S3E2 - The Immunity (Antivax)

0:01 Chris: Okay, start recording now. Kayla: I am. You can't be talking like that, though. Chris: Like what? Kayla: The breathing heavy. Chris: Why not? Kayla: Cause that's not how you're gonna be talking on the show. Chris: No, this is perfect. Kayla: No, it's not. Chris: No, this is the whole. This is where the cold open will go. It'll be like, oh, I can finally breathe easy. Kayla: This is a sound test. Chris: Oh, you don't think I'm gonna use this for the show? Anyway, we should probably get started with the episode today, since it's gonna be a longy. Kayla: So what I'm gonna do for this episode. Okay, I'm not gonna talk. Chris: You probably shouldn't talk at all because we have so much to cover. Kayla: That's what I'm saying. I'm just here to listen.

0:42 Chris: We still do have to do the banter. We still have to do banter. Kayla: I don't know if I got it in me. Chris: Although I have a couple things. So I just wanna say that at the time of publishing, Kayla and I will both have. Actually, wait. I will have my second dose of Pfizer, and you will be on your way to getting the second dose. Kayla: I'll be driving. Driving to it. Chris: To it. So that's exciting. Kayla: It's very exciting. I can't wait to very topical. Be slightly less afraid of the world that I currently live in. Chris: Yeah, it'll be nice to, like, do things and touch people. Kayla: Not to. Again, not random people. Chris: I mean, just. Yes. Kayla: No, don't touch the random people. Not to make it seem like once you get your vaccine, we're out of the woods and the pandemic's over. As we learned a lot about on the previous episode, that is not the case. But I will be glad to be able to hug my other vaccinated friends in a controlled setting and not be afraid that I have just killed them with my Covid germs.

1:37 Chris: Yeah. And by controlled setting, you mean we're all gonna wear plastic bags, and by hug, you mean wave from a distance. Kayla: I'm just gonna be in a full hazmat suit for the rest of my life. Chris: No, it's nice to at least see the end of the tunnel. The light. The light at the end of the tunnel is in view. Did I get that metaphor right? Kayla: Jesus Christ. Chris: Anyway, it's exciting. And of course, there's lots of vaccine stuff in the news. Some of the stuff we'll talk about a little bit. Actually, in this episode, I did want to mention just a couple announcements about our Patreon. I mentioned this on the Patreon itself, if you are a subscriber. But we are. We're going to refund the last two months because we forgot to not charge for it. Dr Gorski: Sorry. Chris: So that's coming down the pipe. But we are going to start charging again with May 1 since quarantine is, like, there's no real answer for when it's over.

2:25 Kayla: So we just. It's been over a year kind of over. Chris: So, yeah, it's been over a year. Kayla: And we're vaccinated. Chris: We're vaccinated. So therefore, yeah, fuck everyone else, and we're gonna start charging on our Patreon again for the first time in a year and a couple months. And also, like, you know, we are. Kayla: Also going to be improving the content that appears on the Patreon, which we. Chris: Already did so far. We are like, if you haven't, well, I guess you need to be a patron. But we did some pretty good, I think some pretty good content. Bonus content. For our first episode where we talked all about what we mean when we say trust network. It's more of us yapping.

3:05 Kayla: If you want to hear more, you. Chris: Just want to hear us yap at each other about, like, you know what I think about things. Kayla: I'm sure so many people just can't wait to get their hands on that content. Chris: And then Kayla says, mmm, yes. I also think this thing, it's really good, you guys. Kayla: I mean, that's the point of a podcast. Chris: It's worth giving us money for sure. Kayla: If you like the show, you'll like the Patreon. So head on over to the cult or just weird Patreon and just get more of the same. Chris: And who knows? There might be more different stuff coming down the pipe. Actually, I put out a poll there, so if you do subscribe to our Patreon, you can vote in the poll and help guide what things we put there in the first place. Like I said, lots of content today. So any other business?

3:48 Kayla: We're gonna put our nudes there. Chris: Like noodles. Kayla: Yeah. Gonna leak our nudes. Chris: I don't think it's leaking if you post them on purpose. Kayla: Yeah, I guess that's true. Chris: Any other business? Kayla: No, I don't think so. Chris: I'm glad that you thought about that. Kayla: Well, I always think if you ask me a question, I want to actually think about it. Chris: That's good. Kayla: If I had, you know, if I were a better podcaster and if I did have business, I would have written it down. But I am not a better podcaster. Chris: No, you're actually terrible. Kayla: Kept it in my head going, eh, I'll remember it. So if I did that, I don't remember it. Chris: Okay. All right, well, are you feeling a little chilly right now? I mean, should I be a little cold, even?

4:34 Kayla: I don't know what you're saying. And no, I'm wearing a sweatshirt, and it's hot, and we have the fan off, so let me. Chris: Cause this is where we're gonna do the cold open. Right?

5:18 Kayla: You know how long we've been recording already? Chris: What, like, 75 minutes? Kayla: Seven minutes. Chris: Okay. All right. Let's go, let's go. Chip chop, chip chop. Let's go. Before we get started, wait, we haven't. Kayla: Said anything about what we are and what this show is. Chris: Well, we're culture. Just weird. I'm Chris and you're Kayla. Kayla: There we go. I just feel like you gotta get that ident in there. It's like, every Netflix show starts with that boom. Chris: Well, then we should have done that, like, right at the beginning, and we should make, like, a little chime boom culture just weird. Kayla: That's not a chime. That's a jingle. Chris: That's a chime. A chime is like, the NBC chime is definitely the same thing as bubom boom, boom. It's the exact same concept, for sure. Trust me. I listened to another podcast about it. 99% invisible had an episode. Anyway, I do want to do give a little bit of a warning today, because due to the nature of the topic and it's being highly related to choices and situations that parents face, there will be a couple points in the episode that we will be talking or at least mentioning an experience that Kayla and I had recently that was not very fun. So your trigger warning is here.

6:25 Kayla: I mean, you should say what the trigger warning is. Chris: I am. I was about to. Kayla: Sorry about that. You're saying, like us, trigger warning? That something bad is talked about. Chris: A little pause so that people can. But. Okay, I'm gonna leave all of that in the topic of our recent premature birth and loss of our son. Arthur will come up during this episode a couple times. All right. Also, before we get started, there wasn't really a logical place to put this anywhere in the rest of the episode, and I think it probably belongs up front. But I do want to say that if you are someone listening to this and you are vaccine hesitant yourself for any reason, maybe you've read some stuff that gave you pause, or maybe you're afraid of needles, or maybe you don't trust the medical establishment or drug companies. Or maybe you've read headlines that understandably gave you anxiety. Or maybe it's a combination of some or all of these things.

7:25 Chris: First of all, congrats for finding us, and thank you for listening. And I apologize in advance if any of today's show comes off as attacking or belittling or anything like that. It's not my intent, and I hope it doesn't happen. I personally would love it if you gave this full episode a listen. And if you don't gain any new insight by the end, then that's totally on us, not on you. And I'll tease this up front. I went down a rabbit hole in my research that really did help me better understand the perspective of vaccine hesitant folks. Fair warning, though, if you are one of those folks, I did come out on the other side of that rabbit hole somewhat more convinced of vaccine safety.

8:06 Chris: I just wanted to disclaim that up front that I hope if you're vaccine hesitant, this episode can be for you, too. Okay, Kayla, after our last show, do you know everything there is to know about infectious disease, vaccines, and herd immunity? Kayla: You better say yes. Chris: Cause I'm gonna be very disappointed. Kayla: Oh, did you see the thing from the Texas governor being like, I don't know what herd immunity is, but no, I don't care. I don't know what her. I don't know what it is, but I think we have it. Chris: Okay. I respect the, like, epistemology. Like, the honesty up front about, like, I don't know what it is. I was gonna be like, that's fine. But then to say I think we have it is just the ultimate.

8:51 Kayla: And I could be mischaracterizing what he said, but that is the way I readdeze. Whatever fucking headline. Chris: Well, he's absolutely right that he doesn't know what her immunity is. Kayla: I will say that I think I have a better understanding. I don't say I know everything, but I definitely have a better understanding of these things than I did before the previous episode. Chris: Good, good. If you had said, no, I don't have a full understanding, I would have total. That would have been fine. Kayla: I think it would be a lie for anyone to say that. Chris: Yeah, well, exactly. We only skim the surface, and it's a complex topic, but it's fun to talk about science stuff. And it gave us a baseline to talk about this week's topic, which, if you listened to last episode, if you didn't, you definitely should go. Listen. Go away. Go away.

9:31 Kayla: Get out of here. Chris: Get out of here. Just leave Earth. But if you did listen to it, you know, the topic today is anti vax. So let's just do a really quick recap of the previous episode, though. First of all, we talked a little bit about your immune system. It's much better at fighting diseases that it has experience with. Vaccines. Give your immune system that sweet XP without having the disease. XP without hitting your HP, baby. Kayla: I do have a better understanding of precisely how to be angry at people on the Internet. Chris: Oh, no, you don't. Not yet. Kayla: Who say, who evoke the natural immune system, natural immunity thing? I have a better. I have a more precise way to be angry at that.

10:16 Chris: Oh, good. I'm happy to be of service. Kayla: Yeah. Thank you. Chris: We also learned about smallpox and how it is the fucking worst. Your best bet for prevention before vaccines was to purposely get infected with a lesser form of it and hope for the best. And this is called variolation. We talked about that a little bit. Kayla: Do you want to explain how the process actually looks a lot different than the way we. Chris: No. Go to our instagram. Kayla: Oh, you posted it on Instagram. Yeah, I didn't see it. Chris: Did you see the thing where it was like the. Kayla: No, you showed that. You showed that to me. Chris: Yeah, yeah, I posted that to Instagram. Go check it out. Kayla: Oh, my God. Chris: Yeah, it's. It looks weird. Kayla: It's a lot. So when they blow the scabby dust into your nose, it's a lot different than how I perceived it.

10:56 Chris: I know. I was. I was picturing it, like somebody just like. Kayla: Like a mystical old man. Dr Gorski: Yeah. Chris: Going with, like, pixie dust, but instead it's like this long tube and there's, like, this little kid who doesn't look very happy. Go check out Instagram. Okay. Call to just weirdos on Instagram. So anyway, the first vaccine was developed to thwart smallpox. It was extremely effective, and the overall technique was copied many times. By the way, quick aside here, speaking of Instagram, I posted that picture of the value tales for Louis Pasteur. Kayla: Yes. Chris: And remember how we talked about in the bonus content a little bit where we talked about the trust network? And I was like, I wonder where my, like, er, trust network is. I wonder where my.

11:39 Kayla: Is it value tales? Chris: I think so. Like, wow. Especially for things like certain things like vaccines and, like, science in particular, because, like, the ones that really stick out to me, like, two of the ones that really stick out are Louis Pasteur and Marie Curie. And I just feel like that has some effect on my, like, future love for that. I don't know. Kayla: It's really interesting because I did not grow up with value tales, as far as I remember, but I think my, er, trust network was the big book of knowledge. Chris: Oh, I remember you telling. Yeah, that's right. Kayla: It's like a really, like a kid's encyclopedia and just full of fun facts and like cool science stuff. And I remember just like, that was my bible as a seven year old.

12:22 Chris: I feel like I should go back and read those now. All right. We also talked a bit about how science fucking dunked on smallpox and now it's toast. And I have another aside. Actually, I read a little bit. Kayla: I love the asides. Chris: The asides. It's all about asides. That's what podcasts are. I do love to long string of asides. Kayla: I love to go to a restaurant and just order a bunch of asides. Chris: Oh, my God. Kayla: Like Mac and cheese and cornbread and mashed potatoes to bungie, besides. Chris: All right, props for that. I like that one. Kayla: I learned it from watching you. Chris: But apparently there's like a whole debate out there about whether or not to destroy the last remaining lab samples of smallpox.

13:03 Kayla: Oh, I want to have that argument. Chris: Fascinating. That's such a good idea. I don't know the answer. Yeah, because there's very good arguments on either side. There's like, on the destroy side, it's. I mean, that's a relatively easy one case to make, right? It's like, we should probably not have this anymore. Like, it's. If it gets out, that's real bad. But then on the other side, it's like, well, we still need it to study. And then also there's like an element of, like, mutually assured destruction, because we're not sure, like, which national adversaries still have samples of it. Kayla: I just. Yeah, I feel like without having waded into this debate at all, I feel like I'm leaning towards the don't destroy side. Chris: I think I am, too. Kayla: And not even for the adversary thing, that's a very compelling argument, but more for studying the. Studying and just the. As damaging as it is, it's a very important piece of our human history.

13:52 Chris: Oh, I hadn't thought about that. That's interesting. Kayla: And it just feels like even though it's something that we want. No, it's something that we want to eradicate. We don't necessarily know right now if we may or may not need to or want to look at it in the future. Chris: Yeah. Like, what if Martians invade and then we have to release it because. Kayla: No, no. Chris: They got the flu. Kayla: It's just cups of water. Chris: That wasn't martian. Kayla: It's just cups of water, man. Chris: All right, enough asides, enough Mac and cheese. Kayla: Everybody go watch signs. Chris: Back to the point. Don't. It's not that good. All right, that's point. Kayla: Debate over whether or not signs is good is our version of whether or not we should destroy smallpox. Chris: Right, exactly. So another point we made was that vaccines today are extremely effective and extremely safe. And it's going to be important later to remember that vaccines aren't just the biologically active ingredient. Sometimes they include things like preservatives to lengthen their shelf life and to help with distribution, and something called adjuvants, which are not biologically active ingredients, but rather increase a vaccine's effectiveness for reasons that are only partially clear to us. And the primary adjuvant that is used today and has been used for a long time is aluminum.

15:09 Kayla: Aluminium. Chris: Aluminium. For our. For our british listeners, we talked a bunch about herd immunity, and this is actually where I have to issue our first. And as far as I'm aware, only correction. Kayla: Don't say that. Chris: As far as I'm aware. As far as I'm currently aware. I'm sure we'll get corrected on something else, but this is an actual correction. So last episode, we defined herd immunity as what is the percentage of population needed to be immune to prevent future outbreaks and to squash existing pandemics. So that's all correct, except for that very last part, as I learned between last episode and this one. So all the math formula that I told you is still correct, and it's still correct that it's that threshold at which you prevent future outbreaks, but that percentage actually needs to be higher to squash an existing pandemic. So I wasn't right about. That's the threshold at which both of those things happen. It's the threshold at which we prevent future pandemic. Future outbreaks.

16:06 Chris: But it's not necessarily the threshold at which an existing pandemic is squashed, which. Kayla: Is why we can't just get our vaccines and go willy nilly running about the streets. Chris: It's part of it. Yeah, but if we get to. I don't know what the percentage is. And again, this is why it's. Listen to your public health official for your community. Listen to them for whatever that percentage is like, they will know. And then that's sort of what. Kayla: Yeah, definitely don't listen to us, especially because we're in the states like our. Chris: Yeah, we're morons. Kayla: No, not even that. We're morons. We are morons. But I just mean our vaccine distribution is not, it's not necessarily how everybody else in the world or every other country is able to. Vaccines are being distributed at wildly varying rates. So don't listen to us, ever.

16:49 Chris: Yeah, just don't even listen. Just as we've said before on the show, just turn this off and don't ever listen to us again. Yeah, and actually, that's a good segue into just this other little point that we're going to talk about today as well. But herd immunity for a large population is actually a massive oversimplification. So herd immunity is extremely location oriented. So even if, say, for example, all of Minnesota is on average above the herd immunity threshold for a measles outbreak, if there's a smaller community within that dips below the threshold, outbreaks can and do happen within that community. Right. So we say herd immunity and we think about giant population, but actually it's like subpopulations matter a lot for this type of thing, especially the more insular that they are.

17:40 Chris: Finally, seemingly for no reason, we talked about human decision making and the prisoner's dilemma. Actually, I think we kind of said the reason last episode, and it's because one of the core insights about anti vax is that dichotomy between individual decisions and public health. It's not just about disinformation, and we will get to that as well. Okay, enough of what we talked about last time. Do you feel caught up? Kayla: Yes. Chris: Perfect. Great. So here's what we're going to talk about this time. Sources. Just kidding. Kayla: Oh, God. Chris: No, we don't have to remember because last time. Kayla: Oh, you're a genius. Chris: I went through all of them so I don't have to. Same now. Beautiful. Kayla: Yeah, good song, too. Chris: Thank you. I'll still copy them all in the show notes, so don't worry about that. So the first thing we're actually going to talk about is the history of the anti vaccination movement, or should I say movements plural. And we will get to what we mean by that. We're going to talk about the modern anti vaccination movement. We are going to talk about the Mirasol and aluminum. We're going to talk about herd immunity. I'm just going to start calling it heered immunity.

18:48 Kayla: It's easier to say for you. Chris: Yeah, we're going to talk about yered immunity again. Oh, my God, I'm doing it. We're going to talk about trust building and trust erosion, and we're going to talk about whether vaccine hesitancy could ever be rational and good. And also a familiar name will pop up. Then finally you're going to tell me if it's a cult or just a weird. Sound good? Kayla: Feels like a lot of responsibility. Chris: Yeah, well, it's, you know, similar. Yeah. If you get it wrong, you'll probably kill people. Just so you realize, you know, that's. Kayla: Excuse me, mister, let me issue a correction from last episode that definitely got entire populations destroyed. Yeah, okay. Chris: All right. So last episode, one of the very first things we said were doing for this topic is we wanted to understand why anti vax, why do anti vaccination movements and ideas existed? So that's going to be answered today, but I want to give you the sort of like the list version before we dive into those individual elements. First and foremost, anti vaxx is an extremely broad term that encompasses many people. Different motivations, different backgrounds, etcetera. As we mentioned last episode, some people don't get vaccinated because they actually just can't medically. Right. Such as people with allergies or that are immunocompromised. I wouldn't necessarily call them anti vaxxers, but they can't take vaccines.

20:06 Kayla: Right. Chris: What about someone who is scared of vaccines or just harbors doubts? Or someone who feels it's a liberty issue, or someone who is financially motivated. Kayla: What do you mean financially motivated also? Chris: Well, I mean, like, people that, like, we'll talk about a particular individual, but essentially like somebody who says they're anti vaccine, but it's actually because they are a chiropractor and their practice depends on nothing. Their practice depends on vaccines. Kayla: Oh, seemingly a chiropractor who's not just like, I'll fix your back. You mean a chiropractor that's like, I'll fix everything? Chris: Like a subluxation, like classical chiropractor, where. Kayla: My chiropractor can fix your cavities. Chris: Yeah, exactly. So anyway, the point is that there's just all sorts of people under that umbrella, and some are operating in good faith and some aren't. So we'll get to all of that. But I wanted to mention the fact that it's such a diverse and huge tent. First, another reason vaccine hesitancy exists is that, of course, people are bad at risk assessment. And it's much easier to justify to yourself a cure for something that is currently hurting you than it is to justify prevention for something that maybe might hurt you in the future.

21:16 Kayla: Right. Chris: So here's the best quote that I read about this phenomenon. Many stumble upon omission bias. They say we would rather not do something and have something bad happened. Then do something and have something bad happen. As explained by Alison Bootenheim, an associate professor of nursing and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing. Kayla: I. Chris: Do you want me to say that again? Kayla: Hardcore relate to that. It's like why you get paralyzed when you have to make a decision. Chris: Exactly. We would rather not do something and have something bad happen than do something and have something bad happen. Kayla: Because if it just happens to you, then it's like, oh, exactly. Chris: Whereas if it's something that I make it choice, then suddenly it's my fault.

21:58 Kayla: A lot of responsibility. And yet you're still going to make me decide whether or not this is a cult. Chris: Exactly. And something bad might happen. Kayla: Oh, God. Chris: Yeah. So there's another thing, of course, that comes up again and again. Actually, you already talked about a little bit, but it's the naturalism fallacy, which is the idea that something, quote unquote natural is inherently superior or more pure or capital g good than something that is not, that is artificial. Right. This is a very common fallacy across all aspects of life, but it kind of goes like double for medical and healthcare stuff. Another thing, and this isn't true for every anti vaxxer, but some have different core values on individual liberty versus prosocial behavior. Now, in my opinion, I think that this involves a bit of a misunderstanding of the liberty thing. Kind of feels a little bit like secondhand smoke to me, where what's, you know, your liberty's end, where mine begin type thing.

22:53 Chris: And, you know, so that's where I personally, I think that is a bit of a misunderstanding involved. But that's, you know, if the. If the question is why do anti vaxxers exist, then that's one of the things that motivates them. Kayla: Right? Chris: And then, of course, trust erosion. Enough said. I mean, like, seriously, though, like, we talked about trust erosion a lot in the QAnon series, and we will mention it a bunch here in this episode. So I don't really need to go into detail for that one right now. I don't think. Kayla: I think one of the most difficult things we face as humans is not having our trust ground down into a pulp. I think that being able to maintain.

23:35 Chris: Now, I want to do bonus content about that sentence. Kayla: Being able to maintain trust in the face of the erosion of trust. It's like there's a lot of faith involved in that, and it's a very difficult thing for humans to do, and I'd argue, very important thing for humans to do. Chris: That's why it's important to make decisions and behave in ways that don't erode that for other people as well. Kayla: Right. Chris: All right. Then there's something called the free Rider or freeloader problem, which I will get to later in this episode, but I do think it's a big factor. And finally, this is probably not a comprehensive list. I'm not the be all and end all on this. This is just the list that I came up with for things that I think motivate people or motivate ideas behind anti vax. So, anyway, the final thing on my list is that fear is powerful and it makes people irrational and especially fear for your children. Yeah. Okay, I have another list for you before we hear from a friend of ours. And that's a list of vaccine myths. Now, there are, again, there's, like, other lists out there. You can go search vaccine myths, and there's, like a bunch of.

24:47 Kayla: If we have eroded your trust, go. Chris: If you've eroded your trust, which we should, because we're garbage, then go elsewhere and seek this information. But otherwise, listen to me right now. I'm going to tell you the list that I think are some of the more common vaccine myths. First one we talked about last episode, again, vaccines can give you the disease. They cannot. This is debunked because no vaccine contains live disease organism for the thing that they're vaccinating against. So it's not possible for them to give you that disease. The next one is that, oh, infant immune systems can't handle so many vaccines at the same time. Now, I sort of, like, get the logic behind this one, you know, because it's like, oh, man, they're just little babies. How can they handle, like, ten vaccines within two days or whatever?

25:34 Kayla: Right? Chris: Totally makes sense from, like, a, you know, layman's like, oh, well, yeah, common sense, right. But when you actually know the science of how that works is not how that works at all. Infants immune systems can handle way more than that in terms of, like, your immune system capacity is not just like, it's not like a gas tank. Like, it's. It's. It's actually quite large. And infants immune systems handle much more than the vaccines that they get on just a daily, ongoing basis from just being alive in the environment. Kayla: And babies are metal as hell. Chris: Yeah, babies are super metal. And then another vaccine myth is natural immunity is better than vaccine immunity. This is one we, like, bitched about a little bit last episode where I just said, like, I don't like the word. I want to call it just getting the disease. Because in my opinion, vaccines leverage your own natural immunity. So it's not really any different. But the point is, it's not better either. Right. So anti vaccine folks will say, oh, it's better to have natural meaning. It's better to get the disease, because then you get a more robust, well rounded, whatever they want to call it, immunity to the disease. And that's just plain not true.

26:43 Kayla: Also, you might die. Chris: Yeah. Even if it was true, it's not worth the risk. Kayla: I just. I don't know, man. I think I keep going back to this all the time. I think people need to be more afraid of dying. I really do. I do. Chris: But that's not it. So, as we'll talk about more, it's not just that they're not afraid of dying. It's that the things that they're weighing, the decisions that they're weighing are distorted in some ways, and in other ways are actually maybe not distorted, but are prone to things like prisoners dilemma type behavior. Kayla: Right. Chris: So another common myth is that our triumphs over disease in the last few centuries are caused by things other than vaccines. So, like, people like to cite, well, sanitation and hygiene is actually what got rid of all these diseases. And while sanitation and hygiene do have a lot to do with preventing disease, there's, like, very, like, you know, sanitation is a huge deal, right, in the 18 hundreds.

