They're linked specifically to the immune system reacting to that vaccine, right? Then you've got vaccine injuries. Vaccine injuries are things that are due to the vaccine, but they're not in the expected side effects. It's not like, oh, it's not like they said, oh, it's okay if some people get these vaccine

injuries. We're not going to worry about it. No, that's not how it works. We know it is okay if you get a fever. It is okay if you get a head. It is it okay if you feel like a stomach ache or you're not tired, you have some fatigue. you have some tingling, you have some muscle soreness, you got a sore arm. Those are all anticipated, expected, accepted risks, accepted harms of getting the vaccine

because the benefit of protecting yourself from the disease that it protects you against, it's worth the trade-off. A vaccine injury, had you know it was going to happen, you may not decide that that was going to be worth the trade-off. An example of a vaccine injury that's actually clogging up the system right now because there's so many of them, there's a shoulder injury associated with the flu shot in some people where they get like frozen shoulder or they're unable to use their shoulder or it damages their muscle. That's a vaccine injury. It's not part of the plan. It's not something we want to happen.

But if you have appendicitis, right, you have a severe appendicitis, you have to have that appendix removed. It's going to kill you if you don't, right? But there's still a risk to that surgery. There could be something that there could be a severe injury that results. I don't know how many people die from appendicitis surgeries. I imagine the number is extremely, extremely, extremely tiny, but I'm sure there's at least one out there. But not zero. Yeah, it's not, it's not zero. But the risk of keeping the appendix is far greater. So yes, in the sense that it's part of the expected broad picture, like you can't make a vaccine that you can guarantee there's no vaccine injury from. You can't. It's not possible. There's going to be unforeseen things that happen.

And then you've always got allergic reactions, right? Someone could develop anaphylaxis. Yeah. So anaphylaxis is considered more of a severe side effect than a vaccine injury because it usually does not result in permanent damage, you know, if you address it right away. But if somebody dies from an anaphylactic reaction to a vaccine, which has happened. It's very rare, but it can happen. Then that, yes, that would be certainly a vaccine injury.

One of the biggest and most important vaccine injuries we learned about during the pandemic, one of the scariest ones, and it actually led to a pause in the vaccine distribution of one of the vaccines, the COVID vaccines, was the blood clots that we saw in the Johnson and Johnson vaccine. We figured out about eight months ago what actually caused that. It took them six years to figure out what caused it, which I can't get into because it's all molecular nitty-gritty shit. But the Johnson and Johnson vaccine, in a very tiny proportion of people, caused severe blood clotting. And it did actually kill some people and other people got hospitalized for it and had to be on blood thinners. That was extremely serious. That was a vaccine injury. That was not, you know, anyone who had

been told ahead of time, hey, you're going to get this so you don't get COVID, but you're also going to get this blood clot thing. No one would have taken the vaccine if that, you know, that had been. So that's a vaccine injury that was very serious. Another vaccine injury that was less serious but still concerning was myocarditis when we learned that the myocarditis, the inflammation around the heart and the heart muscle that could occur particularly in adolescent, um, and young men, like between the ages of like 13 to like 25. It happened in other people, but that was the age group where it happened most often. And I don't know if we actually found out why or not. The myocarditis that you could develop from the vaccine, from certain

mRNA vaccines, both of them actually, was not as severe as the myocarditis or the heart problems that could develop from COVID, but they were still not insignificant. They weren't inconsequential. They were considered mild by cardiac terms, right? In cardiology, they were mild because they weren't causing long-term harm. But for, say, a high school senior who had to sit out his football season when he was looking for a football scholarship, that wasn't minor for him. So, you know, those are your vaccine injuries. And that's what we have a compensation fund for. It was developed in 1986 with the vaccine injury something or other act that I should know off the top of my head and I have a brain fart. But basically, in 1986, there was a big sort of omnibus thing of vaccine legislation passed. What happens a lot is people think that VERS is a list of side effects and it's not. Yeah. It's a list of adverse events and we use it to look for signals. We use it to look for, oh, were there a whole bunch of people who got tinnitus or tinnitus, depending on how you pray and it said after the COVID vaccine? There's a lot of those reports. We need to look into that and see if that's linked to the vaccine or not. Then you get into like how to find out if it's

