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Even with today’s endless cavalcade of corruption and bad policy, it’s impossible to get angry about everything. You’ll lose your mind.
It’s fine—and justified—to be angry. But I encourage people to focus on one or two things [ [link removed] ], because that’s the most impactful way to channel your energy.
For me, one of those issues: vaccines. The anti-vaccination movement is a moral and scientific outrage; people, children especially, are needlessly suffering and dying. That’s tragically on display in West Texas [ [link removed] ].
Sanity is losing right now. The science and pro-vaccine communities—that is to say, the people who are correct—are not doing a good job presenting their case. The anti-vaccine people are gaining ground because they’re running a campaign on fear.
It’s time to aggressively fight back.
The miracle of vaccines
This should go without saying but I’ll say it anyway: vaccines are miracles. They’re an absolute scientific wonder; the eradication of smallpox is arguably the most extraordinary accomplishment [ [link removed] ] in the history of human civilization.
Polio, measles, and rubella had all been eliminated in the U.S. The death rate from infectious diseases has been in decline for decades [ [link removed] ], even with a recent COVID spike.
We slayed one of the Four Horsemen [ [link removed] ] of the Apocalypse. And now, for no good reason, Bobby Kennedy, Jr. and the Trump Administration are bringing that Horseman back to life.
The dangerously effective anti-vaccine movement
I mean this sincerely: Bobby Kennedy, Jr. is one of the worst people in America. But he’s not dumb, at least in the sense that he knows how to get his (wrong and dangerous) message out there. Skepticism around vaccines is as high as it’s been [ [link removed] ] on record.
Why? Some of this is a function of people with platforms spreading misinformation: Bobby Kennedy, Jr., Tucker Carlson [ [link removed] ], Ron Johnson [ [link removed] ], Marianne Williamson [ [link removed] ], and others. And some of this is a function of silos on social media: people who consume diverse media are much likelier to get vaccinated [ [link removed] ].
But a lot of this comes down to the power of fear.
Fear is a powerful—and lopsided—motivator
On July 29, 1944, my great-grandfather Leon wrote my grandmother Kit a letter. She was 12 years old and away at summer camp.
Leon was a collegiate swimmer and he’d stuck with the hobby for decades. But when he wrote the letter, he hadn’t gone swimming in over a month. Why? An outbreak of “Infantile,” shorthand for infantile paralysis [ [link removed] ]—a disease we know today as polio.
“We are glad that you didn’t go to North Carolina,” my great-grandfather wrote in that letter, “because there are one thousand cases of Infantile in that state.”
A family friend, who grew up in St. Louis and recently turned 100, mentioned a few years ago that several of her elementary-school classmates spent time in iron lungs [ [link removed] ]. Children and parents lived in fear of the iron lung for decades; they don’t anymore.
What do parents fear today? Well, too many fear things that are patently untrue: that vaccines cause autism (false [ [link removed] ]) or that they alter your DNA (false [ [link removed] ]) or that they infect you with diseases (false [ [link removed] ]) or that they contain microchips to track or control you (false [ [link removed] ]).
But these are all real narratives, that real people—people trying to make the best, if misinformed, decisions for their children—believe. Their information is wrong but their fear is genuine.
The average age of a mom giving birth in the U.S. today is about 30 years old [ [link removed] ]. That means that she was born in 1995, decades after the eradication [ [link removed] ] of yellow fever, smallpox, and polio in the U.S.
She’s never experienced the fear that my grandmother and great-grandfather felt. As I’ve talked about before, when it comes to vaccines, we’re victims of our own success [ [link removed] ]. But we need to make people fear these diseases, because they’re worth fearing [ [link removed] ].
Gaines County, Texas—the epicenter of the recent measles outbreak [ [link removed] ]—has one of the lowest measles vaccination rates [ [link removed] ] in the country. But even in Gaines County—where there’s demonstrable skepticism around vaccines—there’s been a spike in the number of children getting vaccinated [ [link removed] ].
Why? Fear is a powerful motivator, especially when the devil is on your doorstep.
Scientists: great at saving lives, bad at marketing
People should fear measles, fear polio, fear rubella, and fear other diseases. But scientists aren’t conveying that message particularly well. Take a look at the CDC’s websites for measles [ [link removed] ] and polio [ [link removed] ].
Factual? Yes. But these websites are also boring, and I sincerely doubt they’re changing anyone’s mind. On top of that, only 59% of Americans [ [link removed] ] say that they trust the CDC, so they’re starting from behind.
COVID-19 was a vicious disease. But it wasn’t visually gruesome in the way that polio and measles are.
The pro-science people are often too in the weeds and too lost in the data. We need to deploy some of the same tactics of fear that have been so successful for the anti-vaccination crusaders.
This is what smallpox, polio, and measles look like. They were painful and unspeakably horrible diseases that, in many cases, hit children hardest. When you talk about this stuff—on social media, with vaccine skeptical friends and family—you need to remind people how terrible these afflictions were. We can start to do that by sharing pictures and stories more broadly than anything I’m seeing.
But it goes beyond that. Remember the panic at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic?
That baseline level of panic, fear, and paranoia was a way of life—except these diseases are much likelier to kill children, and they were around much more consistently.
Here’s a quote from David Oshinsky [ [link removed] ], a historian who wrote Polio: An American Story [ [link removed] ] and lived through polio epidemics himself. (Emphasis added.)
The public was horribly and understandably frightened by polio. There was no prevention and no cure. Everyone was at risk, especially children. There was nothing a parent could do to protect the family. I grew up in this era. Each summer, polio would come like The Plague. Beaches and pools would close — because of the fear that the poliovirus was waterborne. Children had to stay away from crowds, so they often were banned from movie theaters, bowling alleys, and the like. My mother gave us all a ‘polio test’ each day: Could we touch our toes and put our chins to our chest? Every stomach ache or stiffness caused a panic. Was it polio? I remember the awful photos of children on crutches, in wheelchairs and iron lungs. And coming back to school in September to see the empty desks where the children hadn't returned.
We do not need to live with this level of fear—the success of vaccines is that we don’t have to live that way. But we do need to remind people that all of this is just around the corner.
More assertively sharing these photos and stories is one way to do that.
All of this is pretty heavy, so I’ll close this section with Police Chief Wiggum’s guidance to scientists:
Winning influence through (the right levels of) fear
I am supportive of vaccine mandates, especially for preventable childhood diseases like measles, but that’s not even what I’m talking about here, exactly. Americans are aggressively individualistic [ [link removed] ], and it’s probably true that telling people that they have to get vaccinated makes people less likely to want to get vaccinated.
What I’m really pushing for: we have to change the narrative such that people want to get their children vaccinated.
I am, in general, against the politics of fear. But this is something we need to be fearful of. Not every day, but just enough to remember that our fragile truce with disease is always perilously close to crumbling—especially with the anti-vaccination movement gaining steam.
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