Virulent: The Vaccine War

[ Traffic passing by ] -[ Woman speaking Spanish ] -[ Woman speaking foreign language ] -[ Man speaking foreign language ] -[ Man speaking German ] …in Deutschland.
-Hospitals overwhelmed, first responders sick in extraordinary numbers.
-Never in anybody’s imagination, in less than a year, you would actually have vaccine going into somebody’s arm.
-I will not be injected with something that you cannot prove is safe.
What’s the point to take a vaccine if they’re still gonna make me wear a mask?
-Bill Gates is trying to kill us.
-This is not communist China.
This is not Cuba.
This is America.
-Here I am recovering.
Am I going to get a vaccine?
No.
-I have a lot of patients that may be hesitant about vaccines, but when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, it brings reality and smacks you in the face.
-[ Chanting indistinctly ] -Sadly, the anti-vaccine community started to co-opt the pandemic and start spinning conspiracies on a daily basis.
-[ Yelling indistinctly ] -They have been fighting this war for more than a decade.
-…original sin.
-There are established groups with established leaders.
There are established tactics and strategies.
And for them, COVID-19 has been the thing that they’ve been practicing for — is a national conversation about vaccine safety.
-[ Chanting indistinctly ] -I got the worst horror stories.
Kids going blind or intellectually challenged.
What if I vaccinated my daughter Katie or my son Gabe and something happened to them?
And could I live with that?
-People who don’t vaccinate love their children just as much as people who do vaccinate.
Parents who are becoming more informed, us pesky millennials, want to make a decision for ourselves, and now we’re having to go up against this medical system that is used to just using authority, and we’re not accepting that.
-I think that the parents should have a vote.
Perhaps the vote.
Don’t tell me how to treat your child.
That’s not the government’s job.
-There you go, baby.
Do you want me to say, “Oh, it’s okay to delay your shot?
Oh, it’s okay to take that risk, your kid getting one of these preventable types of bacterial disease?”
No, I don’t think that that’s a good idea.
-A major concern is the hindrance to routine childhood vaccines.
If a coronavirus vaccine creates fear of all vaccines, then we could easily see a resurgence of these childhood diseases.
-Could polio come back into this country?
Do I think people who are shedding polio virus could walk into Los Angeles airport or LaGuardia airport in New York?
Yes.
Do I think that could happen with diphtheria?
Sure.
Do I think that it could happen with other rare, contagious diseases?
Sure.
These bacteria and viruses are out there.
Let your guard down, and they’ll come back.
-You should tell the truth in this film.
See if any of those guys that you’re talking to can defend themselves against what I just told you?
-There is no guilt like the guilt of a mother.
The mother feels that every untoward event, whether it’s a stubbed toe or difficulty acquiring math concepts in the third grade, has to, in some way, lead back to a deficiency in the child rearing by that mother.
-Just the idea of vaccines seems totally crazy.
I have three kids.
I take them to get vaccines and it’s like, “You’re going to put that needle into my, like, sweet, little baby who’s perfectly healthy and you’re going to shoot him with part of the disease that we’re hoping that he won’t get?”
That is curious.
That’s confusing.
And to be vaccine hesitant, I think every parent has felt a jolt of that.
-Natural immunity sounded really good.
Why are we injecting things into our healthy, beautiful, perfect babies that have just come out of our bodies?
If we say you want to do what’s natural for your baby, right?
Well, how is injecting these mysterious chemicals — How is that natural?
-Disease absolutely is natural.
In fact, during the pre-antibiotic era, it was natural that people would die as a consequence of those natural processes.
-Back in the earlier part of last century, we were plagued with infectious diseases.
And when the first vaccine against polio came along, there was a huge lifting of fear.
The whole country had been behind that program, had contributed to the March of Dimes.
This was something everyone wanted.
-I was born in the year of the release of the Salk vaccine — 1955.
And of course, during that decade, we saw epidemics of poliomyelitis that killed thousands and crippled tens of thousands.
Nobody can share with you the experience of a child from a family in the neighborhood who was a star athlete and now cannot walk.
Nobody can share that story because it’s a story that doesn’t occur in our country any longer.
-1957, I was probably age 6.
I was one of the last kids to get polio before they really swept through with vaccination.
So that had a very searing impact because it told me, if you’re anti-vaccination, if you think that it’s too dangerous to vaccinate, you have no idea what it means to live through a true, horrific pandemic for children.
-Mother Nature has been trying to kill us ever since we crawled out of the ocean onto land.
I mean, the only reason that we live 30 years longer now than we did 100 years ago is we have fought back actively and hard.
We eliminated smallpox — a disease that’s probably killed 500 million people in the world’s history.
Whooping cough would kill 8,000 children a year.
Rubella or German measles would cause 20,000 to 25,000 cases of birth defects every year.
Pneumococcus would cause tens of thousands of cases of pneumonia, meningitis, bloodstream infection.
So vaccines have saved their lives and have allowed us to live longer.
The only reason, frankly, that we now question them is because at some level, vaccines have been a victim of their own success.
-Just as you had families line up to receive Jonas Salk’s vaccine in areas of Central Africa, people are lining up for experimental vaccines against Ebola because between 10% and 40% of people with the Ebola virus are gonna die.
-Until this pandemic happened, most Americans don’t have that level of experience with lots of people dying.
In Africa, they’re not gonna hesitate about that because they know what death is.
They see death knocking on the door too often.
-You can put those who are hesitant to get vaccines into two groups.
I think one I would call vaccine-hesitant parents, which is to say they smell the smoke.
They want to know whether there’s any fire there and you can convince them to vaccinate their children.
You find out what their issue is, and then in a compassionate and passionate and compelling way, try and frame the science so that it’s understandable and hopefully calms their fears.
The second group — and I think it’s much smaller, much, much smaller component — is what I would call an anti-vaccine activist, which is to say conspiracy theorists who just believe that there are forces out there that mean to do them harm.
And they’re not going to believe anything that you say.
I don’t think they’re — they’re — they’re lying.
I think that they believe that their child was permanently harmed by a vaccine.
-I can’t imagine the grief that a mother goes through.
And I imagine that there are lots of ways that that grief can play out, right?
And blaming yourself or blaming someone else.
-I know a lot of people who feel that their children were vaccine-injured.
So it’s more than believable that a parent would really dig their heels in because they would have to admit to being wrong and potentially have put their children, who I absolutely believe that they love, in very real danger.
-We as humans are wired for threat, for risk.
It’s how we’ve survived.
It’s how we’ve thrived as a species.
So for a parent to be concerned because they’re seeing this pop up all over the Internet, I don’t fault them for asking questions.
-One of the interesting developments in watching social media is we’re losing that to the anti-vaccine side, which makes a point of handling those outlets and using them to their advantage.
-Unfortunately, the Internet and more so, social media has given a platform to misinformation about vaccines and the diseases they prevent.
Many of the leaders of the movement profit from the movement itself, so it’s a business model for them.
And of course, the algorithms drive people to the extremes.
-There’s so much noise.
You have to ask the question, “What is the denominator?”
There’s that emotional part that influences our decisions.
So when I look at those sites and I get scared.
