Science Vs - The Rise of Anti-Vaxxers

Episode Date: September 21, 2017

Last week we explored the science behind vaccine safety. This week we try to understand where these fears came from, and why they persist. We speak to three historians: Prof. Nadja Durbach, Prof. Elena Conis, and Prof. Robert Johnston. And a concerned mom named Noelle. Check out our full transcript here: http://bit.ly/355DlZz Our Sponsors: Cotton Inc + Madewell | Spotify | Sundance Now's Riviera | Wordpress.com Credits: This episode has been produced by Heather Rogers, Wendy Zukerman, and Shruti Ravindran. Production help from Rose Rimler. Our senior producer is Kaitlyn Sawrey. We’re edited this week by Blythe Terrell with editorial assistance from Alex Blumberg, Annie-Rose Strasser and Lynn Levy. Fact checking by Michelle Harris, with help from Rose Rimler. Sound design by Martin Peralta. Music written by Bobby Lord. For this episode we also spoke with Russ Bruesewitz, Prof. Sharon Kaufmann, Prof. Alison Buttenheim, Barbara Loe Fisher, Sally Mendelsohn, Prof. Mary Holland, Prof. Paul Jackson, Prof. Michael Willrich, Julie Livingston and Kari Christianson. Thanks to Gimlet producer Luke Malone, the whole Zukerman clan, Joseph Lavelle Wilson, and Leo Rogers. Selected references:Dr. Robert Mendelsohn’s book, Confessions of a Medical Heretic, Nadja Durbach’s book, Bodily Matters, Vaccine hesitancy paper Paul Offit’s book, Deadly Choices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Versus from Gimlet Media. This is the show where we pit facts against fears. On today's show, fear of the vaccine. And this is part two of our look into vaccines. If you haven't heard part one, go back and listen. We dove into the risks and benefits of vaccines. But on today's episode, we're going to talk about where the fear of these vaccines came from. Now, it might feel like the anti-vaccination movement is new, perhaps a product of this era of misinformation where it feels like you can find proof of anything online. But actually, the fear of vaccines goes way back

to well before the internet. In fact, it's existed for over a century. And there were moments when this fear was completely justified. So today we're going to talk you through the surprising, curious and sometimes disgusting history of the fear of vaccines. Here's what you're in for. And you would take your baby home and really, really hope that the wounds didn't become infected and that the arm didn't fall off. The problem with doctors is that they are likely not to tell you the truth.

I know for sure I will never vaccinate her. That's all coming up after the break. After decades of shaky hands caused by debilitating tremors, Sunnybrook was the only hospital in Canada who could provide Andy with something special. Three neurosurgeons, two scientists, one movement disorders coordinator, 58 answered questions,

two focused ultrasound procedures, one specially developed helmet, thousands of high-intensity focused ultrasound waves, zero incisions. And that very same day, two steady hands. From innovation to action, Sunnybrook is special. Learn more at sunnybrook.ca slash special. It's season three of The Joy of Why, and I still have a lot of questions. Like, what is this thing we call time? Why does altruism exist? And where

is Jan 11? I'm here, astrophysicist and co-host, ready for anything. That's right, I'm bringing in the A-team. So brace yourselves. Get ready to learn. I'm Jana Levin. I'm Steve Strogatz. And this is Quantum Magazine's podcast, The Joy of Why. New episodes drop every other Thursday, starting February 1st. What does the AI revolution mean for jobs, for getting things done? Who are the people creating this technology and what do they think? I'm Rana El-Khelyoubi, an AI scientist, entrepreneur, investor, and now host of the new podcast, Pioneers of AI. Think of it as your guide for all things AI with the most human issues at the center. Join me every Wednesday for Pioneers of AI.

