Measles was declared eliminated in the US in 2000. Fast forward to 2019 and the nation experienced the largest number of cases since 1992. Globally, there were 207,000 measles deaths that year, a 50% increase since 2016.
The anti-vax boom time was still to come. Andrew Wakefield, Del Bigtree, and RFK Jr. massively increased their exposure and salaries during Covid via pseudoscientific fear-mongering and promiscuous political alliances.
Scott Kennedy’s new documentary, Shot in the Arm, details the deadly impact of these anti-vax kingpins, as well as the tireless counter-efforts of scientists, medical workers, and science educators like Peter Hotez, Paul Offit, Karen Enrst, and Blimi Marcus. Scott joins Derek and Julian to discuss the past and future of the anti-vax movement.
Show Notes
Shot in the Arm
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Derek, did you know that the year before the COVID pandemic, America had the most measles cases in 30 years?
Yeah, I did.
Thanks, anti-vaxxers.
Exactly.
And sadly, they were just getting their disinformation engine warmed up.
So today we've got countermeasures.
Hey everyone, welcome to Conspiratuality where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy
theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Julian Walker.
And I'm Scott Hamilton-Kennedy.
Scott, for us at Conspiratuality, we are on Instagram at ConspiratualityPod, and you can access all of our episodes ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on Patreon at patreon.com slash conspirituality.
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As independent media creators, we appreciate your support.
It wasn't just here, though.
That year, the world saw over 207,000 measles cases, which was a 50% increase since 2016.
Who to thank?
in the year 2000.
2019 saw the largest number of cases since 1992.
It wasn't just here though.
That year the world saw over 207,000 measles cases, which was a 50% increase since 2016.
Who to thank?
Antibaxers.
Yeah, and that was close to home for both of us, Julian.
Actually, all three of us.
I'm no longer an Angeleno, but the two of you are.
And there was an outbreak in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles that you guys might remember.
I remember talking to friends of mine who had children in the Santa Monica school system at that time, and they were really scared because they were watching vaccination rates drop, and they didn't want to send their children to school because of it.
The misinformation was already penetrating such that my friends who were not anti-vaxxers who had kids were already saying, yeah, I think vaccines are good, but you know, the schedule is a little too crowded and there's too many vaccines now and we're, I'm not sure that's entirely safe.
So the real boom time for anti-vaxxers and their penetration into broader communities was still to come.
Pseudo-science superstars like Andrew Wakefield, Del Bigtree, and RFK Jr.
would massively increase their exposure and salaries during the 2020 COVID pandemic via vaccine fearmongering and promiscuous political alliances with whomever would give them a platform across the right-left spectrum.
Scott Kennedy's new documentary film, Shot in the Arm, shows the deadly impact of these anti-vax kingpins, as well as the tireless counter-efforts of scientists, medical workers, and science educators like Peter Hotez, Paul Offit, Karen Ernst, and Blimey Marcus.
We've got Scott with us today to talk about the film.
It's an honor to be here.
Thanks for having me.
The film is great.
It's really wonderful to get to talk to you about it.
One thing I noticed right from the start is how you weave together really personal, relatable stories with coverage of the big three anti-vax offenders, in this case, Wakefield, Big Tree, and Kennedy Jr., with education on the history and the science of vaccines, but even more importantly, the human impact.
And early on in the film, the vaccine scientist and pediatrician Paul Offit makes this simple statement.
He says, science is not political.
And he backs that up by what I think is a really succinct description of our predicament.
I'll quote him here.
By the early 1980s, there were no longer 8,000 children a year dying from pertussis,
50,000 paralyzed by polio, 48,000 getting hospitalized, and 500 dying from measles.
Vaccines may be our greatest medical advance, yet they are a victim of their own success.
When they work, nothing happens, so it's not that compelling.
Science is not political.
Now, Scott, you actually started this film during the 2019 measles outbreak, which, as it turned out, did not bode well for the COVID era.
Like all of us, I imagine you didn't realize just what you were getting into, but you were already set up to document what happened next.
What drew you to make this film?
I have to go backwards to my previous film just prior to Shot in the Arm called Food Evolution, which was a reset of the conversation on GMOs.
And as you guys know, there's a lot of overlap between Anti-GMO and anti-vax, especially in terms of the industry side of it, right?
Don't trust that group.
Trust us.
Don't use their products.
But look what we magically have here.
We have our own products to sell you, which is really a shame.
So in the late 2018, about October 2018, I was talking to one of the doctors that was featured in Food Evolution, Dr. John Schwartzberg from a wonderful organization called the Berkeley Wellness Letter.
Like you all, it is a group of people that come from, we call it a tribe, let's call it, I grew up in Berkeley, California.
The Berkeley tribe could be, sometimes buys into some of the worst of this misinformation, disinformation.
The Berkeley Wellness Letter does none of that.
They are a group of doctors that try to vet information and then bring it to the people like myself and parents to easily make sense of it.
So that's why he was in food evolution and he said to me, Scott, what are you going to do next?
You've got to take on these anti-vaxxers.
I said, in my wisdom, I said, oh no, they're going to burn out.
I don't need to touch them.
Cut to four months later, five months later, spring 2019, again, a year before COVID, And we were having these record-breaking measles outbreaks, a state of emergency in New York City in the Orthodox Jewish community, a state of emergency in Washington State, outbreaks all across Europe.