-But it is increasingly clear to this reporter… -There was a time where there were established gatekeepers that most people turned to for information.
And now we’re sort of all in this era where we are trying to assemble our own truth rather than having it handed to us.
-It’s the world we live in, right?
I mean, everybody has a screen in front of them.
So as billions and billions of conversations now become online, they start getting funneled into relatively few, precious communication tubes — Google, YouTube, Facebook.
And then they become easily manipulated.
Let’s monetize it because it’s clickbait by they themselves serving up disinformation preferentially to your searches.
-These anti-vaccine activists would go into a group for new parents or they would go into a group of Tea Party Patriots or a QAnon group, and they would start seeding their messaging in there, each time, sort of calibrating the message to the community they were trying to reach.
-The anti-vaxxers, they’re able to make these really strong, emotional appeals and it is very hard to counter that.
Once a really scary thought takes hold, it is really hard to dislodge it.
-The anti-vaccine camp — They come from two schools of thought.
Liberty or purity, right?
Liberty — “You can’t tell me what to do with my body or my child’s body.”
Or purity — “I don’t want toxins and chemicals injected into my child.”
-I’m on the side of parents taking care of their children and not having the government dictate how you should raise your children.
How dare you say that I don’t know what’s best for my kids.
-I love the bird.
In my journey to being a birth worker, many of us in this community fell more toward the naturalist side that giving a vaccine is unnatural.
When you get these convincing memes and articles, it was confirmation bias that the medical community is not trustworthy and we’re just gonna throw the baby out with the bath water and throw out vaccines along with the other things that we were pushing against.
-And then there’s this conspiracy branch.
And for these people, the story of vaccines is about these global elites who are trying to control the population through things like microchips, through things like 5G connectivity, and now they say through vaccines.
-I think long ago, there were families that figured out a way to control the United States.
A section of Jews.
Maybe they would fall more into, like, cabal.
I don’t think all Jews.
I just hope that the people band together and take our freedoms back, because that’s, to me, what’s at stake here.
Way more than vaccinations or viruses or politics.
It’s about freedom and freedom of choice.
-[ Chanting indistinctly ] -The anti-vaccine movement — They are a movement and you belong to a movement.
And it’s good to build up a kind of values, momentum that makes you feel like you belong to something important.
And there is a sense that, you know, you’re the persecuted minority.
You’re the group that really isn’t being listened to, despite the value of your message.
-A lot of family members believed this way.
So just the solid numbers of, “Oh, you guys are doing the right thing.”
It’s very culty, you know.
By someone telling you you’re doing the right thing, we felt like we were doing the right thing.
And so we knew and others didn’t know.
And aren’t we smart?
-I think for one side of that — that coin, you have to point out misinformed people as empathetic and victims of just misinformation.
So my mom — her love, affection and care as a mother was really weaponized.
I grew up understanding that we were not vaccinated.
The ideas presented were the vaccines are very dangerous.
They can cause autism and cause brain damage.
But later on, once I became 13, 14, 15, and I saw online that there were a lot of people disagreed with my mom, those questions of seeing a different perspective really sort of slowly build towards a distrust in what my mom was saying.
I just spoke to my mother.
“These are the reasons I need to get my vaccines.
I don’t think you’re correct with the information you have.
And the medical community disagrees” and went from there to the public health department and got immunizations.
-I think we’re compelled by anecdotes.
I think that it’s hard to argue against anecdote with statistics.
So, for example, there are people who have reported that a child got a vaccine and turned into the Incredible Hulk.
-[ Yells ] -Anybody can report anything.
So that’s what you’re always arguing against.
It’s hard.
I mean, it’s hard to make statistics compelling and passionate and compassionate and fun and convincing… -[ Roars ] -…when people believe that their coincidental experiences are causal experience.
-A conspiracy needs a good enemy.
Big Pharma.
It sounds really scary.
However, it’s not true.
If they didn’t make them tomorrow, I’m sure that they would all be just fine.
-If you were looking to make a lot of money and make a lot of profit, vaccines would be the last place you would look.
You would look to Viagra or drugs for chronic conditions like high blood pressure and diabetes.
-Ask your doctor about Trulicity.
-If I only had to trust pharmaceutical companies about vaccines, I’d be really worried because they’re for-profit companies.
But we have an extensive practice of accountability in the United States in a way that we don’t have for any other product.
Similar or the same vaccines are used in other countries that have their own monitoring system.
There’s just no conceivable way that the serious problem will get by that level of monitoring, and it hasn’t.
-I’ve had people say that I’m in the pocket of Big Pharma.
“Oh, you buy their vaccines.
You make a profit off of it.”
The truth is, for vaccines, the profit margin is paper thin.
-Yeah.
I don’t need any conspiracy to create job security for infectious diseases.
Nature and the world create that just fine.
-Yeah.
I don’t think any scientist goes into the lab thinking, “This is my way to sort of get rich.”
I mean, I was fortunate to work with the team at Children’s Hospital Philadelphia that created the rotavirus vaccine.
Rotavirus in this country — it would cause 75,000 hospital admissions due to dehydration and 60 deaths.
In the world, it causes 2,000 children to die a day.
The fact that we made that vaccine is the professional accomplishment of which I am most proud.
It was a 25-year effort from which to some extent I financially benefited, but I didn’t spend seven days a week in a windowless room inoculating mice, figuring, “If I can just figure out which of these two viral surface proteins evoke neutralizing antibodies, I can be rich beyond my wildest dreams.”
I don’t think any reasonable person does that.
But I think we’ve reached an unfortunate time in our society where we vilify expertise and anybody who has any connection to something that’s commercial, which is sad because when vaccines get developed, only pharmaceutical companies have the resources and expertise to do the development.
-Anti-vaccination is not a contemporary movement.
It’s been around a very, very long time and partly for reasons that have to do with cruder science.
One of the early mandates in America was George Washington trying to control smallpox in the Continental Army and saying, “You are all gonna be vaccinated.”
Some people actually said, “If you’re giving me cowpox, you’re gonna turn me into a cow.”
It got associated very early with resistance to government control and personal choice.
-I think that vaccine hesitancy or reluctance has always been there.
But the modern anti-vaccine movement usually goes back to Andrew Wakefield in the 1990s.
-Andrew Wakefield, who lost his license, was paid over half a million dollars to fake a study and then raised more money to sell his own version of the measles vaccine is doing quite handsomely.
He’s giving lectures to people, spreading misinformation.
In fact, he seemed to be at least partially responsible for the outbreak in Minnesota in the Somali community.
-In 1998, Andrew Wakefield and 12 other co-workers published a paper in a well-respected medical journal called “The Lancet,” and he made the following arguments that when children got the measles, mumps, rubella vaccine, they could get autism for this reason — that because the vaccine was given in combination, that that somehow weakened the immune system.
He just proposed a series of sort of wild speculations for which he had no evidence.
This was a testable hypothesis.
It’s been tested now in 18 different studies in seven different countries, on three different continents, involving hundreds of thousands of children who either did or didn’t get that vaccine.
And what you found is that there is no difference in the incidence of autism between those who did or didn’t get the vaccine.
And so the question has been answered.
And most parents of children with autism believe that.
-Breaking news tonight.
