The Religious Roots of Vaccine Denial

Media Clip: Kevin Spacey is opening up about a recent health scare. In a video, obtained by TMZ on October 4, the 64 year old actor revealed in a speech, at the Tashkent International Film Festival, that he was rushed to the hospital, on October 2nd while on a tour of the museum in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. We have breaking news. Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein of California has passed away. She was the oldest sitting member of Congress, serving 30 years in the United States Senate....

Media Clip (Speaker 1): ...need Moab fire to respond to the airport on standby for a possible aircraft crash off airport property. Again, I need Moab fire to respond to the airport for standby on a possible plane crash.

Media Clip (Speaker 2): There you have the call. We're still following that developing news about the plane crash in Moab that killed North Dakota State Senator and his family. Now, you heard there one of the first indicators...

Dr. Susannah Crockford: Actor Kevin Spacey was rushed to hospital with a suspected heart attack while at a film festival. And the quote tweets above the announcements asked, "Vaxxed?" Senator Dianne Feinstein dies at age 90, and again in the quote tweet, the question is, "Vaxxed?" A North Dakota State Senator dies in a plane crash and, once again, the same question: "Vaxxed?" The allegation that sudden deaths or hospitalizations are caused by vaccination has become so routine on social media that it's become a meme. It even appears in the quote tweets above the announcement that Kevin McCarthy lost the speakership of the House of Representatives. So this one is obviously a joke, right? But much the same could be assumed about a plane crash or the death of Dianne Feinstein, who, after all, was 90 years old and a suspected 'Weekend at Bernie's' case for a month now. The meme is so common on X (the social media platform formerly known as Twitter) that to parse whether it's a joke or a serious allegation requires contextual knowledge of the account posting. Because a lot of accounts are claiming this seriously. They're claiming that many sudden or notable deaths are caused by vaccination and are being covered up as something else.

Media Clip ("Died Suddenly"): U.S. life insurance companies have reported an overwhelming and unexplainable increase in all-cause deaths among 18- to 49-year-olds. Along with that, there's also been an increase in certain medical diagnosis, such as miscarriages and Bell's palsy. Well, when I first started seeing these strange anomalies in the blood, it's just... there's something different about the blood. All of these people that are dying- doesn't matter what they died of- they were having this unique…uh, there's this unique change in the blood. So in the very beginning, I'm thinking, okay, so, COVID could have caused this, possibly. But now I'm seeing these in people that supposedly never had COVID, and then you find out they were vaccinated. And, so it's like, okay, so guess the vaccine might be causing this.

Dr. Crockford: This clip comes from the opening of "Died Suddenly," a documentary that alleged that elites are depopulating the Earth using vaccines. The vaccines are really poison, according to the creator and narrator, Stew Peters, and if you get vaccinated, don't be surprised if you just drop dead suddenly, and it's reported after the fact as a heart attack. Even famous people are not exempt from this nefarious scheme. The documentary includes footage of Damar Hamlin, a Buffalo Bills player, who suffered a cardiac arrest. And even Keyontae Johnson, a basketball player for the Oklahoma Thunder, a clip of him collapsing is included in the documentary. But here's the thing: he's still alive and playing. He didn't die. And yet his collapse is featured in a documentary called "Died Suddenly." So, this has got to be misinformation, right? Welcome to Miss Information, a limited podcast series by me, Dr. Susannah Crockford, in conjunction with the Institute for Religion, Media and Civic Engagement and Axis Mundi Media. Miss Information was produced by Dr. Bradley Onishi and engineered by Scott Okamoto. Kari Onishi provided production assistance. Miss Information was made possible through generous funding from the Henry Luce Foundation. Today we're talking about vaccination. Why some people are hesitant to get vaccinated or refuse vaccination outright, and how rumors and stories about vaccine injuries and deaths have spread online, even in cases where the people they are about are still alive. Before 'vaxxed' became a meme, hashtag #diedsuddenly went viral in response to the documentary. Ordinary people who died suddenly of heart problems or unspecified causes had their obituaries reposted with the hashtag, casting doubt on the official cause of death and on vaccination. In general, stories can spread online without any connection to reality. Keyontae Johnson can still be seen playing basketball in front of millions, yet somehow he also died suddenly. Nurse Tiffany Dover was vaccinated early on in the COVID-19 pandemic and fainted. The video of her fainting, post vaccination, went viral, along with rumors that the vaccine killed her. But she's still alive! She has spoken to the media about the effect on her life of being a cautionary tale against vaccination, despite the fact that she is a nurse who wants people to get vaccinated.