And don't forget to subscribe wherever you tune in. Welcome back. So let's take a journey to the very first anti-vaccination movement. It was in the mid-19th century in England. Queen Victoria was on the throne. Charles Dickens had just written Oliver Twist. And the deadly smallpox virus was rampant. Thousands of people would get infected and some would die these horrible deaths. By 1840, though, more and more people were getting the smallpox vaccine. And you might think that parents of the day would have been excited, except that getting that vaccine was pretty gross. It was a really unsanitary and

unpleasant process. That's Nadia Derbock, a historian who teaches at the University of Utah. She wrote a book, Bodily Matters, about getting vaccinated in the 19th century. And Nadia says that to get vaccinated back then, nice clean needles weren't used. So instead, they used a surgical lancet. This was a small cutting knife that would have been used throughout the whole day, maybe the whole week, never been washed, sort of kind of wiped clean on the vaccinator's pants. And they didn't clean the knives because the science of the day told them that they didn't have to. Back then, they didn't know about bacteria or

viruses or other tiny creatures that could make you sick. And in fact, the medical establishment didn't even know why their smallpox vaccine worked. They just knew that it did. And so to get this magical vaccine into babies, here's what would happen. Say you're a vaccinator. You take your grotty knife and then you'd make a series of cuts into a baby's arm. And then what you would do is then take that same knife and stick it inside the arm of another baby who'd been vaccinated eight days earlier. You'd scoop out the matter, which was this kind of cowpox, liquidy, thick stuff, and you'd smear it into the cut. Presto, you've now vaccinated that baby. And then to

vaccinate more babies, they'd stick that same knife into more and more arms, spreading the vaccine-y pus. And so if you're a parent, you take your baby home and really, really hope that the wounds didn't become infected and that the arm didn't fall off. There were cases of perfectly healthy babies going to get vaccinated and then... Presto. ...ending up with gangrene or other really nasty diseases

and then dying just a few weeks later. Not surprisingly, parents were freaking out. I mean, I felt how horrible it must have been for people to have to make this choice because the risk of getting smallpox was terrible. And if you see photographs of children with smallpox, they're awful. They're really awful because the body is absolutely covered in these pustules and sores. It's a terrible disease. But then you see a picture of a baby who, at least the parents claim, has been injured by the vaccination.

And it's equally distressing. And the baby's equally dead. You can see what a terrible position these parents must have been in to have to make these choices for themselves. But the British government tried to remove that choice. They said that every child in Britain had to get the smallpox vaccine, even though it was so horrible. And if parents didn't get their kids vaccinated, officials could impose stiff fines,

which could be disastrous for poor families. But some parents, they started protesting these vaccines anyway. They refuse to get their kids vaccinated. In her research, Nadia found stories of people resisting vaccines in all kinds of ways. People sucking the vaccine out like you would suck the venom out of a snake bite and spitting it out. What? Yeah, spit it on the steps of the vaccination station is the story. out like you would suck the venom out of a snake bite and spitting it out. What? Yeah. Spitted on the steps of the vaccination station is the story.

Now, of course, that's the added drama of it. And all this fear and anger led to an organised anti-vaccination movement. There were huge protests in parts of the UK and parents worked together and started passing around pamphlets about the dangers of vaccines. And they picked a very specific symbol for their cause. Vampires. They said that vaccination was like a vampire, a monstrous creature waiting in the shadows. And as soon as that pure baby is born,

it's going to leap out, spread its wings. It's like a vampire waiting to eat our babies. The anti-vaccination movement was so powerful that by the turn of the century, Nadia said, at least a quarter of British parents were not vaccinating their kids. In the 20th century, though, vaccinations got a lot safer. Grotty knives got exchanged for clean needles, pus harvested from a baby's arm was replaced with sterile vials of purified vaccines. And so more and more parents accepted vaccinations. It led to what's sometimes

called the golden age of vaccines. And this era would eventually lead to the eradication of smallpox. So when the polio vaccine came out in 1955, it was a cause for huge celebration. The greatest medical news in history. Dr Jonas Salk discovers a vaccine that promises to wipe out childhood's crippling and killing enemy, polio. And church bells rang and sirens wailed and people kind of got up, stopped whatever they were doing.