Just hours ago, the British medical journal “BMJ” did something extremely rare for a scientific journal.
It accused a researcher, Andrew Wakefield, of outright fraud.
-If you read the record that I have set out in the book, you will see the truth.
-But, sir, if you’re lying, then your book is also a lie.
If your study is a lie, your book is a lie.
-He had already received $800,000 or $1,000,000 to try and find a link.
Five years before, he was trying to link vaccines to Crohn’s disease.
I mean, there was all this fraudulent science behind it.
So when people start pointing to, you know, cherry picking a little bit of science and a lot of disinformation, trying to build a case, I say, “Go back to the scientists and the people that really have true data and statistics to guide what we do.”
-The allegations against me and against my colleagues are both unfounded and unjust.
I repeat, unfounded and unjust.
-All the evidence to date points to the notion that autism is a genetic disorder and that if you’re autistic at 5, you’re autistic at 2, you’re autistic when you’re born.
But it’s not unusual when a disease doesn’t have an obvious cause or a cure that it could be subject to a lot of charlatan-ism and quackery.
And that’s true with a disease like autism, where you see people that subject themselves to elimination diets or to baths and magnetic clay or to stem-cell transplantation or to chelation therapy, all of which, you know, doctors are perfectly willing to do and to be paid for out of pocket, taking advantage, I think, of the parents’ desperate desire to do something to make their child better.
-When I think of my sons — I have two sons — seeing language develop and the ability to communicate with me was one of the most exciting and wonderful parts of being a mom.
So when I think of parents who are not having that experience with their babies, you know, the babies are not talking.
They don’t have eye contact, all these communication problems, you know, it’s heartbreaking.
-It’s such a life-altering thing when you have a special-needs child.
It really is.
Just your life is altered.
And I think parents just need to have an understanding as to why.
“Why is my child like this?”
That was really ridiculous.
You have this special bond, and then something is not right with them.
And what’s kind of cruel is, is it really unfolds in really the worst possible way because it’s kind of a slow burn.
You know, other kids are hitting milestones and your kid may not be hitting milestones.
And then finally they get the diagnosis.
And it just is, it’s painful.
-Go get ’em.
-So I can understand why parents want to know why.
Like, “Why?
“Why — Why me?
Why us?”
-Autism is typically first recognized between one and two years of age, and that’s around the time that you’re getting a number of vaccines.
So it’s very easy to make that association.
I mean, you know, the rooster crows, the sun comes up, the rooster crows, the sun comes up.
Is the rooster causing the sun to come up?
If you don’t allow the rooster to crow, will the sun still come up?
Yes.
If you don’t give people MMR vaccine, will they still have the same incidence of autism?
Yes.
-We do not know what causes autism.
We do not know.
Now, to make the claim that vaccines may cause autism is false.
That is a false claim because that very specific question has been answered through very large, carefully conducted studies of hundreds of thousands of children throughout the world.
And no link between vaccines and autism has been established.
-Science isn’t politics.
It’s not philosophy, it’s not religion.
There’s not two sides.
There’s really, as the truth emerges, only one side.
-[ Chanting indistinctly ] -But that story has been taken hostage by a group of people who believe that vaccines are the cause.
I think the media allows for and lawyers enable and I think politicians enable small splinter groups to become very powerful and the only groups that you hear from.
-We’re two decades down the road from when Wakefield unleashed his conspiracy.
And even though all the other scientists on that paper said the data wasn’t true, there have been multiple studies that have tried to repeat it, he lost his license, he’s completely discredited… …and two decades later, people will still say, “But what about vaccines and autism?”
-What other thing?
There were 13 authors on that paper and 8 study subjects.
Just as a tip to future epidemiologists, you should always have more study subjects than authors.
-Now, one thing happened that kind of put that argument to rest.
You begin to be able to diagnose autism in a kid before you vaccinated the kid.
That’s a pretty solid refutation.
-We will not stop until this fight is won.
-But the commitment is there, and it’s hard to go back on 30 years of saying, “The vaccines are bad for you.
Oh, never mind.
Maybe I’m responsible for killing people.”
COVID proves that vaccination is one of the key tools.
Again, the evidence is in front of everybody’s faces.
-Then a lot of individuals that are really big leaders in the anti-vax world.
You can talk about Del Bigtree, Kennedy Jr., even celebrities like Robert De Niro and Jenny McCarthy.
And all of them have such a big sway and influence over this world of the anti-vaxxing community.
-Tonight, exclusive Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy, partners in life and partners in the search for answers to autism.
Isn’t the problem here, Jenny, that people are gonna panic and not vaccine at all?
-Probably.
But guess what?
It’s not my fault.
The reason why they’re not vaccinating is because the vaccines are not safe.
-Jenny McCarthy really brought us to this moment.
She was the first to have a platform and say, “My child was hurt by vaccines,” and you don’t want to go up against a mother who thinks that her child was hurt by vaccines.
Like, who are you?
You’re automatically the bad guy.
-What we are saying is that the number of vaccines given and the ingredients, like the freaking mercury… -Expertise is no match for a good story told by a beautiful, articulate, blond bombshell, who is giving you this message.
-My science is named Evan and he’s at home.
That’s my son.
[ Cheers and applause ] -There were a lot of things that Oprah Winfrey did and brought attention to that I thought were amazing.
But she actually lent oxygen and her power behind anti-vaccine moments and let them run with it.
-Jenny McCarthy was giving medical advice and I just took what she said at face value because why else would she be on Oprah’s show?
And as a result of that, I’m sure a lot of children died.
I’m sure I was not the only one who listened to the Hollywood actress try to push her book on autism.
-Here’s one thing, Jenny.
And you know I’ve got an open mind.
For people to stop vaccinating — Because we’ll start seeing kids die of polio again.
-Okay, let me tell you this.
We do not need that many vaccines.
-Yeah, I think this is a common pitfall.
The idea that, “Well, we have to let both sides have an equal presentation.”
Look, if we’re talking about matters of opinion or faith, I’m all for that.
But it’s a fallacy to say, “Well, we’re gonna give equal weight with somebody who has no education or specialization in that area and is just talking about their own feelings.”
-It was a Wednesday morning.
We sent him off to school.
And a few hours later, I received a call that he had a 102 temperature, I believe.
And we took him in.
The pediatrician looked at him and said, “You know what?
It’s just the flu.
He’ll be alright.
Take him home, get hydrated.”
And that night, he went from being really hot to having projectile vomiting to being ice cold.
And then comes 6:00 in the morning and an ambulance arrived and he had a heart attack in an ambulance.
[ Siren wailing ] And he actually flatlined in the E.R.
and that’s when he died.
Every year when they have the flu vaccine clinics near our home, my kids and I volunteer to just kind of herd people in there and we share our story with them.
If you were one of those fish, which one would you be?
Oftentimes you get push back and they’re just like, “No, we’re not gonna go do that.
We know what happens.”
My kid was supposed to graduate this year.
“He’s dead.
You understand that?
10 years ago, he died.
But he could have got a flu vaccine.
Why don’t you prevent that from happening to you?”
[ Cheers and applause ] -Now I want to introduce Robert Kennedy Jr. [ Cheers and applause ] -There’s this kind of Kafka-esque censorship in the news about having a reasonable debate.