And I thought, well, this is insane.
Why is this happening?
And the first person, expert I spoke to was Dr. Offit, Dr. Paul Offit out of Children's Hospital Philadelphia.
And he did two things.
First, he vetted me, which I respect.
He went and watched True Devolution to see if I was an honest broker.
And he really liked it and saw that I was.
And then he said, Scott, it's pretty simple.
There are people out there that are scaring parents into not getting vaccinated.
And it's lowering vaccine rates.
And a version of what Karen Ernst says in the film, it's never a matter of if, it's a matter of when we're going to have these outbreaks.
So I thought this was all worthy of a complicated story about public health and trust and communication, disinformation, misinformation and disinformation.
And so I started filming and I filmed with the antis as well, as you pointed out.
Robby Kennedy Jr., Del Bigtree, Andrew Wakefield, and thought we had a pretty fascinating and complicated story all the way through shooting quite a bit through 2019.
And then we know where this is going.
COVID happened.
For a minute, as Blima Marcus, nurse Blima Marcus says in the film, there were some of us that thought, oh, maybe a once-in-a-century pandemic might be the turning point that we can get past some of this anti-science rhetoric and dangers.
And maybe they would go away, but we were Completely wrong.
And they doubled and tripled down and got more powerful.
You were deep in this movement.
You had filmed probably dozens, if not hundreds of hours.
Then COVID happens.
How, in your estimation, did that catalyze the anti-vax movement?
I wonder if it did it immediately, guys, or did they have some moments to kind of huddle together and say, what are we going to do?
And I imagine they did.
And hopefully we'll talk about the Samoa story, because I think there's an interesting overlap there as well, in terms of the first response to this horror.
Obviously I wasn't there.
None of us were there with the phone calls and texts and everything that happened between some of the top people in the anti-vax movement.
It was sadly a bit of a perfect horrible storm as well in terms of who we had as president
at the time, who wasn't just a spreader of misinformation.
It was just confusion.
Like just what he said about bleach and all these things.
There's no consistency there, which is one of the most beautiful things about science
is it's consistent.
And just for your listeners, that doesn't mean it's perfect.
That doesn't mean it doesn't change, but it's consistent in using the system of the
best information we have at the time.
And there's also mistakes within that.
The confusion that came with Trump as president fed into what the anti-vaxxers do so well, is they foment confusion.
They foment fear and they benefit from it so much that they pivoted pretty quickly to saying, oh no, we're going to go all in on this.
And then the whack-a-mole and contradictions and hypocrisies, you know, COVID doesn't exist, but you can fix it with vitamin C. It's like, wait, choose a lane, guys.
Which are we doing?
The origin story of this podcast is actually Plandemic.
Right.
That was why we started this podcast.
So I would actually say if they weren't intentionally trying to use it, it was pretty clear very early on that they were going to capitalize on the momentum of anti-vax movement because of that film.
Yes.
I did not include Plandemic in the film.
In our sketches and our rough cuts, I thought for sure it would have to be in there.
But thank you all for Taking that one out at the knees.
It's just a terrible, terrible piece of line.
Terrible filmmaking.
Let's not even get into that.
Sorry.
It's just boring.
It's just just virtue signaling, lying.
It's just terrible.
Yeah.
And, you know, it strikes me that if you've already got this anti-vax movement that's so focused on kids and on vaccines that kids are required to take in order to go to school.
When COVID happens, it's a perfect storm because now it's everyone, right?
Now it's adults.
Now it's that we're all going to be hoping for the development of these vaccines that will solve the pandemic so that we can get back to work.
And not only was it a perfect storm for all of those anti-vaxxers, but they had a ready-to-go marketing machine.
And they knew how to use digital tools to spread the word.
So yeah, part of how you illustrate this overlap between the earlier kind of the measles epidemic and what anti-vaxxers were doing before and then what happens in COVID, is by sharing the story, I thought this was really smart
and really powerful, of Blima Marcus.
And she's an ultra-Orthodox Jew who starts off as a young mother
who is swayed by anti-vaccine fear-mongering.
But then as she learns more, she ends up starting an educational support group for moms.
And then eventually she goes and gets her nursing degree.
And what do you know, by about halfway through your film, she's working on the front lines as COVID explodes in New York City.
Yeah, and I want to chime in because I lived close to that neighborhood in Brooklyn for a number of years.
My wife actually lived on the block where it started in Williamsburg.
And non-New Yorkers probably don't understand how tightly packed communities are in New York City.
And they don't even have to communicate necessarily with anyone else.
I mean, Chinatown is filled with immigrants who never speak a word of English for their entire lives.
They have their own economy, their own systems there, and they live there for generations.
Hasidic Jews own fleets of yellow school buses that bring people from that neighborhood to like B&H, which is the best camera store I've ever been to.
I spent so many thousands of dollars there, right?
I'm just trying to paint a picture of communities within larger cities that are extremely tribal, not even in a bad way.
It's just their communities, and they really are able to keep their own lives separate from the broader ecosystem in a lot of ways.
And Blim is a nurse.
She's very involved.
So how did you meet her in the first place?
Yeah, I just want to underline that what you guys are pointing out, Blima is, I was so grateful to find Blima and it was through just an article in the New Yorker.
It is also to keep underlining that as frustrated as we are with the antis, at no point are we ever going to say that they're bad at what they do.