Media Clip (Tiffany Dover): My message is simple. It is that I am alive. I'm well, that's it. Hope they believe it.

Media Clip (Speaker 1): Tiffany Dover wants the world to know one thing: 'They' are the massive online community of conspiracy theorists who've been convinced she's dead for more than two years. I made a whole podcast about it. Tiffany wasn't ready to share her story then, but now:

Media Clip (Tiffany Dover): I'm ready to just put my story out there. Own my story.

Media Clip (Speaker 1): That story begins in 2020. Tiffany was working as a nurse manager at CHI Memorial Hospital in Chattanooga. Putting in grueling hours on a COVID unit. When vaccines arrived that December, Tiffany became one of the first people at her hospital to get the shot.

Media Clip (Tiffany Dover): I felt okay during that.

Media Clip (Speaker 1): Then she stood up to answer questions. [sound from the video footage of Tiffany passing out]

Media Clip (Tiffany Dover): I ended up passing out. So that created the opposite effect of what I would have liked.

Media Clip (Speaker 1): But you got right back up.

Media Clip (Tiffany Dover): I did. And this is something that's happened to me my whole life. I do have episodes where I pass out.

Media Clip (Speaker 1): But in that moment, a conspiracy theory was born.

Media Clip (Tiffany Dover): People thought that I was dead. People thought that I was an actress paid to do this. That I was paid off by big pharm. It was completely overwhelming...

Dr. Crockford: Typically, a routine preventative practice, vaccination rises in prominence whenever outbreaks of infectious disease occur. A certain level of vaccination maintains immunity in a population because, as long as there are enough vaccinated people, disease can't spread widely. However, if vaccine rates drop, herd immunity is undermined. Vaccination is a relatively low cost medical intervention, compared to the cost of treating people who get sick. And although vaccines can cause some side effects, these are relatively minor compared to the long term consequences that viral infection can cause. In recent decades, however, an increasingly vocal and well-funded anti-vaccination movement has cast doubt upon the efficacy and safety of vaccines. The history of vaccine resistance goes back as far as vaccines themselves. The 1800s saw a marked reluctance to take the new smallpox vaccine that was based on the cowpox virus. It didn't help that that was a live vaccine, which meant that some people did get sick from it. Vaccine science has come a long way since then, however. Still, instances of contaminated vaccines create resistance, as do vaccine mandates. People don't want to be forced to take medical treatments. They don't like the lack of choice. Since vaccines are preventative, they are given to healthy people, often to children. Sick people are more motivated to try whatever treatment is offered to them, but healthy people may pause and wonder, 'Why is this really necessary?' That pause can multiply into fear for parents of newborn babies, anxious about making them sick, about making the 'right' parenting decisions. What if this needle jabbed into their baby makes them sick? And then people are suggesting that that is what will happen? And then what if they do get sick? Which young babies often do, as they are still developing their immune systems. Childhood illnesses occurring at the same time as routine vaccinations can make parents think that the vaccine caused the illness, even if it was just a coincidence. These anxieties make parents a key group in anti-vaccination movements. Today, we're going to learn what motivates anti-vaccination movements. About the importance of notions of bodily purity, even divinity, which suggests that these movements have religious roots. Vaccine resistance is then not so much an argument about competing medical treatments as it is about competing ideologies of the body and what should or should not be done to it. From the outset of the COVID 19 pandemic, vaccination was identified as the primary solution. Government labs, pharmaceutical companies, and university researchers were developing new vaccines so everybody could get back to work.