So they call us anti-vaccine, they call us hysterical, they call us conspiracy theorists.
I wouldn’t characterize myself as anti-vaccine.
That’s something that is a pejorative that other people use to characterize me and, you know, the movement as a way to discredit or to silence us.
Because, you know, if you say they’re anti-vaccine, it sounds like you’re crazy.
And that’s a way of masking the injuries that are caused by the vaccine.
And it’s not science, it’s just marketing.
-Some of the more established names at today’s rally included Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Recently, some of his family members disavowed his views about vaccines.
-I think he’s a believer, but I think it’s very clear that he’s willing to lie for the cause.
Kennedy is saying that he’s pro-vaccine as long as it’s a mythical vaccine that isn’t currently in existence and has no risks and 100% effectiveness.
-In 17 states, it’s now unsafe to eat any freshwater fish in the state.
-Growing up in the height of his career as an environmental lawyer, he was somebody I looked up to.
My background is in environmental law.
How can you say we should listen to the science on climate but not on vaccines?
It just — It makes no sense to me.
And what’s so disheartening is how dangerous his message has become.
-RFK has this name that I think 90% of the people on the planet, if they were to meet RFK Jr, would think, “Wow,” you know.
If they knew anything, it would be, “Oh, you’re a steward of the environment, right?”
Or, “Oh, you’re the son of someone very famous who was well-respected across the nation and seen as a civil rights hero.”
So unless you really do your homework, then you wouldn’t know who he is.
-There are four companies in this country make all 72 vaccines that are mandated to our children, and all four of them are serial felons.
-I talked to RFK a couple of years ago because he wanted to write something and he was asking us to publish it.
And because of my librarian background, when, you know, when RFK comes and says, “Can we run this?”
I can fact-check it, right?
And so I called all the people that wrote the studies and I said, “Can you tell me, is he getting this right?”
And so there are two camps — people who wouldn’t speak to me at all and said, “I know how this research is being used.
I don’t support it, but I can’t say anything because if I do, they will come for me.”
And then there was this CDC statistician whose work he used that said, “This is wrong.
I’ve retired a month ago.
So, yeah, I’ll tell you all the ways that are so wrong and how he’s grossly misinterpreting my work.”
-They haven’t done a very good job about protecting public health, but they’ve done a very good job at using the quarantine to bring 5G into all of our communities.
The reason is for surveillance and data harvesting.
It’s not for you and me, it’s for Bill Gates and all of the other billionaires.
Bill Gates.
Number-one vaccine producer on Earth.
That’s what he does with all of his, you know, “charities.”
He gets the technology, then they go to Africa and he uses his control over the World Health Organization and UNICEF that impose these profitable technologies on developing nations and makes a killing doing it.
-If anything kills over 10 million people, it’s most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war.
-Bill Gates, when he amassed a fortune, what he decided was, “What can I do to make this world a better place?”
And he settled correctly on vaccines.
How exactly does Bobby Kennedy Jr. make this world a better place?
Please tell me that because he was given everything.
He’s a wealthy man who has a great name.
And what does he do?
He stands up there and lies about vaccines that causes children to be put in harm’s way.
Please tell me, what do vaccines do that causes chronic disease?
Is it autism?
Is it diabetes?
Is it multiple sclerosis?
Is it attention deficit disorder?
Is it all the things that Bobby Kennedy Jr. claims to be true that have clearly been shown definitively, reproducibly, redundantly not to be true?
He just makes it up.
-Paul Offit — He is big pharma.
He’s their chief spokesman.
He’s — He’s a vaccine maker.
And he’s a charlatan, and he’s a crook.
You have a handful of people in the CDC and NIH who are lying about the science and who are falsifying science.
And we know who they are.
We know how they’re doing it.
Put that out of orthodoxy because of the misplaced loyalty to an institution.
-I think when people attack me, it’s because they don’t have the data to attack the data that I’m talking about.
I was fortunate.
I got to go from bench to bedside.
I got to see exactly how you make a vaccine, what the struggles are to make a vaccine, to see both — sort of the research stage as well as the research and development stage, as well as the implementation stage.
I think I’m a perfectly reasonable person to comment on vaccines because I’ve seen every aspect of vaccine development.
It’s definitely reluctant advocacy.
And if you really want to know where that comes from, I think it comes from an early childhood experience.
I had been born with clubbed feet.
When I was 5 years old, my foot was operated on and I was in a chronic-care facility for about six weeks, and it was a polio ward.
So I was in a big room with 20 children, all of whom had polio, with the exception of me.
This was 1956 and it was a dramatic and, I think, very painful experience for me.
There was one visiting hour a week from 2:00 to 3:00, so my bed was right next to a window where I could look on to the front of the hospital.
And I just stared at that front door waiting for someone to come visit me.
And when I looked around at those other children, also who often didn’t have people visit, I just saw them as vulnerable and helpless and alone.
That’s how I see children.
I see them as needing to be protected.
And when I see them attacked, in a sense, by being made vulnerable because they aren’t getting vaccines or made vulnerable because they’re subject to these sort of alternative therapies that can be harmful, I think that’s where that passion comes from, the kind of passion that enables me to stand up in the face of what’s a lot of hate from the other side.
I mean, I certainly had — I get a lot of hate mail and occasionally — And physically harassed and have had death threats.
So but always the eyes on the prize.
And the prize for me is children.
Please welcome Mr. Del Bigtree!
-People take multiple approaches to get into the discussion.
[ Cheers and applause ] Del Bigtree seems to rally around the sensational and the ability to make a profit.
-My God is not the pharmaceutical industry.
My God is not the snake wrapped around that branch on every hospital in America.
My God made me perfect.
I am not born into an original sin that needs 72 vaccines.
-It’s really the people who are making oodles of money off of this who have no skin in the game.
But when you see such grift, I don’t understand how any mother looks at that and doesn’t say, “Huh.”
You know?
Like, “why am I elevating this man to be the gods of this movement?”
-He’s earned a reputation based off of his “Vaxxed” documentary.
And there’s a lot of selling involved with his show his documentary, his personality.
He has a large following and likes that power.
-Del Bigtree — he worked for a news studio, and he was one of their producers.
And then he moved into the anti-vax world.
So he took his film knowledge and then used it in a way to monetize off this whole movement.
-Where do you get your funding?
What’s the largest donation?
-I would say that we are being donated to by lawyers by doctors, by scientists, by entertainers that all believe it needs to be discussed.
-Del Bigtree is on the “Vaxxed” tour.
He’s there with Wakefield and all the big names and clearly the large donations — which we’ve seen articles from “The New York Times” and “Washington Post” showing the contributions to that movement.
Those are the kind of things that provide the funding that allow these people to drive their cars and live in big houses, all based on lies and fear.
I mean, that’s horrible, but it’s the suffering and death that’s reprehensible.
-There are physicians who cater to the anti-vaccine crowd, and what’s so successful for them is that they try to empower the parents by giving them misinformation.
-Orange County pediatrician Bob Sears, best known for his book on spacing out the schedule of childhood vaccines, is now facing possible discipline from the state medical board.
-Bob Sears is an interesting case because he actually knows that he is fooling his followers.