They are very, very good at marketing.
They are very, very ruthless.
So with a closed community like the Orthodox community, They targeted that on purpose because it's like, well, if we can get inside that individual tent, right, we can cause so much harm with that tent and then it can come outside of it.
It's going to be much harder to communicate that much disinformation to the entire United States.
Let's get focused.
And they've done it.
They've done it with the Somali community in Minnesota.
So yes, I found BLEMA through an article in The New Yorker.
And I reached out to her very, actually probably more intensely than even Dr. Offit.
She vetted me and I respected it.
No problem with somebody vetting me, right?
That's like the two words that we use a lot in talking about this film, and it overlaps with your beautiful work too, is skeptical versus cynical.
Skeptical is such a great word, so important to our survival, so important to science, so important to just being a curious person, and cynical, but is a poison.
And sadly, I don't know if you guys have experienced this much, especially in our, dare I say, our tribe of liberal Democrats, cynicism has become almost cool.
It's awful, right?
It's become cool, like, well, I know it's all fucked, but at least I know it.
As they're on their phone and they're eating food that's been, you know, all these steps of science that they're taking advantage of.
And they're saying, oh, but it's all awful.
It's like, wait a minute.
We have a slightly higher intellectual conversation here than that.
So yes, that's how I met Blima, and she's a wonderful, wonderful part of the story.
And anytime you see somebody change their mind is an incredible thing as a storyteller.
But also, it was very important for us to Distinguished between the empathy for a mother like Blima, who was skeptical of the vaccines, was swayed by a book and some other communication, and went down this road and distinguished between the people who created that book.
With purpose to sway her, right?
So nothing but empathy that we want to have for a parent who's scared of could vaccines have caused their child's autism.
Fine, be skeptical, but when you're presented with the best information to tell you that that's not true, try your best to not continue down that road and go from skeptical to cynical.
Do you think her pre-pandemic work was making an impact in that community?
Great question.
A mix.
It's a mix.
Yes, it was.
And she was definitely pushing the boulder up the hill and sometimes it rolled back down on her.
And she had terrible threats within her community of saying that she was a traitor and things like that.
And I would need her to come on to talk about in more detail the Orthodox Jewish community.
But as she says in the film, education and knowledge is such an important part of the Orthodox Jewish community's core tenets.
That it's a strange mix of respecting science, respecting the written word, and then also being swayed by take going from skepticism of something to cynicism if somebody communicates it well, right?
So again, it was, there were people that penetrated that fragile community and took advantage of the closed nature of some of their communications.
So speaking of that very effective communication that's targeted towards vulnerable communities, let's turn to your coverage of RFK Jr.
in the film.
How did you get him to agree to appear?
I thought we were going to have to get more clever or just survival mode.
So to begin with, out of budget and necessity, there were shoots with Robert Kennedy Jr.
at a church in Harlem where they were trying to take advantage, sadly, of the rightful Frustration with the medical health community in the horror that was the Tuskegee experiments.
But then they come to a black community like Harlem and say, see Tuskegee was awful.
Don't get vaccinated.
It's just terrible.
And so I couldn't be at that one because of budget.
So I had a crew there and I communicated with them.
They could get the best thing.
Then we had a rally in Washington, D.C.
near the end of of 2019, and I couldn't be there as well.
But I had a 21-year-old production assistant sound man, and he had me in his ear on his headphones, holding a mic and interviewing Robert Kennedy Jr., the second person with camera.
He didn't have to do all three, which I've done that too.
And he held it down.
I'm in his ear.
A piece that didn't end up in the film, but I want to find it too, is his last question was, I'm whispering to him.
I said, ask him if he thinks the people that make vaccines vaccinate their own kids.
And he asked them that.
And Robert Kennedy Jr.
goes, how the hell would I know?
Which is like, he said that like five times in the movie.
It's like, that's not an answer.
That's not an answer.
And then he like walks away.
We started our filming with just showing up where he was.
And I thought we're going to have to continue it that way.
And then a fellow producers in their wisdom said, Scott, why don't we just ask?
And we contacted his office and asked if he would do an interview with interview with us.
And he said yes.
He was a fan of my second film, The Garden, which fell more into his tribe of it was a story about the largest community garden in the world in South Central Los Angeles and this complicated struggle for its survival.
So it overlapped more with his idea of That was impressive.
and things like that, which are wonderful, but he manipulates to sort of feed his tribe.
So I think that's one of the reasons he said yes. And he stuck with the hour. I'll give him that.
That was impressive. In the film, you show how he, along with the other anti-vaccine kingpins,
turned COVID misinformation into a big money payday for themselves.
But it's the way he responded to your questions about his impact on the small island of Samoa that was really telling.
And again, this goes back to pre-COVID times.
Did his reaction surprise you?
Somewhat, because he's such a bully.
But I did save it for last.
I did not.
I knew that that was going to be the most tense part of the conversation.
I definitely saved it for the end of the interview.
And he did not see it coming.
I don't think he's ever been interviewed about Samoa.
So I worked very hard with my team to get every detail of that, you know, the best evidence and the right questions to ask him on that.
And you can literally see him.
Scorming in his seat.
And if you go back and watch his face, where he, I won't go as far as to say it's a lie, because, you know, people are litigious.
You can see in his face that he may have crossed a line in terms of, whoops, should I have said that?
As he said, we'll just do one of them.
