The Politics Behind the Anti-Vaccine Movement

Summary

The Political Scene | The New Yorker

Episode: The Politics Behind the Anti-Vaccine Movement
Date: August 29, 2019
Host: Dorothy Wickenden
Guest: Nick Paumgarten (Staff Writer, The New Yorker)

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the resurgence of measles in the United States, focusing on the roots and spread of the anti-vaccine movement, its religious and political underpinnings, and the challenges faced by public health officials. Dorothy Wickenden interviews Nick Paumgarten, who recently covered the New York measles outbreak, to unravel how mistrust in vaccines has gained momentum and which strategies might counteract the trend.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Comeback of Measles and Rising Anti-Vaccine Sentiment

• Dorothy Wickenden opens by highlighting the troubling rise in measles cases in 2019—the most since 2006. Public health officials blame "anti-vaccination sentiment," leading to outbreaks in places like Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, and New York’s Orthodox Jewish communities.
  • [01:16] B: “The number of measles cases around the world...is rising again. In the first six months of 2019, there were more outbreaks than any other year since 2006..."

The Science and Mechanics of Herd Immunity

• Nick Paumgarten explains how herd immunity protects communities, but is weakened when anti-vaccine beliefs take hold in population pockets.
  • [03:21] D: “The anti vaccination movement has made enough inroads...to erode in certain communities...what we call herd immunity...”

Origins of the Anti-Vaccine Narrative

• Dorothy and Nick discuss Andrew Wakefield’s now-retracted 1998 study, which falsely linked MMR vaccines to autism, sparking a movement that persists despite being debunked.
  • [04:19] D: “The study...published in the Lancet, was later pulled in 1998...But he made the connection between the MMR vaccine and autism. And that study...is sort of ground zero for a lot of anti vaxx arguments.”

Spread and Amplification of Misinformation

• Wakefield continues to fuel the debate with films like “Vaxxed,” stoking conspiracy theories around vaccine cover-ups. The Internet and social media have accelerated the spread of such ideas.
  • [05:08] D: “It’s a film that advances the idea that there’s a conspiracy to cover up the connection, a conspiracy by...the government, CDC...”
  • [11:20] D: "There has been sort of a movement of, you can't tell me what to do in this country...the Internet and social media has amplified what would otherwise be fringe information..."

Detective Work: Tracing the Rockland County Outbreak

• Paumgarten describes epidemiological work in Rockland County, tracing outbreaks to international travel and large gatherings in local synagogues.
  • [05:39] D: “It’s real forensics. There are these public health officials, they’re epidemiologists whose job it is basically to track each case...”
  • [07:00] D: “Patient zero was an Israeli boy who...caught it from someone who had gone to the Ukraine for...Hasidic burning man..."

Religious and Political Exemptions

• Religious exemptions, used both within and outside religious communities, have enabled the spread by letting children avoid vaccination.
  • [07:40] D: “Religious exemptions have been very significant. It’s been used as a lever by all kinds of communities, not always religious communities...”

The Universality of Vaccine Hesitancy

• The anti-vax phenomenon is not limited to any demographic: affluent “yoga moms,” certain Christian groups, and secular communities are all susceptible.
  • [09:28] B: “We’re not just talking about ultra orthodox Jews here...we’re talking about affluent yoga moms in Beverly Hills...”
  • [09:55] D: “Everybody wants what’s best for their children...people...find information on the Internet and there’s a lot out there...It’s not just an opting out, it’s also an opting in. It’s a way of declaring yourself a member of a social group...suspicious of Big Pharma...”

Conspiratorial Thinking & Historical Medical Mistrust

• Growing distrust of authority, amplified by social media, finds fertile ground in past abuses (Tuskegee, Henrietta Lacks), feeding skepticism about vaccines.
  • [11:50] B: “This country...has a checkered history of medical experimentation...Tuskegee, Henrietta Lacks...”
  • [11:59] D: “Right. It’s not crazy to be skeptical. It’s sensible to be skeptical.”

Public Health Communication Strategies

• The main challenge is persuading the “vaccine hesitant”—those who are unsure, not deeply entrenched deniers.
  • [14:10] D: “It’s really the vaccine hesitant. It’s those who are not sure...Those are the people that need to be persuaded.”
• Dr. Howard Zucker and officials emphasize respectful, community-level dialogue, avoiding condescension, to rebuild trust and restore herd immunity.
  • [14:43] D: “Condescension doesn’t work. Persuasion works. And it helps if everybody in the chain...is in support of the idea of vaccination for the greater good of all.”