He was quoted in the “LA Times” — “Not vaccinating is not good for public health.”
So he admits it’s dangerous for the public, but it’s fine for your child.
-Measles is probably the most politically incorrect disease to catch right now.
So if you catch measles, stay hidden.
Don’t let anyone know.
But if you do catch it and someone finds out, make sure you tell them you were vaccinated, so it’s not your fault.
-He even tells people, “Don’t tell people too much so you can hide in the herd.”
So it’s the language of privilege.
It’s a language of irresponsibility.
He is catering to his patients’ anxieties.
He basically is framing it as, “You can get away with this and therefore you’re special.”
-So here’s an example of a physician who would capitalize on people’s fears by telling them, “Well, you know what?
I’ve looked into it further and I’ve created an alternative schedule.”
So there’s the Dr. Sears alternative schedule, and he’ll go in his book to tell you this isn’t really guided by science, but kind of by gut.
-So it feels like a safe in-between, right?
So “I want my kid to get the life-saving vaccine.
I recognize that vaccines are important.
But I’m really scared of doing that to my tiny, little baby.
So I’m going to wait.”
-The vaccine administration schedule has been established so that the child can develop protective responses at the time when they are needed.
-Final prep in our meningitis series.
-If we were to delay, we might miss this vulnerability window that the child will be most susceptible to those infections.
Infections will cause the most damage.
-So it’ll be three pokes and a swallow.
-And that’s why we immunize at such a young age.
Alternative schedules are not based on science.
We can’t say whether they would be safe and effective or not.
But it’s not a chance I would take with my own children.
-Let’s sit Amari right here, facing the picture.
And I don’t think people understand how frightening it is as a physician when somebody is talking to me at 2:00 in the morning and they’re saying, “Dr. McFarland, my baby has a temperature of 103 degrees, what should I do?”
So in our practice, we do our best to keep our families on the routine schedule because it’s too great a chance to take.
-Pharmaceutically trained medical doctors have really no idea how to cure people.
It’s, like, over their head.
You might as well be talking to a brick wall.
[ Camera shutter clicks ] -There are people like Larry Cook who are selling a variety of remedies, whether they’re essential oils or homeopathic remedies.
I mean, he essentially is somebody who profits off of telling you not to vaccinate but to use their products and their advice.
-This is a completely unregulated industry.
I mean, the FDA does not regulate dietary supplements, of which there are roughly 85,000 in this country.
Yet vaccines are highly regulated.
You have to prove that vaccines are safe and effective before they come on to the market.
-Larry Cook created this group called Stop Mandatory Vaccination.
They have hundreds of thousands of followers and fans.
And he started asking for these stories of vaccination that hurt and killed children.
Now, I’ve looked into these stories, and half of them are provably false, like, just on their face.
When you tell him that, they don’t come down.
So Larry doesn’t care about people.
He doesn’t care about the women whose stories he uses.
He cares about money.
And that’s clear because he has an Amazon storefront where you can buy anti-vaccination books and that money goes to him.
He raised hundreds of thousands of dollars via GoFundMe and Facebook fundraisers that go to him.
He says, “They go to me.
I have all discretion of how I will use them.
I’ll tell stories.
Maybe I’ll start a dating site for anti-vaxxers.”
He’s been made very well-to-do off of these women’s stories.
-This repulsive, new tactic that the anti-vaccine community has used is to find people whose infants have died.
Find them, seek them out and tell them, “It was the vaccines that did it.”
-Catie Clobes’ daughter Evee, who was just, I mean, such a beautiful baby.
I mean, you can’t look at her and not have your heart ripped out.
She died in the night.
She was co-sleeping with her mother, and her mother woke up and saw that Evee was dead and reacted like any person with a heart would react.
It was terrifying.
She told the 911 operator, “This is because she slept with me.”
And that is what the medical examiner had determined.
She posted about it on Facebook saying, “I lost Evee today.
It was very sad.”
And then it just exploded.
And it was thousands of comments from people that she didn’t know, all offering her condolences.
And among those, you saw — There were some activists from Larry Cook’s website.
Within three days, her story was on the Facebook page as “Vaccines caused her death.”
And then she poured that energy not just into grief but into real activism.
So against all evidence, she has now claimed that vaccines caused the death of Evee.
She’s selling T-shirts that people are wearing at state capitals.
-A lot of people have been asking about the superhero T-shirts and they will be out on the website today.
-She has billboards in Minnesota.
She had several in California.
So, again, you know, we talked about grieving mothers and how easy it is — You can feel it — to latch on to anyone.
-Her name was Evee.
Evee Gayle.
She was 6 1/2 months old.
She looked just like a little doll from the day she was born.
-She just spoke at the CDC meeting.
-Your recommended schedule killed my daughter.
[ Applause ] -She gave a very impassioned speech.
And if I were watching that and didn’t know what I know and just saw her, I would believe her.
And that’s the power of a story like hers, whether it’s true or not.
And people like Larry Cook and Del Bigtree, they know the power of those stories and they depend on them to move this movement forward.
And that’s what’s so scary.
-He got sent home from school with a fever.
I took him to the doctor, got meds, and the next day, he was clingy and fussy and whiny.
And we went to bed.
And when I woke up to give him his sippy cup in the middle of the night, he was unresponsive.
I called the ambulance and then after they suctioned him, they told me he had something called acute necrotizing encephalitis.
I feel like he’s stuck at age 3.
They can’t give me any answers, like, when I ask questions because they didn’t expect him to live at all.
So anything he’s doing is positive and progress.
So it’s hard to, like, forecast his future because they don’t know.
Let’s go.
Come on.
You got it.
Well, I hope that by the time he’s a teenager, he’ll be able to walk because it’s starting to get harder to carry him.
He’s more than half my size now.
I don’t know.
I don’t know how I want to say it.
I think they should use Andre’s story definitely as a cautionary tale of what potentially could happen if you don’t get a vaccine.
-But now we’ve seen anti-vaccine communities using really horrendous tactics to go into the Somali population in Minnesota, to go into the Jewish population in New York.
They’re now in Harlem using really smart tactics to say, “Hey, this is like Tuskegee again.
Pharma and doctors are experimenting on your kids.”
-Because of our history with healthcare in America, there is a lack of trust.
And because of that lack of trust, more Black kids are gonna die from one of these preventable types of bacterial disease.
-The so-called Tuskegee experiment.
It began as a noble cause.
Foundations in the 1930s said, “Venereal disease, in particular syphilis, is not getting attention among African-Americans because of racism.”
Nobody was given syphilis, but the work was handed off to the U.S. government.
And what made Tuskegee horrible was that in World War II, people found a drug — penicillin — and pretty soon there was a treatment.
So for decades, these men were studied when there was a cure and they were lied to and told they were getting a cure, and many of them got sick and died.
-I think you have to face it squarely.
The observation of men with syphilis without treatment to understand the natural history of the disease is immoral.
And that happened.
And it just did.
-And we can’t dismiss it.
That’s — that’s the thing that’s important, because when you have great distrust, particularly in communities that have great despair, you need to reflect those communities.
We’ve got to get beyond these stories, because here’s what I know.