He says, I never communicated with the Prime Minister of Samoa with anything to do with vaccines.
And you cut to a letter that he sent the Prime Minister of Somalia talking about vaccines.
Okay.
Do you guys know Jonathan Haidt's work?
Yeah.
He's such a wonderful writer and communicator.
He introduced me to this term, which I imagine you guys might know too.
And I just live by it.
It's so simple and clean.
A slur is not an argument.
And we're living through a time where people slur and slur and slur, and then worse, we accept it as if it is an argument.
Oh, look, he owned that, you know, slamming the libs or whatever.
Own the libs or whatever term we want to use.
So, and we just have to distinguish between that.
That's not an argument.
So, and he does that so many times in the film, where it's all slur and no argument.
At the same time, I could very easily hear him saying, well, you're just trying to smear me and make me seem crazy by using the slur of anti-vaxxer.
He does that every day, actually.
I'm trying to get a social media campaign for the press to say, okay, RFK, can you say any vaccine in the history that was a benefit to mankind?
Yeah.
And he said, I don't, I can't remember if he says, I don't know if I have an answer for that question or that's a really difficult question to answer.
You couldn't even say polio.
He couldn't even say chickenpox.
So the question is, when he keeps doing that in the press, please, journalists out there, follow up with that same question.
If you are not anti-vax, tell us the vaccine where you are pro.
And if you don't have any vaccines where you are pro, I don't know what else to call you.
And if you're going to lean back on the, I'm not really an expert defense, well then stop spouting a bunch of stuff as if you are an expert when it is convenient for you, right?
That's again, that goes to the brilliance of their ruthless communication, right?
It's awful.
They will dance around and say, spread opinions and spread opinions.
Oh, don't listen to me.
Listen to experts.
But it's like, well, you cherry pick the experts.
You move the goalposts, right?
It's whack-a-mole all the time that it's whack-a-mole.
I wish we could, probably somebody that's probably has done this, where you have a visual of the whack-a-mole that they played, right?
They started with vaccines and autism connection.
No.
Mercury, autism connection.
No.
Jump to COVID.
Is it real or can you cure it with vitamin C?
Is it all Big Pharma is bad, but they didn't give us ivermectin, which was created by Big Pharma.
Which argument are you going to stick to, guys?
Because we'll beat you.
Just give us the rules on what you're going to stick to.
But they don't.
They don't want to stick to an argument.
Our friends over at Decoding the Guru just did an episode where they were breaking down an episode of Red Scare podcast, and they had an author on named Tao Lin, and there was so much questionable.
The whole...
Conversation was around autism, first of all, and there was just so much pseudoscience junk involved.
But it sounded like they were just repeating RFK talking points.
They actually all expressed how much they liked him and they were repeating it, but they were a step removed because they're not as charismatic.
So then it becomes even more confusing and you're listening and all you can kind of glean from this one moment when Tao Lin is talking and he's saying things like, You know, when we look back, it was probably public health things like handwashing and better water systems that made it so that it wasn't the vaccines that actually cured polio, which is exactly the type of thing that RFK has said before, but it's being filtered through.
And that is really problematic because these people have a pretty big reach.
The broken telephone game that you're playing gets exponentially worse when you're relying on like Recycling bad Joe Rogan takes that you're only half remembering as if they're sort of aligned to some sort of skeptical analysis.
Also, in the communication, let alone the broken telephone, you know, getting it worse, is what is your end game?
Again, they're just slurring.
It's not an argument.
So they're slurring and saying, don't listen to them, the vaccines weren't that successful in stopping X disease.
It was hand-washing.
What's your point?
Why can't it be yes and?
What is your point?
And they're just trying to shit in the pool.
Excuse me, I might curse sometimes.
You can.
Fuck yeah, we're good.
Alright, let's hear it for the internet.
So yeah, it really comes to what you guys do talk about all the time.
How do we talk to an anti-vaxxer?
And you have to Slow down.
You have to really slow down.
Connection, obviously, is so important.
I'm an amateur science communicator.
I'm trying to get better.
I'm grateful for some of my mentors from Neil deGrasse Tyson, our executive producer, to Dr. Paul Offit, Lima, so many people.
But connection is so important.
Where do we agree?
I mean, get back to where we agree.
I mean, the social contract is a huge part Of the film, and I wasn't a part of the film in 2019, and COVID really pointed to it.
It's like, where is our social contract where we agree on decency, right?
Taking out the trash, not driving drunk, like these things that are not political, they're just decent things that we do to have a functioning society.
And people are, I've come to use the term, they're not just corrupt, they're corrosive.
They're corrosive to these institutions that we built.
Yeah, your social contract argument is fantastic towards the end of the film.
I want to ask you about that later.
And right now, you're also making a really, I think, important and beautiful distinction between people who've been taken in by the anti-vax arguments versus the anti-vaxxers themselves.
And I wanted to play back two quotes to you.
From the movie that I think starts to get into what I characterize as the grift of the anti-vax movement.
So here's Peter Hotez.
He says, what we now have to realize is that what was an anti-vax movement has now morphed into an anti-science and disinformation globalized empire.
And then Blima Marcus adds in here, the misinformation and mistrust goes beyond just vaccines and it extends to many kinds of health behaviors.
It creates this very aggressive, interwoven and interconnected community of alternative health beliefs.
I couldn't have said it better.