Media Clip (Speaker 1): ...and as doses of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine make their way into the arms of the first phase of recipients today, the data the FDA will be using to potentially authorize Moderna's vaccine was made public. Those first doses going out today in the UK, the data the FDA will be relying on to potentially authorize the vaccine here was made public.

Media Clip (Speaker 2): 92 page document from Pfizer...

Media Clip (Speaker 3): Alright, now to an update on the COVID-19 vaccine. The FDA has released new documents showing Pfizer and BioNTech's COVID-19 vaccine candidate provides strong protection against COVID-19. It comes as virus cases...

Dr. Crockford: Vaccination took precedence over any other mitigation measure, such as improving ventilation with HEPA filters, for example. Masking and social distancing have largely been abandoned in the US since the release of the vaccines and the subsequent boosters. But coronaviruses mutate frequently, like the flu, and we have to keep getting new boosters. Also, you can still get sick, so it's easier to claim that they're ineffective. This means that the continual push to get vaccinated is faced with the continual push back by anti-vaxxers. Anti-vaccination became more pronounced as a politicized stance through the COVID-19 pandemic. Whether you get vaccinated or not, became part of party political identification. Not getting vaccinated was more associated with Republicans and red states. Conservatives often rejected vaccines because they tended to pay more attention to Fox News and social media than to medical experts.

Media Clip (Speaker 1): Algorithms.

Media Clip (Speaker 2): And so is it mostly Facebook, where you were getting sort of these messages?

Media Clip (Speaker 1): Yes. I saw some Fox News reports online. But 90-95% of what I got was through my algorithms and friends on Facebook. And I can tell you, when I started telling people, 'You need to consider this vaccine. And you need to stop politicizing this,' I lost a lot of friends. And the more hardcore you were..uh, I had some really ugly things said to me, and I had to start blocking people that I've been friends with for years.

Media Clip: The Kaiser Family Foundation found that 64% of unvaccinated people believed at least four or more pieces of COVID misinformation of the eight that they tested. And they found that among those who trusted conservative news outlets, belief in misinformation was more common than among those who trusted other sources.

Dr. Crockford: On the other hand, Democrats and progressives added, "Follow the Science" to their colorful lists of identifying slogans. They portrayed anti-vaxxers as bad citizens, letting down the body politic, exposing others through their negligence. For their part, anti-vaxxers suggested that pharmaceutical companies had corrupt motives, pushing vaccines to make money. And perhaps something even more sinister. Like in the "Died Suddenly" documentary, vaccines were called an attempt by the government to depopulate through injecting poison under the guise of vaccination. Even more alarming conspiracy theories suggested that vaccines were somehow linked to 5G networks and microchips programmed by Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft. So what's going on with vaccines? Is being hesitant about vaccines the same as refusing them outright? And why have so many conspiracy theories developed around them? To find out more, I spoke to Kira Ganga Keiffer from Boston University.

Kira Ganga Keiffer: So, I'm Kira Ganga Keiffer and I recently graduated with my PhD in Religious Studies from Boston University. And my areas of study and expertise are religion and vaccine hesitancy, which I'm writing a book about now. And also spirituality in the United States, health, alternative health, and the interplay between consumerism and spirituality, and women's spirituality.

Dr. Crockford: I asked Dr. Keiffer how opposition to vaccination emerged in the US.

Kira: So, over three centuries since we've had vaccines, there has always been hesitancy. So from day one, even preceding day one, there was hesitancy and rejection of the smallpox vaccine. That kind of persists, waxes and wanes throughout our history. During the latter half of the 20th century is when we get the bulk of the vaccines that are on, say, our childhood immunization schedule now. Those all come out and then logically, as there are more and more vaccines, you start to see more hesitancy, starting in the 80s, 90s, and then in the early 2000s. So that's just kind of a brief history of the hesitancy, because I think it's so important to think about this as a constant. And it's a constant, but it's also contextual, and, you know, obviously, it's contingent on historical things that are happening too. So the religious roots of vaccine hesitancy or resistance, as I see it, are at the core a belief that the body is divine and pure and vaccines are not. So, that's how I would break it down as simply as possible. And I don't think, well, I know that people don't necessarily say that...um...so this is my interpretation from reading account after account after account of people's stories and why they are choosing to reject or are hesitant about vaccines and the type of literature that they would read at different times in history. And applying a religious lens to see, you know, why is this such a constant? And it really comes down to this idea that the body is pure and can be corrupted. And vaccines, for some reason, are corrupters.