27:44 Kayla: Wash your hands. Chris: It's not the. It doesn't explain the eradication or the minimization of disease by vaccines at all. Kayla: Yeah. I mean, the pandemic we're currently living in, we can't just. We can't wash our hands out of it. We can't wipe our groceries out of it. It's. That's not how it works. Chris: Right. Airborne diseases in general is not, like, waterborne diseases. Yeah, maybe, but. Right. Another thing that is a common myth is that infection rates are low. So I don't need to get vaccines because, like, who has measles anyway? That's another misconception. You still need to get it, and we'll get to the reasons why. But again, myth. And then the final myth I have on my list here is that, well, vaccines cause. Fill in the blank. Now, the latest one is that vaccines cause autism. That's like the du jour of what vaccines cause in current day and has been for about 20 years. But there's been other things that have filled in that blank before.

28:43 Kayla: Okay. Chris: All right, Kayla, with all that being said, let's hear a bit from Doctor Gorski now. Kayla: Doctor Gorski, to get into the history. Chris: Of the anti vaccine movement, how were vaccines first developed and what were we doing to actually mitigate and treat disease outbreaks and pandemics before they existed? Dr Gorski: Well, I'm not really a historian, so, I mean, I suppose you know the story of Kaupak, how it was discovered that if you inoculated the skin, little needle holes or small cuts in the skin and inoculated it with pus from cowpox, it was noticed that the person would then be immune to smallpox. So because organisms that cause them are sufficiently similar. And, you know, that is like 300 years. When was that? 1700, roughly. See, again, I'm not a historian, but.

29:38 Chris: I know it's a really. We'll check all those numbers for the show. Dr Gorski: Interestingly, though, you know, the anti vaccine movement goes back almost that far. I mean, as soon as vaccines were invented, there was anti vaccine movement. In fact, in the 19th century, there was even groups explicitly were called anti vaccination groups. And of course, you know, back then, really, the only vaccine they had was a smallpox vaccine. But the opportunities to be anti vaccine were kind of limited, given how little there was in the way of any sort of vaccination. But, you know, it is. People seem to think that the anti vaccine movement is something new, but it's not. It's been around at least a couple hundred years. And in fact, a lot of the arguments are very similar, even from going back that far.

30:29 Chris: Right. Yeah, I think the sort of the common perception is that it all sort of got started with that Andrew Wakefield infamous, you know, retracted study and then. Dr Gorski: Which was 22 years, 23 years ago, because February 1998 was when that was published. Chris: Right, but you're saying that it's actually much older than that. Dr Gorski: And indeed, and I mean, some, you know, there are cartoons which you may have seen out there like that, portray people getting vaccinated with the cowpox to be protected from smallpox, like turning into cows, you know, I mean, there's. Which kind of goes. Which the direct descendant of that, I would say, is the anti vaccine claim that vaccines somehow alter your DNA.

31:16 Chris: Oh, yeah, that's. That's. We've been. Dr Gorski: And that's not a new one, and that is not a new one for the COVID vaccines that are based on Messenger RNA. I'm just gonna notice I wrote about claims years and years ago, about anti vaxxers claiming that vaccines somehow altered your DNA. Chris: Kayla, as Doctor Gorski mentioned, and as you probably assumed, anti vaccine movements have been with us exactly as long as vaccines have. And I mean, hell, if you really want to trace back, you can say that skepticism and opposition to scientific and technological progress itself is as old as the human race. But here's what I they hated that.

31:57 Kayla: Wheel when it first came out. Chris: But here's what I didn't really know before I did the research for this episode is that while we have always had anti vaccination movements, these movements have an incredible diversity of flavor. Their motivations, their philosophies, the people comprising them are all different, and there's all sorts of messy overlap all over the place. Kayla: Tell me it now. Chris: Absolutely. A lot of early anti vax had features that we would recognize in our own movements in 2021, but surprisingly, a lot of motivations were different. Before we get back to Doctor Gorski, I want to tell you a bit more about these early anti vax movements. Here is a quote from historyofvaccines.org that helps support what I am saying here. Jenner's ideas were novel for his time. As you recall, he's the guy that invented the smallpox vaccine, or is credited with it anyway. Jenner's ideas were novel for his time. However, they were met with immediate public criticism. The rationale for this criticism varied and included sanitary, religious, scientific, and political objections. For some parents, the smallpox vaccine itself induced fear and protest.

33:08 Chris: It included scoring on the flesh of a child's arm and inserting lymph from the blister of a person who had been vaccinated about a week earlier. Some objectors, including the local clergy, believe that the vaccine was, quote, un Christian because it came from animal. For other anti vaccinators, their discontent with the smallpox vaccine reflected their general distrust in medicine and in Jenner's ideas about disease spread. Suspicious of the vaccine's efficacy, some skeptics alleged that the smallpox resulted from decaying matter in the atmosphere. Lastly, many people objected to vaccination because they believed it violated their personal liberty, attention that worsened as the government developed mandatory vaccine policies. End quote.

33:49 Kayla: It totally makes sense to think about what life must have been like when vaccines were first coming out and someone's like, yeah, let me cut up your kid's arm and like, shove some cow pus in it. Germs in there. I don't think I'd be dealt with that either. Chris: And actually, to be fair, I don't have this in my script. But to be fair, early vaccine practice, because of how early it was compared to other medical practices around sanitation, and it was before we had things like modern sanitation and antimicrobial, we didn't even know. Again, germ theory was still a ways away. Kayla: Right. Chris: So actually, early vaccines, while they were way better than the alternative of maybe getting smallpox, you could actually be. There was a risk of infection.

34:32 Kayla: Right. Chris: And that was something that wasn't. It was later addressed with improvements to the smallpox vaccine, but early on, that was a risk. So the point of this whole quote, though, is just showing you that a, there was just a whole wide diversity of objections to vaccines. And you probably recognize at least a few of those because it's the same today. There's religious refusal, there's, you know, it's a liberty thing. There's suspicions of the efficacy. There's fear. Like, all of those same themes do come up, right? Right now in 2021, it's the lizard people. And it's also all about the lizard people. Kayla: Everything's about the lizard people. Chris: So diverse viewpoints. Yes. One such early viewpoint that might surprise you. And this is like, when I say early, I mean extremely early, like, immediate, because this particular flavor of opposition died very quickly. But the first opposers to vaccines was actually the elite medical community itself. That makes sense, right? So I said, this may surprise you, and you said, that makes sense.

35:37 Kayla: Well, I think it would surprise us if we hadn't been doing a podcast on this for three years. Like, it makes sense. And it also makes sense when you think about, like, sometimes, like, the great ideas that happen are all, like, crazy when they first come out and everyone's like, oh, that's insane, you're crazy. Chris: And 99.9% of them are crazy. And then the one thing is actually works. Yeah, but there's a little more to it than that here, because remember, what era, again, we're talking about late 17 hundreds. Mister Jenner's first vaccination was administered in 1796. Kayla: That's very early. Chris: So, again, medicine at this point wasn't exactly this bastion of rationality and science. The Royal Society of London was at least as much about wealth and power at this point as it was about science. And they weren't super stoked that a bunch of farmers and milkmaids, if you recall, figured out the greatest cure to the greatest disease threat on earth.

36:31 Kayla: The coastal elites, man. Chris: I know, right? However, as I mentioned, this particular skepticism evaporated rather quickly into vaccines becoming orthodoxy. And that's largely because they were so effective against something so deadly. And because Mister Jenner was able to prove it with this newfangled, like, showing the medical data thing that he had sort of developed, and the more people that got vaccinated, the more data he had, and the better things looked dope. All right, surprise number two. Would it flabbergast you, or you're probably just gonna be like, oh, yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. You're so smart, Kayla. Kayla: I'm very smart. Chris: Would it surprise you to learn. No, that a lot of early anti vaccination sentiment, particularly in England, was actually based in what we might today call social justice? Apologies in advance.

37:23 Kayla: It definitely surprises me to learn that off the top. But then if I think about it for a little bit longer, I feel like I can smell what you're stepping in. I can start to follow that path. Chris: Well, let's follow it, shall we? Apologies in advance for the lack of details, and that's kind of a blanket statement for the rest of this episode. Kayla: But we're just winging it. Chris: We're just making things up, basically. No, there's just. There's so many details. Like, really, we. There's, like, eight different podcasts that could all happen within this one topic. And, like, so we're just trying to hit, like, the high level points. Kayla: So you felt like you were measuring the coastline? Chris: Oh, God, yes. Oh, God. Yeah. Like multiple coastlines, for sure. But let's talk about victorian England, which was not a great place to be poor.

38:06 Kayla: Not a great place. Chris: A series of laws passed in the early to mid 18 hundreds, known as poor laws, were very harsh on the lower classes. The poor laws were what gave rise to things like workhouses, which were essentially like labor camps for the unemployed. So the idea was, like, they were giving poor people, like, a stipend, like, just money, basically. Like, you were getting some sort of, like, welfare. And then, for a variety of reasons that we don't have time to get into, the government was like, well, that's wasteful. Let's make them work. And so then they developed these workhouses as a part of this poor law. And they were not the best place, as you might imagine. No, they were very. They were basically labor camps. There was significant and organized blowback against these laws for totally understandable and good reasons.

38:54 Chris: And thankfully, eventually, this blowback, these organized blowbacks, were successful in getting these laws repealed. But the reason I'm talking about it today is that a lot of the leaders of the anti poor law movement in Victorian England transitioned into being leaders for the early anti vaccination movement there. And so, just to set context for you as to why that happened, today in the US, we have, like, pseudo compulsory vaccination laws. Not really. Right. So by that, I mean it's not compulsory to get your kids vaccinated, but if you don't, then in most places, you're not allowed to have them attend public schools, which is understandable, right? In victorian times and even into the 20th century, it was, like, compulsory. Compulsory. So if you recall our discussion about smallpox last episode, you'll totally understand why the government was not fucking around during this era.

39:48 Kayla: Yep. Chris: If you didn't get vaccinated for smallpox, you faced a fine. If you couldn't pay the fine, guess what was next? Prison. Kayla: We gotta figure out better systems, people. Chris: So if you've ever gotten, like, enraged about parking tickets, you may be aware that fines are a regressive penalty. A $50 parking ticket to someone making $50 a day is a huge deal. A $50 parking ticket to a millionaire is negligible. So fines are regressive and that they affect the poor way more than they affect the rich. Kayla: They're just a price. They're just a price tag.

40:28 Chris: Now, throw a prison penalty on top of that and a victorian prison at that, and you will see why some early anti vaccination efforts were based in poverty activism. Kayla: That makes sense. Chris: On top of that, they viewed bodily autonomy as sort of like the last and only thing that the government wasn't able to wrest control of from the poor. And it doesn't end there. British colonies also tended to view compulsory vaccination similarly as another way that the oppressive state could exercise its control. Kayla: Down with vaccines. I'm on their side. Chris: I knew this would sway you. Yeah. Gandhi, for example, was, like, famously anti vaxx in his early life. There's some evidence that he may have changed. Is mine.

41:09 Kayla: Well, now I'm back on the other side. Chris: Yeah, I know. Kayla: We should do an episode on Gandhi. Complicated. Chris: Well, he's a very complicated person. The reason that I am bringing him up right now is because part of why he was anti vaccination early is for this sort of, like, anti colonialist reason. A lot of his rhetoric, if you listen to it from that time, was based in this british anti colonialism. Kayla: Nice. Chris: So there are two things that I want you, the listener, to take away, actually. Sorry. Three things I want you to take away from this. One is that anti vaccine sentiment is anything but monolithic. And sometimes the motivations align with what you and I think of as a, quote, good thing. So it would be a mistake, and an unhelpful mistake at that. To think that anti vax only comes from libertarian wingnuts that love antisocial behavior, that would be a mistake to think that's the only place that they come from. Takeaway number two. Once again, here we see the pernicious effect of trust erosion. Oh, in this case, we probably can't really actually see even erosion, because this is just like, hey, the victorian colonial UK government is an oppressive terror regime. That's not really erosion. It's just that way already.

42:20 Chris: If you are a victorian poor person or a colonized person, it is very much not conducive to trusting the UK government to have your best interests in mind when they come knocking and say, get vaccinated, or else. Kayla: Let me jab you with this needle. It's totally cool. Chris: And if you don't do it, then you owe us a fine. And since you can't pay it, you need to go to prison with me. Kayla: I'm just mad. Why are you making me mad? Why are you making me side with the anti vaxxers? Chris: Well, again, it's a broad group and my purpose. And actually, this is my third takeaway. Absolutely none of what I just said over the last few minutes changes the fact that vaccines are indeed a miracle of science and one of the most prolific and beneficial humanitarian boons that our species has ever created. Cool.

43:08 Kayla: I'm just mad. I just want to go back to Victorian England and join the good fight. Chris: Well, there's already people that did that. Why don't you just stay in the good fight that you're already fighting here in 2021? Cause we got our own problems, baby. All right, remember that cartoon that Doctor Gorsey was talking about? Kayla: Yes. Chris: All right, well, we're gonna take a look at it here real quick. Kayla: Don't need to record while we're doing it. Chris: Pretty hilarious. Yeah, I want to get your reaction. So this is sort of like one of the famous cartoons, and you can see, like, this lady is being given her smallpox vaccine, and these guys have already gotten it, and. Oh, my God, there's cows growing out of their arms. Kayla: What is that on that guy's nose.

43:48 Chris: Is turning into a cow. This is barfing a cow. Kayla: Did this really happen? Chris: Oh, yeah. This is exactly what happened. People grew cows. Miniature cows. Excuse me? Out of their appendages. Yeah, that guy looks like he's pooping a cow. Kayla: This looks cool, though. Chris: I know. It's like a. It's like a heavy metal album cover or something. But again, as Doctor Gorski said, this has always been part of the anti vaccination umbrella. Again, it's a large umbrella, but this has always been under it. And that exists to this day in sort of the same fears about, like, editing your DNA and that kind of thing. Kayla: Right. Chris: Here's another one. Kayla: Is that a person turned into a violent cow? Chris: This one is a cow that appears to have cow pox.

44:29 Kayla: Okay. Chris: And they're just dumping just bucket loads of dead babies into its mouth. Kayla: Wait, did that really happen? Chris: And then I think the cow is pooping dead babies. Kayla: Explain. Also, that's not what a cow mouth looks like. Chris: It's a very complex cartoon. Kayla: Also, there's, like, what is that going on in the background? Chris: I don't really know. Kayla: There's, like, why is there an obelisk? Chris: Why a battle in the background? And there's an obelisk? I'm not really sure. Kayla: Like a pilgrimage. Chris: The point of. The point of it. Kayla: But why does the cow have, like, sharp incisors and, like, alligator teeth? Why is it cows look like eating babies? Why is it pooping babies? What is going on? Chris: We'll put this out. We'll put this on our instagram, you guys. But it's a very weird cartoon that somebody definitely drew when they were on mushrooms, and it depicts a cow consuming.

45:14 Kayla: I don't think they had mushrooms that. I think it was, like, opium and. Chris: Laudanum and whatever it was the lead in the water or something. It was that somebody had smallpox when they drew that. Kayla: Yeah, clearly. Chris: So that was another part of early. Kayla: Anti vaccination was the terrible cartoons. Chris: It was the terrible cartoons. Right. And that lives on today in things like Delbert. So, yeah, as I just said, a bunch of times, similar sentiment lives on today and concerns about how vaccines are tested and developed with animals. And it falls squarely under the naturalism fallacy that we talked about that pervades alternative medicine and also anti vaccination, because given a human cowpox just ain't natural. Putting virus bits in our blood ain't natural. It's not what God intended. Right. Which, by the way, actually, a lot of the early anti vax stuff, as we also mentioned, was based in religious objection, which I tend to view as similar, if not the same, actually, as naturalism fallacy, because you kind of just substitute God for Mother Nature when you say it's not what blank intended, it kind of feels very similar to me.

46:19 Chris: It's like this bodily purity of not both have similar motivations for being anti artificial, blah, blah. Kayla: You know what else it makes me think of? What makes me think of some of the other diet episodes we've talked about where it's like, oh, this is what Mother Nature intended, like, the natural eating. When it's like, that's not a thing. You're just kind of making something up. Chris: And continuing on the topic of religious objections these days, actually, there aren't really major religions that have doctrine that oppose vaccination. So when religious exemptions are taken for saying, I don't want to get my kid vaccinated, usually that's actually not true. Or it's, like, not a major world religion. It's like some niche religion. And I say these days because actually, like in, you know, in the past, like, now, we no longer use infected cow lymph for vaccinations. But in the past, that was like a real religious objection that folks such as Mister Gandhi might have had, right? Because it's like, oh, no, we don't want to inject cow stuff into us that's against our religion.

47:25 Chris: Again, I don't have the time here to dive into the details of all the religious objections, but you should definitely read the book anti vaxxers that I read by Jonathan Berman to learn more about this. So that was, like, very early anti vaccination efforts. As the decades wore on, anti vaxx sentiment tended to rise and fall, and it does tend to rise when disease is less prevalent in a given community. Each new vaccine comes along, and each new and each disease it targets tends to have its own story. Rabies, polio, pertussis, measles. But this brings us back to the object lesson at the beginning of last episode of the Cups, the lesson about human decision making. One thing that seems to drive this whole vaccines are a victim of their own success.

48:11 Chris: Observation is that humans seem to be mostly driven by chance of consequences, not magnitude of consequences. And by the way, this is true for crime as well. So, in other words, it's been shown in studies that people are deterred from breaking laws and breaking rules, not when they think that there's a bigger punishment, but when they think that there's a higher chance of being caught. Kayla: Dedoy. Chris: Sorry. Yeah, you definitely knew that without doing the study. Kayla: I just meant dudoy, our criminal justice law enforcement system. Chris: So, going back to that initial question, why do anti vaxxers exist? One reason is that there's a natural, logical fallacy in human judgment that leads people to overvalue the chance of something happening. Oh, I probably won't get the measles, right? You'll get the measles and undervalue the consequence of it happening. That is pretty bad news if you do get the measles.

49:05 Kayla: That's why we text and drive. Chris: Exactly. Kayla: That's why I text and drive. Chris: And now add to that fallacy, that thing that we said earlier from the Upenn school of nursing professor, we would rather not do something and have something bad happen than do something and have something bad happen. And that's why you see this rise and fall over time of anti vaccine sentiment, right? Is because as the disease goes away, people think, oh, I'm not going to get it. And they tend to overvalue that and undervalue the consequences if they do, right? Kayla: Don't text and drive. Chris: Don't text and drive, people. Also, me. There have also been vaccine scares, some real and some.

49:45 Kayla: I don't want to know about this part. No, I don't want to. I'm scared already. Chris: During the rollout of the polio vaccine, something called the cutter incident happened. And this is actually, I probably shouldn't even call this a scare, because this was a legitimate medical disaster. And actually, I think Doctor Paul offit even called it, like, the biggest medical disaster in american history. Kayla: Oh, jeeze. Chris: So anyway, bottom line, big disaster. Essentially what happened was that there was this colossal fuck up and a large batch of what were supposed to be polio vaccines went out to the public from Qatar labs. Only they weren't polio vaccines. They were mistakenly filled with live polio virus.

50:28 Kayla: No. See why I can't. Please don't talk about this. This is horrible. Chris: This batch, unfortunately, was administered to about 120,000 children, that's. Of which 40,000 wound up contracting some form of polio. 51 were paralyzed and five were killed. It was extremely fucked up. And of course, this is one of the incidents that adds fuel now to the anti vax fire. It doesn't matter that it wasn't actually vaccines that caused this incident. It was a mix up. That doesn't matter. Right? To the end user, to the patient, they said, yes, I want a polio vaccine, which will prevent polio, and instead they got polio, right? It doesn't matter. There was a mix up and it wasn't a vaccine to them. They wanted to get a vaccine, and instead they got polio.

51:19 Kayla: How would I ever trust getting a vaccine ever again? How would I trust anything ever again? Chris: Exactly. And then throw on top of that, it was kids. And as we mentioned several times, this adds a whole other layer of terror and anxiety. It was a terrible tragedy. And once again, the ramifications go beyond the incident itself, eroding trust. Now, 60 years later, and polio, a. Kayla: Terrible disease that was only 60 years ago. Chris: Yeah, geez. It was in the fifties. So people that, like, almost 70. Kayla: God, the people that happened to you are still, like, living. Chris: Oh, yeah. And polio is a terrible disease. It's, like, kind of in the same ballpark of smallpox, really, in terms of, like, how bad it is, but it's on the brink of elimination now, 60 years later, and it's thanks to the polio vaccine. And Jonas Salk is rightly remembered as a hero. And by the way, at the time, the US was terrified of polio. We were terrified, and that's basically because there was nothing we could do about it. And it even got our most powerful president. So when the vaccine was developed for it, Salk was given parades and everything. Like, it was. It was a big deal, and it was really good. But this cutter incident, like, really put a dent in it. And, yeah, it was not good.

52:31 Chris: And even if, you know, ignoring all of the ramification stuff, it's just terrible for those people, obviously. Kayla: Yeah. Chris: Aside from that incident, a lot of polio specific anti vaccine propaganda came out of the chiropractic community. And as we mentioned before, now we're touching on, sort of, like, the financial identity sunk cost motivation for that segment of anti vaxxers. So if you're a chiropractor, and I'm talking, you know, you sort of differentiated this before. I'm talking, like, classical, full blown chiropractor, not like glorified physical therapist. Kayla: Right. Chris: But if you're one of those chiropractors who used to be more prevalent back in the day, you've dedicated your life's work and your earnings potential to theory that all disease comes from irregularities in the spine called subluxations, which, like, I'm sorry, that's.

53:24 Kayla: I'm sorry. Chris: It's batshit. Kayla: I apologize to any chiropractors. Listen to this podcast. That is so stupid to hear now. Chris: Yeah, I know now. But just again, remember at the time, like, early, the germ theory of disease sounded pretty wacky, too. No, disease is caused by these tiny things that are so small that your eyes, I can't even see them, and they live inside you. Kayla: You have polio. Cause your back ain't right. Like, come on. Chris: I don't know. Kayla: And if you're a chiropractor now that subscribes to the idea that, like, the crack in your back is cancer. I mean, I think that you're an evil villain. I'm sorry. Chris: Yeah. Kayla: And this is coming from somebody who comes from a family that has, like, a family chiropractor. Everybody I know in my family and close friends goes to this chiropractor. I will defend this chiropractor. But, however, go to the chiropractor to get your back cracked, not to, like.

54:21 Chris: Get your cancer, and even then, maybe. Kayla: And then, like, make sure they're not doing your cervical spine. Yeah, let's lower spine only, please. Chris: Let's be careful. So, obviously, as the polio vaccine got closer and closer to wiping out polio as the decades went bye, this was bad news for chiropractors who really wanted to die on that subluxation hill, and they had to get more and more creative with how they framed their opposition. Right. They had to get more and more creative in their explanations for, like, well, it's. You know, it's this. It's not this. And it's actually. I mean, don't the problems still come from subluxations? And the reason that there's less polio now is x, y, z. So they had to get really creative with these explanations.

55:02 Kayla: The reason there says polio is because we just cracked so many backs. Chris: But it got to the point now where it's basically just, like, impotent grumblings from, like, a very few people. However, chiropractic now heavily mixes in with anti vax, and there's a lot of overlap in that Venn diagram, and it's because the history is there and the motivated reasoning is there. By the way, I got most of this from a great scientific american article on how we can use the example of the chiropractic profession's opposition to the polio vaccine. To inform our current situation, I highly recommend you go check it out. It's in the show notes. The next thing I want to talk about is the DTP vaccine. That's diphtheria tetanus pertussis also had a scare in the eighties whose effects lingered. But this scare was fundamentally different from the polio cutter incident. The cutter incident was a legitimate medical catastrophe.

55:55 Chris: The DTP scare was some alleged harm coming from the vaccine that was legitimately debated and studied, but then never substantiated. Kayla: Can I tell you something that's gonna blow your mind? Chris: Please. Kayla: So you know Elestra? Chris: Yes. Kayla: You know Elestra? Chris: Yes. Kayla: The, like, fat replacer that's, like, got. Chris: No calories in the Nephrinus or whatever. Kayla: It doesn't. Chris: What? Kayla: It doesn't. Chris: No. This is. No. Okay. No. Kayla: Just saying. This reminded me of it. Like, kayla rumors of medical stuff in the eighties. Apparently the, like, the olester's gonna make you shit your pants thing was kind of like a myth. It was like an urban legend.