So my question for you is, anti-vaxxers often just present themselves as being activists, concerned with protecting kids or standing up for medical freedom.
And of course, we should assume that many of their beliefs and motivations may be sincere.
But this is also really big business for them, right?
Absolutely.
It's enormous.
It's an enormous business.
And again, it's almost like they're magicians.
Their sleight of hand is brilliant.
That they will use the greed, right?
The conflict of interest and greed angle in Big Pharma.
Yeah.
Important question to ask.
Are we saying we're going to remove profit?
That's a longer conversation.
We can talk about that.
I haven't seen it be successful, but we also can talk about it.
If it's too far, it's too far.
But then they don't say why we should check them on the exact same things, right?
If they're making a profit, and worse than making a profit, they are marketing fear to sell you that product.
So can they show us the evidence that we should be scared?
No, they can't.
Again, back to slurs, not an argument.
But yes, to underline that it's a huge industry and now it gets into and again, this is going to what I would see as foundational to your wonderful mission is The concentric circles, where it starts to overlap with things that some of us don't want to see the overlap, right?
So we talked about yoga before we started the conversation.
I love yoga.
Great.
Sadly, some people that teach yoga can espouse disinformation.
Healthy food, food grown local.
Wonderful.
That doesn't mean that organic food is the answer to all of our ills, right?
So it's just saying, can we look at the whole picture here with the best information we have and not cherry pick and cheat to sell a product and sell a personal belief?
Absolutely, and the alternative to using fear to then sell fake cures and supplements that don't have any science behind them would actually be to become an activist for greater regulation, for socialized medicine, for the government playing more of an active role in using our tax dollars for making sure that everyone has access to good medicine and that pharmaceutical companies actually are held more to account.
Hear, hear.
You know, I mean, I think I think we have fantastic government agencies as it is, but none of these people are talking about improving government agencies.
They're just playing into paranoid conspiracy, right?
I'm so glad you underlined that.
I would gently disagree with you on the pharmaceutical companies not being held to task.
They are probably the most supervised businesses in the world.
That doesn't mean mistakes don't slip through.
Obviously, we can go down the road.
We're talking about opioids, but there's a lot of nuance even there.
So sorry to have to give a tiny bit of nuance there, but yes, you're making such an important point.
If Children's Health Defense, the organization that Robert Kennedy Jr.
is I think president of, really wants to help children,
can we have a conference, Bobby, with the children's health experts,
children's safety experts from around the world, and let's look at the list of things
that we should be focusing on.
We really want to help children.
And then let's look at the work that you do.
So what are you actually doing?
Somebody recently saw the film and they said, the anti-vaxxers are not just anti-vaxxers and anti-science people are not just getting it wrong.
They're keeping us from doing what's right and doing the good work.
So such an important thing that you're pointing out there.
And I, I don't know how we're going to fix it.
The only way we're going to fix it is with, with patience and communication and telling the truth.
RFK held his healthcare policy roundtable in June, and I recorded it and I covered it in an episode.
And who did he invite?
He invited Joseph Mercola, Sherry Tenpenny, Sayerji, Mickey Willis.
He didn't invite any actual pediatrician.
He didn't invite a doctor.
like an incredible doctor.
And so it's interesting what you said before though about how they monetize it
because one thing that I've gotten pushback on is when I point out the fact
that they're monetizing their supplements, people will actually say,
yeah, but they're only making thousands of dollars.
Pharma companies are making billions of dollars.
Great argument.
And that is the only argument that I've actually gotten credible pushback
that you can consider that credible on.
It's just a disaster.
It's such a it's such lazy arguments.
It's like, so OK, so no, no, no profit.
Nothing I'll do is forgive the sidebars.
You guys have hopefully gotten used to the fact that I don't stick to the questions.
Is one of my cynical, snarky ways of looking at this is I dream about making a reality TV show.
called Elon Musk's Island.
So Elon Musk buys an island and everybody that doesn't want to have big farm in their life, doesn't want to have big government in their life, any of the bigs, they all get to go to this island and they have all their freedoms.
Yes, you know, it's just going, it's called Lord of the Flies.
All the guns.
All the, everything, everything they want.
They can all agree on that, what they want to have for their freedoms.
And let's see how that goes.
I'm really glad that you looked into Andrew Wakefield.
I mean, so anti-vaxxers, the movement began with Edward Jenner, right?
So as long as there's been efficacious vaccines, there's been an anti-vax movement, but it's come in waves.
And Andrew Wakefield is responsible for the current wave.
I'm sure most people know who he is, but he's the discredited physician We know he falsely created and purposefully falsely created the autism MMR vaccine link in the 90s.
You use one clip in your movie with Brian Deer when he's chasing what you've killed.
I was kind of hoping you got him for the movie because his book, The Doctor Who Fooled the World, I've covered it years ago.
Everyone should read that book to understand how egregious Wakefield is.
And the thing about Brian Deer is he doesn't get enough credit.
A lot of people overlook him in terms of what he accomplished.
He is the singular reason that anyone even looked into Wakefield.
I mean, there were some replication studies that were done, but he is the reason.
That Wakefield got exposed.
We know that Wakefield was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to falsify the studies.
We know that he picked and chose what children were involved in the study.
We know that he tried to patent two MMR vaccines while he was working on the Lancet study because he wanted to be able to monetize that.