Dr. Crockford: Would you be able to give us an example from some of the accounts that you've read of how this narrative of the body as pure and vaccines as impure comes across?

Kira: Yes. So, I'll give you a few examples from different time periods. So, in the late 1700s or the early 19th century, you had the smallpox vaccine coming out in the UK, and in England, and the United States. There were a lot of accounts of people who were angry at the idea that a smallpox vaccine would be mandated. And they wrote lots of little screeds and pamphlets that they passed around (which we have access to) and they would talk about corrupting the body. During this time they were much more explicit about the divinity of the body. And they had the perception that inserting a needle into someone's arm and pushing that syringe was going to deliver the cow lymph, that was used to make the smallpox vaccine, into the person and turn them into a cow in some way. So, that goes on, and that evokes these ideas of the devil, and maybe like in inserting Satan into yourself. And that you should really keep your body clean and pure and your children's body clean and pure just to be safe. So that's one example. In the 90s, let's say the 80s and 90s, in Mothering magazine, which was a pretty popular magazine for mothers in the US, there were lots of women who wrote letters to the editor about vaccine choices. And they talked a lot about keeping their children's bodies 'natural.' And mothers would write back and they would say, 'breastfeed.' Just breastfeed them and they will be as strong and as healthy as ever, and you don't need to corrupt them or hurt them potentially with a vaccine. Later, even just a couple of years ago, during the measles outbreaks in 2019 in New York, there was discussion about the MMR vaccine corrupting a child's soul. And that it was the parents responsibility that the parent felt, and this is an affidavit that the parent gave under oath, the parent felt that the child had been gifted to him by God or the divine. And it was his sense that he had to protect that child in every way that he saw fit. And that the soul was developing along with the body, and that the soul was not ready to accept a vaccine into it. Those are three examples.

Dr. Crockford: So, vaccine hesitancy is a constant throughout its history, and it is also contextual. It ebbs and flows with current events. The more pressing the need to vaccinate, the more prominent the campaigns are to convince us to get vaccinated. The more common it is to see that anti-vaccination counter reaction. Much hesitancy can be overcome, such as nervousness around needles, for example. And so vaccine hesitancy is not the same as refusing all vaccines outright. And in saying that vaccine resistance is religiously driven by ideologies of the body as divine and pure, does this mean only religious people reject vaccines? Some communities do have higher rates of religious exemption from vaccinations. For example, measles outbreaks in 2018 and 2019 among Orthodox Jewish communities in New York highlighted high rates of vaccine resistance.,even though faith leaders tend to strongly support vaccination. But religious exemption can also be framed as philosophical or moral. This creates space for people from diverse religious traditions and no religious affiliation to express their disquiet with vaccines and to gain an exemption in states which have laws granting exemptions on religious or moral grounds. But that is not all that is going on with the religious roots of vaccine hesitancy. Religious ideas about the body and vaccines are also found amongst people who are secular, as I found out from Dr. Keiffer.

Kira: That's really the gist of my whole work. Is that when we say, 'religion' we think Catholics who go to church, or Jews that go to synagogue, or Hindus, and we're really missing the big picture when we think that way. But on the whole, this is a movement that spans left to right, secular to religious. You've got Catholics who are devout, and you've got people who are, like New Age hippies, completely on the same page when it comes to whether or not to vaccinate their child. And I think one of the reasons for that, is that when we're talking about vaccines and vaccine hesitancy prior to COVID, we are talking about children. We're talking about infants. Primarily. That's who gets the bulk of the vaccines in our country. And that's a pretty universal experience among parents. Taking care of a newborn infant and not knowing what on earth you're doing. There's no instruction guide, and you don't know how this child even got here, and all of a sudden you have to start thinking about, 'Oh, what's going into them?' And that's when people start to freak out. And they think, and they look around, they hear from friends or Mothering magazine, or a social media post, or, you know, the local screed back in the 19th century, and they get hesitant. And they say, 'You know what, I'll step back. I don't think so. We're not going to do it.'