This is Elena Konis, historian and author of Vaccine Nation. In the late 40s and early 50s, polio was crippling more than 35,000 people in the U.S. each year. And Elena told us what it was like when Americans found out about the vaccine. When the first polio vaccine was approved or when it was announced that it was effective, the whole country kind of gathered, people gathered in movie theaters and churches to hear the news and stopped everything just to kind of reflect on this moment. Wait, so this was, people were going into churches and stopping school and what they were doing

just because the polio vaccine was announced? Yes, literally. Yes. But shortly after all this excitement, a bad batch of polio vaccine came out. It sparked a polio epidemic and left 200 kids with paralysis and killed 10. That really, really scared the public. And what happened was that authorities went on TV and said, we've got this under control. We're going to step in.

We're going to ensure that all polio vaccine is safe from here forward. And it seemed, at least for a while, that the public was reassured by that. And parents, they trusted authorities so that even after people died from getting vaccinated, parents quickly went back to vaccinating their kids. And states in the US were getting so excited about vaccines that they mandated that if you wanted your kid to go to public school, they had to be vaccinated. By 1973, that was the law in around 40 states. But all this trust and hope in vaccines, it wouldn't last.

The golden age of vaccines was about to end. The times, they were changing. Because people have got to know whether or not their president's a crook. Well, I'm not a crook. Already, many Viet Cong prisoners have been taken. What kind of choice is it, after all, to be able to go out and earn half as much as a man? All power to the people, brothers and sisters. Right on. A new anti-vaccination movement was about to form, but these anti-vaxxers were different to the ones from the 1800s. New fears were taking hold, and an unlikely voice of this moment was found in Dr Robert

Mendelsohn, a paediatrician with these big dorky glasses and a warm smile. He was a very prominent figure, and he was just a grandfatherly, white-coated, paediatric kind of guy who, he got politicised in the late 60s, like so many people did. This is Robert Johnston, a historian at the University of Illinois in Chicago. And yes, there's two Roberts here. So we're going to call our historian Robert and our doctor, Dr M, because that's what lots of people called him, according to his daughter, Sally. So Dr M did checkups, gave vaccines to kids, and he was just part of the medical establishment. But then...

He ultimately came to believe that all medical authority was pretty much tyrannical. And especially the way he took it was he said, look, I'm a doctor and I've seen all kinds of terrible things that doctors have done. They constantly misrepresent their authority and their expertise, which is not nearly as absolute as people say it is. In Dr M's mind, he had seen the medical establishment abuse its power over and over again. While Dr M was at medical school at the University of Chicago, a clinical trial was going on around him

where researchers on the campus were giving pregnant women a synthetic hormone. They wanted to see how it would affect their pregnancy. But none of the women were told that they were part of a study or even what they were taking. And in the end, the women who got the hormones had twice as many miscarriages or gave birth to small babies. That's compared to women who got the placebo. And so Dr M wrote about this and other examples of tragic medical failures in his first book, Confessions of a Medical Heretic, in 1979. Now, the medical community dismissed it.

One doctor described it as piffle. But Dr M's book became a bestseller, and it landed him on The Phil Donahue Show. According to Dr Robert Mendelsohn, if you are a woman, the greatest danger to your health may be your doctor. It was here where he talked about that University of Chicago study, which was called the DES experiment. I was there when the DES experiments were going on,

when we told women that we were giving them vitamin pills. You could do this because you knew what was best and there was a real arrogance, wasn't there? Well, I don't know why you say there was. It hasn't changed one bit in medicine. The sexism in medicine is so strong. His message was decidedly anti-establishment and feminist, and he railed against the male-dominated medical community.

Here he is with Joan Rivers. Will you please welcome, and he's adorable, Dr Robert Mendelsohn. OK, Dr Mendelsohn, what's wrong with doctors? The problem with doctors is that they are likely not to tell you the truth. So I tell everybody to ask your doctor plenty of questions and then check up on his answers to see if he told you the truth. Dr M said that the medical community had two modes with women. They either didn't tell them the truth or they mansplained.

They learn in medical school that if you ask them a question, the proper answer is just trust me. Unless you're a woman, then it's just trust me, dear. People were starting to realise that the medical community couldn't always be trusted. And that message was turning onto vaccinations. Here's our historian, Robert. He said that Dr M...