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On herd immunity:
  • [03:21] D (Nick Paumgarten): “If you have 95% of a population vaccinating, then those 5% that aren’t vaccinating are protected by the majority.”
• On the origins of anti-vax myth:
  • [04:19] D (Nick Paumgarten): “That study...is sort of ground zero for a lot of anti vaxx arguments.”
• On vaccine hesitancy and group identity:
  • [09:55] D (Nick Paumgarten): “Being anti vaxx or saying no to vaccinations, it’s not just an opting out, it’s also an opting in...A group of people that are suspicious of Big Pharma.”
• On skepticism:
  • [11:59] D (Nick Paumgarten): “It’s not crazy to be skeptical. It’s sensible to be skeptical.”

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [01:16] – Introduction and measles outbreak statistics
• [03:21] – Explanation of herd immunity; breakdown in communities
• [04:19] – Roots of vaccine skepticism, Andrew Wakefield’s influence
• [05:39] – Epidemiological work tracing the outbreak
• [07:00] – International travel & specific case origins
• [07:40] – Religious and political exemptions exploited
• [09:28] – Spread across diverse communities; affluent anti-vaxxers
• [11:20] – Role of social media and conspiracy thinking
• [11:50] – History of medical mistrust and skepticism
• [14:10] – Focus on persuading the “vaccine hesitant,” not just fringe deniers
• [14:43] – Importance of respectful communication by health officials

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Conclusion

The episode frames the anti-vaccine movement as both a public health crisis and a cultural phenomenon, exposing the fears, conspiracies, and identity politics fueling it. The real battleground, according to Nick Paumgarten and public health experts, is not with the most entrenched deniers but with the uncertain—and winning them over requires empathy, listening, and community engagement.

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Summary prepared for listeners seeking a comprehensive understanding of the episode without exposure to the full audio.

Transcript

[A]

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[B]

This is the Political Scene, a weekly conversation with New Yorker writers and guests about Politics. It's Thursday, August 29th. I'm Dorothy Wickenden, executive editor of the New Yorker. The number of measles cases around the world, which have been rapidly declining in recent years, is rising again. In the first six months of 2019, there were more outbreaks than any other year since 2006, according to the World Health Organization. Public health officials attribute the increase in the United States and the United Kingdom to anti vaccination sentiment. Some private schools in Santa Monica and Beverly Hills report that extraordinarily high numbers of students are not vaccinated. And New York State has been fighting a particularly pernicious measles outbreak centered in Orthodox Jewish communities in Rockland county and Brooklyn. The State has reported 1,046 measles cases in the past year out of a national total of 1203. In June, Dr. Howard Zucker, new York State's health commissioner, made a public service announcement urging parents to vaccinate their children.

[C]

Hi, I'm Dr. Howard Zuercher, New York State's Health Commissioner and a pediatrician. I want to talk to you about an aggressive anti vaccine movement that's causing confusion and fear. It's leading some parents to delay or even avoid vaccinating their children. Unfortunately, it's one reason we're seeing more and more reports of these diseases here in New York and across the nation. I assure you vaccines are safe and effective. I'm a father, mother. My kids are vaccinated.

[B]

Nick Paumgarten, a New Yorker staff writer, joins me to discuss the religious and political roots of the anti vaccination movement and how public health officials are fighting it. Nick, welcome to the program.

[D]

Thanks for having me on.

[B]

You recently wrote a piece for the New Yorker about the measles outbreak, focusing it on New York state. So maybe you can tell us how we got as a country from virtually eliminating the disease almost 20 years ago to this point.

[D]

Well, it seems that the anti vaccination movement has made enough inroads into the population and the popular understanding of the efficacy of vaccines to erode in certain communities, in small pockets of the culture at large, what we call herd immunity, which is, you know, a level of protection against viruses or diseases that's high enough to protect even those few who would say no to vaccines. You know, if you have 95% of a population vaccinating, then those 5% that aren't vaccinating are protected by the majority, the herd immunity.