linked to the vaccine. There's got to be biological platforms. is there actually a biological mechanism that would enable whatever's in the vaccine to lead to this? Then there's got to be temporal causality, like options. Like, like, did X actually happen after Y, basically? Or did Y happen after X? Or was it a coincidence, basically? And I use the tinnitus example because it's one of the ones that we don't have a clear answer on still. The CDC will say that we don't have evidence of that, but I would argue that we don't have enough evidence to rule it out either. And at least one vaccine research, would agree with that, who experienced it himself, a very, very prominent vaccine researcher who

actually runs the world vaccine conference that happens every year, experienced tinnitus after his vaccine. He will not tell you that the vaccine caused it because he doesn't know, but he is one of many who experienced it. And so I wrote about this for National Geographic. The question is, could tonight us be caused by the COVID-19 vaccine? And I don't think we have enough evidence to rule that out right now. So that's the difference between adverse event, side effect, vaccine injury. Yeah, very helpful. And I love the anecdote that you had in your book about a doctor putting that he turned into the Incredible Hulk. And can you tell us that story? Yeah, that's a very famous example. I think every pediatrician knows the story. But a doctor was trying to prove that the VERS is just literally. I mean, there are people in VERS who said they got into a car accident. There's people in VERS who fell into a hole. I mean, but a doctor actually submitted a report to VERS. Anybody can submit

a report to VERS. I mean, anybody could literally, tomorrow, write a report saying that they did this, saying he didn't actually say that he turned into the Incredible Hulk, but he described the transformation into the Incredible Hulk in undeniable terms. One of my biggest annoyances is that the VERS people, the database runners or whatever, they actually asked him to withdraw it. And they can't force him to. But he agreed to withdraw it. And I am actually disappointed because I thought it was a fantastic. I think it should have stayed in there, even if it was false, which I guess that makes me some kind of heathen or something. But I think it was a good learning experience to, like, I think there was value in having that there to say, look, this could be submitted and it could

remain there. Our fantasy commission says for him it's all about the friendships. Cute, Kevin, but I disagree. Like with about 365, I get paid the second my team goes up big with early payout and can cash out at any time before the game ends. No hard feelings, Kevin. Just faster payouts from Bet365. The home of winning early. Must be 19 and older. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you were someone you know is concerns about gambling, visit connectsontario.ca or call 18665 through 1,2,600. Terms and conditions apply. If you like your true crime, like you like your coffee. Red Handed is the podcast for you. It's dark, intense, and might just keep you up all night. I'm Hannah. I'm Suruti. And every week on Red Handed, we break down a different fast.

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where we unpack everything from the Black Death to Area 51. If you're looking for smart, detailed true crime with personality, check out Red Handed wherever you get your podcasts. We were talking earlier in our conversation about this idea of memory and memory of suffering and that being part of what gets people to do things like take vaccines, right? And I think it's interesting as we're talking about these, you know, losing these memories of like the Booburn generation. But at the same time, everyone alive who's over the age of, you know, three, right? Like three or four, like I would say my youngest child has no memory of COVID. Actually, my daughter, who's almost eight, has probably no real memories of COVID. But like anybody older than that remembers living through a pandemic. And yet here we. are. And it's the amnesia around COVID is sort of extraordinary. And I would argue it's not amnesia. Okay. What do you think this is about? There's a couple of things going on here. First of all,

there's not one thing. There's, there's multiple sort of mental gymnastics occurring here. Okay. One of them is a huge swath of people still don't believe that COVID killed anybody. We have to remember that. Yeah. So you can't forget something that you didn't believe in the first place. In your experience, how do those people get there? Because it's like if you were living in a place, especially like I hit really hard, like I have, I used to live in New York City, so I have a lot of friends in New York City, who saw bodies stacking up on the street and heard the sirens around the clock in the worst of COVID. Lots of people know someone personally who died. Yeah, how are they getting there? That that sort of just didn't happen at all. Again, there's not one answer. There's multiple answers, but one.