Dr. Crockford: It can be really hard to make good decisions when you're a parent, because you're so stressed, right? You're like, I just have to do the right thing for my child. But then what is the right thing? And that's really why trust and authority are so important? Like, why do you believe Mothering magazine over, say, your local doctor? So, you know, can you just talk about more... Like, would you consider that a religious decision? Why is trust so important, and whether it's a religious decision?

Kira: Yes, so I do see it as a religious decision, in this kind of subtle religion framework that I operate in during my work. And the reason is that I think about, okay, we're talking a lot about bodies. Bodies are the only thing that we have, right? We have a body, that's the only thing we inherently have, or innately have. And so there's something really important about how we treat it. There's also something really important about trusting others with your care. Now, for most of us, we sort of, we follow the script of whatever it is in our society that we do. We go to the doctor, we get our checkups, or we don't. We eat what we're going to eat. But you could be getting information about this, about how to care for your body from a myriad of sources. And when you are in a period of time when there's a lot of controversy about a vaccine... say, the Mercury/Autism controversy, you may not think that your doctor has the most up to date information, or that they really know. And you see that a lot where it's like, 'You know what? I think my doctor is a sham. I think that my doctor is, basically, never going to tell me the truth if there is actually a risk here that I should know about.' And so there's a lot of skepticism that comes about. And at the end of the day, I think, again, it comes down to the body.

Dr. Crockford: The fact is that most of us do not know what is in vaccines. We don't read medical studies, and even if we do, we don't have advanced degrees in immunology to put those studies in context. That is why trust is so important in vaccine decisions. Why trust your doctor over your friends or neighbors or posts on social media? How do people decide who to trust? There has been an historical shift in the position of doctors, and experts in general, and a rising opposition to the science in recent decades. Trust in the authority of doctors peaked after World War Two. In the 1950s the polio vaccine was very successful, and scientists were deified as miracle workers. Increasing pushback emerged during the 1960s to 1970s as part of the wider shift in authority structures in society. There was a corresponding increase in interest in alternative medicine and chronic illness diagnoses. Chronic illnesses in particular, are not well treated in mainstream medicine. They tend to be poorly understood and in some cases not acknowledged as illnesses at all. People often left to find their own communities of fellow sufferers, often online to find people who know about their symptoms and have ideas on how to treat them. The trial and error process of finding relief for chronic illness often incorporates alternative medicines as well as mainstream medicine, and the dismissiveness from doctors about their conditions can make some who suffer from chronic illness turn away from mainstream medicine altogether. During this same period, pharmaceutical companies grew in size and power. Despite producing a product that can mean the difference between life and death, pharmaceutical companies tend to privilege their own profit margins above human health and well being. A particularly egregious example of their behavior was the sale of strong opioids such as OxyContin, marketed as "not addictive" despite being stronger than morphine. The result was the opioid epidemic of the 1990s to 2010s, during which millions suffered from debilitating opioid addictions, hundreds of thousands died, and pharmaceutical companies like Purdue Pharma made billions. So, it's not irrational not to trust the companies that make the medicine we take and rely on for our health and well being. It can often be small steps from a decision about vaccines to believing outlandish seeming claims about depopulation. It can begin with watching your baby get sick around the same time as they received a childhood vaccine, and then researching alternative treatments like homeopathy online. This research can lead to alt-health influences, people like Robert F Kennedy Jr, currently running for the Democratic nomination for president, who said this:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: ...what I've said is vaccines... I'm not anti-vaccine. I think vaccines should be subject to the same level, rigorous testing as other medications, and that is the only thing, my only position. Listen, I fought to get mercury out of fish for 40 years, and nobody called me anti-fish. I'm not anti-vaccines, just because I want safe vaccines. And I think everybody wants safe vaccines. And as we all now recognize, the COVID vaccines were neither safe nor effective.