We know that he was selling a made-up Well, let's start at the beginning.
that could tell you whether or not your children have autism.
Like, all of this is out in the public record.
Why, from your, you know, dealings with people in these communities,
why do people still believe him?
Well, let's start at the beginning.
First of all, thank you for listing all of that because we couldn't include all of it in the film.
And Brian Deer has a special thanks in the film.
And I take the criticism if Brian Deer doesn't get enough credit in the film.
It's a complicated thing, making a documentary and narrowing things down.
Oh no I didn't mean you guys.
Oh you weren't you weren't you weren't saying that I'm just I just want to give props to him and also God forbid we bring humility into this conversation, that I can admit that I love this film.
We stand by this film.
We're so proud of how effective it is.
And I can be self-critical.
To the point of why, let's start like, why was this this journey so successful?
Why did this disinformation and misinformation spread?
Let's start with the fact that the Lancet put it, they printed it, right?
Lancet is one of the top, is one of the top Three medical journals in the world.
I don't know how much you guys have dug in on The Lancet.
We could have a separate episode talking about the imperfections of The Lancet.
I'm not saying it's all bad, but there are plenty, there's plenty of evidence to show that The Lancet has played politics and tribal, let's say, beliefs that they want to support over consistent science.
So they never should have published it.
It took nine and a half years for them to retract it.
Right.
If it was retracted, it was out on Tuesday and it was retracted on Friday.
OK, great.
It probably wouldn't have spread, but it spread the world.
Sadly, people like Oprah Winfrey thinking that there was valid science here put people like Jenny McCarthy on her show multiple times because she thought The information was worthy.
But why do you think people still believe him?
Oh, sorry, do they trust in him?
I don't know if it's believe in him or trust in him.
Confirmation bias, obviously, you guys talk about all the time.
Doing the quick version, if anybody doesn't know it, we look for evidence that supports our beliefs, right?
So if you want to believe that vaccines cause autism, you're gonna find that evidence.
If you want to believe that Big Pharma is evil and is trying to Poison your kids.
You're going to believe that.
So if that starts to be the case, you see people like Robert Kennedy Jr.
and Del Victory and Andrew Wakefield as martyrs, right?
Oh, of course.
Of course they've been beaten on because they're telling us the real truth of what's going on out there.
So it's so many pieces, Derek, that it's It's so much harder to do what you all are doing, dare I say we all are trying to do, to tell nuanced, good information.
Look at how easy it is to do the opposite.
Vaccines cause autism.
No evidence, nothing else.
They can just say that, they can do a meme, they can make a movie called Vax, on and on and on.
It's so easy to slur, and it's much, much harder to have a nuanced and respectful argument.
Yeah, and the other side of that confirmation bias, if I may, is when you come across anything that disconfirms what you've already committed to emotionally and what you want to believe, there's a tendency to ignore it, to reject it.
Yep.
Or see it as part of the conspiracy against you and all those things.
Yeah.
I mean, we go back to Watergate, that Watergate is the birth of a lot of this, but it was with good information, right?
So Del Bigtree thinks that he's Woodward and Bernstein.
Exactly.
But he is not.
Again, the way they're brilliant at flipping the David and Goliath argument, the David and Goliath trope, right?
Who wants to root for Goliath?
So they're brilliant at saying anything that is big, we're the little one, believe in us.
And it's psychologically absolutely brilliant.
But we also have to pause and say, just because somebody is saying they are David and Goliath is evil, can we take a breath Yeah, and consider the conspiracy that Derek just really clearly laid out in terms of Wakefield, right?
That was an actual conspiracy where you can see actual ways of following the money and we have evidence and, you know, all of the co-authors ended up pulling out of that study and the Lancet eventually was forced to retract it.
So it's all there.
But the skepticism has gone awry with these folks.
You know, for our final questions, I really wanted to turn to what I see as the pitch of your film.
How you're making the closing argument.
Because I think it's really smart.
When you show Paul Offit being dead wrong by saying on TV that he thought the pandemic would not last more than a few weeks and it would cause less than one tenth of the damage that influenza causes every year.
When he then talks about how the polio vaccine was mishandled historically by one company and this resulted in 164 kids being paralyzed and 10 of them dying.
When you bring up, as you did earlier today, the Tuskegee medical atrocity in which fake treatment was delivered without informed consent over 40 years to black men with syphilis in Alabama just to track the disease process and see what happened.
And what happened is 100 of those men died and many of their wives and kids were infected.
When you acknowledge that doctors used to do commercials saying smoking is really good for you, aren't you just telling us that we actually can't, hashtag, trust the science?
What are you doing?
Interesting.
Yeah.
So, you know the answer, where the film goes after that.
But yes, I will take the question.
We wanted to include that because we're not We're not afraid of what is true.
Neil deGrasse Tyson signed my poster for food evolution saying to Scott,
who's not afraid of what is true.
I was like, wow, I never heard it put that way.
But that's that it's hard to not be afraid of what is true because it won't go to our confirmation bias.
So I'm not afraid of the truth.
that science is going to make mistakes, that human beings are going to make mistakes.
We are imperfect.
We are mean, we are calculating, but we are also brilliant and we're empathetic
and we can be kind to each other.
And I think I'm an optimist.
I think most people, I see it in life.
We wake up not trying to fuck up the world.
We wake up trying to do the best that we can, right?