Had an incendiary message about the damage that vaccines can cause to children, and he was outright anti-vaccine. The stage was now set for a new anti-vaccination movement, and Dr M took all that kindling and struck a match. That's coming up after the break. Welcome back. So we just learned that Dr Robert Mendelsohn

was using his platform to push this idea that parents shouldn't trust their doctors. And he discussed this a lot, writing once that mothers and fathers are the best doctors around. They were better than doctors because they knew what was right for their kids. Ultimately, Dr M was empowering everyday people, and particularly women,

to push back against the medical establishment, especially when it came to vaccinations. But it wasn't until 1982 when a lot of people really started to take notice. That's when a documentary called DPT Vaccine Roulette was broadcast. DPT, the initial stand for diphtheria pertussis tetanus, three diseases against which every child is vaccinated. And this documentary would become a flashpoint for the anti-vaccination movement.

Journalist Lee Thompson reported that the DPT shot could cause rare but disturbing side effects. Shots, we are told, will protect every child from a dread disease, pertussis. It's whooping cough. But the DPT shot can also damage to a devastating degree. And our Dr M appeared in the documentary right at the start, wearing a white coat and his signature thick glasses. I feel that the vaccine should not be used. It's probably the poorest and the most dangerous

vaccine that we now have. The doco showed a handful of scary stories with parents who said their kids had terrible reactions to the vaccine. One mum said that her son had become intellectually disabled. I went home and cried. Jim cried. We couldn't believe that we could possibly have such a black future. As a side note, we looked into whether vaccines were associated with brain damage in Science Versus Vaccines Part 1. And new research has come to light since this doco, suggesting that the problem isn't the vaccines. Go back and listen to that episode to get into the science of it.

But back to the documentary Vaccine Roulette. Dr M, our Dr M, was thrilled when it came out. He said the program was, quote, the greatest thing since apple pie. But the medical establishment was horrified. They accused the journalist who made the documentary, Lee Thompson, of distorting facts, calling it show business sensationalism, biased, histrionic and inaccurate.

Doctors went on radio stations around the country defending the shots. And vaccination rates in the US actually didn't drop significantly. But the ripples of this documentary would ripple out far and wide. Parents at home watching, having a really serious emotional response saying, whoa, I think that's actually what happened to my child. That's Alina Konis again. And she says that across the country, some parents were frantic. After the documentary aired, the television station in Washington, D.C. started getting a ton of calls from parents all over the greater D.C. area.

And it started to put some of those parents in touch with each other. And very, very quickly, those parents organized. Within days, some of these families started meeting, and they formed their own advocacy group with a very catchy name. Initially, they called Dissatisfied Parents Together. Get it? DPT? Dissatisfied Parents Together? Also, diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus shot? They were very outspoken. They were pretty media savvy. They held press conferences. They were really persistent, calling their representatives. And I think some of them were pretty well connected. Within three weeks, the group helped to convince a senator

to call for a congressional hearing on the safety of the DP T-shot. And later, this group lobbied for a compensation program to support kids who ended up with rare side effects from the vaccines. But still, the dissatisfied parents were, well, dissatisfied. Over the next 20 years, as different vaccines came out, the group developed new concerns. And these days, they link vaccines to a broad range of illnesses, including autism, diabetes, Alzheimer's, autoimmune diseases, ADHD.

And on their Facebook page, they share links claiming that vaccines kill thousands of babies each year. And along with this evolution, this group also changed their name to Vaccines Are The Devil. No, no, they didn't. They're much better at sounding legitimate. It's now called the National Vaccine Information Centre. And they have since become one of the most prominent

vaccine-sceptic advocacy groups in the country. When you Google vaccine risks, their website, the National Vaccine Information Centre, is one of the top links you find. And this brings us to the current phase of the anti-vaccination movement. And in it, you can hear echoes of the 1970s and the way that they're pushing back against authority. But here's the difference. Many in this group have no memory of the diseases that vaccines prevent. Measles, mumps, whooping cough, polio, they're mostly gone.

