How I Stopped Being an Anti-Vaxxer

Anyone 10 years old or so can manage it. Which says something about the adults running this country.

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I remember the year I stopped being an anti-vaxxer. I was 11, living in a small city in Indonesia in the 1970s, a skinny little drama queen from Canada in batik shorts who dreaded the approach of the next booster shot for cholera or tetanus as if were the date of my execution. My father, a doctor, administered the injections in my bedroom, beneath a ceiling fan and in the view of mosquito-eating lizards that clung to the whitewashed walls. He was not handy with a needle, so he slowed the whole ritual to the pace of an archeological dig. He even pegged some injections to the week of my birthday. I found the whole business outrageous.

But that year I was forced to put away many childish things. The move to Java ended my access to comic books. My Hardy Boys library had been left behind. We had no television. I began reading my father’s copies of The Lancet and The Journal of the American Medical Association, wrestling with articles whose titles had an unfamiliar, flat cadence: “Goiter Prophylaxis by Addition of Potassium Iodate to Bread: Experience in Tasmania.” It’s true, I did read such stuff! I didn’t understand much, but enough for the lightbulb to come on: The goal of medicine might be to cure, but the deeper subject of these journals was the nature of evidence and facts. Here was my first glimpse of the scientific project. My father was part of that project and so, by extension, was I. I understood that, in a sense, important evidence was being injected into my arm.

I soon converted to a vaccination champion. When two young Americans turned up at our door in Java showing bloody scrapes from a fall off their motorcycle, I was alone at the house. I fetched a vial of tetanus vaccine from the fridge and directed them down the road, to the hospital, with stern orders not to delay.

I became quite proud of my Yellow Card, the vaccination record required for international travel by the World Health Organization. Mine had stamps and signatures for smallpox, polio, yellow fever, tetanus, typhoid-paratyphoid, and cholera. I also received a whopping five CCs of gamma globulin into my left buttock every six months, to ward off hepatitis—a week-long pain in the ass—and wrapped anti-malaria chloroquine pills with banana goo, because chloroquine, even the tiniest grain, was bitter as Mary’s tears and made me retch. These were the prophylactics for diseases that afflicted patients in the hospitals where my father worked, and he had taken me through their wards to witness.

Our family of five spent a collective total of 47 years in developing countries, eating street food from Denpasar to Tunis, traveling to the most remote villages, never suffering anything worse than brief bouts of diarrhea. Of course, we were healthy and well-fed, but immunization presumably helped. We were happy to be the Traveling Antibodies.

In a recent post, I noted that our country is now being run by destroyers of meaning. To replace facts with non-facts is fundamental to their work. Consider what it means that the weird and dangerous Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is now in charge of the government’s repositories of research and fact-keeping concerning disease and health. As everyone in Congress knew during his approval hearing, he’s a long-time vaccine skeptic who is widely reported to have influenced the anti-measles-vaccination movement in Samoa (triggered by the deaths of two infants the year before due to a faulty vaccine) that led to the deaths of 83 unvaccinated children in 2019.

Let’s briefly consider what sort of evidence Kennedy’s anti-vax leanings replace with non-evidence.

First, the supposed link of vaccines to autism traces to an article published in the Lancet—yes, the very same journal of fact and evidence—in 1998; that article was discovered by an intrepid reporter to be fraudulent, based on doctored evidence, and its author financially compromised; the article was a pox on the Lancet’s reputation and was eventually, but not before damage was done, withdrawn.

Second, and far more concerning, is Kennedy’s history of claiming that the measles vaccine wasn’t properly tested and that its effects rapidly wane. Experts in immunology refute both claims. Here’s the true story: After a bumpy start in the early Sixties, the vaccine had eliminated by the year 2000 a disease in the US that had caused four-to-five- million cases and 450 fatalities annually. In poor countries, the fatality rate was much higher, due to malnutrition and other causes. The CDC estimates that a massive global vaccination effort, perhaps more than a billion shots in arms, has saved 60 million lives since 2000! The vaccine’s job is not done, however, and requires widespread adoption. More than 200,000 people died globally of measles in 2019, according to the WHO. And now measles creeps back into this country. This year, two American children died of the disease in an alarming outbreak; both were reported to be unvaccinated.