COVID knows no end and it’s indiscriminate and it’s much higher probability amongst African-Americans because of some of the modalities associated with our community, health-wise, that you’ll die.
-There are perfectly valid reasons for Black Americans to distrust organized Western medicine.
When you couple that with the fact that they’re being actively targeted with disinformation by people like RFK Jr. and Andrew Wakefield, their vaccine hesitancy becomes pretty easy to understand.
-The people who are leading this movement and capitalizing on the fear of the past, they talk about being segregated when they’re not allowed to be at school.
So all of their talking points very much align with issues that the Black community cares about.
-It’s offensive when I — When I look up on that to see that they’re comparing vaccinating their kids to the civil rights movements and to, like, the Holocaust.
-They compare themselves to people who were put in the gas chambers, who were hosed down with fire trucks in the streets.
I think we really need to think about the level of privilege of people who can make such comparisons.
[ Cheers and applause ] -Anti-vaccination is primarily an upper-class White movement.
-…for our children.
-And the anti-vaxxers could be among the worst.
Death threats and having to notify the cops and warning my family not to answer the phone.
It’s part of the movement to shut up your opposition.
-[ Chanting indistinctly ] -They’re angry, and so they want to make sure that anybody who stands up in defense of vaccines or vaccine safety is punished.
And so they will send hate mail or they’ll scream at you, or they’ll occasionally send death threats or they’ll throw blood, which is what happened in California.
-It’s a very toxic space, especially online.
I expected it.
People think I’m killing children by defending vaccines.
So they’re very upset and they really want me to stop it.
I’ve gotten death threats, harassment, everything to my appearance and the way I talk.
Any attacks that can be made personally or about the arguments I make has been said and will be said again.
-You get bombarded with tweets, you get bombarded with e-mails.
You get people launching social-media campaigns, sending me e-mails that are just unhinged and saying that I am in a plot to harm their children.
And, you know, and threats against my own children.
And so, you know, it becomes — It becomes difficult to report on these things and not let that get to you.
-I was told that I was killing babies.
Somebody compared me to Hitler.
You want your reporting to land with people and you want to do the public good.
But to feel that vitriol so aggressively was hard sometimes.
-We were the target of an anti-vaccine attack, which are now coordinated, funded, really well-organized and global in nature.
-The attack started 1:15 on a Friday afternoon, and then the next hour was when I realized we haven’t seen anything like this before.
This is a new beast.
We had people attacking us from countries in Europe, from New Zealand, from Australia, from all over the U.S. -Literally 16-hour days, six days in a row calling us baby killers, telling us that, you know, we would die and burn in hell.
Not being able to keep up with the waves and waves and that’s part of their strategy is to overwhelm, create fear, create paralysis.
-Was a brand-new phenomenon — this war-room-like real-time tactics and strategy from inside anti-vaccine groups on Facebook.
-Recognizing that they could impose harm by attacking physicians’ ratings has been a real shift to harm and damage.
Because if they can harm your reputation, they can financially harm the practice.
-This was the wild, wild West, right?
Totally new frontier.
So while suffering 10,000 comments on our Facebook page, I was making it up as I went.
There’s no playbook for this stuff.
It didn’t exist before.
It’s a brand-new kind of warfare.
-“Here’s their Google site.
Here’s their Yelp site.
Here’s their phone numbers.
Let’s block up their phone lines.”
Real coordinated attack.
And we saw our reviews on Google and Yelp going from 5 to 4 to 3 to 2 to less than 1 star.
So you can see that they can bring a system like that to their knees.
And we see entire health systems as well as small practices going silent for fear of being attacked.
-A turning point in our attack was when a lot of other groups and pediatricians came to our aid.
And what we learned was that anti-vaccine bullies lose interest in punching people when they start getting punched back.
-Since we’ve created a purposeful response, I’ve seen amazing support, amazing support from not just other health professionals, but in our patients and our families who were like, “Yeah, we want our kids to be in neighborhoods where we know they’re safe, and where my baby, who can’t yet be vaccinated, is around other people that are vaccinated.
-We created a digital cavalry, a strategy guide for practices, hospitals, even all healthcare systems to prepare for, defend against, and clean up after an anti-vaccine attack on social media.
It’s a free download.
Anyone can have it.
We thought, “Hey, we’ve got this sort of battle-scarred store of knowledge now.
Now we need to get it out and let other people benefit from it.”
-Chad always calls it a badge of honor to survive one of those attacks.
I call it a real meter of your impact and effectiveness.
If they hit you in those large, coordinated fashions, it’s because you’re effective and your message is resonating and they feel a real need to squelch it.
-FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg today called the recent measles outbreak in the U.S. alarming.
Hamburg’s comments came after warnings of unvaccinated children being invited to a so-called measles party for intentional exposure.
-You’ve raised a very controversial subject.
Autonomy of parenting and abuse of child.
I’m not sure that measles parties or chickenpox parties would rise to that level.
It makes no sense to me.
I don’t know that any parent would take their child to a COVID-19 party.
[ Monitor flatlines ] This is no reason to expose anyone to an infectious agent that could potentially kill them.
-There is no advantage to getting a natural infection for the simple reason that a natural infection could cause you to suffer or be hospitalized or die.
What vaccination did, in essence, was it allowed you to achieve something close enough to what you got from natural immunity without having to pay the price of natural immunity?
-Many of us say, “I had chicken pox.
It was no big deal.”
But we didn’t realize that there was 10,000 people being hospitalized and we’re having 200 deaths every year.
-[ Coughing ] -When you see a newborn child, you know, just enter the world and it’s like, you know, it means like the world to you.
It means everything to you.
It has to be taken from you for medical care and has a tube in and it’s not breathing on its own.
And then when it comes to asking the family about their vaccination status, and they haven’t been vaccinated, you really see a lot of, you know, regret and remorse, you know, on these families’ faces.
-Proponents of mandatory vaccinations point to California, where state lawmakers removed personal-belief vaccine exemptions after a measles outbreak at Disneyland sickened 147 people in 2015.
-Vaccines are one of the very few interventions where, in order to protect a society as a whole, to help our most vulnerable, the people who cannot get vaccinated, we are going to vaccinate all of these healthy people, like in a school or in a daycare.
-We have kids and grandparents and parents and neighbors who are on chemotherapy or who have had an organ transplant.
I have a kid in our practice who doesn’t make antibodies.
I mean, he just congenitally just does make — He could die, right?
Any of these people could die.
They want vaccines.
They can’t get the vaccines.
That’s the beauty of herd immunity.
-To have really the full benefit of herd immunity, you need more than 90% of people to be immune.
And so it’s just not good enough to say, “Well, let’s get three quarters of people vaccinated and hope for the best.”
That means kids are gonna suffer and die.
-And some parents, it’s just that, “Well, I’m not gonna expose my child to something that I perceive as harmful because your child has a compromised immune system.
That’s your responsibility to limit any kind of exposure.”
-They’re giving her oxygen.
-I would hope that people would have some generosity towards those who do not have immune systems that are capable of fighting off infection.
These kids can’t help that, but they’re not able, in some cases, to be vaccinated and are walking around unprotected.
-It’s why it’s a really hard topic.
Something I fight for is bodily autonomy and that we should all be able to make decisions about what goes into our bodies.