56:41 Chris: Oh, no. Kayla: I listened to an entire episode on it done by the wonderful folks over at the maintenance phase podcast. Aubrey Gordon, Michael Hobbs. Chris: So, should I be eating Alestra? Wait, what's Alestra good for again? Kayla: I mean, I wouldn't necessarily. I wouldn't necessarily say alestra is good for anything. It's just. It is a. It's like, basically a fat that's had something specific done to it that then when you eat it, you don't absorb it. But it also, like, I don't think it's great for your nutrition because it actually leaches certain nutrients out of the food that prevents you from, like, absorbing it, like vitamin K and stuff, whatever. It was marketed as a diet food, but. So there's lots of problems with the luster. I'm not saying it's good, but the idea that it's going to make you shit your pants is not medically sound.

57:22 Chris: Mind blown, but anus not blown. So that's good. Kayla: Yeah. Chris: Yeah. So we're good. So, yeah. So, cutter incident, legitimate catastrophe, DDP scare, alleged harm that was studied and debated, never substantiated, but this, of course, led to news outlets reporting on it irresponsibly. Kayla: Wait, what was the scare exactly? Chris: It was just that there was some heart, like, oh, there's some kids that were harmed in some way. I don't remember the exact harm. And a propaganda movie being made called vaccine roulette sounds dope as hell. Which in turn led to its own decrease in vaccine uptake in the population, which finally led to some pertussis outbreaks in the UK. If you followed the current iteration of the anti vaccine movement, which mostly likes to target MMR instead of DTP, then this whole playbook I just described probably sounds very familiar to you. Like I said earlier, this stuff is very cyclical. I do want to reiterate something I just said, though, because this is something that I think isn't always clear, but is really important.

58:27 Chris: The vaccine research and medical community does a lot of good faith science to investigate vaccine safety, and as a result of that, sometimes they have to do serious research on claims of harm. And of course, serious research isn't just like an overnight thing. This research can take a while, and there's a lot of back and forth as there is with science and with this whole thing. Again, they eventually found that there was no link to the vaccine. The harm that was being claimed, while it may have been experienced, was not linked to the DTP vaccine. With the DTP vaccine, the additional research was never able to substantiate the claims of harm. But I believe that it's important that they did the additional research, and we'll talk about this more. Dr Gorski: More. Chris: But that level of carefulness, like the huge microscope that vaccines are under, is one of the main things that makes me so confident about getting them myself.

59:14 Kayla: Right. Chris: But that leaves so much opportunity for poor communication. While science is working on looking into the issue, science news is already off to the races, and fear sells eyeballs much more readily than carefulness and precision. And this is where I want to talk a little bit about the current situation with the Johnson and Johnson vaccine, because we talked about this a little bit the other day, there's this, like, tension, there's this dichotomy between, like, okay, well, they're being super careful. They always use this word, abundance of caution. Right. Which we'll talk about. Abundance of caution. We're going to take the Johnson and Johnson vaccine off the market for now while we verify that the risk is low to non existent. Right. So there were clots that were forming. I think it was, what, six cases?

59:56 Kayla: Six cases out of. Do you know how many were administered? Chris: How many calyn? Kayla: I think it was like 6.8 million. Chris: Yeah. So it's 6.8 million. So I won't do the math there, but it's like. It's like a fraction of a percent. Kayla: It's so much lower than other medical interventions people interact with every single day. It is a gazillion quote me on that number. Times lower than the risk of blood clot from taking the birth control pill. Chris: Right. So. But again, the weird thing to me is, like, part of what makes me so confident about vaccines is that there's, like, all this abundance of caution. They're way more cautious than anything else. But then the abundance of caution also creates this opportunity for people to be anxious and scared and, oh, my God, what if I get a blood clot and then anti vaxxers come in and exploit that? And so it's. Or I should say, and anti vaxx influencers come in and exploit that, and, you know, so it's. It's. I don't know. I don't know the right answer to that. Which, again, you know, we'll get to this a little bit more, too. And later in the episode, because this comes up more than once.

1:01:03 Kayla: Right. Chris: But yeah, I mean, I, that's. Again, I personally would feel completely safe taking the Johnson and Johnson vaccine because of this. But then it's the abundance of caution creates this, I don't know, this risk of misinformation. Kayla: I have a question for you especially. I've been sitting on it, but you just said something that made me think of it. So you talked about how in some previous iterations of vaccine hesitancy, chiropractors were invested in being anti Vaxx. Like the financial aspect of their anti vaxness. Are you going to get into the financial aspects of, or the financial aspect of modern day anti vaxx? Because you just said the phrase anti vax influencer and it just made me.

1:01:55 Chris: Kind of think about yes and no. Like, we talk about that a little bit with Doctor Gorski. We talk about. There's actually, he'll mention, you can say it. We'll get to that. I mean, we don't talk as much about where the money is being made. Kayla: Okay. Chris: But I do talk about that with a few specific individuals, but not as much, like systemically. But I'm not even sure if there is necessarily a systemic thing. I think it's like, because of the diversity of the camp of anti vaxx, there's all different reasons for it. And some people are making money, and even the people that are making money are making it on different things. Kayla: Gotcha. Chris: And it's also like, I want to be real careful with that because it's also not the best way to argue a point because anti vaxxers do that, too. So anti vaxxers will say, well, look at follow the money, right? They'll say, look at the pharma companies making so much money off of blah, blah. Now, granted, vaccines, if you actually look at it, they make way more money off of drugs than they do vaccines. Vaccines are not a very profitable thing in terms of the portfolio of these big drug companies.

1:03:05 Kayla: It's not like OxyContin, right? Chris: So that debunks that. But at the same time, there's the larger issue of when you attack the opposition's motivation, you should probably have be really certain about it, and that should be really material to your argument, because otherwise you're not attacking the argument. You're engaging in logical, rhetorical bad faith, essentially. So there are basically, let's say later in the episode, I talk about this with one individual person, and I don't really get into that as a whole. So the next question I want to ask is, the anti vaccination movement is like, it's gotten so much traction in the last few years, it kind of feels like it's part of the online landscape. But when I first learned about it, I remember how weird and bizarre and backwards it sounded.

1:03:55 Chris: I think the first time I actually had entered my consciousness was via some article about Jenny McCarthy or something years ago. Dr Gorski: Okay. Chris: I was just curious where you first ran into anti vax and misinformation. And what did you think about it at the time? Dr Gorski: I mean, it was a little more than 20 years ago, most of my life, going back to college, graduate school, medical school and all of that, I wasn't really into skepticism. I didn't really pay much attention to bogus medical claims, anti vaccine or otherwise. But then I became involved in Usenet. I don't know if you remember what Usenet is or if you're too young.

1:04:36 Chris: I vaguely recall. Dr Gorski: I get a lot of eyes glazing over when I try to, when I mention Usenet. But believe it or not, before social media of the sort we're used to, Usenet was kind of social media. Chris: I remember prodigy. Dr Gorski: It's just that a relatively small proportion of the population used it on, like, current social media. Basically think of it like, as a worldwide discussion forum or, you know, that kind of derived from the old BBS's, from the eighties. And there were thousands upon thousands of what were called Usenet newsgroups, which were, you know, dedicated to various things. So I found an alternative medicine one, and that's where I first started seeing anti vaccine claims. And at the time, my reaction was kind of was pretty much what it is with a lot of people who first encounter this stuff, who are generally science based and like to think of themselves as rational. It's the kind of, what the hell, you know, what is this stuff?

1:05:38 Dr Gorski: And the more I got into it, the more I saw, you know, saw the claims and started getting involved in refuting them. But most of the action was on blogs back then, and basically most of the action had moved to blogs and web based discussion forums, and Usenet was just turning into a place full of spam and trolls. Chris: It is interesting that you think of anti vax being like this big plague on Facebook, and it's interesting that it was already there on Usenet before Facebook even existed. That is interesting. Dr Gorski: Oh, sure it was. I guess one advantage of being an old fart is I have some personal perspective. Basically, what happened is the anti vaccine movement started blogs, lots of them, in the early two thousands around the time when I started blogging. That was when a whole number of fair number of blogs that still exist today were formed. Like, age of autism is still spreading disinformation 16 or 17 years later. And then this whole move to social media like Facebook and Twitter. I mean, really, Facebook and Twitter didn't become super popular until 2010. Give or take is when everybody was getting on. Yeah. The funny thing about Twitter is that early on, for the first few years I had a Twitter account. I didn't really use it much.

1:06:58 Dr Gorski: I couldn't really grok what Twitter was for or how to use it or how to be effective at it. I seldom used it. And I don't know what changed. I started using it more and more over the last few years. Until now, I have close to 56,000 followers, which kind of blows my mind. Chris: That's. That's a, that's a pretty good count. Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah, I think Facebook, that's. It was, that's when it was getting really big is when they started doing all the infinite scroll stuff and the third party apps. Yeah. Dr Gorski: Right, right. And I've never been much into Instagram just because I don't really take many photos or use photos or take pictures of myself, it's not like something I'm fond of doing. So.

1:07:39 Chris: Yeah, I think we're actually, we use Instagram a little bit for the show. I think we use it for stuff. Like, for example, I'm going to some of those cartoons you're talking about on there, just like supplement the show. Dr Gorski: Right, right. Also, I mean, I do have an Instagram account, but it mostly consists of photos and videos of the litters of puppies that we fostered over the last three years or so. Chris: Okay. Well, that actually sounds pretty good, though. That's. Dr Gorski: People like that more than my writing, I think. Chris: Yeah. I mean, it's hard to be puppies. It's no slight to you? Hell yeah. Puppies. Kayla: I mean, I feel like that's the reason why you played that whole section for us. Chris: Or the reason why I did these.

1:08:19 Kayla: Whole episodes just so we could talk about puppies. I have seen some of the puppy pictures. Chris: Surprise. It's actually about puppies. Kayla: Get your puppies vaccinated. Ps, but I have seen some of the puppy litters that doctor Gorski has posted on his social media and I can't. Chris: Yeah, I know. He tweeted the other day. It's just like this, like, puppy pile. Kayla: Oh, man. Foster puppies everybody. Chris: I saw a funny joke too. You're just saying about vaccinating your puppies is like somebody said, made some joke about, like, I need to put, you know, fully vaccinated on my dating profile now. Like I'm a fucking animal. Kayla: Yep. Yep. It's actually really interesting because one of my best friends almost since this has started, almost since the beginning of the pandemic, has been convinced that putting on your dating profile, or like, especially putting on your dating profile, but maybe in even other areas of life, saying fully vaccinated or proving that like. Or like, uploading pictures of your Vax card and having that be a standard thing, especially in your dating profile, will be the way this goes. Because that is already a thing in the, like, men who date men population. Because. And I think. I think that. That having your STD tests up to date is something that is common for all people of, you know, in the dating world.

1:09:44 Kayla: But particularly with gay men and men who date men, having, you know, your STD profile up to date, having that very up to date and kind of at the forefront is very much the norm. Chris: Right. Kayla: And so since the beginning of this HIV. Yes. And so since the beginning of COVID he's been like, I think this is where this is gonna go. I think it's already standard in my community for this reason. I think it will become standard. Chris: And now here we are a year later and. Yeah. Kayla: Making jokes about it. Chris: Making jokes about that exact thing. Yeah, that is interesting. Puppies aside, the other reason I stopped us here was to talk about now the modern anti vaccination movements. As with everything else on the show today, we'll have to do this at pretty high levels. So we have time to go over everything and not have a ten hour long epic novel.

1:10:34 Kayla: We're not doing Doctor Zhivago here. Chris: No. So again, high level. And, you know, it's not even gonna. It's gonna make high level. And like, 45 minutes later, we're gonna. Anyway, the modern anti detective brushing the surface. I know, but that's how it's so big topic. So big. I shouldn't have done it. The modern anti vaccination movement really began with a thing that I think that a lot of us already know and love now. And that is the Andrew Wakefield MMR and autism study. Kayla: When he. Okay, sorry, I'm gonna be jamming the gun. But when he eventually came out and was like, this was fake, was he like, apologetic or was he nothing?

1:11:16 Chris: I mean, he's like a leader of the anti vaccination movement. Kayla: Okay, I thought that he just kind of faded. Chris: No, no. So this study was published in the Lancet all the way back in 1998, when there was still a blockbuster on every corner. Now, the Lancet is an extremely well regarded and prestigious medical journal, typically full of good peer reviewed science. So he wasn't publishing on, like, gateway pundit or, like, four chan or something like this was, like, the real deal. Okay, so to summarize heavily, the study that he published seemingly demonstrated a link between the MMR vaccine, which is, again, is measles, mumps and rubella and incidence of autism in children. And to heavily summarize once more, this wound up being utterly baseless science. I did look at the details. I did look at the details of the study and why and how it was poorly conducted. And you should, too, if you're interested, which, you know, check the show notes.

1:12:17 Chris: But safe to say, it was indeed poorly conducted. So much so, the Lancet later retracted the article. Now, if you remember the story with the DTP scare that we just told a little bit ago, something similar happened here. The scientific community scurried to address Wakefield's findings, and generally, the study was given the benefit of the doubt early on. So a bunch of other studies popped up to verify this MMR autism link or not. And nothing. No subsequent study has been able to reproduce its findings. No subsequent study has been able to find that link. Now, you may be thinking that, well, I mean, that's not good enough to retract an article, right? Like, just because somebody can't reproduce your findings, and you'd be right, that's not enough to retract an article.

1:13:02 Kayla: It really isn't. If the. If you can't reproduce the findings. Chris: No, necessarily, right? Like, it's if you conduct a study in good faith and you publish an article about it. Hey, this is what I found. Sorry. And you couldn't reproduce it. Okay, well, I guess I was probably wrong then, in a normal case. But being conducted well and being done in good faith, neither of these things wound up being true. Damn it. Wakefield's study was conducted very poorly. Mostly, I think, has to do with, like, population sampling. But also, an investigative reporter did a deep dive years later and found a bunch of conflicts of interest. Wakefield's research was actually funded by personal injury attorneys whose clients were suing makers of the MMR vaccine.

1:13:49 Kayla: Oh. Chris: And Wakefield himself. Quick aside here, by the way, I watched the movie he made with Del Pigtree called Vaxxed, and I don't know if you remember that movie from a few years back, like, maybe we'll talk about it on Patreon. I know we've, like, said about eight things now, but in the documentary, Wakefield does lengthy interviews. And, yes, he both is the producer of the doc and also its main subject, which, Oh, yeah, not great. Kayla: I learned in documentary class that generally leads to bias. Chris: I mean, that's no bueno. Kayla: Every documentary. It's not necessarily no bueno. It's just every documentary has a bias, has a point of view, and when that happens, there's a very particular bias and point of view that we should all be very cognizant of.

1:14:31 Chris: Right. The interesting thing in this documentary, as he's being interviewed in his own documentary, is he keeps talking about how I'm not actually against vaccines. I'm only against the MMR vaccine. Kayla: Just this one. Chris: I'm not against measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines being administered separately. So then what's the problem? This confused me for a little while because I was like. Well, I mean, I don't know. Like, I guess that's reasonable, right? Like, he's not anti vax. Precisely. Is it? Well, I looked at this, and turns out, prior to his MMR autism research, he also owned a patent on individual vaccines for those diseases. Kayla: Oh.

1:15:13 Chris: So multiple conflicts of interest plus poor study will not only get your article removed from the lancet, and rightly so, it will also strip you of your medical license, which is eventually what happened to him. Kayla: No big pharma's just a against him. Chris: But by this point, the damage was done again, mirroring the DTP scare. This event poisoned the well, and we are still today dealing with those ramifications. Kayla: Do you think the Internet made it worse? Chris: Absolutely. And I. You know, that's a dumb question. I talked about that a little bit, but, like, that's what Doctor Gorski was kind of talking about, right? That's kind of what we get. What we get into is how this stuff spreads, and that's. That's a. Well, we'll get to that. Kayla: How it has a viral effect.

1:15:56 Chris: Okay. Kayla: You know what we really need a vaccine for is the spread of misinformation. Chris: Oh, well, that's what this podcast is. Kayla: Kayla, man, if they had a vaccine for that, I absolutely would not take it. Chris: Well, you like? Kayla: Definitely the man trying to control your. Chris: Disinformation night, raw and unfiltered. Kayla: I'm just saying I want to be able to access Alex Jones and. And Joe Rogan whenever I want. Chris: Yeah, you're a big fan. I know. Anyway, we're still dealing with these ramifications. Autism is still considered to be a risk of taking vaccines by anti vaxxers. And Wakefield is himself just like, he's like a king crank out there pushing conspiracy after conspiracy. He's. He is a leader currently of the anti vaccination movement. Kayla: I had such a different narrative in my head. In my head. It was like he got debunked and.

1:16:40 Chris: Then, like, quietly went away. Kayla: Yeah. Chris: No, no. He made vax that came out in, like, 2014. Kayla: I don't. Chris: And vaxed was, like, basically what vaxed was like, no, I was right. Look, and the whole subject of vaxed is this, like, conspiracy theory around, like, what's called a CDC whistleblower that Doctor Gorski will talk about, but, like, the whole documentary is basically him just, like, trying to back justify all of this crap that he got fired for. Kayla: Look, I love documentaries. They are important and they are incredible. Chris: And they're a hell of biased. And some of them are hella. Hella bias. Kayla: Bias. Chris: And this is not just bias. This is like, they're also. They're not propaganda. This has, like, a very. This has a point. Kayla: They're not science. They're not. That's why we have scientific journals that. That publish studies, because, like, there's a reason why making a murder isn't exonerating Stephen Avery.

1:17:29 Chris: Right? Because it's not the real world. No. No comment one way or the other. Whether Steven Avery is innocent or whatever. Kayla: Let's get into it. Chris: We are not getting into that. But documentaries are inherently biased. They have a biased point of view. Now, there's honestly, like, a whole ten hour podcast we could do just about the vaccine and autism stuff because it's a huge topic all by itself. And we do have to move on after I mention one more thing, because I think it's important. One might wonder, what does the neurodivergent community think about all this? Kayla: That is, I think, a question we should be asking often. Chris: How do folks with autism view the modern anti vaccine movement that has autism at its center? As you might imagine, not super happy about it. So when you watch a movie like vaxed, you see that they try to portray an autism diagnosis is about, like, the worst thing that can ever happen to a parent. In this documentary, they cherry pick, like, the absolute worst examples of behavior on film from these kids to put on screen. And it does look bad. But honestly, I've had some pretty shitty temper tantrums in my day as a neurotypical. Person. And Wakefield isn't putting video of me on his movies to scare parents away from vaccines.

1:18:41 Kayla: You've had some real bad ones. Chris: I've had bad temper tantrums as an adult. So now, don't get me wrong. Having kids, as we know, is terrifying. And I know I'm terrified of what bad things might happen to our potential future children if and when we have them. We've mentioned the parental fear factor in this episode a few times now, so I get it. But when you see autism portrayed as a medical disaster, or you hear Jenny McCarthy say things like, and I just saw the light go out in his eyes, and you are someone living with autism, then you might say to yourself, I still have light in my eyes. Like, I'm a person, not a medical disaster. Like, I'm not a soulless, like, empty disaster of a person. Right?

1:19:27 Kayla: So dehumanizing. Chris: And by the way, I'm not putting words in mouths here. I'm actually paraphrasing accounts that I read from the writings of people on the autism spectrum that have written about this. So the bottom line is the modern incarnation of the anti vax movement is fundamentally ableist and harmful to the neurodivergent community. All right, if anti vax is cyclical, but the Wakefield MMR autism unholy Trinity is the flavor du jour that the modern version of it takes, then there's actually one other big flavor that it also takes, and you mentioned it a minute ago, and that comes from the idea of online radicalization.

1:20:07 Kayla: Yay. Our favorite. Chris: I don't think I need to say too much more than Doctor Gorski said, or he will say is he sort of outlined his experience with Usenet and later social media and how blogs ended up being a big part of pushing these narratives. Kayla: I blame the blogs. Chris: But, you know, obviously, online radicalization, as well know on this show, is one of the top issues of our time. And the who agrees. And in fact, they list vaccine hesitancy as one of the top ten biggest threats to global health currently. Kayla: Dang. Chris: And I will add to this point about online radicalization that, yeah, this is part of why all this stuff sort of ends up, like, mushing together with things like QAnon and anti maskers. Right? Like, that's why it all mushes together, is because everybody's online and they're all getting radicalized into the same sort of, like, conspiratorial framework. Conspiratorial? Did I say that right? Conspiratorial. Who cares? Although I'll also say that the anti masker thing is not just because it's online. I actually think there's an additional element there. And it's because anti vax and anti mask folks who share the same ethos that personal liberty is more important to me than pro social behavior are of course going to be. They're going to be the same people.

1:21:20 Kayla: Right? Chris: Right. The same people that say it's more important to me to have my liberty about not taking a vaccine than it is about like, whether I'm, you know, helping my fellow citizen by contributing to herd immunity is going to be the same person that says, don't tell me to wear a mask, even though it's helps my neighbors out. Right. It's the same mentality. All right. Kayla: And I want to say to that person, then don't drive on the roads. Chris: Right. Okay. I gotta mention one more thing about the modern anti vax movement before we hear from Doctor Gorski again. You are gonna love this one. Kayla: No, I won't. Chris: No, you will. If you are a longtime listener, you are also going to love it one way that anti vaccine doctors are trying to prove that vaccines are harmful. Actually, 1 second, I want to unpack something I just said there.

1:22:09 Kayla: You said doctors, and I kind of almost stopped you and was like, what are you talking about? Chris: Oh, I didn't even realize I needed. Have I not said that yet? Kayla: I don't know. Maybe I wasn't paying attention. Chris: I mean, there are anti vaccine doctors. Like, that exists. That's a thing. We talk about this in our interview, which was coming up, but, like, this. Kayla: Is what makes it so hard is that, like, doctors are people too. Chris: It's not just chiropractors. Kayla: Doctors come all of the, like, various flaws and shortcomings and complications and complexities that go along with being a human being in the world. And it just makes it so difficult because, like, doctors are the way we interact with the body of medical science, and while doctors are people, so therefore they're fallible.

1:22:51 Chris: Right. I know, it's, it sucks. The thing I actually wanted to unpack, though, is when I said trying to prove vaccines are harmful, what's wrong with that sentence from a scientific standpoint? Kayla: I don't know. It just sounds like you're saying, like, how all the scientists are trying to prove that the earth is flat. Chris: I mean, like, science 101 is you are not trying to prove your pet hypothesis. That is not what science is. Science is not. I think this, and I'm going to go out and try to prove it. Kayla: That's bad science. Chris: That's literally bad science. It's the most basic fallacy, but it's rampant in the anti vax, sort of like doctor or researcher community. It's rampant that, like, they already believe that vaccines are harmful and they are searching for ways for that to be true, right? And that's not what science is. Science is. Here's this thing that is proposed that may or may not be true and actually try to disprove it as much as you can, right? You never prove it. It true. But you can say like, well, I think we've exhausted all the reasons. It's probably not true, right? That's what science is. So these folks believe that vaccines are harmful, and they try to find some link to prove that's the case. It was true with Wakefield, and it's true for so many others.

1:24:03 Chris: It's just weird to me sometimes that such a basic logical fallacy keeps cropping up. It's just. I don't know, it's weird. It feels weird to me. In any case, anti vax doctors now are trying to prove vaccine harmfulness by saying, well, it only harms some people because they have genes that interact poorly with the vaccine material. Kayla: This is H. Christ. Who is this? Is this doctor Ben lynch? Chris: And guess what the star gene is that they say is involved in this? Kayla: Is it empty Jafar? Chris: Oh yeah, baby. Empty Jafar is bad. Here, just let me read you the title and subtitle of this Atlantic article from 2019.