Kennedy prevaricated on his anti-fact beliefs during his Senate approval hearing but afterwards sacked the FDA committee that oversees vaccine approval, appointing a new group with several members who are considered skeptics.¹ He also announced in late June that the US is withholding funding from GAVI, a private-public alliance that delivers vaccines to millions of poor children. Reason: GAVI silenced “dissenting views” during the Covid pandemic.

A camel could more easily pass through the eye of a needle than convince me that Kennedy should be anywhere near the CDC, NIH, and FDA. But there he is, destroying. Why?

As I was writing this, I received a text from an economist I know who spent his career advising governments and international agencies in developing nations on three continents and now splits his time between Asia and Washington. I know him to be a scrupulous, rigorous thinker. His global perspective is scary. (I’m deliberately withholding his identity.)

“Destroying value—meaning knowledge—starts with first attacking facts,” he wrote. “That is the only way the plutocratic elite can hoodwink the genuinely grieving people who have been left behind.”

There is a disease metaphor here: Bombard vulnerable people with anti-facts to create an opportunistic infection whose effects include rapid transmission over social media. This obviously extends far beyond the medical domain. America reminds my associate of the worst such excesses he battled globally for more than 30 years. “Things—autocratic urges, corruption—are happening here that would be unthinkable in even most developing countries.”

Part of the destruction of meaning involves forgetting the past. Yet of course the past is documented. My maternal grandfather ministered to victims of harsh truths who lived before science delivered insulin, antibiotics, and most vaccines. His name was Victor Johnston, and he practiced medicine in a small Ontario, Canada town in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1972, he wrote a book called Before the Age of Miracles.

At the time, doctors had few medicines that did much for hard cases. Sulfa drugs—an early form of antibiotic—had not arrived to make scarlet fever, the leading killer of babies and infants, “lose its terror.” A woman came to my grandfather with a small cut on her finger, swollen, infected. Treatment took six months. “By that time,” he wrote, “not much remained of her hand except bones and tendons…”

Faith and a certain amount of fatalism comprised the locals’ disposition. I don’t recall my grandfather as particularly religious. He drew a poetic line between the faith of the God-fearing Presbyterians he cared for and the fact-based story that he based his practice on.

“To be told that the death of a young man or woman from a vicious disease was the Lord’s will invariably shocked me,” he wrote. “I could only remember the young person’s bitter frustration, his feeling of being cheated that life should end so soon. I had to believe that the Lord permitted these deaths, but he didn’t will them; instead, he willed that we use our brains and talents to prevent and cure illness and postpone death.”

Is there a diagnosis other than nation in decline for an America whose leaders weaponize the attack on facts, carelessly cause illness and hasten death (exhibit A: the dismantling of USAID²), and undermine the scientific project that extracts meaning from the operation of the universe so that we might extend our experience of life?

If I were religious, I’d say theirs is the work of the Devil. But I’m not. This country needs to leave these childish ideas, which in adults constitute corrupt manipulation and madness, behind.

1. None of this means that vaccine science and policy do not require scrupulous ongoing review. Not every vaccine works. In 1959, the WHO mandated a cholera vaccine that proved, although not seriously harmful, not effective enough to be justified. In 1973, the cholera mandate was reversed. (I received more than of a dozen of those painful shots.) Meanwhile, the WHO was slow to approve an oral cholera vaccine that proved much more effective, in part because it was expensive. Absence of need in healthy and wealthy countries undermines corporate incentives to produce vaccines for developing regions. Meanwhile, in America, Big Pharma heavily lobbies for vaccination policies which, even if a good idea, are distorted by the lobbying money involved.

2. My evidence is anecdotal, but as a teen I witnessed workers from USAID and related programs, including CARE, treating—and presumably saving the lives of—babies and mothers with medicines, nutrition, and vaccination in Afghanistan and India.