And we'll succeed on some days and we'll fail on other days.
So I wasn't afraid of showing that of course science makes mistakes.
Sometimes horrific, horrific calculated mistakes like Tuskegee.
That doesn't mean that the scientific method is broken.
That doesn't mean that Lemonade came out of those horrible lemons in terms of safety, the safety measures that came out of after Tuskegee.
I wanted to show the truth of that and the humility that Paul Offit can say, look at me, I made a terrible mistake in early COVID.
That doesn't mean I'm crazy.
And then he finishes it by saying, because the antis will never admit they're wrong.
Go ahead, Andrew Wakefield, Robert Kennedy Jr., Del Bigtree.
Go ahead and meme us the list of all the places and times you've admitted you're wrong.
Crickets, right?
If that's not a tell, I don't know what is.
Yeah, the way he handles it, as you just said, is so good.
He says, just because I was wrong about one thing doesn't mean I'm wrong about everything else.
What matters is I acknowledge I was wrong and I tell you how I've updated my current perception.
And he also says, in the wake, as you mentioned, in the wake of all of these awful incidents, we now have better protections in place.
We have informed consent.
We have a vaccine oversight.
That is many layers, rich and deep, that really tries to be as careful as possible.
Absolutely, yeah.
He says it so well, and yes, I'm very happy that we found a place for that to land, because it's so important that nobody's trying to say, people are trying to say, oh, science is just a word of They wouldn't say God, maybe.
They would say science.
Everybody believes each other in science.
Have you ever been to a science conference?
That's their M.O.
If anything, they're perfect is the enemy of the good, which I love that term, perfect is the enemy of the good.
Is there too skeptical?
Yeah, come to say that there's two perfect is the enemy of the good in this conversation.
The antis fail at perfect is the enemy of the good.
They don't accept anything that isn't perfect for their child.
There is no acceptance of any mistakes in medication, in food, in anything that's ever happened to my child.
That's perfect is the enemy of the good, instead of the good of, of course, there's gonna be some minor mistakes, but the benefits of vaccines outweigh it.
But our science community also fails at perfect the enemy of the good.
the good on the communication side.
Ah.
The communication isn't perfect, right?
We don't have the exact way we're gonna do it, we're not gonna say it.
Or just ignore them.
They've been trying to ignore the anti-vaxxers for years and years and years, don't give them oxygen.
Eh, fail, never worked, right?
So we have to help our science community say, find the good in these communications
of ways to stop the spread of this disinformation and just get a little bit past, don't be so precious,
looking for the perfect way to communicate this because it doesn't exist.
We need to stop the spread of disinformation.
We need to stop the spread of disinformation.
Yeah, I wanted to list all of those examples and sort of ask you that slightly tongue-in-cheek question, because I feel like what you're doing is you're grabbing several different counter-arguments that tend to come up, and you're responding to them in a very humble and very human way.
It's kind of like your Eminem moment in 8 Mile, right?
Where it's like, oh, here's all the shit you can say about me.
Yes, that's all true, but now let me tell you what's really going on here and why, you know, what I have to say is relevant.
It's great.
There's another thing that you do as part of what I'm calling the pitch.
And I want to ask you to tell us about the decision to show the really emotional montage of all of those people in their hospital beds.
They're on ventilators and they're each, they're, they're, they're in tears.
You know, they're, they're talking about how wrong they were to think COVID was a joke, how they wish they had gotten vaccinated.
Tell us about the decision to share that and what you were hoping to accomplish.
So I'm a big fan of the classic three-act structure of books and of film.
It can be five acts if you want to get into Shakespeare.
And so the story presented us with a Sort of very sad and strong end of Act Two.
In Act Two, we see Robert Kennedy Jr.
speaking at a rally in Germany, spreading disinformation and getting his photograph taken with what seems to be Nazis.
We can look at the image yourself and decide what that is.
And then Blima Marcus' community is burning masks in her community and denying science there, and she's on the verge of quitting science communication.
And that turns to the opening of Act Three, where we have this montage that you're talking about.
And it was very... It's just so sad.
It's just so sad.
There's so many layers to the sadness of what was COVID and what still is COVID.
But to see people... It was sad and inspiring.
To see these people suffering who said, I didn't believe it was real.
I didn't believe COVID was real.
And also I have such respect for the fact that they did want to communicate this.
That they could change their minds.
who died or who didn't, we wanted to make it a, it was actually a time passing montage.
But, and also I have such respect for the fact that they did want to communicate this,
that they could change their minds.
And again, that goes to what we can do as human beings.
We can make mistakes and we can try to correct them the best that we can.
That's all we can ask of each other.
That's it.
And if I came on your show, I said, Hey, nice to see you all.
Can't wait for you to see the rest of the films I make for the rest of my career.
They're all going to be perfect.
I'm not going to make any mistakes.
I'm not going to make any mistakes on this podcast.
I can't make any mistakes going forward.
It's insane.
So it's wonderful to see people that have the Humility and courage to want to show that they made a mistake and try to make the world a little bit better by admitting those mistakes.
We said earlier about vaccines being the victim of their own success.
We can no longer see the damage that polio causes, and there's a moment where Dr. Offit is talking about having clubfoot when he was young and he was in a polio ward, so he got to see it firsthand, and that's what set him off on his path.
My aunt had polio, and while she survived, she's worn a colostomy bag her entire life.