1:24:48 Dr Gorski: Jesus. Chris: Why anti vax doctors are ordering 23 andme tests. No subtitle. Naturopaths have long been obsessed with a gene called MTHfR. Now vaccine skeptics are testing for it, too. Kayla: My stomach hurts when I read this article. Chris: I was just, like, snickering to myself the whole time. I was like, nice. Kayla: The thing that I hate is that, like, how this kind of stuff is so insidious, because it doesn't seem to matter how inoculated you are against this stuff, it sows a seed of doubt. Like, when I was pregnant and after I was pregnant and I had complications, and I read somewhere that, like, oh, maybe MTHFR can, like, affect you. I had a, like, I had a freakout inside that I had to coach myself through. And because of what we learned in the podcast and because of just like, general stuff we read, I had to really do a lot of work to not freak out over, oh my God, what if, what if?

1:25:54 Chris: Interesting. Even though we had done a lot of, like, debunking work with that, with Mt. Java and the podcast itself. Yeah, interesting. Kayla: And I think that can happen. I think that's why these things are so difficult is because it's so much easier to sow seeds of doubt than it is to create trust and maintain trust. And I think that it is completely normal for our brains to worry about these things. It's like I think you talked about in the previous episode of like, it's safer for us to be cautious and to be worried and to have these fears. And so then our brains naturally go that root. And so then you, like, it doesn't matter how well inoculated you are, these things are going to come up, right?

1:26:36 Chris: None of us like, as much as we want to try to say that this is like a way to inoculate ourselves against misinformation. There are certain fundamental things about the way human brains work that will always make us vulnerable to certain forms of ideas and attacks and that sort of thing. And it's only with that constant vigilance and concern assaulting your trust network and talking to people that, you know, won't turn you the wrong way or, you know, thinking about your scientific knowledge, all that stuff together is the only thing that can really pull you through that stuff. Kayla: Right? Chris: Anyway, I thought it was cool that empty far. Kayla: It's not cool. Chris: Made another appearance on the show, by the way, if you're a new listener, I'm referencing our season one, episodes 18 and 19.

1:27:19 Kayla: What is it with you and the two parters? Chris: I don't know. Cause this one, I even think this probably should be a three part. There's just so much. Kayla: Oh, yeah, this episode's gonna be long, listeners. Chris: It's already long. Kayla: It's gonna be even longer. Chris: All right, anyway, enough about Ben lynch and other faux doctors. Let's get back to our actual doctor. So why do you think the anti vax movement exists in terms of, do you think it is just a cynical monetary grift? Or is it that there's a bunch of true beliefs believers? Or is it maybe a combination of that? Dr Gorski: Yes to both. Chris: Yes to both. Dr Gorski: Okay, well, there's an interesting campaign for countering digital hate. Did a rather interesting report a while back where they categorize the anti vaccine movement. You know, like they divided it into four groups. One they kind of kindly called the entrepreneurs, you know, which they're the ones I call the grifters.

1:28:20 Chris: That's a euphemism. I get it. Dr Gorski: Yeah, they're way too kind. I call them the grifters. They're the ones who use the anti vaccine movement to promote their business and brand and to sell supplements and quackery and that sort of thing. The next category are the campaigners. They are the true belief. They are mainly the true believers. And some of them are even full time activists who run the Facebook pages, who run the blogs, who run that sort of thing. Then there's a conspiracy theorists. I'll be happy to get into that in a minute, because what I've come to believe over the last couple of years is that basically all science denial is rooted in conspiracy theories, and that the anti vaccine movement is basically just one big conspiracy theory.

1:29:05 Dr Gorski: And then there are the communities, which are just basically, usually the Facebook, you know, the looser Facebook groups, you know, the ones that are run by people who, for instance, who are not campaigners. Like, it's not their full time gig or not. They're like a huge proportion of their time. And, you know, the level of belief probably varies there from whether they're, you know, super invested or not. But these are the places where a lot of people get sucked in and radicalized. Chris: That's interesting, because, first of all, that was going to be my next question, so you already answered my next question. And second of all, the hierarchy that you described there sounds very similar to so many other groups we've talked about on the show where there's this hardcore center, and then as you kind of go out, you get more and more. It's more about the conspiracy theories and then further out, and it's more about the onboarding process of taking somebody who's maybe curious or skeptical and radicalizing them into the. Into the ideology, as it were. And it's so similar.

1:30:09 Dr Gorski: And there are always the grifters. Always, always. They're in the mix for all of these things, all of these movements. Chris: Yeah, we just did, our last few episodes of last season were about QAnon. And it sounds exactly like QAnon, right? Like you have the Ron Watkins's that are sort of at the top that are clearly grifting. And then you have like a bunch of influencers slash what you called campaigners. And then, yeah, the campaigners could be the influencers. Dr Gorski: I mean, you have like the inst. Well, before social media started cracking down, you had people like Larry Cook, who ran the biggest anti vaccine page, I believe, on Facebook, for instance. And, you know, those sorts of people. I mean, the influencers have had more difficulty being influential since social media started finally cracking down. But they still manage. And I mean, a big problem is still that Facebook is still a wretched hive of scum and anti vaccine quackery. Just not really so much for public Facebook pages. You know, they've basically turned a lot of their pages private. Facebook, I don't think, really takes as close a look at the private pages because they're just viewed as, like, groups that the public can't see.

1:31:26 Chris: So I just want to stop here to talk a little bit about the categories in particular that he talked about. Kayla: I love that he had those, like. Chris: Yeah, he had it, like, ready off the top, right? Yeah. By the way, I was on video with him, so he didn't, you know, he wasn't, like, looking anything up. It was just. It was off the top of his head, man. The CCDH, the center for countering digital hate, by the way, is a very good organization. Definitely in my trust network should be in yours, too. And they do a lot of good research and publishing on anti vax. And this is one of the most useful things, I think, that I've seen from them. And again, we talk about this on the show a lot, and I mention it with Doctor Gorski, too, like, how similar this is with QAnon. How similar it is with mlms. Right. With mlms you have, like, the top of the pyramid. You have, you know, the devosses. Right.

1:32:17 Chris: And then you have a few steps below that. You have, like, the. The king influence. You have the people that are sort of at the top of the amway pyramid, and then you have a bunch of people at the bottom who are interested in selling MLM but aren't necessarily hardcore about it. I feel like it's just. Yeah, there's this concept of these different levels of hardcoreness and different levels of identity and motivated reasoning. And the further up you go, the more of that you have. Kayla: Right. Chris: Seems to be very common. And I like the categories that the CCDH has here. Right. I like the people that are in it for the money. Then there's people who are true believers and they're pushing the narratives. And then there's sort of like. He called them conspiracy theorists who are sort of maybe like the mid level guy. They're like the. They're like the breadcrumb bakers, I think, in Qanon.

1:33:08 Kayla: And then there's like how the bakers were like one level up from the. Chris: They were like the mid level. Yeah. And then there's just, like, lurkers, you know, there's, like, people who, like, read the stuff and follow it, but don't. They're not really, like, participatory. I just think it's a really useful way of, like, categorizing it. And that's why, like, when we're in this episode, I'm. I'm trying to be careful with my language. I think I'm failing pretty radically at it, but I'm trying to be careful about. Yeah, I'm a huge failure, is the. Kayla: Thing, as kind of like Andrew Wakefield, if you've watched. Chris: If you've. If you've listened to this show, you know what huge failure I am. But, yeah, like, I try to say anti vaccine influencer when I mean that, or anti vaccine doctor or anti vaccine leader when I'm talking about Andrew Wakefield versus people listening to this might be just, like, nervous about vaccines or harboring some doubts based on something they read or, I don't know, you saw some, like, scary headline about Johnson and Johnson, and now you're like, ugh. Right, right. Those folks are not the same as Andrew Wakefield. They're not the same ones that are pushing these narratives and profiting from these narratives. These are people that are being affected by these narratives.

1:34:17 Kayla: Yeah, I don't think I have much anger towards people that have fears and doubts. I think it's when it starts to go beyond that and starts to really affect other people and starts to get into this ableist territory and get into this spreading misinformation is when it starts to get more complicated. But, like, when I'm scrolling Twitter and I see somebody be like, I'm afraid to get the vaccine. Yeah, I feel for that person. Chris: Makes me sad. All right, let's get back to Doctor Gorski for a minute. And you're right. I wish that they would take more action on that because it's every bit as dangerous as something like QAnon. Dr Gorski: Well, I was gonna say I can't resist here, but people wonder why QAnon, why anti vaxxers so rapidly fused with QAnon back in the day? And I don't know if you've had this thought or some of us were kind of naive and that we thought, well, part of the reason there's anti vaccine movement is because of the success of vaccines. You know, people don't see the horror that diseases cause. You know, the ones that we vaccinate against anymore. You know, they're a. Vaccines are a victim of their own success. You've heard this narrative before, right? So the thought was, well, if there was ever really a big outbreak or a big pandemic that was causing mass death, the stuff would rapidly go away or go, be marginalized, you know, or anti vaccine would. Exactly the opposite happened.

1:35:42 Chris: Yeah. Yeah. That is surprising and depressing, I guess. Dr Gorski: Well, it's not so surprising if you look at the anti vaccine movement as very much like QAnon. I mean, I'm talking pre pandemic. It's a conspiracy theory movement. And I. I'm going to make the argument that all science denial is rooted in conspiracy theory, but especially the anti vaccine movement. I once wrote about something I like to call the central conspiracy theory of the anti vaccine movement. And you can probably guess what it is. It's the idea that vaccines are harmful and don't work, but that, quote, unquote, they, and, you know, they being the CDC doctors, big pharma, the government, etcetera, don't want you to know about it and are suppressing the evidence that they're harmful. And the two major anti vaccine conspiracy theories that I've dealt with over the years, the first one was promoted by Robert F. Kennedy Junior in 2005.

1:36:48 Dr Gorski: In 2005, I kind of made my first big splash as a blogger. Like, I had the first post that I ever did that went viral, and it was in response to Robert F. Kennedy's article that was published, believe it or not, simultaneously in Salon.com and Rolling Stone called deadly immunity. It was basically promoting the idea that mercury, which was part of the thimerosal preservative that had been used in several childhood vaccines until around 2001, 2002, when they. When those vaccines were pulled and thimerosal free versions offered that the thimerosal in vaccines, that the mercury in vaccines was the cause of the quote unquote, autism epidemic.

1:37:35 Chris: All right, so we're going to hear Doctor Gorski in a little bit talk about some of the central conspiracy theories surrounding vaccines. But he also. He talked. Well, he talked about what he says is the central theory. He's going to go into a little more detail about other sort of, like, central ish theories. But before we get to that, I wanted to. There's several things that have been talked about that I want to add to. First of all, I don't know if this is like a counterpoint that I want to make, but I want to talk a little bit about the whole, like, vaccines are a victim of their own success thing. And he mentioned that we thought that was the case, but, oh, no, Covid came along and it only inflamed anti vaccine rhetoric and activity. And so that sucks, right?

1:38:22 Chris: Yeah, and it does suck. However, I want to point out a few things. We don't quite know what the actual uptake of vaccines will because it hasn't happened yet like we have. We're not at the end of it yet. We're still doing. We're still very much in the middle of the vaccine rollout, and. Yeah, totally. There was, like, as we mentioned on the QAnon episodes, the pandemic threw gasoline on the QAnon fire. It also threw gasoline on other similar fires, such as anti vax. But there's a big difference between online rhetoric and real world decisions. Kayla: Yup. Chris: And even though a large chunk of the populace has said in. In polls that, oh, I won't get COVID vaccine, there's also a difference between intent and action. So I'm actually very curious to see how it plays out in the real world. I'm really curious to see if actual vaccine uptake really does follow the anti vaccine rhetoric or if it doesn't as much.

1:39:24 Kayla: Can I give you an interesting anecdote? Chris: Yes. Kayla: I know somebody who was a little vaccine hesitant when the rollout started, and then when they experienced the relief when their own parents were vaccinated, the relief they experienced in knowing their parents were vaccinated convinced them that it was the right thing to do for themselves because they couldn't really argue with those feelings of relief. Chris: Can I riff on your riff, please? One of the major ways, and the reason I'm riffing is that's not part of. It's not part of my script because I had to cut so much. But one of the major ways that it's suggested now that doctors in particular, interact with people who are vaccine hesitant is to use storytelling such as that, because it's steam, baby. As we have said on the show.

1:40:18 Kayla: Before, arts are always a part of it. Chris: Well, yeah. And as we've said on the show, and as we will say again on the show and this episode and again in the future, just countering with facts doesn't work. Kayla: Right? Chris: If it did work, then we wouldn't even have a problem, because the facts are out there, right? So it's not. It's not saying, hey, did you know that QAnon was stupid? Did you know that there's not a global cabal? Did you know that vaccines are actually. That they work? And you're an idiot. Like, that doesn't sway people. That doesn't change people's minds. Kayla: Right? Chris: So what. What is recommended is that if a doctor gets. If a patient tells a doctor, oh, you know, I heard. I have a friend who got XYZ vaccine, and her kid got real sick after. So I don't know. Like, I don't. I'm a little worried right. Then. The way to counter it isn't, you got sick for reasons that's not true. Here's the facts. A better way would be to say, like, well, actually, I have my own story of this person who got the vaccine, and they felt just fine, right? And I have another story of somebody didn't get the vaccine and got the disease, and it was way worse. Point is, that sort of that storytelling element compels people more. And this is something I've been thinking about a lot, actually.

1:41:32 Chris: I think for those of us who grew up pre Internet, who have experienced the world, like, and that's like half of millennials and, like, Gen Xers and whatnot, right? I think we sometimes get frustrated that, like, the objective facts, the facts don't win by default anymore, right? God damn it. We live in this world where facts and objective reality is just one more viewpoint online. And I think that we get scared and frustrated. I think that. And I've been sort of coming to this conclusion more and more lately, is that something we sort of need to accept as the new reality and then turn our attention towards, well, what does work?

1:42:12 Chris: If we think that facts and objective reality are important and will save us, then we need to actually fight for it by being good communicators and good storytellers and understanding that we're in that environment, that we're not in an environment anymore where we can just sit by and be like, oh, yeah, QAnon, that'll die out because it's complete rubbish. Kayla: I think it's also we live in, because we live in the post Internet era, we as a society also have better access to facts. And so it's like the disparity is even more apparent. Like, think about the thing I told you earlier about Elestra. Like, everybody thought that the objective reality was that, oh, Lester made you shit your pants. But because we didn't have the same access to facts, it was not really an issue. And also, it wasn't Covid.

1:42:59 Chris: The last two to three minutes of this podcast is the exact brand of culture. Just weird. I talking about online radicalization, facts, science, and shitting your pants. That is what we are about here at culture. Just weird, you guys. So I hope you remember in the future, if you need to tell a story about how vaccines are safe to somebody who is legitimately anxious or afraid, remember, Olestra doesn't make you shit. Your pants. Kayla: There you go. Chris: That's the key. Kayla: Can I tell you one more interesting anecdotal vaccine Covid story? I know somebody who does not get the flu shot because, quote, unquote, the only time they've ever gotten the flu was the one time they got the flu shot. They got the COVID vaccine.

1:43:48 Chris: Interesting. Kayla: I thought that was very interesting. Chris: Well, and remember when we had dinner with those friends of ours in Orlando and they talked about how they knew some folks that were, like, kind of fringy in terms of being, like, nut jobs and they still got the vaccine? There's. I mean, there's other people in my life who I thought would have more hesitance than they have. There's other people that I espouse some beliefs that are questionable at best. And they got the vaccines. Kayla: So there's people I know that literally were anti COVID vaccine in September that have gotten the vaccine now. Chris: So all this is to say, going back, bringing it all back, I am not yet sold that this whole, like, well, we thought vaccines were a victim of their own success, but turns out that's not true. I think that the story is not fully in on that yet.

1:44:44 Kayla: Right? Chris: It may be true. It may be. Oh, yeah. Well, Covid came around and proved that, but I think that actually, we might see that more people get vaccinated with COVID than we might expect otherwise. Based on. If you're a person that spends a lot of time online and interacts with vaccine skeptics a lot, especially with the. Kayla: Social pressure of putting it on your dating profile or with the, like, you can travel if you have your vaccines, like, with those things in place, I think people who are, like, on the fence or slightly hesitant are going to be pushed one way. Chris: Yeah. Now, again, Covid is. It's no smallpox. Right. So it's not, like, everywhere and gonna kill you. And if it doesn't kill you, it's gonna disfigure you. So, like, you know, it's. It's possible that also contributes to this, like, anti vaccine. Vaccines are a victim of their own success. Just kidding. They're not. I think that might also have something to do with it. Is it, like, Covid is like, this nebulous? Sort of, like, you only have a 1% chance of dying, and not everybody knows somebody that went through it or, you know, whatever. And remember, people don't make decisions based on the magnitude of the consequences, only the chance of the consequences. So if you hear, you know, 1% chance of death from COVID then you know, maybe that will contribute to some vaccine hesitancy more than we might think.

1:45:58 Chris: But I also think, by the way, that was an important change in the talking points when communication, I don't know if you remember when the communication sort of changed from, hey, it's not just a 1% chance of dying. There's also like a much higher chance of some sort of like, complication happening that you don't want to have happen. Kayla: Right. Chris: Because again, people don't care. I could die. People care about 1%. That's small. Kayla: I also think that there's probably some overlap between the folks who believe it's all a hoax and not real and some anti vaxxers or vaccine people. Chris: Absolutely. Because then they're making decisions on different information. We are. Kayla: Right. Chris: They're saying, like, why would I go do this thing that's going to insert a microchip in my body for something that's not actually real.

1:46:42 Kayla: Right. Chris: All right. Anyway, all that said, even if I wind up being right and there's more vaccine uptake for Covid than the Internet, surveys show the discourse around Covid has definitely been infected by talking points from anti vax influencers. So that part is still true. Now, I will also add, I think Doctor Gorski is totally right, obviously, about anti vaxx as a conspiracy theory. There has to be a motivated reasoning behind theories that they have. Because otherwise, how could vaccines be harmful unless there was a shadowy group hiding the fact that they are right? Kayla: It's got to go all the way to the top. Chris: That's right. And we've seen that again and again on the show with all sorts of quackery. Textbook motivated reasoning. And then the last thing he talked about before this latest interjection here was Thomyrsol last episode. We talked a little bit about vaccine preservatives and that's what Thomyrsol. Okay, by the way, just, do you know that I've always read that word as themyscerol? I know that it's thamyrosal and people say, but like, I read it as themisserol. Why?

1:47:48 Kayla: Have you had experience with reading this word before researching this podcast? Chris: Well, I mean, I've read about it before just in researching anti vax stuff, just. Kayla: Yeah, I probably came across that word and my head went and then kept moving. Chris: That's weird because it doesn't even have a p in it. Kayla: Yeah, but you know, when you see a word that you just like, aren't going to take the time to figure out how to say in your head. So you just make a noise in your head and move on. Chris: Yeah, well, I did that, except I switched the consonants. Anyway, it's not the miseral, it's the mirasol. Kayla: Good job. Chris: And it is, or I should say was a preservative used to keep some vaccines shelf stable, most notably the MMR vaccine. And this is one of the things that the modern anti vax movement keyed on, is a possible cause of autism, as Doctor Gorski mentioned. After all, the mirasol decays into a mercury compound. And we know mercury is a bad thing to have in your bloodstream, as the reasoning went for anti vaxxers. Since we know that vaccines cause autism, maybe we can prove the mechanism must be thimerosal. And again, note the trying to prove problem here.

1:48:56 Kayla: It's the same problem with the flat earthers, man. Chris: Never mind that the effect that you're trying to find a cause for has been debunked many times over this vaccine autism link. Or actually, hold on, let's be generous. So the worries about thimerosal are pretty old at this point, right? There's basically as old as the Wakefield study is. So let's just assume that instead of ignoring the science that there is no link, the thimerosal people are instead jumping to the conclusions that additional studies will just verify that there is a link. Right. Because at this point, let's pretend that we're in 1998 and the only information you have to go on is this Wakefield study in the lancet. And there hasn't been additional studies to try to verify or deny that, which will eventually end up denying it.

1:49:39 Kayla: Right, right. Chris: So they're jumping to conclusions that the science will say that there is a link, and then they're saying, well, maybe it's the samarisol, maybe the mercury and thimerosal is causing autism. However, this was also found to be untrue. The amount of mercury that you are exposed to as the result of the vaccine is far less than it would take to amount to any kind of poisoning. However, as Doctor Gorski mentioned out of a, quote, abundance of caution. And that word will come up again. It's already come up with. That's the words they use for Johnson taking it off the market. And that's the words they used for removing thimerosal from vaccines. Out of an abundance of caution, us public health services recommended that different preservatives be used in vaccine manufacture, and thimerosal was phased out of use entirely.

1:50:27 Kayla: Copy that. Chris: The anti vaxx community of course, regarded this as a success, except there wound up being a bit of a problem for them. The thimerosal was all gone, but autism diagnoses still kept rising. So we didn't mention this, but Doctor Gorski said the words autism epidemic, quote unquote. This is one of the pillars of proof for the autism caused by vaccine folks. Kayla: Right? Chris: One of the pillars of proof is that autism cases keep rising year after year. And why is that happening if vaccines aren't causing it? Kayla: It just makes me so frustrated because even though I don't know why that is, instead of going like, well, that sounds reasonable, anti vaxx people, my brain can figure out like four or five different reasons why that might be happening.

1:51:17 Chris: Yeah. It's so interesting that it's like, again, it always comes back to the vaccine, right? There's not like, could be this, could be this. We don't know which is like the real, in the real world, right? That's what it is. We don't know why it is. There's speculation. And I think Doctor Gorski speculates this later on, and I agree with this, is that it's probably just changes in diagnostic procedure and medical understanding. Kayla: That's what I was always under the impression of, is that it's not necessarily that there are more cases which may or may not be true. I don't know. But my understanding was that it probably is related to the fact that we have different, better adjusted diagnostic procedures now.

1:51:59 Chris: Right. It's more people are more than we are recognizing. This is a thing. And I'll say that, like, you know, if you go fully into the, like, non ableist, sort of like neurodivergent versus neurotypical, it's not even really a diagnosis, quote unquote. Right. It's just there's a different way of being. Kayla: Right. Dr Gorski: I. Chris: And it's something that we just never really, like, had language or categories for before. And now we sort of are. And that's why it's increasing. But now, you know, it does increase. These, quote unquote, diagnoses do increase every year. So maybe it's something else. I don't know. But the point is, I'm not sitting here going like, oh, those vaccines. Kayla: Right. Chris: Anyway, the fact that autism is still around and increasing despite thimerosal not being still around is quite inconvenient if you're anti vaxxer. So the anti vax leaders moved the goalposts.

1:52:49 Kayla: It's like when those flat earthers in that documentary were like, here's the defining experiment we're going to do, or prove that earth is flat and it proves the earth is round. It's like we must have done it wrong, right? Chris: Exactly. Exactly. So that means it's time to talk about aluminum. So we talked about aluminum a little bit. We mentioned why it's used. It's used as an adjuvant, which means that it's added to some vaccines to increase their effectiveness. So I was curious about this, and I looked into it. Kayla: You did your research? Chris: I did my research, and actually, one of these things that I want to talk about, actually, before I do this, is when I do research for these things, for these topics, for the show, particularly when it's something I, like know that I'm gonna be biased against. I do try to. Steel man. I don't know if you've heard steel man. No, it's basically the opposite of straw man. So, steel manning, an argument is. It's actually, it's what Jatar said in that interview about, like, trying to present your opponent's arguments in the best light. And it's actually can be a very.

1:53:52 Kayla: Good, like, benefit of the doubt. Chris: Yeah, it's sort of benefit of the doubt. It's like, what is the best possible case, right, that my opponent can make here? And it actually helps you. It's good for your own understanding because it helps you understand, like, what their points are, what they're trying to say. Kayla: It gives you empathy for that position. Chris: But for the position, it's just good practice. So I've. I've been into this, like, whole idea of, like, steel manning. Dr Gorski: Right. Chris: So obviously, I wanted to do that with this as well. And so I looked into it, and it turns out aluminum sort of. Sort of like having too much mercury in your bloodstream. So aluminum is actually toxic to your. To your neurology. So it's a neurotoxin.