So it is hard for me to wrap my mind around that sometimes, even that I could possibly support something that takes away the choice.
-I’m really on the fence with being told what to do with your children.
But having an immune-suppressed child who would benefit greatly from mandatory vaccinations, that profoundly changes — I call it “It changed my DNA.”
It just changed everything about me.
[ Monitor beeping ] -I was born with hypoplastic left heart.
I take medication and that medication makes my immune system low in order for my body to accept my heart.
So my body takes twice as long to recover from a cough or from a fever.
So people don’t know who they’re around.
And they could easily get somebody sick if they’re not fully vaccinated.
-Thanks.
I was pregnant with Hannah when we found out she needed a heart transplant.
She had the same heart defect that my son passed away from.
And I gave birth to Hannah.
And thankfully, 11 days after her birth, a heart became available.
We’re just going over a medical checklist… -You can go upstairs for echo and EKG, 7:30, -…and the immunologist got to immunizations and said, “Well, of course, now, the kids are immunized.”
So I…I kind of went, uh…
He said, “Let’s stop right there.
They’re not?”
At first I felt embarrassed and I felt kind of silly and uneducated.
And my husband and I had to really own up to the reasons why they’re not.
And, of course, she was very graceful and just non-judgmental.
And she explained to us herd immunity and how important that was for Hannah.
So we had to start the younger children on a schedule and got them fully vaccinated.
You can open your eyes.
Can you open your eyes?
-I just think that if people knew what low-immune-system patients have to go through in order to survive, in order to live, they would feel a little bit differently about vaccination.
And so if you have the power to not cause any harm to anybody else, you should use that.
-Hannah’s heart surgeon, he said, “You have now become an advocate for your child and it is up to you to protect her against other people.”
It’s kind of like a crown he put on my head.
It was the green light to where you would now have permission to advocate for your child.
Sun.
[ Laughs ] -We are seeing ever-increasing rates of personal-belief exemptions.
And I and many other pediatricians are very worried about what this would mean, our vulnerability to an outbreak of disease.
And in fact, we saw that happen.
In 2010, 10 infants died of pertussis.
Hundreds were hospitalized.
I think when you talk to those parents, they would tell you it’s a very serious disease.
And in fact, when researchers looked at it, they noted that the outbreaks mainly happened in communities where you had higher rates of personal-belief exemption.
-There was a map that I saw where it had the areas of vaccine-preventable disease outbreaks, and it was enough of a correlation for me.
Feel like this makes a lot of sense when we have those hard numbers and then we can look at maps like this.
This makes sense.
-It was right around the time when I had my first child, and I was very aware of his vulnerability to diseases like measles.
And I started looking at the preschools in the area and discovered that a number of them had children with personal-belief exemptions to vaccines.
And this is the heart of one of the most educated communities in the country.
You know, we’re a stone’s throw from Stanford University, and you think of these people as being science-minded.
And it just blew my mind how many schools had kids who weren’t vaccinated because their parents didn’t want them to be.
-My name is Dr. Richard Pan.
I’m a pediatrician and a father, as well as a state senator.
And I’ve worked throughout my life to keep children and families safe and healthy.
My office and many of my colleagues were being called by parents who said, “You need to do something about this,” right?
“I have a baby too young to get vaccinated.
I’m afraid to take them outside.
I’m afraid to take them shopping.”
And so that’s when I and Senator Ben Allen authored SB277 to abolish the nonmedical exemption, and then SB276 was to ensure we protect children who genuinely needed a medical exemption.
The parents came together and organized into a group called Vaccinate California.
And so Vaccinate California was actually the sponsor of SB277.
So it was parents who said, “Enough is enough.
Do something about this.
We want this problem fixed.”
-I was fighting for SB277 not to pass because it should be a personal choice.
There is no way everyone’s gonna fit into one category.
This is not a cookie — Health is not cookie cutter, and the injustice just burned a fire in me.
And the one thing I can say for sure is that vaccines do not make us healthy.
So I strongly oppose this bill.
-I oppose this bill.
-I oppose this bill.
-Concerned parents packed the hearing room at the state capital on Wednesday, speaking out against Senator Pan’s vaccination legislation.
-It holds my children’s education hostage in exchange for a coerced medical procedure.
-There were three hearings, each of which was an opportunity for us to make our case.
-I’m a mom of a toddler in California.
To protect my baby from preventable disease before he can be vaccinated, I need everyone in my community to vaccinate their own families.
-And also for people who oppose the bill to derail it.
-I’m a grandmother of four and a mother of three with a vaccine-injured grandson, and I strongly oppose this bill.
-Thank you.
-Can you imagine being in a room full of 3,000 mama bears who think that somebody is pointing a loaded weapon at their child?
-Why are we here?!
-Our children!
-What do we stand for?!
-Freedom!
- We shall overcome -They sang songs through the halls of the legislature.
They stood on chairs during committee hearings.
They lined up by the hundreds to protest against the bill.
[ Chanting “Kill the bill” ] -It is unfortunate that those who are opposed have chosen to resort to bullying and intimidation.
I think it actually reflects the fact that they don’t have facts on their side.
They can threaten.
They can engage in theatrics.
We saw what happened in this last legislative session when they were pounding on walls and screaming in hearing rooms, throwing blood onto the floor of the legislatures.
-Hundreds of anti-vaccine protesters swarmed the Capitol again.
Then things took a turn for the bizarre.
[ Indistinct yelling ] While the Senate was in session, protesters gathered in the gallery above and one of them threw a cup of red liquid on to several senators.
She claimed it was her menstrual blood.
She screamed, “This is for the dead babies.”
-It caused the evacuation of the Senate.
It became a crime scene.
There was tape everywhere.
Lawmakers went home to go take a shower.
And it cost the Senate thousands and thousands of dollars because it required forensic cleanup.
-The fact that I was physically attacked on the street… -Yeah.
I pushed you.
I pushed you.
-…certainly is a sign of both the desperation… -Adios.
-…but also the hollowness of the anti-vaccine movement.
-And then with days to spare, there were reports the first partner, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, was sympathetic to the anxieties that some of these moms and families felt.
And that threw everything for a loop, because with just a couple of days to go, it had to get approval from all lawmakers before Newsom would sign it.
-I think that in those long, hot days of having people who opposed the bill sitting outside his office for day after day, he was in a really tight spot.
The politics and policy were both screaming at him to sign the bill.
Op-ed after op-ed saying he didn’t want to be known as Governor Measles.
-And more breaking news now.
Governor Newsom has signed that controversial vaccine bill that sparked protests at the Capitol.
-Ayes, 24, noes, 10.
The measure passes.
-It was really under a civil rights stance.
-Thank you, everybody.
-Your child has the right to live in a community that is safe from infectious disease.
And that’s how those legal challenges were won, that you don’t have the right as a parent to put your child at risk and the public at risk.
And there’s public-health policy to guide us on this.
And that’s how those states got to that point.
-It was really, really, really disappointing and really difficult because we had such high hopes.
And to see, you know, each and every doorway closed, I felt powerless.
I really thought that people that thought like me, as wonderful as they were, I just felt as a group, we were not gonna be able to make a difference.