[B]

So scientists have repeatedly and emphatically dismissed the purported link between autism and vaccines. But that's where a lot of this originated. And maybe we can go back and you can tell us what was the original source of that idea.

[D]

I'm not exactly sure what the original source was. I know that the source that everyone has referred to over the years and the study that caused the most problems was a study by Andrew Wakefield, a doctor in Great Britain. He did a study that was published in the Lancet, was later pulled in 1998. Yeah, but that study, it was only, I think, eight or nine or a dozen subjects. It was really small pool. But he made the connection between the MMR vaccine and autism. And that study, you know, is sort of ground zero for a lot of anti vaxx arguments.

[B]

So he was discredited as a scientist after that, but he's kept at it right up until, you know, a couple of years ago when he released this documentary, Vaxxed.

[D]

Vaxxed, yeah.

[B]

Tell us about that a little bit.

[D]

Well, it's a film that advances the idea that there's a conspiracy to cover.

[B]

Up the connection, a conspiracy by, you.

[D]

Know, the government, cdc, the federal government.

[B]

And presumably this has been widely distributed among those who already have this fear.

[D]

And, you know, there's a whole literature of it. There are videos or other people. It's very widespread.

[B]

One of the things that really interested me in your piece is how the public health organizations in New York traced the source of the outbreak in Rockland County. It was real detective work.

[D]

Yeah. It's real forensics. There are these public health officials, they're epidemiologists whose job it is basically to track each case, both where it came from and where it might have gone. It's really about locating people in space and understanding the way the viruses work. In this case, they went to the town of New Square, which is in Rockland County, New York, and they went to a synagogue where 7,000 people had been worshiping during a holiday. And. And they were able to figure out where this boy who had the case that brought it to New Square, where he had walked, you know, who he'd walked past, and then follow each of those people. It's pretty interesting.

[B]

And why has the Orthodox community in New York State, particularly in Rockland county, been so hard hit by this outbreak?

[D]

Well, the Orthodox community does have its pockets of anti vax sentiment, but they're not alone in that. One of the reasons that the Orthodox community has been vulnerable this time around in New York is that there are outbreaks. There are a lot of measles in Ukraine and there are a lot of measles in Israel. And because of the travel of people on holidays to and from those places, that's made this particular community, the Orthodox community, vulnerable.

[B]

And the boy in the synagogue had come from Israel.

[D]

Right. Patient zero was an Israeli boy who, the theory is, anyway, he caught it from someone who had gone to the Ukraine for what's called acidic burning man, a sort of wild weekend in Oman, in Ukraine. And so, you know, as someone explained to me, this town of New Square, which is, you know, I think 8,500 people, and it's just one square mile, functions like an international city because of the travel and people coming and going. I mean, it's almost like a mini.

[B]

New York and yet very insular.

[D]

Yes.

[B]

So what role have religious exemptions played in the spread of diseases like the measles?

[D]

Religious exemptions have been very significant. It's been used as a lever by all kinds of communities, not always religious communities, to avoid the vaccine regimen that the, you know, that the public health officials would like us all to follow. In the orthodox community, it was used to exempt kids going to school, but it's also been used by non religious people. There's an example of my story from 13 years ago, a great New York Times story by Donald McNeil. He joined a church in New Jersey that had been set up by chiropractors to avoid vaccinations.

[E]

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[D]

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[E]

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[B]

So one of the things that's extraordinary about this crisis is that we're not just talking about ultra orthodox Jews here, not even just Christian Scientists, evangelical Christians. We're talking about affluent yoga moms in Beverly Hills. So the Hollywood Reporter, I think you cite this piece, found rates of vaccination in some private schools in Santa Monica and Beverly Hills that are roughly the same as in Chad and South.

[D]

Well, I think everybody wants what's best for their children and people have different ways of arriving at that state of wanting what's best for your children. People on the right, on the left, they find information on the Internet and there's a lot out there. And there are examples of people being harmed by vaccines. There's a lot of anecdotal connections between vaccines and all kinds of problems. So they're vulnerable to that fire hose of information. Also, I talk about this in the piece a little bit. The idea that being anti vaxx or saying no to vaccinations, it's not just an opting out, it's also an opting in It's a way of declaring yourself a member of a social group. And in this case, it's a group of people that are suspicious of Big Pharma. I mean, there's a rationale in abstract to all that, but, you know, it's not good for the child or for the community of children.