1:54:36 Kayla: Cool. So should we throw away our aluminum foil and. Chris: Well, don't eat your aluminum foil, for sure. Kayla: Yeah, but we touch food on it all the time. Chris: No. Do you know ubiquitous aluminum foil is? Kayla: Throw it away. Chris: All right, so if. If you have aluminum in your bloodstream and too much of it, then it can be a neurotoxin. And I looked into it more, and there are actually some scientific studies out there in respected journals that do explore this idea. I'm not going to say they demonstrate one way or the other, but they do explore like, hey, is aluminum bad for you? Kayla: Let's. Chris: Let's actually look at this. So I was like, okay, well, is there something to this then? Right now, vaccine advocates will stress that more aluminum is consumed by children and mother's milk than they get in a vaccine. So case close, right?

1:55:31 Kayla: But anti breast milk, that's what it should be. Chris: The thing is, vaccine delivers the aluminum directly into your bloodstream. And that's very different than absorbing through your gastrointestinal tract. As you know, you don't absorb as much as you would just by getting it directly injected. So it feels like a bit of. Kayla: A inject alcohol directly into your veins as opposed to absorbing it rectally. Chris: Right. Kayla: That is what we actually. Chris: How many times are we going to talk about the rectum in this one episode? Kayla: As many times as I possibly can. Chris: Good. Yeah. Is it a goal? Are you writing it down? Kayla: Why do you think I'm sitting over here taking notes?

1:56:12 Chris: So it just, it felt a little weird that it was like, oh, yeah. Like, why would you say you eat more aluminum than you get in the vaccine when the vaccine is not. You're not eating the vaccine, you're getting it injected. That's a legitimate argument. I thought. Kayla: That is, I can see an opening to the door of a legitimate argument there. Chris: So you layer on top of this if you are afraid for your child, and perhaps you're someone like me, like us, who has been through an experience of child loss where the low probability catastrophe actually happened. And suddenly you're finding yourself thinking, well, it's probably safe, but like, I don't know, maybe I just don't want to take the risk. Kayla: Right, right.

1:56:54 Chris: So did I become anti vaxxer at this point? Kayla: Am I supposed to answer that? No, I don't think you did. Chris: Yeah, obviously I didn't. And there's probably not a lot of suspense here, unless you've skipped like the entire rest this in the last episode. But I will say, man, I really did gain a ton of empathy for the vaccine. Hesitant when I went through this experience myself. Not sympathy, I already had sympathy. I mean, empathy. Like, you know, I, like, I got it. You know, like I felt it. I got how their headspace feels when they're thinking about this because I was like, for a moment in time, I was kind of feeling it myself. Right, right. So if you are wondering now how I climbed out of this, here's how. Basically it comes down to the trust network stuff. And I know I keep referencing trust network and it's like, that's on our Patreon.

1:57:47 Chris: But, you know, we talk about it enough on the show. Trust network again, is just like the people and the things and the science and the whatever that I trust already. So I was like, well, is this, is there something to this? Okay, well, let's see. Let's see if the other things that I trust have something to say about this. So actually Doctor Gorski had a couple articles that I, and this is actually, this is like way after talking to him in the interview and I'm like reading these articles by him. It's kind of weird. But he had, you know, he has a few articles where he talks about and he actually goes into, what's great about him is that he says, like in his articles he'll say like this is all bonk and stupid, but let's say that it wasn't. Chris: Let's like go point by point and explain like in detail, like what's going on here. Kayla: That's the best kind of skepticism.

1:58:29 Chris: I agree. Kayla: You know who else does that? Chris: I know who you're gonna say. Kayla: Ann Reardon of the how to cook. That YouTube channel. Chris: Ann Reardon is another. Kayla: She is in my trust network 100%. What she does is she debunks food hacks, like viral food. Chris: Are we gonna do that? I really want her on the show. Kayla: I want her on the show too. This is just a little taste. She debunks viral food hacks by going through and treating them as if they. Chris: As if they were real, demonstrating what actually happens, which sometimes is quite disastrous, but always funny. Kayla: Go check out Ann Reardon and how to cook that you'll be entertained. Chris: So what I really liked about this is, remember I was saying I read some actual real studies and so Doctor Gorsy talked about like, okay, here's how this study was conducted, here's what happened with it. Here's. And actually going into the context of like who did the study and blah, blah. So that helped. Then I also went to another person who is a famous sort of vaccine advocate. We mentioned him on last show, Doctor Paul Offit. And he actually had a statement that he made about aluminum amounts that address the exact thing that I had read about and was thinking and was concerned about, which is, oh, but it's different if you get it injected. So he was basically like, yes, that is true.

1:59:50 Chris: Even so, if you take the amount that a baby intakes when they eat and you adjust for the fact that they only absorb x percent of it. Kayla: Right. Chris: It's still more than is in the vaccine. Kayla: Dang. Good to know. Chris: So he addressed that exact thing. So that was another thing that I read and then the other thing is that I sort of was realizing some of the stuff that we've been talking about on the episode now is that the science was still being worked on just like with the other vaccine incidents, like with the DPT scare and the MMR autism scare. Right. Both of those ginned up additional studies about, well, like, okay, well, there's a scare. Should we look into this? Let's look into it. Right. I feel like that's kind of what was happening with the study that I read about aluminum, right? It wasn't like, there wasn't like, oh, well, it's definitely fucked. Or it's like, oh, it's definitely safe.

2:00:39 Chris: I mean, there's lot to suggest that it is safe based on the fact that it's been used for hundreds of years and all the other things I've already talked about. But me reading a study where scientists are going back and forth about like, well, I tried this and this happened, and then we know this about this and it does this to neurons, doesn't mean anything, right? Like, it's not. It's in progress science. So, like, you know, if somebody finds like, well, under these circumstances in this particular thing, like aluminum could fuck you up if this happened, then maybe eventually there would be some actionable insight from that. Kayla: Right. Chris: But you don't necessarily get actionable insight as a layperson, even a very scientifically literate layperson such as myself from reading one of these studies. And that became very clear to me there.

2:01:24 Kayla: Right. Chris: And then this is also when I dug around and discovered what's called the GACVs, or global Advisory committee on Vaccine Safety, essentially the. I don't know, gaCvs, you can't pronounce it, but it's essentially it's a Who World Health Organization who created committee whose sole goal is to be vigilant about vaccine safety. This group investigated aluminum adjuvant safety, and here was their finding. And the following quote is going to be the last paragraph in a larger article they published about aluminum safety in vaccines. From the most recent evidence available, there is no reason to conclude that a health risk exists as a result of administration of aluminum containing vaccines, nor is there any good reason for changing current vaccination practice. The GACVs will continue to review the evidence that might emerge from ongoing studies. End quote.

2:02:28 Chris: And the key thing to remember here is that this is a committee established by the WHO to be independent and like, almost adversarial in terms of vaccine safety. Almost like a, like vaccine ombudsman. Like they're supposed to track this stuff down, right? When the aluminum research happened, it was the gacvs recommending that it happen to the WHO, not the other way around. So that's like their whole job. Here's the way the group describes themselves. The JCVS is a scientific advisory body established by WHO to provide a reliable and independent scientific assessment of vaccine safety issues in order to respond promptly, efficiently, and with scientific rigor to such issues. Membership includes experts from around the world in fields of epidemiology, pediatrics, internal medicine, pharmacology and toxicology, infectious diseases, public health, immunology and autoimmunity, drug regulation and safety.

2:03:30 Kayla: That covers quite a bit. Chris: So me realizing that an abundance of caution is how vaccine science is and always has been done is another thing that helped bring me out of that little like, oh, how do I feel about this? Kayla: Right? Chris: And finally realizing that kind of none of this matters anyway because the aluminum fear comes from autism fear, which is not only begging the question, as we've mentioned several times, but also has been debunked a bunch of times. Basically, we're trying to, again, find a cause for an effect that doesn't exist. So it's like, oh, wait, why was I even worried about this?

2:04:14 Kayla: Yeah, it's like, oh, no, I'm afeard that I'm gonna turn into a cow from this. Chris: Right? It's like, it's one thing. If it was like, oh, man, there's a link between this, between vaccines and this disease, and we just don't know what it is. Is it this? Is it this? Is it this? Kayla: Right. Chris: It's another thing to be like, we're looking for this link to nothing. Kayla: Yeah. Chris: So all of those things are sort of, again, what brought me out of that. So there's one anti vax myth that we didn't state at the top of the show, but I actually think it's pretty. We probably should have stated it. But there's this myth that vaccines don't have the same trial and approval process that normal drugs.

2:04:56 Kayla: Oh, yeah, they would love to say that. Chris: Yeah, that's a very. Yeah, it's a very popular one. And this is true. They don't have the same trial and approval process that normal drugs do. They have different processes. And in fact, from my research, they have way more layers of safety even than your non vaccine pharmaceuticals, as we've been talking about, as I just mentioned, vaccines are always treated with this quote, unquote, abundance of caution. Kayla: Right. Chris: So here's a pretty good, although probably not comprehensive list of the layers of vaccine safety I discovered on my journey of researching this episode. First and foremost, the existence of the jcvs that we just talked about by itself is like, pretty much enough for me to make me say, okay, that's definitely safe. Their independence and their purpose is a check and balance. Their multidisciplinary approach all make me feel very good about their work. But let's talk about the US specifically a little bit since we have several things going on. One of them is called the vaccine court. There's like this more boring technical term, but everyone calls it vaccine court. Long story short, is it like night court? It's exactly like night court, except instead of happening at night, it happens inside of a vaccine. That's what it is in the real world.

2:06:15 Chris: Long story short, there's this whole specialized apparatus of the legal system designed specifically to process claims of vaccine harm. It was actually established in 1986 as a response to that DPT scare that we keep talking about in an effort to rebuild trust and get back to herd immunity levels for pertussis. And I think it was pertussis. It was one of the three. As we see again and again, though, the very existence of this safety net is now used as firepower by anti vaccine influencers to push the idea of, oh, if vaccines are so safe, why is there a court specifically for vaccine injury then? Kayla: God, that's so insidious. Chris: It's so evil. I know. It's. It's. Yeah, it's. It's tough. The next thing I want to mention is another popular anti vax topic, which is Vaers. Vaers. You may have heard of this one.

2:07:04 Kayla: V a e r s. Yes. Never seen it. Never heard of it. Chris: Don't know what you're talking about. The vaccine adverse event reporting system, it is co managed by the CDC and the FDA, and it came out of the same act of Congress that created the vaccine court in 1986. And the idea is that basically it's like a pipeline for anyone who has received a vaccine can report any adverse reactions they might be experiencing in the wake. And then on the other side, Vaers will process these claims and investigate once again. Same old story. Vaers does a lot of good, but gets misused and abused by people pushing anti vax narratives. Kayla: Well, even just like a regular person, like, I don't know, my tummy hurts a lot. It probably hurt after getting the COVID vaccine. And if I had gone like, tummy hurts, it could have been because I ate Chipotle.

2:07:53 Chris: So that's the thing. Do not disparage chipotle on the air. Kayla: Chipotle makes my tummy hurt. Chris: Swear to God. Kayla: I don't like to eat it. Chris: I am in the Chipotle cult. Kayla: I know. I need to get you out of it. Cause it makes my tummy hurt. Chris: I know. I know that. I'm an idiot. That's true, actually. So, yeah, the thing is that Vaers actually has helped identify problems. And, like, that can be problems with, like, oh, there's. We've used our statistical analysis to identify the specific batch that has, like, some issue with it or in the specific region or with specific vaccines, whatever. It's a. It's a great tool for monitoring the effectiveness and safety of public health. Kayla: Yeah, I'm super down with that. Chris: Yeah. It's just unfortunate that it gets used so heavily to promote the idea that vaccine aren't safe because it's so easy to look at the numbers of reports and say, holy shit, that's unsafe. There's like 5 million reports on this thing for this vaccine.

2:08:43 Kayla: Maybe it's because those 5 million people ate Chipotle the same day they got a vaccine. Chris: Exactly. The fact is, the vast majority of VaErs reports are not actually related to the vaccine. It's just like, they're just all related to Chipotle. Coincidental. Yeah. All these people had chipotle or, you know, whatever. Kayla: Chipotle. Chris: And it's the chipotle epidemic. Kayla: Chipotle has aluminum. You heard it first. Chris: But the point is there's symptoms or experiences that happen at similar times to when they had the vaccines. And so I guess I should report it. Kayla: It's like all the people being let go. The flu shot gave me the flu. Chris: Exactly. Kayla: No, it didn't. Chris: It's that if you, like, threw them all in a bucket and said, look, there's 5 million as anti vaxxer. Right? So the only way to get a signal out of that noise is to use statistics. Right. You can't look at those numbers and say, oh, my gosh, look at all of them. Like, you actually have to say, like, you have to use statistical methods to say, like, oh, there's actually a signal in this noise over here in this community. Like, maybe we should look into that a little bit.

2:09:41 Kayla: Okay. But there's lies, there's damage, and then there's statistics. Chris: Not getting into that's a whole other discussion. So the CDC also co manages two more things, the VSD and CISA. I'm just going to let these descriptions speak for themselves because I'm lazy. These are both from the CDC vaccine safety website. The vaccine safety data link is a collaboration between CDC and nine healthcare organizations that conducts active vaccine safety monitoring and research, and the clinical immunization safety Assessment Project is a partnership between CDC and seven medical research centers that provides expert consultation and conducts clinical research on vaccine associated health risks. I'll stop listing stuff now. I'm probably missing stuff. But the point is, vaccines have layer upon layer of safety nets.

2:10:43 Chris: And folks, I have to say it is this abundance of caution and these multiple layers that make me feel extremely confident in getting vaccines for myself and hopefully one day for my children. It's a bit of a paradox, I know, just like we've talked about with the J and J vaccine today. On one hand, the abundance of caution engenders bad communication and creates negative impressions and anxiety, and that all fuels anti vaccine sentiment, which is itself dangerous because when people don't take vaccines, it damages herd immunity, as we've talked about. On the other hand, it's also a part of why vaccines are so ridiculously safe. So I'm not sure if I have the, quote, right answer to this question, like, are we too cautious with vaccines?

2:11:33 Kayla: No. Chris: There's definitely a trade off between caution and anti vaccine sentiment. And I don't know what the right amount of trade is, but I do know that we skew very heavily currently towards caution. And while it sucks that does create vaccine hesitancy in the larger population, I know for me at least, it makes me feel extremely safe. Kayla: Me too. Dr Gorski: So the conspiracy theory here was what I like to call the Simpsonwood conspiracy theory, because in 2000, the CDC, in response to growing concerns about mercury in vaccines, the CDC convened a conference at the Simpsonwood conference Center, which is, I guess, in suburban Atlanta, not too far from the CDC. And there they talked about some studies, and one in particular, where the raw epidemiologic analysis showed a seeming correlation between the thimerosal containing vaccines and autism. But it's a correlation that went away when they started controlling appropriately for confounding variables. And a whole transcript of this thing, which is like 100 plus pages, was published. So it's not like this was something, you know, even though the anti vaccine movement portrayed this as some sort of secret meeting. A month later, they published the entire transcript of the meeting.

2:12:57 Dr Gorski: But anti vaxxers portrayed this meeting as being there to find a way to cover up that initial finding. Never mind that what was happening was it was just being corrected with appropriate analysis of the data. I mean, epidemiologic studies. When you do the raw analysis without correcting for confounders, you will quite frequently find spurious correlations, which go away when you start controlling for things that might have influenced that correlation. So that's the Simpsonwood conspiracy theory. And that was like the heart of RFK junior s article in 2005, was that the Simpsonwood conspiracy theory? That he basically sold that. Now, fast forward nine years later to 2014, and maybe you've heard of this one, the CDC whistleblower. This is the first anti vaccine conspiracy theory that I followed, blogged about, and watched be born in real time.

2:13:56 Dr Gorski: Basically, there was a disgruntled CDC scientist who was involved with the publication of an article on MMR vaccine and autism, an epidemiologic study done using data from Georgia. And to make a really long story short, it's the same damn thing. The initial analysis of the data set suggested that there was a, I believe it was fourfold elevated risk of autism in african american boys related to the MMR vaccine. Now, at the time, I couldn't help but be a bit sarcastic by saying, you know, the study basically proves Andrew Wakefield was wrong, because even if this is true and there's this elevated risk in african american boys, it shows that the vaccine is safe for everybody else. So, of course, when you look at it's the sort of correlation that went away, again with appropriate control for confounders.

2:14:54 Dr Gorski: It was also based on a very small subset, a small number of cases. So even if it hadn't gone away, it could well have been spurious. You know, and especially if you put it in the context of all the other studies, all the other science, you would have probably been able to safely conclude that it was spurious. In any event, for whatever reason the CDC scientist started, William Thompson started a series of phone conversations with a biochemical engineer named Brian Hooker. Brian Hooker had become anti vaccine because his son had autism, and he came to believe that vaccines had caused it. It's unclear why Thompson reached out to Hooker, but Hooker recorded the phone calls with secretly. Those phone calls became the basis for the conspiracy theory because basically, again, Thompson was disgruntled. He complained about all sorts of people in the CDC.

2:15:50 Dr Gorski: He felt like his concerns over the study had been whitewashed, even though they hadn't. There were claims, for instance, that all of the raw data had been destroyed for some reason, which is highly unlikely given that would go so much against government data retention policies. In any event, he became the quote unquote CDC whistleblower. Now, Hooker did the same thing, basically, and reanalyzed the data set that he had gotten from the whistleblower. And he did it without controlling for confounders. And then he said, aha, look at this. They're hiding this. Thus was born the CDC whistleblower conspiracy theory, which bubbled along until 2016, when Andrew Wakefield teamed up with Dell Bigtree to make the anti vaccine propaganda piece vaxxed. The CDC whistleblower conspiracy theory is the heart of vaxed.

2:16:49 Dr Gorski: And it's kind of funny because what happened is the existence of this channel of communication with the disgruntled CDC scientist came out too soon. Because for some reason, Hooker let Andrew Wakefield know that he was having conversations with Thompson. And Wakefield couldn't keep his mouth shut and made a video about it, including excerpts from the recorded phone call, you know, from the recorded phone calls. And that kind of blew it up. And then the anti vaxxers started pushing it. Thompson lawyered up and hasn't been heard from since. So we're going, we're well over six years since this happened. You know, there you go. It took on a life of its own. And so that sort of supplanted the Simpsonwood conspiracy theory as the main one. The main one is like, this is, you know, this one now is the main one.

2:17:45 Dr Gorski: I'm sure that something related to Covid will likely supplant this one, you know, but they're all of the same form. Chris: They're all plandemic, right? Dr Gorski: Well, they are always, always of the same form. That vaccines are horrible, but that the CDC, government doctors, big pharma, etc. Are covering up the evidence about how horrible they are. Yeah, this is always, it's the same. It's the central conspiracy theory of the anti vaccine movement. Which brings me back to conspiracy theories in general. First, science denial. And I like to think of it this way. So let's say you're denying some well established piece of science, let's say climate, human induced climate change, or that vaccines are safe and effective, etcetera, you know, whatever. Evolution, that too. So how do you explain why the entire relevant scientific community that's devoted to studying those questions rejects your viewpoint?

2:18:46 Chris: Yeah, I mean, you have to. I was going to say, yeah, it. Dr Gorski: Becomes a conspiracy theory, right. Chris: It's necessary to say that there is a. They covering it up because otherwise. Dr Gorski: Because otherwise the truth would account would come out. And you can find this pretty much in any science denial. I always hesitate to mention this next one because the association causes, you know, cranks try to use the association to say that. Oh, you're calling me a Nazi? No, no. But Holocaust denial is the perfect example. You know, it's all a conspiracy by, you know, the Jews and et cetera to cover up that the Holocaust wasn't that bad, didn't happen or whatever. Chris: Right. In the case of Qanon, it's like the MSM is covering things up and they won't tell you certain things and it's the deep state or the deep state. Yeah. Yep. Another thing I wanted to comment. So that makes it, by the way, that makes a ton of sense to me, that sort of all medicine quackery must funnel into a conspiracy theory because.

2:19:43 Dr Gorski: Of that central need, cancer quackery, too. There's a cure for cancer that they are keeping from you, which has always been ridiculous. That's been the most ridiculous one to me because almost everybody has had a family member die of cancer, or cancer is so common that so many of us will get it ourselves before we're through on this earth. Can you really believe that, for instance, high ranking big pharma employees, if one of their family members or friends came down with potentially deadly cancer, would hide the existence of a cure for that cancer for whatever reason, the men in. Chris: Black come and take them away. Dr Gorski: The neuralizer, right.

2:20:25 Chris: Yeah. One of the other things I wanted to comment on too, about what you were saying. So what you were talking about with Simpsonwood really recalled to me this article I had read. Again, I keep referencing, maybe it's just fresh in my brain, the QAnon episode. It's called the illicit aura of information. And how when there are informational bits that are intended to be private and then become public, they attain this sort of like magical level with folks who then use them to justify their beliefs. So an example for that would be like the DNC emails back in 2016 where private emails, when they became public, they acquired this like magical secrecy. Oh, what are they hiding? And there's actually another emails, the climate.

2:21:10 Dr Gorski: Scientist emails, I forget what university. That one. Chris: Yeah. So that's. So that I was just going to mention that climate, I think it's been referred to as climate gate. Dr Gorski: And there's a 2000 research, I don't remember what was it, Oxford or someplace in the UK, I thought. Chris: Yeah, but it sounds to me it remind. Yeah, it reminded me of that too. I'll look it up for the show because I don't want to. I don't want to look it up while we're talking here. But it reminded me of that too. And then, and so then the exact same thing basically sounds like it happened with vaccine. If anti vax is that there is this quote unquote secret conference, which wasn't really secret. It was just a private gathering of scientists. Dr Gorski: Right. And I mean, they published, you know, the CDC published the transcript of the meeting. It's like a hundred plus pages long. I read the whole damn thing back then.

2:21:57 Chris: Yeah, it's really interesting, actually. I'll send you this link too, because I really love the article. Dr Gorski: It's actually true for the CDC whistleblower too, because there's this cache of documents that Thompson gave to a congressman Posey, Florida. I don't think he's in Congress anymore, but he was back then proving the conspiracy. Now a pro vaccine autism advocate blogger, what this blogger did, they contacted Bill Posey's office and someone sent them a PDF of the document which he spread around. And we all went through it and there was nothing there, you know, and it was a pain in the butt, but were able to ascertain that there was no there.

2:22:48 Chris: So one of the things that scares me the most about anti vax and actually, like, a lot of the other topics we've covered on the show scares me about as well, is that there seems to be like a lot of, quote, like, legitimized experts that promote this stuff. So, like, actual mds and PhDs. And we've seen it in other places where there's like university tenured physicists that promote quantum flapdoodle. And we had an episode about, there's actually a guy that's an accredited university professor, psychologist, and he is working on building a phone for talking to dead. Dr Gorski: People, but he's like, oh, I was unaware of him. Well, no, this is true. Chris: Gary Schwartz. Yeah. Dr Gorski: I could rattle off name after name of anti vaxxers who have mds or PhDs.

2:23:33 Chris: Yeah. The last time we spoke, actually, you had a really good phrase for this. You called it the Nobel disease. Yeah. And you basically, you said that having intelligence and creativity is just a totally different mental skill set than something like critical thinking. So I guess the question I want to ask is if as an average person, you're trying to sort fact from fiction online, what do you do when you run across these grifters that have these letters next to their name? Dr Gorski: My answer today is probably different than what my answer would have been a few years ago. One thing I've been moving towards advocating is in terms of critical thinking, is that people need to learn the characteristics of conspiracy theories. And to recognize them when they see them. So if you see someone, regardless of the letters after his or her name, making arguments that are rooted in conspiracies or in conspiracist thinking, that should be a huge red flag. As I like to say, they get my skeptical antennae twitching. That's one. Obviously, others are. Well, is this person actually a vaccine or infectious disease expert? You will find that almost never are they. They're almost never experts in the relevant field.

