Anti-vaxxers in SoCal

On recent appearances on The Daily Show, NPR, & BBC

The anti-vax movement has troubled me for many years. While the Conspirituality podcast covers a range of issues in the wellness-far right crossover, the most apparent meeting point occurs in anti-vax sentiments.

I’m excited to have received opportunities to speak to a number of media outlets on this topic, most notably an appearance on The Daily Show earlier this week. As a huge Jordan Klepper fan, it was an honor to spend time with Jordan and his team.

Over Thanksgiving weekend, I chatted with the BBC and NPR about this topic as well. They were inspired by an extensive piece in The Guardian in which I had the chance to offer a number of points on conspirituality.

Most frustrating about this phenomenon is the fact that this fervor predominantly extends from the disbarred physician, Andrew Wakefield, who falsified data in a retracted study that claimed the MMR vaccine causes autism. Wakefield took out patents on his own vaccines at the same time that he was trying to discredit those in circulation. The grift didn’t stop there, as I wrote about last September:

The actual data is mind-boggling. The 12 children in the original study were handpicked, which is antithetical to clinical research. Wakefield falsified the results from pediatricians. He used microscopic-level stains; a more reliable molecular method found nothing. The parents of study subjects, some with their own agendas (such as litigation), kept changing the timeline of their child’s conditions—some children showed symptoms of autism before the MMR vaccine was given while others claimed symptoms started hours after injection when previous reports state that it was months. While Wakefield was raging against the vaccine, he filed for two patents on single measles shots.

While Wakefield initially operated pre-social media, he enjoys the monetization of anti-vax sentiments that these platforms now offer. As I covered last July, social media has catalyzed vaccination fear-mongering from a cottage industry into a public health threat:

This longstanding problem transcends social media. One 2010 study found that spending 5-10 minutes on an anti-vax website is likely to sway your opinion on vaccines—there are two sides to the story—while the opposite does not occur. Anti-vaxxers dig their heels in when confronted with opposing information.

And then, of course, my initial reporting on “Plandemic,” published the day after the pseudoscience propaganda film was released. According to the filmmaker’s email list, “Plandemic 3” is dropping in time for the holidays—the grift that keeps on grifting.

This morning, I took a studio cycling class. Everyone was masked; Equinox requires proof of vaccination to attend (and they really check). After class, the five people in the room started comparing after-effect stories from getting a booster shot.

It felt…normal.

And sane.

This tiny anecdote can’t compare to the weight of the larger issue, which transcends vaccines and drives to the heart of collective public health. These issues aren’t going away anytime soon, and in many ways, I expect them to grow worse.

And so we must continue to fight disinformation at every turn.