Dr. Crockford: Or Dr. Joseph Mercola, a licensed medical doctor, who trumpets the miraculous cures of alternative medicine and casts doubt on the efficacy of vaccines, and who got banned from social media for doing it.

Dr. Joseph Mercola: ...as you mentioned and alluded to the removal of basically all this information that we know is solid and true and will radically change your life and improve your ability to get off of and or rely on pharmaceutical medications and address the foundational cause of what's causing your health challenge. But not only that, but how to implement relatively simple, inexpensive strategies, things like sunlight. I mean, I've made a list... I have, like, I want to have, like, 50 modules. Each module...

Dr. Crockford: From listening to alt-health influencers like Kennedy and Mercola, you might start blaming the vaccine for your child's sickness, and then you start wondering, if vaccines are dangerous, why are mainstream doctors recommending them? Why are laws made requiring us to take them? Then you might start to think something else must be going on, something worse than just misinformed doctors, something really sinister. And then you might watch a documentary that claims this:

Media Clip ("Died Suddenly"-1): These people know. These people know. [Second Speaker] Who knows? [First Speaker] The governments know. This has been well planned. This is Agenda 2030. This is the great reset.

Media Clip ("Died Suddenly"-2): Somebody mentioned to go on to Google and go into the news section and then type in "died suddenly." And lo and behold, here's a whole listing of people, of articles, of people within that last week who died suddenly. Older people, but a lot of younger people throughout the world.

Media Clip ("Died Suddenly"-3): And then you find out they were vaccinated. And it's just there's something different about the blood. Something's causing this. Somebody needs to look into it. I talked to other embalmers that have 30, 40, even 50 years of experience. 'Have you guys ever seen this stuff before?' And the answer was always, 'I've never seen anything like it.'

Media Clip ("Died Suddenly"-4): US life insurance companies have reported an overwhelming and unexplainable increase in all-cause deaths among 18 to 49 year olds.

Media Clip ("Died Suddenly"-5): That's a 12 sigma event, one in 800 years, 12 standard deviations above the man.

Media Clip ("Died Suddenly"-6): No one's even calculated that. It's apocalyptic.

Media Clip ("Died Suddenly"-7): Who knows? Young people are dying these days.

Media Clip ("Died Suddenly"-8): This is different. This isn't normal.

Media Clip ("Died Suddenly"-9): The dead can't speak for themselves, so therefore I have to speak for them.

Dr. Crockford: That was the trailer for, "Died Suddenly," the Stew Peters documentary that claims that vaccines are part of a plan to depopulate the earth and force a transition to socialism. I asked Dr. Keiffer about the history of anti-vaccination documentaries.

Kira: In the 1980s; in 1982 with the documentary, "DPT Vaccine Roulette", that came out and aired nationally a few times in the United States. It really kicks off what I would call, like the contemporary movement of vaccine hesitancy. And we can sort of debate, I don't even care to debate, whether or not this documentary is like propagandistic or, you know, just muckraking. But it worked. And what it told people was that there was a default, a faulty vaccine, the DPT vaccine, that other countries, other developed countries, were using a different version than what we were using in the United States. And that scientists had known for 40 plus years that this vaccine had problems and that it caused higher incidences of brain damage than were good, a good risk. And so this is a huge controversy, and the quote, "anti-vaxxers" were right. The story changes a lot over time, but at the end of the day, they came together and they found enough evidence to say that they were right. The vaccine should be changed. There were reasons in place of why everybody was kind of silent on it. And they kind of acted like a consumer rights movement and said, 'defective medical product we want it recalled,' basically, and it was so that's also in the news.

Dr. Crockford: "DTP Vaccine Roulette" sparked a trend which Dr. Keiffer says has continued without the same level of evidence.