2:24:48 Dr Gorski: You also have to realize, and I sometimes get some blowback from this, but in terms of the physicians who, or anti vaccine, most physicians are not scientists, nor do they need to be good doctors. You need to be, you need to understand the science. You need to know how to apply that to clinical care. But you don't really need to be a scientist in terms of forming hypotheses, understanding how science works, how interesting, how hypothesis is tested and moves on. I mean, I wish that weren't the case, but on the other hand, a lot of what we do in medicine is somewhat protocol driven, but it's also, I like to say, or like Steve Novella said when he named the blog, science based medicine. Medicine is based in science, but it's not a science.

2:25:38 Dr Gorski: I mean, the reason it's not, it's, well, I like to liken medicine to engineering. Chris: Right? Dr Gorski: That makes sense, because, you know, engineering is applied science, but medicine, it's even a little hazier than that, because a lot of things affect how you treat an individual patient, other than just the science, their situation in life, their family, their personal risk factors, their desires. You can present two options. You see, this option is like maximum aggressiveness. You could present two options that could be supported by science, but patient, in the end, gets to choose. In other words, patient value. What does the patient value? Chris: Right. That's really interesting.

2:26:20 Dr Gorski: So, like, you could have a cancer patient who's got a nasty cancer that has maybe a very small chance of survival, be like, okay, do you want to go all out, or do you want to do this and, like, maximize your quality of life for as long as possible? That's a value judgment. You know, you can justify both courses based on the science, but it's a value judgment over which one gets picked. Chris: That is really interesting. And that's, and that's a good going back to what you said about, I recognize that when you said, like, the skepticism antenna or whatever, because, like, I feel like most of the time now when I. It's kind of weird. It's kind of counterintuitive. But most of the time when I have that experience, it's. I sort of have that gut reaction first where I'm like, I'll read somebody that seems legitimate and then I'll read what they're saying and then I'll kind of go like, wait a minute. What? That doesn't feel right. There's something smells wrong here.

2:27:20 Dr Gorski: Well, another thing, it's not just conspiracist thinking, because some of these docs will not, in their public utterings, let their conspiracy freak flag fly, but they will often use fallacies of logic and argumentation. So that's like another thing you need to learn to recognize. Now, one of the hardest though, to recognize if you're not an expert yourself is cherry picking. Like, if you don't know literature on a topic, you will have a hell of a time recognizing whether the citations being used to justify an argument are representative of the scientific consensus of the field.

2:28:01 Chris: Right. It's a big problem with the climate denial. Yeah. Dr Gorski: Anything in medicine too? You know, sometimes I don't. Sometimes I don't even know. And I have to like ask around and look into it. I mean, it happened especially with COVID I had to like, educate myself. And I tended to be fairly cautious at first because everythings were changing so rapidly. Chris: So a lot of anti vaxxers I've seen claim this is that they aren't actually anti vaxx. Rather, they simply believe that vaccination should be a personal choice and the government should stay out of it. Which, you know, we saw that same argument used by a lot of anti maskers for Covid, they'd say, my body, my choice. Right. So many other medical procedures are a personal choice. In fact, you just talked about that for you and your family. So why shouldn't vaccines also be that way? What is different about vaccines?

2:28:52 Dr Gorski: I guess it's the difference between public health versus private health or personal health. For instance, if you have cancer and you choose more palliative care, other than going all out for that 5% chance, you're not affecting anybody's health but your own, you're not. And, you know, adults really do have the choice here. It's a fallacy in a way. Nobody is forcing adults to get vaccinated. Yes, if you work for a hospital, the hospital is going to require that you have your flu vaccine every year and that you'd be up to date on your TDAP. But that's not the government forcing you. You don't have to work for that place. You can choose to go work elsewhere. It's the children. And this kind of. This is another area the anti vaxxers like to co opt a message of personal freedom.

2:29:42 Dr Gorski: And it's part of the reason, I think, why right now, it wasn't always the case. But right now, the most extreme, the most, the loudest, the most dangerous anti vaccine rhetoric is all coming from the right. I mean, there are a handful of exceptions. You know, RFK Junior is obviously a lefty. But in any event, it's the success of the anti vaccine movement of co opting messages of freedom, personal responsibility, keep the government out of my health, that has, I think, led to this alliance. Surveys and studies have shown for a long time, pretty conclusively, that anti vaccine views are present at roughly the same prevalence on the left and the right wing of the political spectrum. The old cliche or stereotype was that, you know, anti vaxxers were all, you know, long haired, granola crunching lefties, you know. Yeah, that was never true.

2:30:36 Chris: It wasn't even that long ago that I remember that. Dr Gorski: Yeah, right. That was never true. It was never true. There was certainly that wing of the anti vaccine movement, but it was never true that was the main group. There's always been a right wing component to the anti vaccine movement. I think what happened, it was already moving in this direction, like, a decade ago. But what really turbocharged the alliance between right wing and anti vaxxers was it happened in 2015. It was the passage of SB 277 in California, the law that eliminated non medical exemptions to school vaccine mandates. It was at that time that you heard the anti vaccine movement.

2:31:20 Dr Gorski: These arguments had always been in the anti vaccine movement, but it was at that time that I noticed the anti vaccine movement making a noticeable, strong pivot, primarily using arguments of personal freedom, you know, anti government, etcetera, and reaching out and trying to form alliances with right wing groups. I mean, there were various tea party groups that started making common cause with anti vaxxers, and it grew from there. And then came Trump about that time, and Trump at that time had a long history of making some credulous statements about vaccines and autism, going back at least to 2007, which I had written about it in 2007, never imagining what would happen with Donald Trump eight or nine years later, in 2007.

2:32:11 Chris: Nobody did, though. Dr Gorski: So, no, he was still hosting the Apprentice. And the show was kind of going downhill on its last legs, if I recall correctly. But in any event, since then, if you look at most of the politically oriented anti vaccine groups, such as Michigan for vaccine choice and Texans for vaccine choice, and there's a bunch of other ones by state. They're almost all right wing, and some of them are even funded by right wing dark money sources. And that evolution happened pretty fast. Again, that element was there long before, but it wasn't the overarching face of the anti vaccine movement the way it is now.

2:32:54 Chris: Well, it makes sense to me that would have caught fire so quickly because there's a lower burden of proof. Right. If that's your argument, then you don't even have to. To prove that vaccines cause autism or that vaccines are dangerous. You just. All you have to do is say that, well, regardless of whether they're safe, it's just my choice. Right, right. Dr Gorski: Well, also, it's a great gateway for recruiting because, okay, let's say giving off this message of freedom, etcetera, and a conservative person hears that message and it resonates. And let's say this conservative person is not anti vaxx. Well, that's kind of the in where they get you and they pull this conservative person down the rabbit hole.

2:33:37 Chris: Right. Based on their liberty feelings. And then they are exposed to the more. Yeah. Toxic. Dr Gorski: And then they get into the echo chambers and gradually get into the more toxic stuff. And pretty soon they're not just conservative, but they're anti vaccine. Chris: Yeah. Mandy, that's horrible. So you mentioned. Dr Gorski: I know. And again, the same things happen with QAnon. And it's not like this is anything unique to the anti vaccine movement. Chris: Right. It's a radicalization inroads thing. Yeah. But I want to hit one more time on this. You called it public health. You mentioned public health as a reason why it's not just as simple as making a personal choice. Can you expand on that a little bit? Like. Like, what is it about me if I say if I don't want to get a vaccine? Like, why does that, science wise, why does that affect other people, too?

2:34:30 Dr Gorski: Let's go back pre pandemic. We'll start there. Obviously, there's the concept of herd immunity, which people don't like that word anymore and tend to use community immunity now, which is basically the idea that you have to get a certain proportion of the population vaccinated, and then the disease can't really take hold because there aren't enough susceptible hosts. And it also protects people who can't be vaccinated because, again, there aren't enough susceptible hosts. There is that. Chris: What's examples like very young children or. Dr Gorski: Elderly or immunosuppressed children, too young to be vaccinated. People with cancer are getting chemotherapy. Oh, that's immunosuppressed again, those sorts of people. The other thing is, you can be the source of outbreaks if you're not vaccinated.

2:35:17 Chris: All right, so a lot to unpack in that segment. One is just like, were talking about a whole bunch of different motivations for anti vax, which has come up in the episode already. Dr Gorski: Right. Chris: It's a very wide umbrella. So there's people that care about personal liberty, and were talking about that. And then there's, like, he mentioned RFK Junior, and. And RFK junior s organization cares about pollution mostly. That's their alternate explanation for why people are getting sick. You know, and there's other groups that care mostly about autism, and there's other groups that care mostly about don't tell me what I can and can't do with my body. And then, of course, there's a lot of overlap. But I just wanted to mention that again. It was also interesting when we talked a little bit about sort of like, the red flag. You know, intuition like this does smell right stuff.

2:36:07 Kayla: Right. Chris: And when he brought up the cancer example, I thought it was interesting because he was saying, well, of course, if you're a big pharma executive with somebody that you love has cancer, then if you had a secret cure, you would use it on them. Right, right. And while I think that's true, I think, you know, a conspiracy theorist might say, oh, well, they. They do get the secret cures. It's just we don't know about it. So I think that, like, what doctor Gorsy said is true, but I think there's this other layer, too, of, like, keeping it a secret. Right, right. Like that. That's where my red flag comes up. When I see something that's like, okay, this would require, like, 10,000 people to have kept a secret, at least. That's one of my sort of, like, gut reaction things.

2:36:49 Chris: And you'll also, you'll hear conspiracy theorists frequently use the words controlled opposition. Right. So clearly, anybody that saying what I'm saying is wrong is controlled by some nefarious force. Right. You see that a lot in QAnon and also some of the anti QAnon communities that we talked about. And another red flag for me is always, like, ascribing way too much competence. Kayla: Yeah. Chris: Just something so, like, if you exist in the real world and you've, you know, made. If you've been. Actually, I saw a really good tweet that was like, a project manager is a really good like, critical thinker when it comes to conspiracy thinking, because a project manager knows that everything that people do is just, like, a total goddamn mess.

2:37:35 Kayla: Right? Chris: And so whenever you see conspiracy theorists talk about controlled opposition or whatever cabal or deep or whatever it is that's in control, the CDC, whatever it is, they always have this sense that they're, like these movie villains that just, like, do everything, like, correctly and do everything. They're just, like, competence porn evil villains. Right. When in reality, everybody is a mess, and that includes the government and CDC, and everything is just kind of a mess. So no one knows. Yeah, no one knows what they're doing. So another red flag for me is when I see somebody talking about how their opponents have this coordinated, hundreds of years long campaign, blah, blah.

2:38:16 Kayla: Can I devils advocate you? Chris: No, never. Kayla: Okay, make your next point then. Chris: No, please do. Kayla: How does that square you think, with the reality that there are real conspiracies that exist? As we explored, particularly in our QAnon episodes, there are real conspiracies that exist, particularly when we're talking about the CIA, that do remain, quote, unquote, secret to a certain degree until, like, documents are declassified. Chris: That's the thing. I mean, they eventually do. Right? Like, are there conspiracies that are happening right now that we don't know about, like, at this very moment? Yes. Do I think that eventually those, if they are real, will come to light also? Yes. Right. We talked about this in our QAnon episode. Is that, like, should we put that on a t shirt, too? We talked about this on our QAnon.

2:39:06 Kayla: This is most just like, the way that QAnon is a category. Chris: Like, encompasses everything. Kayla: The QAnon episodes are a catch all for everything. Chris: Right, right. But it's not that. Like, if you were to sift through, you know, a bunch of Q drops, or if you were to sift through a fuck ton of websites with conspiracy theorists, the nature of how many there are means that it'll, like, one or two of them will be right. You know? So it's like the whole broken clock. Right? Twice a day thing. Right? Was there somebody in, you know, 1970 talking about, oh, my God, Mkultra, you guys. And did people dismiss it? Probably. Kayla: Right. Chris: Was that part of a sea of other things that were wrong? Yeah. And at the time, it's like, how do you sort that out right now? That's the thing, is, that's sort of how you know that you can't keep a lid on this stuff is because we know of. We know of conspiracies from the past that eventually do come to light because nobody is perfectly competent and everybody is incompetent. So eventually these things do come out.

2:40:10 Kayla: People are bad at keeping secrets, right? People are very bad at keeping secrets. Chris: And then the last thing I talked about in that segment with Doctor Gorski was this idea of personal choice. And why is it not just personal choice? And this sort of came up, this is why I brought up the prisoner's dilemma. Why the opening of last episode was about decision making stuff is because I felt it's a really important pillar of what we're talking about is individual choice versus public health. Kayla: Right? Chris: Now, I brought this up at the very beginning of the show today, and I want to expand on it more now. And it's called the free rider problem. So we may be thinking of all these choices as being like, so remember when I was talking about my aluminum scare that I was like, is aluminum maybe like, I don't know, like it's probably safe. But I mean, even if it's just a tiny risk, is that a risk worth taking?

2:41:06 Kayla: Right? Chris: And obviously I, you know, went through about how I got out of that and everything, but think about it this way. If, for example, let's say there's some disease, measles is not a great example because it's, it spreads so readily, right? But, you know, disease x, whatever, and we are at herd immunity for disease x, okay? That means that any new outbreak is going to be squashed. It's going to, it won't have any chance to gain hold for this disease because we're at herd immunity. That's what that means, right? So now me, an individual thinking, okay, well, should I vaccinate my kid for disease x? If you think about this rational decision I'm making in my head, what if there's, on the one hand, my kid is not going to get the disease because we have herd immunity, right?

2:41:56 Chris: Because everybody else has gotten vaccinated. On the other hand, because the other side of the equation is completely safe in my mind, then it doesn't take much for me to decide not to vaccinate my kid. All it takes, especially if I'm afraid for my kids safety, which parents are. All it takes is just like the tiniest little feather weight on that side of the scale for me to say like, well, I mean, you know, we have herd immunity, so why bother, right? And so that's what's called the free rider problem is actually you can choose to not if you have herd immunity, you can choose to not vaccinate your kid and be safe. Kayla: Right? Chris: But the problem is, again, prisoner's dilemma. The problem is, if enough people make that choice now, you no longer have herd immunity.

2:42:42 Kayla: And that's the thing that I have seen often talked about in anti vaccine circles of, like that retort of, well, if we have herd immunity, then why does my kid need to get the vaccines? If I want to send my kid to public schools, why do they need to get vaccines if we have herd immunity? It's just, if you follow that logic a little bit further, you'll understand why. Chris: Yes, but I want to really impress, and this is, again why I opened last episode with that little cup example that is actually a individually rational choice, right? If there's only a tiny, tiny chance one side that some adverse event happens from a vaccine, even if it's one a bajillion, but on the other side, that's zero chance because we have herd immunity. Let's say everybody gets vaccined except for my kid, right? Then that is an individually rational choice to make.

2:43:34 Kayla: I don't think it is an individually rational choice to make because you're nothing. Not making the choice of everybody else's vaccine, and my kid is not. That's not a reality based decision. Chris: Right. But that this is. This is what game theory helps illustrate for us, though, right? Is that because we want to think. I think sometimes that it's like, well, that, you know, they're being irrational. And in many cases, as we have seen on the show, in many cases, that's true. In many cases, it's misinformation. In many cases, it's wrong, inferior. In many cases, it's bad science. It's motivated reasoning. It's Andrew Wakefield being a fraud. But I think we're missing the picture if we don't also say that because of this free rider problem, which is not just, by the way, that's not just vaccines, that's a, like a mathematical thing. That's like an economic phenomenon. It's called the free rider problem. It's also an economics. So I think we're missing the picture if we don't consider the free rider problem.

2:44:30 Chris: There's a bunch of articles about this, too. In fact, there's a good one in Scientific American. This is a discussion within the medical community and the scientific community of, like, how do we address this free rider problem? So some of the ways that, you know, we talk about addressing it are, okay, if you don't get your kid vaccinated, then they can't go to public school, right? Because, okay, if you don't want to contribute to herd immunity, then you cannot benefit from herd immunity. That's the logic behind that. The same thing that Doctor Gorski was talking about with like, okay, well, if you want to work here, you have to have these vaccines, right? You don't have to work here, but if you want to benefit from the herd immunity of your coworkers, then you must also contribute. I think that's a fairly good.

2:45:14 Chris: It's a logical solution. The problem is, in our modern society, we're so interconnected, right, that it's hard to isolate pockets of folks that are not vaccinated, right? So I don't, you know, I don't have, like, a good, like, well, here's how we solve it. All I know is that it is very similar to the prisoner's dilemma and that these individual choices can be individually rational and yet contribute to a worse situation for everyone in aggregate. Kayla: Right? Chris: And I know the way that you solve that with a prisoner's dilemma is you change the payouts, right? So in the prisoner's dilemma, the way you change that is you say, like, okay, well, it needs to be either harder for the person to rat out their friend, or there needs to be a better reward for cooperating. So whatever that solution looks, and this is why I bring it up, is because I think whatever solution, whatever that solution looks like for vaccines, it needs to involve some sort of either incentive or punishment or whatever, right? Maybe lean against punishment, because then we might end up in the same, like, poor people getting fines in the victorian era type situation, but maybe some additional incentive for vaccine. I don't know.

2:46:29 Chris: We're already, again, we're already doing some of that because we have, you can't travel certain places if you don't have certain vaccines and you can't send your kids to school if you don't have vaccines, I think. Kayla: And this existed before COVID Doctor Drew. Chris: Yes. But the free rider thing really stuck with me as a really interesting point because of the fact that I think I went into this assuming that it was entirely irrational, right. And that contributed to this shitty situation. But because of the way game theory works, people can be making these actually individually rational decisions. They're not dumb. They're not just getting bad information all the time. Sometimes they are making selfishly rational choices that detract from the good of society.

2:47:14 Kayla: Anyway, I do think I have a problem with calling the decision rational, because I don't think I agree that it is just because it feels rational doesn't actually make it rational. Chris: Well, it's. It's selfish. It's like, selfishly rational. I don't even think it is selfishly rational, because now we're getting into the semantics of what the word rational. Kayla: We are getting into the semantics of what the word rational means. But I think that words are important, and I'm just expressing that. I don't think I agree with calling it a rational choice because I think it has the appearance of rationality without actually being rational. Chris: Okay, well, then I'll. Let me. I mean, I just. I don't know another word to use. But what I mean when I say that is, like, an irrational choice would be, I'm going to select the $4 prize instead of the $20 prize. So that's what I don't mean, like, in, like, a general sense, like, whether it's, you know, right or wrong or smart or dumb. I mean, people are making, maybe I should call it optimization. They're making value maximizing choices for themselves. Right, right. So we shouldn't necessarily think of it as these people are saying, like, I would rather take the $1 bill than the $20 bill.

2:48:25 Kayla: Right. Chris: They are actually taking the, you know, $1.01 over the $1. Right. Like, they are choosing, in that sense, the value maximizing choice. So we shouldn't think of it as that. That's what I'm trying to say when I say, I mean, like, economically rational. Kayla: Right. Chris: I read this really interesting thing. So, malaria, because it has this, like, crazy life cycle where from a mosquito to person, and then even within the person, it goes to different parts of your body. I think first it infects your liver. There's different stages of how this life cycle progresses for malaria. And because of that, vaccines for malaria can only really target certain stages of the life cycle because it's essentially multiple different organisms that you're trying to prevent. And so there are vaccines called transmission blocking vaccines that are able to target the stage of the organism. The stage is essentially where it gets transmitted back to mosquitoes, and they're called tbvs, transmission blocking vaccines. But because of the nature of the multiple stages, it prevents transmission, but it doesn't prevent you from getting sick.

2:49:39 Kayla: That's so weird. Chris: So you can still get sick from malaria if you catch it from someone, if you have this vaccine, but then you will not spread it to other people. Kayla: I mean, I guess it's good. Chris: So what I found really fascinating about that is that it's like, it's the extreme example, there's like two extremes, right? There's like, vaccines that don't prevent transmission. Like I believe. I believe hepatitis is like that. Maybe pertussis. I think Doctor Gorski mentions it. It'll prevent symptoms but not prevent transmission. So that's like the ultimate selfish vaccine, right? That's the ultimate, like, cool, I'm not going to get sick, right? And then there's these malaria, tbvs, there's these transmission blocking vaccines that are on the opposite end of that spectrum, where it's like, it's the ultimate selfless vaccine, where I'm going to get sick, but I won't prevent the spread. And I just found it really fascinating because it really highlights, again, that difference between individual and public, individual choice and public health.

2:50:40 Chris: And in one sense, you want to be like, well, I'd rather get the vaccine personally that prevents me from getting sick. Kayla: Right, right. Chris: But from a societal standpoint, I'd rather have herd immunity and stamp out the disease altogether. So actually, if everybody was required to get it, then I'd rather have the transmission blocking one, because I'd rather just not get it. I'd rather it be gone. So, you know, I don't really have, like, a and therefore, conclusion point for that. I just found it really fascinating that there are actually, because most of the time we're used to vaccines that are just prevent both. Kayla: Right, right. Chris: Most vaccines just prevent your sickness and also prevent the transmission. Kayla: Right. Chris: I found it fascinating that there were vaccines that were sort of, like, on either side of that spectrum that, you know, like, if I was the only one getting the transmission blocking vaccine in the entire population, then I'd be like this. Right.

2:51:30 Kayla: Yeah, that wouldn't feel good. Chris: Yeah. So it's like, it's interesting, and I think that's why we have to consider these large scales. It's a systemic problem. Right. We'll talk about this. I think this whole season is that diseases, like many things, are these systemic, society wide problems that need systemic, society wide solutions. They aren't necessarily individual solutions. Like I said, team sport, pandemics are a team sport. Dr Gorski: I think pre pandemic, kind of an interesting thing was all the measles outbreaks among various orthodox jewish communities and how these outbreaks spread, because there are these members of the community who tend to travel widely from community to community. And, you know, basically, if they get it, they can and spread it to the others. And kind of interesting thing here in the Detroit area, you know, you look at the Brooklyn community, many of them had been radicalized by anti vaccine messages aimed at their community. I don't know if you know the story of that, but there were anti vaxxers who specifically concentrated on those orthodox jewish communities in Brooklyn and the surrounding environs. And in fact, they actually published old fashioned pamphlets and booklets to distribute. But in any event, that was what contributed there.

2:52:57 Dr Gorski: And there were certain highly vocal rabbis who also promoted that message in Detroit. What was interesting was that was not the case. The reason there were outbreaks here is because there were a fair number of orthodox Jews who did not know that they were not immune. They didn't know if they had ever gotten the vaccine. Also, some of the older measles vaccines from the sixties, there's actually waning immunity, which actually inspired me to get an MMR booster, because I'm in the age group where that could be the case. If you're in your fifties, it's possible that you might not actually be immune to measles when you think you are. And actually, the orthodox jewish community here was exemplary in trying to work with public health officials to isolate people who got measles, quarantine them, and to promote and help run vaccination drives.

2:53:52 Dr Gorski: Now, coming into the pandemic, everything is amplified. As of now, we have more than 400,000 dead from the disease in this country. Millions and millions of cases. You know, we're losing three or 4000 a day at the moment. The situation is really bad. Not vaccinating in the case of a pandemic is really harmful. And again, nobody's saying anyone has to be vaccinated. There's no law forcing vaccination. It's the power of persuasion. And unfortunately, the power of persuasion is limited by the effectiveness of anti vaccine messaging. When dealing with anti vaxxers, I always like to divide them into at least two groups. The hardcore anti vaxxers. You know, they're the ones who have totally drunk the Kool aid, so to speak. You know, they're true believers. You are not going to change their minds.

2:54:49 Dr Gorski: I mean, if you manage to change their minds, it will take so much effort per single person with a very limited chance of success that it's just really not worth dealing with them. What you need to do is to try to inoculate, steal the vaccine analogy, those who are susceptible to their message against it. This is where the idea of, instead of debunking, pre bunking comes in. Chris: I have not heard that word. I like that. Dr Gorski: I'm definitely going to use that from my viewpoint. Pre bunking includes the characteristics of conspiracy theories, fallacies and thinking. The logical fallacies, good information about vaccines that actually is honest about what we do and don't know. For instance, there was recently this whole kerfuffle on Twitter about whether or not the COVID vaccines prevent transmission. There was, like an article in the New York Times saying, we're underselling the vaccine. And one particularly popular amateur epidemiologist even called the messaging about the vaccine a crime against public health. Now, the pushback is, well, people don't understand is that there are vaccines that do not prevent transmission. They just prevent disease, like pertussis, for instance. So we don't know yet. Hopefully we will. Hopefully, it does prevent transmission, but we don't know for sure yet.