One of those answers actually relates to what's happening right now with one of the measles deaths in Pennsylvania, which is that they died with COVID, not from COVID. That's a really common. And that's not just with measles. Right now they're arguing that one of those newborns died with measles, not from measles. And you have a lot of people who say she had COVID when she died, but it wasn't the COVID that killed her. Now, there's a couple ways you can get there. One way you can get there is by ignoring that COVID caused whatever did kill them, right? You can say, oh, she died of heart failure.

Well, why do you think she had heart failure? That's one way. The other way is simply denying that, you know, that COVID was very severe in believing they had some other condition that happened. And an individual basis, that person exists, right? There are certainly people who died with COVID but not have COVID. They're like on a mass scale. If you, okay, if I had COVID and I was in a car accident and I died in the car accident, guess what? I died with COVID, but not from COVID.

And that's a dramatic example. And then there's people where we can't really say. Let's say that you had, let's say you had cancer and you got COVID. And you got it and you already have stage four cancer. Did you die from the cancer or did you die from the COVID? Well, probably mostly the cancer, but maybe the COVID sped it up a bit at the end. These aren't simple things. There's not clean answers with a lot of these things.

Then you also have the people who think, and this is more the conspiracy thoughts, but the people who are dying were dying because of the doctors. They think that the treatment was what was killing people. COVID didn't kill people. The treatment was what it killed them. Putting them on the machine is what killed them. Being in the hospital killed them. Giving them something they weren't supposed to give them killed them.

There's a whole swath of people who believe that doctors, whether some of them might believe doctors did it on purpose. Some of them might believe doctors did it by accident. Most of them believe that doctors didn't know what they were doing and they were following orders and didn't realize it was killing people. I mean, there's, so there's all of those possibilities. And then you've got the people who think, well, yeah, some people died of COVID, but not as many as we think did. Right. So there's there's a there's whole like, I mean, yeah, trying to map out all these different things. Now, why did they believe that? Well, the misinformation was an overdrive and some of that came from the top. Yeah. Trump did not want people to think that that many people were dying. He tried to actually hide how many people were dying from COVID.

Because if you don't see the numbers, it's not happening. That was literally what he worked. off of. If you don't see it, it's not there. So if we hide the numbers, if we pretend like this many people didn't die, if we pretend like this many people didn't have COVID, then the numbers are low. Like he wasn't interested in keeping the numbers low, not in real terms in terms of preventing it, but in terms of pretending like they didn't have it. Yeah. So you add that coming from the top. Then you have all the misinformation people. I often encourage people to watch, what was that movie with Contagion. Did you ever see Contagion? Oh, yes. Yeah. Jude Law is the, is the, is the, misinformation guy, right? He's the, he's the guy who's going to get to the bottom of this and find out

the real story, right? And the only flaw, really, in the movie Contagion, is that there was just one Jude law and that he just had, like, his own influence. Because during COVID, we had... He was misinformation, the guy. Yeah, like, he, yeah, his part was too small. And he had a major part, but it wasn't nearly major enough. The extent to which the misinformation machines, and I say machines, went into overdrive, is impossible to underestimate, you know, to exaggerate, I guess. And I even wrote about, it was funny because I wrote an article for the New York Times called, this is the moment the anti-vaccine moment has been waiting for. A lot of people who did not already work in vaccines or vaccine hesitancy assumed that, oh,

we now have a pandemic. People are going to run to get the vaccine. Everybody who works in vaccines and vaccine hesitancy, all of us were like, uh-uh, that's not what's going to happen. This is going to make it worse because we had seen this before. Right now, we have a measles outbreak happening. You do have some people rushing to get the measles vaccine. And you have other people who are saying this is all the more reason they're not going to get the measles vaccine. You have to account for like these sort of mental gymnastics that happen.