And a lot of the reason for that is because of vaccinations. So yay for science. But on the flip side, it also means that for parents, vaccinations have become a choice between two virtually invisible things, the risk of getting a disease that many of us have never seen or the risk of getting a bad reaction to a vaccine which the vast majority of people will never have. And so that choice all boils down to who a parent decides to trust.

Hi, baby girl. Hi. Hi. This is Noelle, a new mum who lives in California, and she visits the National Vaccine Information Centre website a lot. It's been very, very helpful. This is my go-to website. Welcome to my mum's house.

Our reporter, Heather Rogers, recently went to meet Noelle's family, which now includes her baby, Emma. Emma. Look at you. Look at you, little chubby, chubby girl. What a cutie. Well, come on in. Thank you.

Now, Noelle hadn't thought much about vaccines when she was pregnant, but an anti-vax friend of hers on Facebook knew that Noelle was pregnant and started sending her these messages about vaccines. And at first, they seemed like friendly notes, but with an agenda. I don't even think I really replied to her. I wasn't interested. It kind of sounded like a sales pitch, if I'm going to be honest. But these messages planted a seed. Noelle was growing skeptical of her doctors. During her pregnancy, she'd been anxious, but her doctors... They just seemed to want to get me in and get me out.

And so many doctors have made me feel stupid for asking questions. So it's just made me feel like I needed to take it on to myself to educate myself, to do good for my daughter. And so she went back to that mum on Facebook and asked her for more information about vaccines. Soon she got a packet in the mail. It was this folder filled with photocopied pages about all the risks of vaccines. It encouraged parents to, quote, do the research before it's too late, end quote. When I started reading those things, it totally, it educated me. It opened my eyes and it's terrifying.

It's terrifying. It's terrifying. Like if she got vaccines and something bad happened, like what, what do you imagine? I'm afraid of taking the best chance she has at life away from her. Noelle is worried that Emma could get autism or epilepsy or brain damage. In fact, Noelle saw a video on Facebook that she just can't get out of her mind. It was from another mum who'd said that her baby's seizures were caused by vaccines. The baby's eyes were rolled back

and they were twitching and jerking and, I mean, it's heartbreaking to see. It completely sucks the air out of your lungs. It's understandable that she's heartbreaking to see. It completely sucks the air out of your lungs. It's understandable that she's worried if anything were to happen because of a vaccine. But we looked into this during our last episode and her fears aren't backed up by science. So go back and listen.

But still, for Noelle, given what she's seen online, she just can't believe that. And this summer, Noelle hosted a seminar on what she sees as the dangers of vaccines. It was on a hot afternoon in a party room at her mum's apartment complex. Everyone sat on droopy sofas and munched on cookies as Noelle talked about what she'd found online.

Vaccines cause the underlying physical conditions that result in the pain, neurological damage, immune system disorders, gastrointestinal damage and yeast overgrowth, of all which combine to produce the behavioural symptoms that result in the autism diagnostic. A friend of Noelle's, Jessica, says she's been really convinced by Noelle's ideas. I never really kind of thought about vaccinations as being something that's harmful.

I've always thought of something as that our children need in order to be able to develop and grow in the world. But seeing her posts and stuff, it's actually the vaccines that are giving us the diseases and making us ill. So pretty much the fact of that knowledge that I was receiving from her opened my eyes. There were just a handful of people who came to the seminar, but Noelle had streamed it on Facebook. And a couple of hours later, Heather checked in with Noelle. The last time I had looked at it, it said that it was at 866 views. So let me pull it up real quick and see where it's refreshed at. 1.2 thousand views. 1,200 views.

Yeah. Woo! A month later, the video has over 5,000 views. So, in less than a year, Noelle has moved from being kind of agnostic to vaccines to all out against them. I know for sure I will never vaccinate her and I will never support the pro-vaccine side. It's in too deep for me now.

There's no going back. Now she'll often go online looking for information about vaccines, but she doesn't trust the medical establishment, like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC. OK, the CDC pushes vaccines. They contradict themselves all the time. So it's really hard to trust into the CDC pushes vaccines. They contradict themselves all the time. So it's really hard to trust into the CDC and what their numbers really are. So after we had spent some time with Noelle, I just couldn't understand why she was so freaked out about vaccines.