2:56:18 Dr Gorski: There are indications that it at least partially prevents transmission, but until we know that, it's irresponsible to say, oh, once you're vaccinated, you can take your mask off and you don't have to worry anymore. And my counter is, if you oversell the vaccine and you're shown to be wrong, the hit that trust and medical and scientific authorities would take from that would be such a setback that recovering from that would be really difficult. Chris: Yeah. And not only. I think we've seen that so much with the stuff that we've looked at on this show, and not only would I think the hit from that be in the near term would be more risk than it's worth, but it's also, I feel like the eroding trust winds up being a long term thing that you have to spend a very long time to come back from. I mean, like, people still have a lack of trust from things that happened, like 100 years, like the Tuskegee, stuff like that. That is still eroding trust in the black community. And understandably, I mean, I would rather.

2:57:16 Dr Gorski: Be cautious and be accused of underselling the vaccine than oversell the vaccine and have maybe proven wrong about some claim that we're making and undeniably wrong. Chris: So there's our good old friend trust erosion again. Kayla: Oh, man. Chris: And again, I think he brings up a good point about being. Yeah, because I've seen this, too, where it's like, we're being too cautious and, you know, the messaging should be this. And I know that it's like, you know, people need hope for sure. Like, that's obviously, we need to be able to feed people hope, but also, we want to be careful enough that we're not giving more reason to distrust things that we already have a lot of distrust for, unfortunately.

2:58:03 Kayla: Right. Chris: Right. If Doctor Gorsey comes out and says, like, yes, it prevents transmission, probably, and then it doesn't. Then it's like, look what Doctor Gorsuchy said, right? It doesn't. They're lying to you, just like we told you. And, you know, and we talked about this, obviously, earlier in the episode with, I mean, the british government in victorian times, right? Like, there was not a lot of trust to be had there when you're talking about the oppressed minorities and oppressed poor people living in that society. And of course, when I was just talking to Doctor worsky here, I was. I was trying to get, like, white guy smart points by bringing up Tuskegee. And I mentioned that as, like, an example of, like, long term trust erosion, right? While that's true, it's, like, woefully incomplete. One of the things.

2:58:53 Chris: So Kayla and I attended a conference put on by Grey Faction. It was. It was basically about, like, misinformation and all the stuff we talk about on the show, actually. And one of the panels was by people of color that were part of that, you know, part of the Grey faction. One of the things they talked about was how it's. They actually brought up Tuskegee in particular and said, like, oh, that's the go to thing that people think of. But actually, the trust erosion is chronic, right? It's not just that. It's. There's other things that have somebody brought up something that I didn't know about that I had to learn about for this podcast episode called the Baltimore lead paint study. And that just happened recently. That just happened, like, within the last few decades.

2:59:37 Chris: And I won't get into the details, but basically it was another similar thing where there was a study done that was, like, highly unethical. And of course, it targeted disadvantaged communities, which, oh, surprise, happen to be mostly people of color. So. And the thing that this person at Grey faction talked about, too, a lot, was just like, not only distrusting the government who does these studies and who did the Tuskegee study, but also distrusting the medical community because they're frequently underserved, not chronically underserved, and chronically, like, not taken seriously, and chronically, like, put second and put behind other, you know, non POC patients.

3:00:19 Kayla: The maternal mortality rate for black women is shockingly higher than the maternal mortality rate for white women in this country. In this country, right? Chris: And here's another unfortunate side effect of that, is that anti vax leaders and influencers know this, right? And then they actually go out and they specifically target minority communities with their messaging, because they know that it's a susceptible population because of how mistreated they've been and how little trust they have institutions. Kayla: Is it purely a susceptibility thing, or is there any sort of, like. Like, do they think they're doing a good thing? Do they think they're doing the right thing? Or is it anti vaxxers in that particular case?

3:01:04 Chris: Maybe. I mean, I think. I think that answer is the same as any other time we asked that question, which is like, this is probably a mix of grift and true believing. You know, I don't know. But there's a person. There's a mother from the. The vaxxed movie that they always bring to minority communities to tell her story. She's a black mother who has two kids, and one of them didn't get the MMR vaccine, and one did, and the one that did ended up developing autism, which is really unfortunate for this mother. But, you know, she's, like, very much anti vaxxer now. And so they always bring her in front of these communities. And you heard Doctor Gorski talk about orthodox jewish community got targeted very specifically with even the style of the pamphlets they used. And I'm leaving stuff out, too.

3:01:51 Chris: There was an incident in Minnesota where specifically a somali community got targeted by anti vaxxers. And then there was a massive reduction in MMR uptake among that community, which led to an outbreak. And as we said at the top of the show, herd immunity isn't, like, a nationwide thing. It's a very, like, low calculus thing. Kayla: Right. Chris: Which is why you have these, like, individual outbreaks. So it's. That's another. That's another facet of this shit diamond that minority communities tend to get individually targeted by the anti vax influencer slash leadership. Kayla: But it's also, like, not. It's just like, we all need to do a better job. The medical community needs to do. Right.

3:02:32 Chris: Well, it's like. But, yeah, that's the thing. It's. It's not just like, oh, stop targeting minorities. It's, let's stop eroding their trust. Right? Like, that's why we bring up trust erosion so much is not just to say, like, that sucks. Like, it's to say part, like, if do you want QAnon? Because that's how you get QAnon. So we need to do a better job institutionally, systemically. Again, we need to do a better job with our systems of not destroying trust. And by not destroying trust, you have to, like, not treat black people like shit if you're the medical establishment and you need to not experiment on them and you need to not find poor people into prison if you're Victorian England.

3:03:16 Kayla: Yeah. Victorian England. Chris: Yeah. Are you listening? The past. But that's. Yeah, so that's the thing. It's not just, please don't target the susceptible. It's, let's try to not make them susceptible by not treating them like shit and eroding their trust. I have another really shitty one. Kayla: Great. Chris: So Pakistan has a very low uptake of vaccines. They are very anti vax in Pakistan. Would you like to know why? Kayla: I don't know. Because we fucking suck as a country. It's probably our fault. Chris: It is quite literally our fault. Kayla: I don't even have to know the why. I just know that it's our.

3:03:59 Chris: When were hunting Osama bin Laden, the CIA had a program of fake hep B vaccinations that they deployed across the country to trace DNA and find bin Laden's compound. And this information got out. And now Pakistanis are extremely vaccine hesitant, and it's becoming a problem for Covid. And many of them view Covid as a globalist, anti muslim hoax because the CIA had these fake vaccination things, and when it came out, it was like, oh, vaccines are just a tool for Americans to, you know, hurt our children and, like, exploit us and blah, blah.

3:04:46 Kayla: I'm gonna ask a very loaded question. Chris: Oopsie daisy. Kayla: Has the CIA ever done anything good? Chris: Like, there's some fun movies. I don't know. Kayla: I don't know if those are fun, because then they just turn out to be propaganda. Chris: Yeah. And the thing that's so depressing about this, too, is that it's like, man, remember when the CIA used to do shitty stuff where they would, like, overthrow legitimately elected governments in South America, like, decades and decades ago? Kayla: Oh, and they're still doing it now. Chris: And then you're like. And then you read this and you're like, oh, that was, like, one decade ago. That was, like, yesterday. Kayla: GIA does a lot of just real dumb stuff. Chris: It was yesterday enough that it is now coming back to bite us right in the ass with COVID Because, again, team sport, we can say all day, oh, well, who cares if they get vaccinated there or whatever?

3:05:38 Kayla: You gotta care. Chris: Like, I'm saying, even if you're a total sociopath and you don't care about. Kayla: Other people, you're still dumb for not caring. Chris: Still will come back to bite us in the ass, because if we don't squash Covid then it has it'll. Kayla: Just mutate super Covid a foothold and supersede your vaccine, bitch. Chris: Yeah. So maybe that was not the best idea of this, of the CIA. Kayla: One of many bad ideas. Chris: Yeah. So trust erosion, am I right? Kayla: I have no trust. I'm sorry, I know that I'm being general. I have no trust in the CIA, I'm sorry. Chris: Just from a science perspective, the vaccine rolled out really quickly. They started rolling out in the US in late November, which was like basically only a year since the global community even became aware of the virus. How did that happen so quickly?

3:06:29 Dr Gorski: First off, one of the messages of the anti vaccine movement is, oh, this was so rushed. What I always like to say is, for instance, the Moderna and the Pfizer vaccines mRNA vaccine technology was something that had been worked on for at least a decade ahead of time. I read a quote from a vaccine scientist saying, you know, if this had happened five years ago, the technology would not have been ready. So in one way I think it's a culmination of this happened at a time when this technology was ready to be used. What happened instead of like the usual cautious rollout of a new vaccine based on rna? The pandemic forced the issue.

3:07:13 Dr Gorski: And I mean, the beauty of rna vaccines is once you get the lipid nanoparticle that deliver the rna to the cells, once you have that right and safe and it works, you can rapidly develop new vaccines just by changing the rna payload. That's good to know, but it's not new technology. The same with the vaccines that are going to be based on replication deficient adenovirus, which is basically the same idea as the rna, is that instead of injecting the protein, you're injecting a nucleic acid that codes for the protein and the cells make the protein. That's what provokes the immune response. So those had been under development for over long time, a lot of times for cancer vaccines. So I think it's a confluence of the science being ready, plus the driving need for a vaccine Covid.

3:08:13 Chris: Right. A lot of resources being poured into it. Dr Gorski: Yeah, and the resources, obviously, you know, in a non pandemic situation, these things would have been developed more slowly because there just wouldn't have been nearly as much in the way of resources poured into them. Chris: Right. And I was also reading some stuff about how like, you know, there's certain like, go to market type stuff, like comfort stuff that, you know, and ordinarily you would wait for that. Like, ordinarily, you'd wait for it to be a single shot rather than needing a booster shot. But because of the urgency of the situation, we have this booster, which makes total sense, right? Dr Gorski: And I mean, ordinarily, for instance, you know, with the Moderna and the Pfizer vaccines, especially the Pfizer vaccine that has to be stored at minus eighties, normally, that would not be a very appealing vaccine if that was just a vaccine to anything else, like, let's say it was a new, highly effective flu vaccine, I don't know if it would have ended up making it to market just because of the storage considerations and how much more expensive and difficult it would be to store compared to most vaccines, which you, instead of being in a -80 freezer, they're either fine being in a standard -20 freezer, which every place has, or in the refrigerator or something like that.

3:09:27 Chris: I want to ask real quick, there's several folks I noticed in the sort of the skeptic anti disinformation community that back earlier in the earlier last year, earlier 2020, were concerned with the speed with which the vaccines might be rolled out. Dr Gorski: So was I. I even wrote a piece, a post or two about it. Chris: Oh, you did? Dr Gorski: Part of it. The whole operation Warp speed thing did really lead to some concern, because it just really gave the impression that it was speed above all else, the implication being speed over safety. And to be honest, look at the previous administration and its record on science and what it did to the FDA and various capacities, its focus on marketing. I did not have a lot of trust in the Trump administration to get it right. Fortunately, companies managed to do it. So we have two vaccines that are now available under an emergency use authorization and several more in the pipeline. But to be honest, given who was in charge, I won't try to deceive or lie or anything. It's. I did not trust the administration, fortunately. You know, to some extent, I was. I might.

3:10:50 Dr Gorski: My distrust might have been a little too high because the vaccines did end up being very effective, at least in the short term, and pretty darn safe. But the other thing people don't seem to realize is, you know, these are like, huge bets for these companies. If the vaccines turn out not to be safe, it could be the end of the company, right. Regardless of how much money the government gave them, invested in them, to develop and distribute the vaccines. Chris: Yeah, the president can be yelling at you on the phone to release it before the election all he wants, but if it means the end of Pfizer then you're not going to do that. Yeah. Do you think that there are some cases, it sounds like there are some cases of in which vaccine hesitancy actually is based in some rational, reasonable sort of skepticism versus the sort of irrational, unreasonable skepticism that mostly plagues anti vaxx.

3:11:43 Dr Gorski: I like to say about anti vax, one of the cliches that some of us have about anti vaxxer or anti vaccine views is like the old famous quote on pornography. I know it when I see it. Chris: Right. Dr Gorski: But I guess the question is rational versus irrational. And one way I like to get into that is, first of all, what would it take to change your mind? Or let's say it's six months ago, and were expressing skepticism over the rapid pace of the COVID vaccine development. What would it take to change your mind? And one thing it took to change my mind was strong evidence from well designed clinical trials that the vaccine was safe and effective.

3:12:25 Chris: Right. Which is what happened, which is why. Dr Gorski: I've had both doses of the Pfizer vaccine now. Chris: So this is one of, like, the last points that I kind of want to make is that being a vaccine advocate isn't about being blindly in favor of putting shit into your body, regardless of all evidence. Right. It's actually the opposite. Like, if being a vaccine advocate is precisely because there's so much evidence saying that vaccines that we do have are extremely safe and extremely effective. Right. We keep talking about that abundance of caution. Like, that's what gives me the confidence. Not because I'm just like, I like vaccines. Kayla: Just give me. Just give me shots. Just give me syringes.

3:13:05 Chris: Shots, shots, shots. Kayla: Inject them into my skin. I just love it. Chris: Right, exactly. It doesn't mean that doctor Nick Rivera's discount back alley vaccines are safe because I'm on team vaccine. It's rather because our Yden, our trust network includes good science and good evidence, and there's, again, evidence that they work. There's hundreds of years that vaccine science that vaccines work, that they're safe, that they're effective. There's multiple layers. There's literally thousands of people that work on this thing, and for them all to be covering up the evidence that vaccines are actually unsafe is just for literally hundreds of years is completely untenable. And it goes against the fact that we've eliminated so many diseases or near eliminated so many diseases. Like, it just doesn't make sense.

3:13:54 Kayla: Doctor Nick from the Simpsons is not part of the trust network of this. Chris: Podcast, but we do love Doctor Nick, obviously. Kayla: I certainly like Doctor Nick more than I like the Doctor Oz Phils Drew's of the real world. Chris: Yeah, yeah. Like, I read an, I forget, I think it might have been skeptical raptor. But, you know, I definitely read an interesting article last year in 2020 that was sort of about that. Like, hey, like, just because I trust all of the existing vaccines, because they have a massive body of evidence behind their safety, doesn't mean that I'm going to necessarily trust a new one that comes out that may not have that. Now, once it develops that body of safety, once it, you know, if Pfizer is like, look at all these trials and tests and blah, blah, and it's safe, then I'll believe it. But like, you know, it depends on what happens. So I thought that was like an interesting and good point.

3:14:44 Kayla: I'm super with Doctor Gorski. Like, when the phrase warp speed came up with regards to the vaccines that were being developed, I automatically became so much more vaccine hesitant than I've ever been in my life. If you call your program to get vaccines for the global pandemic to market warp speed, I'm going to be afraid to of what that means. That doesn't build trust with me. That makes me scared. Chris: Right, exactly. And if you had called it maybe warp safety instead, less catchy, maybe. Maybe less catchy, that would have built more trust, I think. But yeah, that definitely suggested speed over safety. And again, poor scientific track record, poor management track record and even let's take all that out and just forget the partisan stuff. Let's say, regardless of what the administration, let's say the previous administration had been democrat instead of republican, just for the sake of argument. And they had forced a rollout of vaccines like a month before election day. And then other bits of my trust network were questioning it. The CDC saying this is too early, CDC scientists saying we don't have the evidence yet, or Doctor Gorski or Paul Offita or whoever, saying, like, this is too, then I also would have been vaccine hesitant at that point. Right.

3:16:00 Chris: So it is possibly rationally vaccine hesitant, I believe. Oh, and there's also one thing I want to mention is that there is actually one thing that we are all anti vax about. You, me, doctors, scientists. We've already talked about it on the show. Kayla: Tell me. Chris: Smallpox. None of us get smallpox vaccines anymore. Kayla: Doesn't mean I'm hesitant. Chris: Well, I said anti vaxx. Kayla: Oh, anti vaxx. Chris: Not hesitant. Kayla: I'm not antivax about it. Chris: No. Well, then why won't you get the smallpox vaccine. Kayla: If it were offered to me, I would get it. Chris: You would get the smallpox vaccine even though it's been eliminated? Kayla: I'm sorry? If it's good enough for our soldiers in case somebody throws smallpox at them.

3:16:44 Chris: So are you planning on going overseas? Kayla: No, but what if, like, I'm sorry, who's to say that, like, those kinds of bio weapons wouldn't be used on a civilian population? Sign me up for the smallpox vaccine. I don't want to get smallpoxed. Chris: I can't say this for sure, but I'm almost 100% sure that if you wanted to get a vaccine for smallpox, you absolutely still could pay for it. You're saying if it's available, that means it's available. Kayla: It was a. Chris: My God, get the hell out of here. What I'm saying is there is a point at which we say, like, you know, it's. Maybe it's not worth the side effects of being inconvenienced or having, like, a scab on my arm or a scar on my arm, and it's because small box isn't around anymore. So there are situations, there are specific instances when it. We are anti that vaccine because we don't need it anymore.

3:17:35 Kayla: Right. Dr Gorski: One thing I like to do with anti vaxxers who claim they're not anti vaccines is I say, okay, if you're not anti vaccine, okay. Which vaccines do you think are safe and effective? Name one or two that you think are okay and that you would recommend, you know, usually silence or dancing around the question, you know? Chris: Right. Crickets. Yeah. So we're doing this interview. This is late January 2021, and the episode is probably going to publish. Things may be wildly different, but I wanted to ask, what do you think of the COVID vaccine rollout so far, and how has the anti vax community impacted that rollout, if at all?

3:18:20 Dr Gorski: I'm obviously not an expert here, but could better hoping if this isn't going to air for a month or whatever, that by the time that it airs, things have been mostly ironed out. I mean, in any huge effort like this or any mass vaccination program, there are going to be glitches. It's just the nature of the beast. People are not perfect. Things happen. However, let's just say that the last month and a half or so since the rollout started, more things have happened than I would have liked. You know, the rollout's been a lot slower than we would have liked. A fair amount of it has to do with a lack of federal coordination.

3:19:03 Dr Gorski: Hopefully, the new administration will fix that, but even if they do, they're not going to be able to fix it right away because it's like steering the Titanic, you know, away from the iceberg. It's like you can only turn so fast. Chris: Yeah, that makes sense. What I've seen some of you've talked on, or not talk, you've written on Twitter about some of the campaign. Like there's a coordinate. Are you saying there's coordinated campaigns now on behalf of anti vaxxers against Covid? Can you talk a little bit about the coordinate these coordination? Kayla: Sure. Dr Gorski: I mean, that's actually today's post. There was a report by the center for Counseling Digital hate called the anti vax playbook that was published not long ago. And they basically just talk about a conference that was held in October. And basically, all the big names from the anti vaccine movement were there, or actually, or most of the big names. Del Bigtree, Andrew Wakefield, Robert F. Kennedy junior, Barbara Low Fisher, Joe Mercola, Sherry, all the luminaries. These are like the leaders in the anti vaccine movement. And they basically, we're promoting three main messages. And the point I made, none of these messages are new. These are the same messages that the anti vaccine movement has been pushing as long as I can remember. They've just been tweaked and updated for and modified as needed for the Covid-19 vaccine.

3:20:38 Dr Gorski: So, for instance, one message, Covid-19 is not dangerous. Right. You've heard that? Yeah. Oh, yeah. You've heard the conspiracy theory of the case. Endemic. Which is basically the claim that the reason there appear to be so many cases is not because there really are so many cases, but because the PCR test has been set to be too sensitive and is generating a crap ton of false positives. Chris: Yeah, it's a popular hashtag. Dr Gorski: Yes. And the other one, COVID deaths are exaggerated. Like they're attributed to Covid when they're nothing. You know, like, that was the whole. Chris: Right. Dr Gorski: You know, 94% of. Only 6% of the deaths from COVID are listed as Covid only, which. Yeah, just because you have comorbidities doesn't mean Covid didn't kill you. Yeah. You know, the other claim, Covid can be addressed without vaccines. You know, and that's part of where all these treatments like hydroxychloroquine and all that stuff come in. So again, everything old is new again. I used to have something I called the Brady Bunch fallacy, and this was the claim that anti vaxxers started making around the time of the Disneyland measles outbreak. They based it on an episode of the Brady Bunch from 1969, where the whole family caught measles. And it was played for laughs as evidence that back then, 50 years ago, people didn't think measles was a big deal. It was just a childhood illness that everyone dealt with.

3:22:06 Chris: And based on the Brady Bunch, well. Dr Gorski: And then, well, they would also cite some other sitcoms going further back, like into the fifties, I think there was like an episode of the Donna Reed show and a couple others. I wrote about it once, and basically I called it the Brady Bunch fallacy. And you could also demonstrate that, well, yeah, maybe popular culture viewed measles as childhood disease. That's not that big of a deal. But medicine did not. It was appreciated back then that the mortality rate of measles was about one in 1002% chance or so of severe neurologic complications. And then of course, something like 20 or 30% end up needing hospitalization, you know, for like secondary pneumonia. So the other message, and moving on, so we can get through the three messages.

3:22:53 Dr Gorski: The other one, of course, is that Covid-19 vaccines are dangerous virus, it's the same, I mean, there's no big surprise. And every anti vaccine trope, save one, which I'll mention on the second, has been resurrected for this, including they're full of toxins, there are fetal cells in there that they'll permanently alter your DNA, which is again, a claim that dates back to before mRNA vaccines. Oh, even the claims that the vaccines will sterilize our women. Chris: The other one, I haven't heard that one, I don't think. Dr Gorski: And of course, the claim that they'll kill you, these are all claims. The only claim they haven't made yet, and I say yet because I'm sure that they will, is that the COVID vaccines cause autism. The only reason they haven't made that claim yet is because there is no COVID vaccine approved for children yet.

3:23:45 Chris: Right? Dr Gorski: And then of course, the third point is that vaccine advocates can't be trusted, you know, and that's where, for instance, you may recall that the nickname that anti vaxxers have for Doctor Paul Offit is doctor prophet. The whole idea that we can't be trusted, we're all in it for the clever, we're all in it for the money, or the ideology or etcetera. And, you know, then the Bill Gates conspiracy theories come in. So anyway, these three main messages are what they talked about at the conference. There's nothing new about those messages, but it is kind of clarifying to see them all laid out in that form in that report that the center for countering digital hate wrote. Those of us who've been following the anti vaccine movement a long time, there's nothing surprising in that report.

3:24:29 Dr Gorski: It's just the same old, repackaged and repurposed for Covid. Chris: Yeah, I think what's interesting and scary about it is how it feels. So at this point, almost professionalized and strategic the way that they're, oh, taking the approach. Dr Gorski: Strategic. There's no doubt that it's strategic. Professionalized, maybe. But, you know, there are all these groups now that, for instance, Dell Bigtree has his group, Robert F. Kennedy junior has his group, Barbara lo Fisher has her organization, all promoting anti vaccine messages, sometimes undertaking dubious lawsuits like Del Bigtree's I can, you know, which is the informed consent Action Network. You know, very orwellian name. Loves to sue the CDC and pharmaceutical companies and loves to use Freedom of Information act requests, which comes back to your whole secret knowledge thing. Or, you know, like about the emails, if they got it from a FOIA request. Oh, you know.

3:25:29 Chris: Right, right. Magical. All of a sudden the words are magical. Yeah. Yeah. So we've been talking a while and I'm actually just about at the end here. So I've had more question I want to ask, which, you know, the gimmick of our podcast is it a cult or not? So would you say that anti vaxxers constitute a cult and why or why not? Dr Gorski: Does it have to be yes or no? Because I think what I'll say is sort of, okay, it definitely has features of a cult. Pretty much all cults, I think, have an overarching conspiracy theory that they're into, which is why they believe that their viewpoint is not more widely accepted. I think part of the most important thing that makes them cult like is that their belief system, for many of them, especially the harder core ones, their belief system has become so internalized as part of their identity that it's every bit as powerful as religion, politics. It's, you know, whatever ideology you want. Trying to get them to change is akin to deprogramming a cult member or getting a religiously devout person to convert or to become an apostate. Just that difficult.