-Every child has a right to be safe at school.
That includes children who cannot be vaccinated.
If you choose not to vaccinate, you can still get home-school.
You can get independent study through the public school district.
Your child will still have an opportunity to get educated and there’s no fine.
There’s no jail time, there’s no penalty.
-Anti-vaccination advocates often like to use that sort of language.
“It’s a woman’s choice.
My body, my choice.”
But in the end, obviously, that’s not the same thing.
An individual’s right to choose how they live their life isn’t the same as whether you can opt out of a social good that saves elderly people and saves babies and is good for all of us, and that we’ve decided, as a country, that we value.
-If my decision to not vaccinate my child had no impact on the other children and the other people in my community, then it would be your right.
But it’s precisely because of the connectivity of lifeforms that are making the decisions for the good of the greater community.
Ask yourself the question.
Do I want to put other people’s kids in danger?
-I don’t think you should be allowed to put your child in harm’s way.
I don’t think that should be your right.
I don’t think it’s your inalienable right as a U.S. citizen to allow your child to catch and transmit a potentially fatal infection.
And I think the thing that’s so sad about all this is the only reason that immunization rates now are increasing is because we’ve let it come back, because children had to suffer.
And it’s invariably children who suffer our ignorance, and it’s unconscionable.
-If the parent makes a bad decision that will kill the child because they don’t get vaccinated, then government has a role to step in because somebody’s got to protect the child’s best interest.
Parents have decision making, but it’s not unlimited.
I can’t practice a religion that says I’m gonna beat my child every day.
It’s child abuse.
I can’t take my kid and not put them in a child-safety seat.
Kids have a right to live.
Kids have a right not to be made sick.
And governments have to look out for them when parents are making bad choices.
-Parents who are concerned about vaccinating their kids, they’re not bad parents.
It’s not that they don’t love their kids and don’t care about their kids, but they’re colored, as we all are, by their own experience.
Probably few of those people know somebody who died of measles or was left deaf or blind from bacterial meningitis.
And so in the era of vaccines, we’re a victim of our own success.
-Ready?
-Mm-hmm.
- I have confidence in sunshine I have confidence in rain You have to back up.
-I remember it was a Tuesday in 2012.
She was a freshman in college.
She called and said that a friend of hers had taken her to the emergency room because she had thrown up, she said, seven times.
“I threw up seven times, and they were worried that I was dehydrated.
And so they put me on an I.V.”
When I got there, I said, “Where does it hurt?”
And she just kind of screamed, “Everywhere!”
And after that, it was sort of like the worst hell you can imagine.
Three weeks.
Not one day, not two days, not three days.
21 days of just torture.
Until finally she passed away.
[ Both laughing ] It’s not only losing your child, but it’s in kind of the most horrific way you can imagine.
One of the hard things for me was that… she — since she grew late, she didn’t get that much time to be that beautiful woman.
-Very pretty.
-She got probably, like, a year or two and — and then, you know, she got sick and died.
-There is a line from an historian that goes something like, “The history of drug development is built on tombstones.”
That is true.
-There is a price for knowledge.
When we say that a vaccine is effective, there is a price for that.
And there’s probably no better example of that than the polio story.
When Jonas Salk made his polio vaccine, there was going to be a big so-called phase-3 trial.
420,000 children were gonna get his vaccine.
200,000 children were gonna get placebo.
And so the trial was completed and it was found to be remarkably safe and effective.
And Thomas Francis stood up on the podium and had said three words — safe, potent, and effective.
[ Applause ] He knew it was effective because 16 children died from polio all in the placebo group.
He knew it was effective because 36 children were permanently paralyzed in the placebo group.
That broke Jonas Salk’s heart.
He couldn’t conscience giving 200,000 children salt water in the midst of what he knew was a yearly polio epidemic.
So it’s those gentle heroes that we left behind that were never acknowledged because we were so busy celebrating that vaccine that we forgot exactly how we knew that it was effective.
-Polio was a horrific pandemic for children.
We have COVID, and it’s a horrific pandemic for adults.
COVID appeared just at the time when there was a significant shift in anti-vaccination propaganda, personal choice, personal self-determination.
So while the science was there to help us, our values prevented us from using it as fast as we could have.
And it was that shift that led us to have hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths.
-The new push to get more Americans vaccinated as the U.S. is moving in the wrong direction.
-We have a storm coming.
I would call it a hurricane.
-We’re already seeing a blue state/red state divide.
-No one should be forced to take a vaccine against their will.
-Far-right politics is king here.
Science the villain.
-Why should I trust science?
Does that mean I’m not trusting God?
-This Delta variant, we’re seeing skyrocketing cases of children sicker than they ever have been.
-One sick child needs to die before another sick child gets an ICU bed.
Think about that.
This is America.
-Polio’s impact was known, predictable, and terrifying.
And with COVID, there’s so many extra overlays of the politics and the economics that I don’t know.
It’s a weirder time.
Back then, in the ’50s, we prized science.
We were trying to get in space and holding our scientists up as role models.
And here the political and conspiracy theorists are now just trying to attack science.
-One of the things that we’re seeing in a time when we desperately need a large mobilization around something like a vaccine is that there is no single source of authority that can pull people together.
And so not only do we have to marshal our scientific resources, but we have to start laying the groundwork so that when these things do emerge, people will actually believe in them.
-You need to meet the people where they are.
Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to go to your kid’s college graduation or to have that family reunion or for the grandparents to see the grandchildren?
And if you get the vaccine, guess what?
You’re protected and they’re protected.
-We’re all in this together.
The planet Earth, the big ship that we ride, carries us all on a journey in which we are interdependent.
In this time of COVID-19, these controversies, like vaccines, can be helped by a strong drive to seek first, to understand, to try and understand, try and engage as people.
-We’ve seen with the coronavirus that it was across our entire nation in less than a month.
The world is small, and so if we were to stop vaccinating, we would have major outbreaks within a month here in the U.S. -Here we go.
I do not want to be at the bedside of parents with something that they could have prevented.
I don’t want them to think for a nanosecond that this risk is worth taking.
Perfect.
I immunize my kids without any hesitation.
All of my colleagues have done the same.
-Here it comes.
Whoo!
I value objectivity, and I think that if you’re presented with different evidence that you should change your mind.
That if in our conversation you figure out that what you have been teaching or what you believe is wrong, that you’re willing to accept the evidence.
-You never know what’s gonna flip someone’s switch.
You never know what it is.
For us, it was dramatic.
It was dramatic.
When you get wrong information and then you have to change, you just have to own up to it.
When you know better, you do better.
-Anybody who’s alive today has been able to witness the enormous impact that vaccines have made.
But I think that because of that impact, we become willing to ignore that effect.
And if we let our guard down, these vaccine-preventable diseases can certainly come roaring back.
-Public-health crises, like COVID, I’ve learned, and I think we all should learn are really as much about ethics as they are about science.
You can have all the science you want.
If people don’t buy the underlying ethics framework, the underlying values framework to achieve community health, then we have a problem because there will be others.
More will come.
Public health needs pulling together needs community, needs some sense that you’re gonna watch out for each other to make it happen.
[ Child laughing, waves lapping ] [ Traffic passing by ]