Kira: There have been so many anti-vaccine documentaries over the last 30 years. And so what I would say is that documentary, "DPT Vaccine Roulette," kicked off a very effective genre for this idea, this fear, this concept, this movement that is reused and reused time and again. So yes, absolutely, "Died Suddenly" fits right into that genre. It picks up right on all of those same issues, and it's there to try and be an expose and to scare people.

Dr. Crockford: Yeah, so what do you think the ultimate aim of the "Died Suddenly" documentary is? Like, what's it trying to do?

Kira: It's trying to scare people into thinking that there's something going on that they didn't see before, but now they've seen it. So again, a wake up experience. Died suddenly? Okay. That's objectively terrifying, right? So we need to give meaning. I think as people, we need to give some meaning to things that we don't understand. Again, that is a religious impulse. That is what we religions do. They give meaning to things that we don't understand. And so we create narratives and myths to put things into a context where we can sort of live with it. And that's what "Died Suddenly" is about.

Dr. Crockford: But what's the meaning of theories that suggest people, sometimes well-known celebrities and sports people, are dead when they are still alive?

Kira: That's where online misinformation changes people's worldviews so dramatically that even seeing someone's face and them testifying that they are not dead, doesn't change your mind. That wouldn't have happened without social media. And they'll come up with all these excuses for it. You know, oh, it's a hologram. Oh, it was actually taped earlier, etc. Those aren't, you know, obviously those aren't real, but they keep telling a narrative that 'you don't know what's going on.' There's people that are pulling the strings at a very, very high level. And that's where, like, the New World Order, or other major conspiracy theories such as QAnon come into play. You wouldn't have "Died Suddenly,"...you wouldn't have people saying that one of the, you know, "Died Suddenly" folks, is still dead. You know, even 10 years ago, I don't think you could pull that off.

Dr. Crockford: Something in the information environment has changed. Information sources have diversified and fractured, and social media is now playing an important role in how people get their information. When a video goes viral, it can convince a lot of people of something that is very untrue, as in fact happened at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Media Clip ('Plandemic' Narrator): So Anthony Fauci [Fauci Voiceover: My name is Dr Tony Fauci. I'm the director...] the man who is heading the pandemic task force was involved in a cover up.

Media Clip ('Plandemic' Speaker 1): He directed the cover up, and in fact, everybody else was paid off. And paid off big time. Millions of dollars in funding from Tony Fauci; Tony Fauci's organization: National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease. These investigators that committed the fraud continue to this day to be paid big time by the NIAID.

Media Clip ('Plandemic' Narrator): And the whole world is listening to his advice for how to handle this current pandemic. How do we know that what he's saying is what we need to be learning?

Media Clip ('Plandemic' Speaker 1): What he's saying is absolute propaganda. And the same kind of propaganda that he's perpetrated to kill millions since 1984.

Dr. Crockford: That clip is from the half hour documentary, "Plandemic," that alleges that the COVID-19 pandemic is a hoax perpetrated by Anthony Fauci, then the head of the National Institutes of Health. The original "Plandemic" video was released on social media at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in April 2020. Like, "Died Suddenly," it stoked anti-vaccination sentiment and went viral online, supported by hashtag campaigns, until they were removed from the large social media platforms, at which point the makers could cry "censorship!" which then becomes part of their claims to legitimacy. "Plandemic" and "Died Suddenly" are part of a longer history of anti-vaxx documentaries, which have been released over and over again over the past few decades. Concern about what exactly medical procedures do is not a ridiculous position to take, especially for marginalized groups. Again, there are longer histories to contend with. In the Tuskegee Study, black men were purposefully infected with syphilis between 1932 and 1972 and not told about it. This is just one example of a pervasive problem of medical racism that can have a knock-on effect on trust in the healthcare system more widely. Vaccination rates are lower among certain minority groups. The Somali community in Minnesota had a measles outbreak in the 2010s following low vaccination rates. This legitimate caution is exploited by the anti-vaccination movement and alt-health influencers to make money from supplements and alternative treatments. Andrew Wakefield gave talks to the Somali community in Minneapolis around the time of the outbreak. You may remember Wakefield from his previous work linking the MMR vaccine to autism, for which he had his medical license in the UK revoked and his landmark study retracted by the Lancet Journal. When it became known that Wakefield had manipulated the study group and concealed his conflict of interests.