And so that's why when you say, oh, we had this pandemic, people, they haven't forgotten the pandemic. They remembered the wrong things. They learned the wrong lefties. They remember not being able to leave their house. They remember having to wear a mask everywhere. That annoyed them. They remember fighting with family members over it.

They remember when their millennial children didn't let them see their grandchildren for a minute or whatever it is, all of that stuff. Their personal inconvenience, yeah. Yes, yes. And that's fair too. Like, I think that's to say, like, that's too, Glib. Like, I mean,

No, you're not wrong though. People lost jobs, people. I mean, there was a lot of suffering that was not related directly to... There was. And there was a lot of suffering that resulted directly from the public health measures meant to keep people safe. And look at the losses that we've seen in kids who are out of

school for so long and all these school interruptions. I think most people who look at this now agree that it's not that we shouldn't have stopped any school at all, but the level of interruption that occurred and how long it lasted in schools was not worth the trade-off.

Yeah. I mean, lots of public health officials have done lots of deep, you know, sort of introspection and searching. Like, is that what we should have done? Now, I think everybody was doing the best they could. We didn't have a lot of information. But, yeah, lots of mistakes were made throughout that time. And at the same time, public health people were absolutely battered during that time.

So we lost so many public health workers during that time because they couldn't handle the stress. Understandably so. I don't say that casually. I mean, no rational. reasonable person should be in the yeah push yeah they were pushed to the limits i would agree with you in one thing though when you said they have forgotten i wouldn't say that we have forgotten what happened in covid i would say we haven't dealt with what happened i've been processed i believe that covid

left a massive massive psychosocial wound on our society and we haven't dealt with it i kind of think some people are going to take issue with this analogy so bear with me after world war two in Germany, a lot of people wanted to pretend like the Holocaust didn't happen. It took decades before they started to reckon with that and accept what happened and deal with what that meant. Now, this is a very different, this was not like an intentional humans doing things to other humans things. So there's a huge caveat there. But the idea of mass death happening and huge change is happening, you know, and human directed restrictions on our lives and ways that relationships broke and people who died and jobs that were lost, all of the stuff that happened with. Yeah. I think

even maybe like even to remove it again, you know, we're talking about my grandparents who are, who were living in England at that time, like they were both involved in the war and obviously, you know, deeply traumatized and no one talked about it. And that was the way they went with it. It was very British, like keep calm, carry on. Like they like talking to my grand, you know, my and my dad about like what the, like, he remembers the day that they stopped rations. They stopped rationing food in England. And he remembers going home and getting in trouble because he said that and his parents thought he was lying. But it was like, there was no collective, like, mental health resources for people who live. There was no reckoning. There was like,

my grandmother wasn't allowed to talk about her role in the war for 30 years on penalty of death. So there was a lot of, like, there was like, there was some reasons for that. But it was like, I think that, yeah, maybe we. do. It's like we, we have processed it and reckoned with it. Now, of course, we're forgetting it again as we sort of talked about. But like, yeah, I mean, I agree with you. And I think there is this weird thing that, like, we all have, right? Where you remember, like, something will kind of take you back and you're like, oh, shit. And you really remember what that was like. You remember hearing on the radio, watching the death toll go up and up and up and, and do you know what

the signs on the doors? What is it for you? You're going to laugh your ass off because I think it's funny. It's the theme song to Animal Crossing. That's your Madeline, as I were. That's what takes you back. I played so much Animal Crossing during the pandemic that if I ever, if I pull it up now and I hear that theme song at the beginning of the game play, it takes me back to 2020, 2020, 2021 when I was playing Animal Crossing. And it's bizarre. It's a fucking video game. And it's a cozy game at that. Yeah. Right. For me, it's the theme song. It's the theme thong to the what a day podcast because I listened to Whataday back when Akila Hughes was still on it. And like if I listen to that, it's like, yeah, it takes me right to like my morning walk.