But she didn't seem worried about the diseases that vaccines prevent, like whooping cough. So I asked her about it. Have you ever thought about what you would do if Emma had whooping cough? Yes, it's very frightening. I think any situation, any virus or any disease is very frightening for a mother. Can you actually describe what a kid looks like with whooping cough um not really I haven't really looked much into what they look like I've read about whooping cough should we actually do you want to have you got a computer near you or perhaps a phone um I do have my phone on me

so what do you see oh baby's struggling to breathe it's really sad if i were to imagine this being my daughter it makes me want to cry yeah it's very scary it's very sad so what do you like what is what does that make you think when you're like comparing all these risks and stuff i mean what if that was emma yeah but what if if it was my daughter Emma having seizures or stopped breathing or died the next morning after a vaccine? Say I went and did these vaccines because you guys are putting these scare tactics in my heart. And yes, it makes me nervous and sad. But say I go get my daughter's MMR tomorrow and she dies the next morning or she wakes up a whole different baby.

Then what? I can't do anything. I can't take my daughter's life back. I don't know the numbers to be specific, but I see these vaccine injuries way more than I do see whooping cough. So the CDC, I've read the studies that are based on what the CDC is reporting. And what they find is that if Emma were to get whooping cough, it's three out of a thousand kids would get some kind of like permanent brain injury. Whereas one out of possibly 10 million children who got the DTaP vax would get some kind

of permanent brain injury. Okay. Just to clarify, I got that stat from a study published in 2007. The CDC actually says that the risk of getting permanent brain damage from the DTaP shot is so rare that it's hard to tell if the vaccines even cause the damage at all. Okay, back to our discussion. So it's like, so I hear you, like there are cases of it, but they are so rare and I don't understand why you don't... A lot of these adverse events, they aren't... A lot of adverse events aren't reported nor fought

against because the parents think that it's normal because that's what the doctors and their peers have told them. There's a lot about the vaccines I don't agree with because we are not being educated before we are taking the risk we are only being educated with scare tactics I could totally understand as a parent how you wouldn't want to vaccinate and cause harm to your kids but I couldn't understand why you weren't at all thinking about like measles and whooping cough I still I still can't I still can't because all I can hear is you saying like, I don't trust the studies. I don't trust this. I don't know. I guess it's just mother's intuition. I was always told trust my gut. For any mother, it's hard. It's always going to be hard. But I know that my stance on this is where I feel that this is best for my daughter.

Noelle and I spoke for a while, and I guess I was just really trying to pin down what is this mother's intuition that pitted her against science and exactly where it came from. We went around in circles, and the truth is, I still don't get it. So, where do we go from here? Well, for as long as we've had vaccines, some people have been afraid of them. And these fears have changed as vaccines have changed too. But the fact is that today, the vast majority of parents do vaccinate their kids. They might have concerns, but ultimately, they trust the science.

This episode has been produced by Heather Rogers, me, Wendy Zuckerman and Shruti Ravindran. Production help from Rose Rimla. Our senior producer is Caitlin Sorey. We're edited this week by Blythe Terrell with editorial assistance from Alex Bloomberg, Annie Rose Strasser and Lynne Levy. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with help from Rose Rimla. Sound design by Martin Peralta.

Music written by Bobby Lord. For this episode, we also spoke to Russ Bruzewitz, Professor Sharon Kaufman, Professor Alison Buttenheim, Barbara Lowe Fisher, Sally Mendelsohn, Professor Mary Holland, Professor Paul Jackson, Professor Michael Wilrich, Julie Livingston and Kari Christensen. An extra thanks to Gimlet producer Luke Malone,

the Holsuckerman clan, Joseph Lavelle-Wilson and Leo Rogers. We're taking a week break to do some more reporting, but when we come back, we're looking at renewable energy. Can America be powered on 100% renewable energy by 2050? And things are going to get feisty. Jesus Christ. Frankly, I am just absolutely astounded at the degree of vituperativeness.

What exactly does that mean? I'm Wendy Zuckerman. Back to you next time.