[B]

Well, and public health officials told you that the virus they're fighting is more about vaccine hesitancy and refusal than about measles itself. And it feels very much a part of the broader conspiratorial thinking that has infected the country in all kinds of ways. As you just mentioned, suspicion of authority, rejection of certain kinds of expertise, and even, you know, the defense of individual liberty versus the common good.

[D]

Right. I mean, there has been sort of a movement of, you can't tell me what to do in this country for a while. And it's, it's obvious. But the Internet and social media has amplified what would otherwise be fringe information or misinformation. I mean, there has always been information, I think in, you know, probably in Renaissance Florence, there was misinformation. It was used as a tool by powerful people to undo each other. We now have Russian involvement in elections, Brexit, so on and so forth.

[B]

And we also, by the way, have this country, as you mentioned, has a checkered history of medical experimentation going back to Tuskegee, Henrietta Lacks, et cetera.

[D]

Right. It's not crazy to be skeptical. It's sensible to be skeptical.

[B]

So we just got, just before I came into the studio, we just got the first letter criticizing your piece. And the writer says that in a 9,000 word story, Pamela couldn't find the space to interview even one person who has suffered injuries due to vaccines. So what do you say to that?

[D]

Well, the piece was 8,000 words. You know, I was explicit in the piece and I went into this intent on not relitigating the vaccination question. I am not a scientist, you know, I can only convey what public health officials, what scientists, what doctors tell me overwhelmingly. In the same way, if I were writing about climate science, I would accept the findings of the scientists. So in this case, I accept the findings of the scientists. I believe vaccines work.

[B]

So how does Zucker go about changing minds that seem so stubbornly fixed? There was only one fatality in the end among the 296 reported cases, and the pace of infection slowed over the summer. And, and yet he and others in the field describe this phenomenon as part of an all out war on science.

[D]

Right.

[B]

And yet he somehow succeeded in getting a handle on this thing?

[D]

Well, a lot of it's just a ground war. It's sort of going house to house and getting people vaccinated at a high enough rate to restore the herd immunity. It turns out that we are, well, vaccinated on a grander scale as a society. You know, New York state I think is 98, has a 98% vaccination rate. So while there will be these outbreaks in pockets where the numbers have dipped, we are on the whole, you know, well prepared for this kind of thing at the moment. The trend isn't always your friend.

[B]

He seems to have a way of getting in and talking to people in a way that doesn't make them immediately get their defenses up and listen and reflect on what he's saying. It's a real conversation. So are there lessons here for the broader political climate?

[D]

The public health officials and a lot of doctors and hospital officials have recognized that the issue isn't so much the fringe that believes very strongly in anti vaccination ideas. It's really, it's the vaccine hesitant. It's those who are not sure, who've heard this, who've heard that and who want nothing more than the best for their kids, but who just aren't sure to the extent where when they go to the doctors, they say, not this time, let's do it next time time. Or I'm going to do some more research on Google. I'm going to ask some more of my friends. Those are the people that need to be persuaded.

[B]

Like the undecided voter.

[D]

Yeah, they are the undecided voter, but the means to do so, that's what they're working on. They're realizing that condescension doesn't work. Persuasion works. And it helps if everybody in the change, whether receptionists, nurses, doctors, the doormen in the hospital, everybody is in support of the idea of vaccination for the the greater good of all. That's the idea.

[B]

Thank you so much, Nick.

[D]

Thank you for having me on.

[B]

Nick Paumgarten is a staff writer at the New Yorker. This has been the political scene. You can subscribe to this and other New Yorker podcasts by searching for the New Yorker in your podcast app. And find more political analysis and commentary on newyorker.com feel free to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. Our theme music is by Russell Gillespie. This program was produced by Alex Barron for newyorker.com with assistance from Kylie Warner. I'm Dorothy Wickenden.

[F]

Right now we are living through some of the most tumultuous political times our country has ever known. I'm David Remnick, and each week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll try to make sense of what's happening alongside politicians and thinkers like Cory Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Tim Waltz, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Newt Gingrich, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Charlemagne, tha God, and so many more. That's all in the New Yorker Radio Hour, wherever you listen to podcasts.

[D]

From prx.