Media Clip (Speaker 1): Disgraced and discredited the doctor who convinced 1000s of parents to skip vital vaccinations for their children. Andrew Wakefield has already been stripped of his medical license. Now, he has been called a fraud. 13 years ago, he published research in the Lancet magazine which claimed the three-in-one measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine, MMR, was linked to autism. Now, after a long investigation, the influential British Medical Journal says the report has been discredited.

Media Clip (Speaker 2): I think what we now know is that the Lancet paper, which was always felt to be bad science, is a deliberate fraud that was perpetrated in order to try to show a link between the vaccine and autism.

Media Clip (Speaker 1): The investigation found Wakefield altered facts about patients in his study. Despite having supporters, the UK medical profession's watchdog, the General Medical Council, stripped him of his medical license last year, calling him dishonest and irresponsible. Yet speaking to an American TV show, Wakefield claimed there had been a ruthless, pragmatic attempt to crush any attempts to investigate valid vaccine safety concerns.

Dr. Crockford: Wakefield now lives in Texas and is an active anti-vaccine advocate, as well as seller of alternative treatments like supplements. With examples like the opioid crisis, it's easy for anti-vaccination advocates to sow doubt about the intentions of pharmaceutical companies. Part of that crisis was driven by a revolving door between pharmaceutical companies and their own regulatory bodies, such as the FDA. Officials that give companies like Purdue Pharma friendly decisions about their products can expect a big reward when they leave the FDA in the form of a high paying job at Purdue Pharma. This can be fixed by banning people who work for regulatory bodies from accepting jobs in the industries they regulate. Without doing something about regulatory capture, people are left feeling like their medical and scientific institutions are not working in most people's favor, but instead to enrich those within the institutions at everyone else's expense. These feelings can be fertile ground for the growth of conspiracy theories about vaccines and other medical treatments. Vaccine resistance is driven by ideas we have about our bodies, about what is normal or natural and what is artificial or corrupted. Vaccines, for a number of reasons, are seen as artificial and therefore potentially dangerous. Ideas about maintaining the purity of our bodies have religious roots, stemming from how we define these normative concepts of natural and artificial. Things that are natural are seen as good, and things that are artificial are seen as bad, but this isn't necessarily true. Naturally occurring arsenic can kill you, just the same as an artificially synthesized vaccine can save your life. Anti-vaccination isn't an automatically ridiculous position listening to legitimate concerns from communities that have been harmed by medical racism and pharmaceutical companies greed is important. Effective regulation would also help mitigate some of the fear and mistrust that people rightly have. People who work for the FDA should not be able to go and work for pharmaceutical companies immediately after. The revolving door between corporations and the regulatory bodies entrusted with devising the rules for those industries has to close. Regulatory capture undermines trust in medical and scientific institutions. It makes it seem like those organizations are in cahoots to profit at the expense of everyone else. But supplements are not regulated by the FDA at all, nor are most alternative treatments like homeopathy, because they're not medical treatments. All alternative medicine sellers need to do is add a disclaimer that they're not dispensing medical advice, and the rest is just marketing. This may be a deeply unfashionable suggestion, but regulation can help provide an acceptable quality of service for consumers and citizens. It can also protect people, especially vulnerable people desperate for relief from illness or injury from snake oil salesmen. But regulation doesn't work if the regulatory bodies aren't free from corruption by the corporation that it's their job to regulate. That's it for this episode of Miss Information. Thank you so much for listening. Next time we're going to explore the overlap of medicine and misinformation some more by taking a closer look at alternative health and wellness practices. For now, thank you so much for listening. I've been Susannah Crockford and remember misinformation matters.