3:26:43 Dr Gorski: I guess what I would say is, yes, they certainly, the anti vaccine movement certainly has cult like features, but I think it's also a little too diverse in terms of the groups involved to call it, strictly speaking, a cult. Chris: Yeah, that makes sense. Another thing that I think we'll probably end up talking about on the show is there doesn't seem to be, like, a single charismatic leader. It seems like there's just, like, a bunch of little ones. Dr Gorski: You know, there are a bunch of charismatic leaders whose views are not always in concert other than hostility toward vaccines. Chris: All right. It's been a long two episodes, Kayla.

3:27:26 Kayla: And as you don't have to tell. Chris: Me, just asks Doctor Gorski about whether it was a cult or not. So we don't have to do it now. Kayla: Thank God. Chris: Which is nice. No, just kidding. We are totally gonna do it because it's our gimmick, by God. And if we don't do it, then the people are gonna be disappointed. Kayla: If we don't do it, then who. Chris: Will give the people what they want? But before we do that, I do wanna just, like, a little bit of a chat about what we've talked about on the show today because of how much it was. First question for you. Do you feel any differently about vaccines now than you did either before last episode or a few hours ago? Kayla: I understand what they are better. Chris: Okay. Kayla: But I don't think I feel stiff.

3:28:08 Chris: You don't feel more safe? Less safe? Kayla: No, I don't feel more safe. I just feel secure in the safety that I already felt. It feels like, oh, I was right to feel like that. Chris: Yeah. Kayla: Yay. Chris: I think before, for me, it's sort of like, yeah, I had some sort of, like, default assumptions based on the information that percolated to me. Now after, like, diving into it and especially, like, after having that deal manning the aluminum adjuvant thing, right. And getting into that headspace of, like, is it worth the risk? And then, like, understanding all these things about, you know, how the value optimize, like, the rational decision. You can make these rationally individual decisions that. Anyway, the point is, after learning all that, I do feel actually, I think, more confident in vaccines safety now than I did before learning about all those layers. Yeah, the multiple abundances of caution all the time.

3:29:02 Kayla: Right. Chris: Do you feel any different about anti vaxxers now than you did a few hours ago? Kayla: I guess I'm begrudgingly more sympathetic. Chris: Sympathetic or empathetic? Or both. Kayla: I think sympathetic. Chris: Okay. Because I definitely, like, again with the aluminum thing, right? That experience gave me a little bit of empathy. And by the way, I don't want to, like, oversell that too much. Like, that wasn't, like, I wasn't having, like, a multi week existential crisis that was, like, over the course of a few hours one day. But it definitely, I think gave me some insight into that headspace, empathy wise. Do you feel like you understand maybe why the movement or why the. I guess shouldn't say the movement. The movements, since it's so diverse, exists and always has existed.

3:29:53 Kayla: Yeah. Chris: Good. I guess I did my job well. Kayla: I mean, I would hope so. Chris: What would. Kayla: Otherwise, why were we sitting here for 5 hours? Chris: I don't know. It's just like verbal masturbation, as it always is. Kayla: Gross. Chris: What would you say to a vaccine hesitant person listening to the show right now? Kayla: I don't know. I don't know. I would have to know. Why are they vaccine hesitant? Because you talked about how there's so many different reasons of why somebody might go this route. So I think to tailor answer like that, I would need to know more about, like, I don't think I have something to say to all vaccine hesitant people everywhere. Because as you've pointed out, and probably in a way that I didn't understand before, it's a really diverse population. So I don't know how to. I don't think I have something to say that would address every single person in that population.

3:30:56 Chris: That's a good answer. I mean, like, I think. Yeah. The first thing I would say is, yeah. Why? Like, what is it that makes you vaccine hesitant? Kayla: Right. Chris: Do you feel like that's even an accurate characterization? Because if they say, like, well, it's because I'm immunocompromised, then I'd be like, all right, cool, have a good one. Kayla: But if they said, is somebody immunocompromised? Is like, is that. Are you. It feels like that. That's a third group. Chris: That's true. That's true. Maybe I shouldn't be lumping. I've been sort of lumping them in a little bit. It. But maybe you're right. Maybe people who, for legitimate medical reasons, can't get them right, maybe that's a different group. So somebody who's not part of that group, though, I might say, yeah. So if it's an individual liberty thing, I might ask them how they feel about secondhand smoke or how they feel about the trade offs. Or if you're not willing to contribute to herd immunity, are you also willing to not benefit from it and things like that.

3:31:46 Dr Gorski: Right. Kayla: Right. Chris: If it's somebody who's just scared or anxious, then I think that there's things that we can talk about that we talked about on the show today, about all those multiple layers of safety that might alleviate those fears. And if it's like a parental being scared for their children thing, then I feel like I can at least empathize with that. Kayla: Right? Right. Chris: Okay, it's finally that time. You want to flip the paper a little bit? Kayla: I don't have the paper. Chris: Just pretend that's the paper. Kayla: Sounds different than the paper that it really is. It's a different kind of paper. That was notebook paper. This is printer paper. Chris: This is fake news. That's not actually the paper that has the criteria on it. But don't worry, I have them written down. And part of why I wrote them down this time you've got something to say. Since it's a new season, we are adding two new criteria to the list. Oh, my God. That's crazy. That's a big risk. That's a big risk because that's our bread and butter, man. That's what people come here for.

3:32:46 Kayla: That's our better not mess it up. Chris: It's our gimmick. So we'll see how this goes. Oh, and I think we mentioned this earlier in the show, but we're going to do some bonus content for Patreon where we talk more in depth about these two criteria, where they came from, why we added them. So we're going to do some bonus content about that. So if you're interested in hearing us talk about that, then mosey on over to Patreon and join our cult. But let's go ahead and get started with the criteria right now. Start with the newest two. Kayla: Do it. Chris: The first one is dogma. Whoa. Crazy. Like the movie. We have to watch the movie dogma. There's a new criteria. Yeah, you have to watch movie dogma. No. So this is what we talked about last season, actually. I think it first came up in, like, the GiF versus GiF episode.

3:33:37 Kayla: That sounds appropriate. Chris: And basically the idea is, does this group, does this. Do these. Does this community have a sense of right versus wrong that is not necessarily rooted in some sort of objective scientific reality, but rather in, like, the in group versus the out group? Like, is it. Is this right because it's us and wrong because. Because it's not us? Kayla: Or does challenging the beliefs automatically make you a suppressive person, make you shunned, make you an outsider? Chris: So is that present here? Kayla: Am I supposed to evaluate that right now? Chris: Yeah, we're doing the criteria. Kayla: I wonder if you were going to talk about the first two. Chris: Oh, no. I'll talk about the second one at a time. Yeah, one at a time.

3:34:19 Kayla: I honestly, I don't know because I feel like with this, we almost talked more about the impacts of the group, and you talked about how not to jump ahead, but you talked about how it's difficult to pinpoint a single charismatic leader, and it's difficult to pinpoint what each specific group is. So it's really hard to say if it's dogmatic, because I'm not 100% sure I know what it is. Chris: Yeah. I think the diversity of motivations and diversity of people in the movements make it hard to say that. I think that means dogma is. The level of dogma is low.

3:35:01 Kayla: It might be high within certain sects, it might be low within certain sects, I don't know. But comparing this to the criteria of antifactuality, I feel more comfortable talking about overall anti factuality than I do about overall dogma. With overall, I just don't know. Chris: Yeah. And while it was tongue in cheek when were talking about it for GiF versus GIF, I think it's an instructive example, because with that, it was just like, the reason that it's GiF is because it is, and it's definitely gif. And if you don't think that, then you are bad. Kayla: And here are some examples that definitely Jif easily be shooed away. Chris: Right. Kayla: But we're gonna ignore those. Chris: And there wasn't, like, a diversity of, like, well, I'm motivated to think that it's gifted because of this or this or individual liberty. So I do.

3:35:44 Kayla: I would. Chris: Again, the main point here is that if you're a gifr, you are stupid. Kayla: Get out. I will say, in my personal experience with anti vax community, on Facebook, on social media, the kind of anti vaxxers that are drawn to social media, I will say it does seem to be dogmatic in that if you accept, express sympathy or interest or belief in vaccines, you're automatically like. It's almost like a flat earth kind of thing. It's like you're ridiculous. Chris: Controlled opposition. Yeah. Kayla: Like, I mean, I've even seen posts where somebody will be like. And it's really sad, but posts of parents being like, you know, I tried to raise my kid right, and then on her 18th birthday, she went and got vaccinated. Like what?

3:36:28 Chris: Like. Kayla: And everybody else being like, oh, you did what you could, but she's like, dead to you now kind of thing. Chris: Oh, God. All right, that's dogmatic. So maybe like half, then. Kayla: I think there is presence of dogma. I don't know if we got into it that much with the episode. I think it's there, but I don't. Chris: Think we can say it's, like, higher, low, 73%? Kayla: I'd say maybe lower. I don't know, difficult pulling that right. Chris: Out of my ass. All right, some. We'll say some. The next new criteria, and I think this one has been a long time coming, actually, is chain of victims. So chain of victims is actually best understood if you think about. If you think about that song or isn't there a Lindsey Buckingham? Never break the chain. Isn't that.

3:37:14 Kayla: That one was less good. Mine was. My reference was better. Yeah, I know you tried to jump on that chain. Chris: Swing from the chain. Actually, it's so. It's virtually any of the destructive cults we've talked about. But I was gonna say mlms, right. Where every person is just a link in the chain of victims. Right. Each person is both a victim themselves when they got recruited, and then they continue to victimize others by recruiting. So it's kind of like. It's almost a synonym of, like, just recruit. Enos. Like is how recruiting is the group. Kayla: I would say it's very high here. Chris: Yeah. And we also saw it pretty heavily, by the way, with QAnon as well. Kayla: Yeah. Chris: Where one person would become victimized and get red pilled, sucked into the cult, and then they would go try to red pill others and suck them in as well, and so on and so on. And it becomes hard then to separate. Is this person a victimizer or a victim? They're both. And that makes it hard to think about. And I think that's definitely a key characteristic of occult.

3:38:13 Kayla: Right. And I think it's very high here. Chris: Yeah. So why is that? Because we didn't talk about that too much, actually. Kayla: No, but it's. It's like, I don't even think I need to explain it. Like, it feels like it's so apparent in this. Like it is with Q and A. Chris: The recruiting. Kayla: The. I mean, I think it's. I think it. The. I was gonna say dogma, but that. That seems incorrect. Chris: That was the previous one. Kayla: The belief is inherently recruiting. Chris: Yeah, I think so. And we talk a little bit about how, like, there's definitely this. This sense of, like, lifeblood. Right. Because otherwise, why would anti vaxx influencers and leaders go out of their way to, like, target minority groups, right. Like, why would they go out of their way to do that unless they cared about recruiting? Right.

3:38:56 Kayla: Well, I just feel like if you're somebody that's been convinced that vaccines have harmed you in your life, and then you spread that rhetoric, it's going to convince other people that vaccines have harmed them in their life, and then they're going to continue to spread. It's like, very. Chris: And, you know, what's another shitty thing is that to kind of keep riffing on what you just said is, from what it looked like to me, like from watching vaxed and from, you know, looking at some of these parents who have, you know, it's like these parents have autistic kids. It was like Jenny McCarthy. Right, right. And ignoring the, like, massive ableism going on there. Like, just for just setting that aside for a second and just assuming that means that to them, they had this bad experience where something bad happened to their kid, this become that, you can kind of see that this becomes maybe a meaning making thing for them. And for you and I who have lost a child now, meaning making is such a big thing for, like, how to process and make sense of that.

3:39:54 Chris: And I can see that being the case for parents. It's the reason that they want to spread this message is like, please don't let this happen to your kids the way it happened to my kid. That's the only way I can make meaning out of this loss. Kayla: Right. Chris: Really shitty. Kayla: But there's also another chain of victims there because it's like, I worry about and I am afraid for, and I am sad and scared for autistic children that have anti vaxx, parents that believe that this is why it happened and make it their mission to, like to talk about this and to talk about autism in this way. Unfortunately, I think that they have the capability of doing a lot of damage to their own children and to other people's children and to autistic adults and to the autistic community. And so there's, like, this other chain of victims that is victimized by this group.

3:40:42 Chris: Yeah. You know, being able to conceive of autism as neurotypical versus neurodivergent, I think, is with, at least within the neurotypical community, relatively new. I'm sure it's something that neurodivergent people probably thought about a lot in the past, but in the, you know, quote unquote, like, neurotypical mainstream whatever, I think it's relatively new to, like, frame it that way versus, like, diagnosis. Kayla: Right. Chris: And so hopefully that, like, helps with some of this stuff. But, you know, that would suck. Like, if I were a neurodivergent person and my parent was, like, upset because of that and using me as an example of, like, ugh. Yeah, that.

3:41:28 Kayla: Wouldn't you hate for this to happen to your child? Chris: Yeah, exactly. Like, wouldn't you hate for your child to be like mine? Kayla: Right. Chris: I'd be like, oh, God, fuck you know? So anyway, so that's shitty chain of victims. I think we can say safely, that's relatively high. Kayla: Yeah. Chris: All right, now the two new ones. Kayla: Nice. Chris: So good job. Let's talk about all the old boring. Kayla: Primarily, I don't even want to cares. Get out. Charismatic leader, I feel as what was presented here today, I do not have a sense of one. It sounded like there's a bunch of different ones. Maybe Andrew Wakefield. Chris: Yeah, I was gonna say, like, for some of the older stuff, like, maybe there's, you know, there was, like, a slew of leaders. Like, certainly it seemed like there were. I didn't go into. I didn't, like, list a bunch of names or anything, but in victorian times, there are a bunch people involved in the poverty activism. And so there was, like, you couldn't really pinpoint one person, I guess. But in, like, modern anti vaxx, it does seem like you got Andrew Wakefield. And we sort of mentioned a couple times, Del Bigtree, we mentioned RFK junior. I don't know, I felt like when I was watching vaxed, that Mister Wakefield did come off as somewhat charismatic. Like, he didn't have come off as, this person's a nut job. Like, you know, he wasn't. Like, it doesn't matter if they come off to a ranting.

3:42:45 Kayla: This person's a nut job. Because teal Swan comes off to you as, like, this person's a nut job. And still we can write her a charismatic. Chris: But we disagree. Well, yes, right. And so that's true. But I'm saying, like, even that didn't seem to be like, teal Swan certainly is, I think is charismatic, even though she comes off to me as a nut job. Andrew Wakefield didn't even come off as a nut job. I know that all the facts of what he said, all the content of what he's saying is obviously not good, but the way he presents himself, he presents. He's. He's a good communicator, let's put it that way. So, I don't know, I maybe medium on this, too. Kayla: I mean, if we're gonna call Andrew Wakefield the charismatic leader, and I think. I think, honestly, just going off of the size and scope of the movement that was spawned by this one.

3:43:32 Chris: That's true. Kayla: Journal article, study, whatever, right? He had a huge impact. Chris: Right? Kayla: And he's continued, and I didn't realize this, but he has continued to have that impact by making himself the face of this thing. So I think we can go ahead and call him our charismatic leader and so say that's. Chris: Yeah, he's. He's doubled and then tripled and then quadrupled down. Kayla: Right. Chris: And now he's, like, into his, like, 15th downing. Like, he just keeps doubling down. Kayla: Okay. Chris: All right. Percentage of life consumed. Kayla: I don't know. Chris: Yeah, we didn't really talk about, like, individual anti vaxxers and how that, like, that was an easy one to answer for QAnon, because we talked to people whose family members were sort of, like, consumed by it.

3:44:14 Kayla: But it does seem like this can be really high, because if you are a parent who's like, I'm not gonna vaccinate my children. Then they are not going to public school. Then you're making, like, really big life decisions based on this thing. I mean, you're. There's going to be other parents that won't let their children play with your children. There's going to be other parents that you're probably not going to want to associate with because they do believe in vaccines. Like, it does tend to have some dogma in that way where I think that the population can tend to insulate itself. Chris: So varies, maybe. Kayla: I think it varies. I don't know enough anti vaxxers in my personal life to have an idea. Chris: We know people who have had anxiety and fear about vaccines, but nobody that, like, I'm not gonna vaccinate my kids and I'm gonna homeschool them. Like, we don't know anybody like that personally.

3:45:00 Kayla: So I don't know if my view of that is really just stereotypical. I think the possibility is there for a high percentage of life consumed. Chris: Here's an easy one. Anti factuality and disinformation. Kayla: Yeah, I think it's really high. Chris: Bada bing, bada boom, super high. Kayla: I don't think we need to explain that one. Chris: I mean, I don't want to be flippant about it, but yes, there was the whole, with. Kayla: The whole podcast was about, though. The whole last 5 hours was about this. Chris: Yeah. Yeah. So just lots of motive, like motivated reasoning out the wazoo here. And definitely a lot of, like, the clotus logical system where, well, I'm right because the CDC is hiding things. And the more you show me that they're not, the more it's an evidence for that. Oh, they're just, they're hiding the hiding.

3:45:43 Kayla: I'm gonna do science to prove that my hypothesis is right. Chris: Exactly. Exactly, exactly. Presence of ritual variolation, baby, that was highly ritualist. But that. But that's obviously not the anti vaxxers. Kayla: That was right. Chris: We have seen ritual in the show. I don't know if. I don't know if there rituals. What about meme sharing, eh? Is that ritualistic? Maybe kind of is. Kayla: But I also don't feel like. I don't know. I don't feel like the anti vaxxers necessarily have the same exact relationship to meme sharing as like the QAnoners do. Chris: There's a lot of anti vax meme stuff going on. Kayla: I know there's a lot of anti vax meme stuff, but they are not sitting there going like, we did literal magic with our meme.

3:46:24 Chris: Oh, meme. Well, okay, so. But that's a high bar for Q. Kayla: Like QAnon is saying, I don't think. Chris: They'Re like the meme army. Kayla: I don't think all meme sharing is ritualistic. I think meme sharing is. Chris: Oh, really? I'm not sure. I think I maybe disagree with that. Kayla: I think it's kind of like saying that all talking is ritual. All communication is ritualistic. I think it's another form of communication. Chris: It is, but it's a very, like. Kayla: Is our reaction gifs ritual? Chris: I don't know. Kind of. Right. Because, like, when I think about communication, like, us having a conversation, right. That is maybe me trying to get information from you or vice versa, us reacting to each other. Meme sharing feels very like I am proving my identity and worth to this community by, like, post. Because, like, a lot of the meme shares that I see in my own bubble on Facebook are from the same people saying the same thing over and over to a bunch of people that already agree with your problem is that you're on Facebook, but that's where the meme sharing happens. That's what I'm saying. Like, that's the purpose, isn't to say, like, I think, like, the stated purpose is, hey, listen to this thing. But it's inevitably always something that, like, everyone goes, that's right, 100% this all caps, right?

3:47:39 Chris: Is that communication or is it ritual? That's what makes it feel ritualistic. Kayla: But I also don't feel like we got into the nuances of meme sharing amongst anti vaxxers in this episode. Chris: That's true. Kayla: Don't really know how it's used. Chris: So I guess what I'll say is, without having again the time to go into the details of that, because meme sharing is used in the community, and because I think personally, that I've made a case for meme sharing, having a ritualistic element, then I'm going to say that it's present. Maybe not high, but it's definitely there. Kayla: Low but present. Chris: Low but present, yeah. Kayla: Okay. Chris: Societally, niche, I don't know. Well, one hand, it's. Yes, one hand, it's small compared to, like, it really is. Like, the number of people who refuse vaccines is actually relatively small compared to the people that don't. I feel like, however, top ten health. According to who? Top ten health threat.

3:48:36 Kayla: I feel like I'll be able to answer this question better in like five months once I actually see. Are we actually going to hit this, like, wall that we're talking about in the United States of, like, the vaccine hesitancy inhibiting our herd immunity for Covid-19 or not? And I don't know if that's a great answer because, like, there's vaccine hesitancy and anti vax for plenty of things, not just Covid. But I feel like if anti vax sentiment can stymie our Covid-19 herd immunity, then. Then that's not niche. Chris: I think that's a great answer, actually, because I think that's the key. That. Yeah, that is sort of the key thing. Like, is it niche within, at least within the United States, because most of what we see prior ignoring Covid with measles. Right. Is there are outbreaks that happen in smaller communities.

3:49:24 Kayla: Right. Chris: Because those communities get targeted or in some cases they're susceptible or whatever. Kayla: Right. Chris: And so then we see. And because herd immunity, again, is a local thing, the outbreaks happen there. So that feels niche to me because it's like, let's go for these, like, micro communities. Kayla: Right. Chris: But for it to be. Not niche for it to be like, yeah, like societally harmful at large. I think. Think that your answer makes sense. Like, let's see what happens with COVID Right. All right, finally, harm to the individual. Actually, this is like harm to the society. You know what I mean? Kayla: The harm is high. Chris: The harm, whatever you want to characterize it. High. Kayla: High. Chris: Yeah. Because literally it makes diseases, and that's not good. And then people die.

3:50:10 Kayla: And also it promotes eugenesis to thinking. Chris: Right, right. And also, you know, harmful ableism for communities that unfortunately get wrapped up in the motivated reasoning. Kayla: So what do we say? Chris: I, you know, first I think I was like, oh, this is gonna be a cult. But I kind of think I agree with Doctor Gorski's assessment where it's like, it kind of is and kind of isn't. It definitely has elements, but. Kayla: Are you fucking kidding me? Chris: Oh, what? You. Wait, actually, you're the one has to decide. You're right. Kayla: You flip out. Chris: You're fair. Cult. So you say cult. Kayla: I'm saying cult.

3:50:50 Chris: I guess then a wishy washy answer for means, sorry, but I'm saying it not cult. If I. If I must say something, I'm. Then I'm gonna say not cult, but definitely has a bunch of cult elements. There's just. Kayla: I don't even know if you're allowed to say that. Chris: There's too much missing for me. It's too diffuse too. It's existed for too long. It's a move. To me, it's more of like a. It's a thing that exists. It's a part of our culture almost. Right? Like, as long as it's existed, the broad swath, it cuts across society in terms of, like, all the different viewpoints, it just seems like it's. As long as you have vaccines, you'll have antivirus, and that's the way it is. And the more abundance of caution, as we've talked about, you treat it with the more inroads there are for people who are susceptible to disinformation or will use it purposely and nefariously to say, well, why would there be so many safety nets if it was safe?

3:51:49 Kayla: Right? Chris: So I'm gonna say not cult because of those reasons. Kayla: Sounds good. Chris: All right, before we sign off, I do want to mention one more thing. It's always important, but especially with something critical like vaccines and herd immunity in public health, to focus on the goal, not on the process, not on the details, not necessarily how we get there. Those things are important. But the thing to focus on is the goal. You should always have your eye on the North Star. Your north star with herd immunity isn't changing people's minds. The North Star is getting a higher percentage of the population vaccinated to protect the vulnerable. Right.

3:52:31 Kayla: Right. Chris: So one thing that did come up a couple times in my research is that as much as anti vax is indeed a problem for public health, it is not the only thing affecting vaccine uptake. And it's maybe not actually even the biggest thing. The biggest thing, in fact, may just be access. We've talked about this a couple times, but fighting a pandemic is a team sport. And if poorer countries and poorer communities have less access to healthcare and vaccines, that literally hurts all of us via the mechanism of herd immunity. And again, it's true for poor countries as much as it is for poor communities within the US, especially since in the US we suffer greatly from lack of access to healthcare.

3:53:16 Chris: So the last thing I want to mention before we go is that yeah, it's great for you to argue with Aunt Susan about why she's a dumb face and should vaccinate her kids, goddammit. But it may actually be even more impactful to support healthcare access for everyone, to support programs that help disadvantage communities get access to healthcare, and even to support international cooperation and aid. You can be a vaccine myth debunker too, but don't lose sight of the goal. Kayla: This is Chris, this is Kayla, and. Chris: This has been cult or just weird.