Polio's big comeback

Public health is in serious trouble

Before we begin: I had a wonderful time chatting with fellow Jersey native, Matt Bernstein, about my favorite topic: conspirituality on his podcast, A Bit Fruity. It’s been especially interesting reading all the wonderful feedback in the comments, as Matt focuses on beauty influencers, which is not our usual territory. But the pipeline is the same. Enjoy it, and enjoy the holiday weekend if you’re in the States. I’ll be taking Monday off to be up in the mountains and in the lakes, so I’ll see you hear next Friday.

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Sure, the following is engagement bait, but it represents something very troubling. I don’t doubt this person’s sincerity, nor their desire, consciously or not, to monetize misinformation.

Thankfully, most comments reject this “functional” holistic practitioner’s argument. Yet it fits perfectly into the conspirituality framework. Clicking through to her profile, I discover she’s a nurse practitioner who sells a ton of products, including:

• parasite cleanses

• doTerra essential oils

• "chocolate fat burning supplements"

• "pure water"

• "non-toxic" facial cleanser

• ion-based "foot detox" • pet supplements

• "non-radiation breast cancer screenings" on her downline

Unqualified coaches marketing unproven products is nothing new. But it always leads back to one question that we’ve been asking on Conspirituality for four-and-a-half years now: What harm does this really do?

A new report from the Annenberg Public Policy Center makes that clear.

The title alone says it all: More in U.S. Accept Covid-19 Vaccine Misinformation, and Willingness to Vaccinate Has Declined

This comes during one of the worst Covid surges we’ve endured since the initial wave—and just as updated Covid vaccines are rolling out.

The data compiled by Annenberg is disturbing:

• 28% of American adults incorrectly believe that the Covid-19 vaccines have been responsible for thousands of deaths

• 22% believe the false idea that it is safer to get Covid-19 than to the vaccine

• 15% incorrectly believe that the Covid-19 vaccine changes people’s DNA

All of these numbers are up from the last polling in 2021, some by a lot: believers in the DNA-changing myth was just 8% then.

Of note: far more people have far less faith in Covid vaccines than in other vaccines. MMR, shingles, flu, and pneumonia vaccines all scored much higher in terms of belief of efficacy and safety. This is in large part due to anti-vaxxers focusing on Covid vaccines during the pandemic, even though they’ve been shown to be both safe and efficacious in numerous large-scale studies.

Some anti-vaxxers claim that they’re not against all vaccines, just Covid. Inevitably, this has damaging downstream effects. When you dig a bit deeper, you find out it’s usually all vaccines. And that is influencing others: uptake of both flu and RSV vaccines are down from just two years ago. Measles vaccine rates are dropping year after year. Polio is making a comeback.

Just about every statistic in the Annenberg data moved in the wrong direction in regards to either understanding or getting a range of vaccines. The only slight ray of hope: knowledge of which vaccines to get (and not get) while pregnant increased over the last year.

A glimmer of hope in an otherwise frightening report.

What’s going on at Stanford?

The anti-vax movement was given steroids with Covid-19. It’s not like they didn’t exist prior to this pandemic. Anti-vaxxers protested Edward Jenner’s work as he was developing the very first vaccines. I wrote about the increasing number of vaccine exemptions in 2017. They’ve always been around.

But their presence, and prominence, is increasing. A disheartening symposium at Stanford exemplifies this trend. A group of anti-vaxxers, led by Great Barrington Declaration co-author, Jay Bhattacharya, will be staging Pandemic Policy: Planning the Future, Assessing the Past in October.

This event, which features known anti-vaxxers on every panel, is being given further legitimacy by the appearance of Stanford president, Jonathan Levin, who will be offering opening remarks.

Unlike previous efforts sponsored by Stanford’s chapter of the conservative think tank, The Hoover Institution, this symposium is being put on by Stanford School of Medicine and Freeman Spogli Institute.

Bhattacharya is trying to mainstream the event by baiting Dr Peter Hotez on Twitter, which is giving real creationism energy. (Creationists intentionally try to position their viewpoint as mainstream by getting biologists and science professionals to “debate” them, as in the Bill Nye / Ken Ham 2014 debate.) So far, Hotez has rightly ignored him (as he did when RFK Jr offered to debate him on Joe Rogan). This has resulted in right-wing stans charging cowardice, which is irrelevant and untrue.

The symposium is presented as a sound discussion on future public health protocols. The LA Times has a different opinion:

No one can doubt that a sober examination of the policies of the recent past with an eye toward doing better in the next pandemic is warranted. This symposium is nothing like that. Most of its participants have been associated with discredited approaches to the COVID pandemic, including minimizing its severity and calling for widespread infection to achieve herd immunity. Some have been sources of rank misinformation or disinformation. Advocates of scientifically validated policies are all but absent.

In truth, Bhattacharya doesn’t need Hotez’s appearance in order to reach a broader audience. Vaccine hesitancy and outright denialism are both increasing, as shown in the report above.

Humans, generally more reactive than proactive as a species, are driving straight into tragedy by refusing, denying, and demonizing one of the most important public health technologies ever invented.

Anti-vaxxers do get the vibe right: Americans are discouraged by the rampant greed of pharmaceutical and insurance companies in our for-profit healthcare system.

But they get the data completely wrong. Vibes only carry you so far. At some point, data makes itself so, so apparent.

And we’ll all pay the price on that day.

For more on the anti-vax credentials of symposium speakers, Allison Neitzel covers them here. You can sign a petition to ask him to request that Stanford cancel this symposium in the name of public health here.