Okay, what's going on today? What's the deal today? And like, yeah. I mean, it's really, the other thing I have like really vivid memories of is the, you know, signs that were all on the doors of all the businesses that were closed that were just like, we're closed still further. And then the caution tape around the playground because I had a small child. Keep in mind, this phenomenon of not being able to deal with a reckoning, it's not unique to one event. After the flu pandemic of the 1918 flu pandemic, it was the same thing. Nobody talked about it. It just sort of like, we all pretend like it did happen. After Vietnam, individual veterans didn't want to deal with their PTSD. They tried to like, you know, now we did have sort of a weird reckoning with Vietnam. I would argue that the whole Rambo movies and the whole Hollywood, like they're, you know, this idea of not being able to sort of face that. is a totally random things to recommend. But if any of your audience happens to like Y.A. fantasy books,

I recommend that they read Graceling so that they can then read the book Bitterblue, because Bitterblue is this Y.A. book that basically deals with exactly this. I've never read another book that deals with sort of the collective reckoning of a nation having to deal with a group trauma. And this particular book, Bitterblue, does that. Wow. You know, when I asked Dr. Palloff at this question, he had an answer that was both hopeful and really depressing. And I'm wondering what yours will be. How do we, how do we get past this very, what feels like a very dark moment in public health, in trust in medicine, in trust in science? How do we get to the other side? First of all, I would say we have to put it in context because it's not just a dark moment in public health and medical trust and all that. It's a much larger, darker moment. I mean, you mentioned you already alluded to the fascism. Our country is enveloped by fascism right now. So this is a, this is one realm. I mean, we haven't discussed because it's not relevant to this podcast. What's happening with deportations and ICE. I would say we scale out and say, how do we get through this dark moment in American history? Although, admittedly, the issues going on with.

vaccines and public health is a global issue. We're seeing these, it's particularly bad here in the US, but we are seeing other versions of this throughout the world right now. It's not limited to the US. And my answer is kind of the same way we always have as humans, which is we just have to keep on, keep it on. We can channel Churchill here. When you're going through hell, you just keep going, right? I don't know what the other answer is in sort of the simple answers. We just have to keep doing stuff. Now, what does that look like when we're doing it? I think we have to keep listening to people. I think we have to work to understand what motivates people and try and tap into that instead of demonizing people. I think we have to try to bridge gaps where it makes sense and doesn't

harm our own self-care. Because I'm not saying that you should get into an argument with your Trump or friend or your crazy uncle or whatever. You have to protect yourself. You can isolate the super fanatic people and still focus on the big middle. And the big middle doesn't have strong feelings about a lot of this stuff, whether it's fascism or it's ice or it's vaccines or it's measles or it's COVID. You know, the big middle, they have ideas about things, but they don't have strong, a lot of them don't have super strong feelings about a lot of this stuff. And so you look for little footholds. Think of it as though we're climbing a mountain and we have to look for like, every little foothold we can.

And sometimes we're going to slide back down again. But then we have to kind of climb back up. And the only option is to go up because if we give up, we fall off the fucking mountain. I don't know. I mean, I refuse to fall off the fucking mountain. Yeah. I too. I too refuse.

And I think just to say like our audience, like, yeah, I suspect it does skew liberal, but we actually have like a decently politically diverse audience on this show, which I think is wonderfully helpful. Yeah. Yeah. And I think like that it can be very hard to get people to show up for children, for other people's children in particular, much easier to galvanize people about parents' rights because then they're thinking about their own rights. And so that's a whole challenge that we have, I think, in this arena. But I actually do think that people on both sides of the political aisle. And I have seen this in terms of child abuse policy. It is not. It does not fall on, oh, the, you know, one side's doing a great job and the other one. It's not. It's really, it's really a,

you know, case by case basis. And I have, I have found myself agreeing with some people that I probably don't agree with on much else in this arena. But I think, as you said, like, that most parents, not all parents, obviously, but most parents, you know, want the best for their children. I do think that most people in this country care about each other and care about their neighbors and care about children in general. And so I think when you are able to tap into that compassion, I think that's when things get achieved and finding those comments. Not just compassion. I would argue that the key, I often play this game with myself as to what is 42. Do you know what 42 is? Okay, many of your audience members know what 42. I mean, I know what 42 the number is. I don't

know what you're talking about. 42 is the answer to life, the universe, and everything. Oh my gosh, Douglas Adams. Yeah. Yes. Okay. So I often play this game with myself where I wonder, what is 42? What is 42?

And I generally sort of bounce between two to three things. Empathy. Empathy is the answer to life, the universe and everything. But that has flaws to it. So I've usually settled on communication. Communication is the answer to life, the universe, and everything. Because if we can communicate with people, truly communicate with people, that's the key to everything. But there's another guy who's popping in here and saying, what about me?

What about me? Community. We are social animals. Community could be the answer to life, the universe, and everything. So I would argue that those three intersect in inescapable ways. And when I think, you know, people ask me all the time, how do you live in Texas, I like, Jesus, how can you stand it? Well, you know what?

I have a community here. I have my pickleball community. I have my school community. I have the people that I grew up in high school years ago, a couple of them. And within, for example, the pickleball community has some diverse political things. That's an in. That's an opportunity just the other day, literally two days ago. I was playing pickleball and someone asked what I did for a living and I told them and they

asked the question I get all the time, which is so what do you think about vaccines? And that gave me a chance to pontificate about all the problems that Kennedy is doing. and this person, and I had no idea what their politics were, no clue. But this was an opportunity for me to bring that up. And I didn't explicitly sort of like talk about the damage of Trump, but I did talk about the damage from the HHS and the damage from USAID and from PEPFAR being, you know. And that was an opportunity to share that and to sort of like get that information out there and make that person think about that. Yeah. So how we get through this.

We get through this the same way we always have. We have to work on that empathy. We have to work on communication. But we also have to remember that we're all part of a community. Yeah. I love that answer. And I think, you know, one of the great joys of working on the show is that we do a lot of field reporting. And that has taken me to many, you know, rural communities in the South and the Midwest that I would not otherwise go to. And that has made me see things very differently. And so I would really encourage anybody to get outside your bubble, especially now, right? Because it is, because things are so contentious. Well, Tara, thank you so much for being with us. And us as to the state of vaccines in 2026. And to your point, just keep going. Don't fall off the mountain. Yeah. That's going to be my new thing. Don't fall off the mountain. And where can people,

where can people find you in your work? The place where I post most often is Facebook. I know not everybody loves Facebook and for good reason. I mean, they're part of the evil empire. But Facebook is where I probably post most stuff. I mean, you don't have to pussyfoot around it. Like, don't, you know, don't feed around the Bush tariff. You know, it's people are in. Hard agree. Hard agree. But yeah.

I have, I also get, I wear lots of political t-shirts. I have my t-shirts that say, you know, like keep the immigrants, deport the racists. Or my favorite new one that I got, which is first they came for the immigrants. And I spoke up because I know the rest of the goddamn poem. And people ask me, like, where do you get your t-shirts? And I'm like, Amazon. I know it's evil, but that's where I get them. You know what?

Actually, that's a great, that's a great point of, you know, connection for all of us, right? We all hate meta. We all hate flock cameras and we all hate data centers. And those are major things. Like we all like let's look at the real enemies. It's the tech bros. So anyway, yeah, I'm on Facebook. I'm on blue sky, but I'm not super active there.

I technically have an Instagram account, but I rarely actually do much with it. And one of these days I keep saying I'm going to start a newsletter, but I haven't done that yet. So if Tara does that before this airs, we will include that. And otherwise, thank you so much for being on. and we'll have you back on soon to talk about all the things. Thanks. Nobody should believe Meek is produced and hosted by me, Andrea Dunlop. Our editor is Greta Stromquist,

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