Because of it, so she knows well the damage that it does.
And so I always wonder, we have another polio case that's emerged in America a year or two ago.
We have these measles upticks.
We have all these diseases that are making comebacks when they're very manageable.
I don't know if you came across this, but maybe you did.
If a parent of a child is stricken with measles, who do they blame?
Depends on their confirmation box.
So, but blame is such an interesting word in these things, right?
There's people that want to find blame, and there's people that want to find answers, right?
So trying to find blame is another piece, a brilliant piece of the evil communication from the Antibes, is they want to paint a picture of wanting to find blame in somebody.
So I hope that if somebody has the terrible experience of having their child come down with measles, that they go and just try to find the best information on how to deal with it.
That's all I can ask for.
But going to the blame game and measles, if I can do a sidebar to the Samoa story, which is a sort of centerpiece sequence in the film, where the A tragedy happened with the MMR vaccine being given to two babies and they died and it was just a mistake that the nurses mixed in a muscle relaxant into the vaccine instead of saline water and these babies died.
Nothing to do with the efficacy of the vaccines and we can see that because it's never happened any other time.
Right.
And I'll jump to the end of that.
This this this leads to start to go to the middle again.
This leads to the prime minister stopping all vaccines on the island of Samoa because he was scared.
And this leads to an outbreak there where there's 5,000 cases of measles and 83 deaths, almost all of them babies.
In the end of that sequence, we see those same parents that lost their babies to the mistake come on the news, ask to come on the news.
and talk about people that were still scared when the vaccines are telling the story terribly.
It's better than the movie. It's really good in the movie.
It is that they finally do bring back the MMR vaccine to stop the measles outbreak and it works.
And there are still some parents that are scared to go get vaccinated. These parents who lost their
kids to the mistake say, we want to come on the news and say, please go get vaccinated.
And that is as hopeful as I can find for humanity.
They didn't become vengeful.
They didn't want to lay blame.
Right?
They wanted to find answers.
They didn't want to lay blame and make the situation worse by cynicism and all those things that we see so much in the anti-vaxx world.
So, yeah, I'm just so impressed by that.
And that's the humanity I want to live for and hope for.
I don't know if I'll ever have the integrity of those parents, but I will sure strive to.
That's a really incredible sequence in the film and there's one extra piece to it that you didn't get to.
So you have the tragic mistake, you have the Prime Minister saying, you know, we're not going to have MMR vaccine anymore.
You have the terrible outbreak and, you know, Kennedy and other anti-vaxxers sort of participating in really, I think, being to blame for that.
And then you have the turnaround.
And, you know, you also show in the movie the kids that are dying as a result of this and these amazingly courageous parents, as you just said, and then the prime minister realizing, no, actually, now that I have more information, we need this MMR vaccine.
And then you quote the fact that they didn't have a single COVID death, because when COVID happened, they actually were ready.
They actually followed really strict quarantine.
They were really good in their uptake of the vaccine.
Incredible success story.
Wonderful.
Thank you.
just to get the nuance right, because the antis will come after us.
By the end of 2021, they had had zero deaths, and I think they've had five or six by now,
but in terms of the percentages, 100% right.
But we have to see that, we have to tell all the truth.
We don't get to.
Wonderful, thank you.
Thank you for updating me on that fact.
No worries, no worries.
There's a couple other closing moments that are right in line with what we're talking about.
You know, you have the Nobel Prize winning co-developer of one of the COVID vaccines, Peter Hotez, who has, you know, become kind of famous online in ways that I think he would have hoped never had to have been as a result of some bullshit on the Joe Rogan experience.
He talks in the film about his daughter who has autism and You also loop back around to Lynette Marie Barron, who's a parent activist you show early on in the film who's opposed to vaccination, but by the end she's changed her mind and here she is interviewing Paul Offit, it looks like, for her podcast.
What do these two stories illustrate alongside what we've been talking about for the last couple minutes?
Peter Hotez's story is so brave of him to have written a book called Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel's Autism.
Going a little bit to what we talked about before, is people on the anti side not just getting it wrong, they're not helping, they're not actually working on the more helpful solution.
And this is a sad subtext of the anti-vax movement that Peter tries to correct so beautifully, is that not only do vaccines not cause Rachel's autism, By being vengeful and thinking there's somebody to blame, you're treating, some people treat their autistic children as if they're pariahs and they should be like banished from the community, you know?
And it's just awful and it's not the healthful way that they should be treated.
I have a nephew who's autistic and my big sister, thankfully, didn't take any of the bait on the disinformation side.
She tried to follow the best Information she could and the just pure hard work and love it took to try and give Nikki the best life that he could.
And people told her when he was five or six, he'll never drive a car.
He's not going to go to college.
He's going to lose that.
He has to choke up.
He has his driver's license.
He's in college.
He has a beautiful life, thanks to the hard work of my sister and the medical community.
And that's what we should be striving for, right?
Not looking for blame and bad information, trying to use the best information to do the best we can.
Now to jump to...
To Lynette, just to be clear, Lynette has not changed her mind completely on all vaccines, right?
So she's still, she and Paul Offit don't see eye to eye on all of the science behind vaccines.
She changed her mind in terms of decency.
She used to believe in what Del Bigtree was selling, that he was an honest broker, and she points out herself, these are her own words, that it's all about him.
That he's in this for his ego.
And then he had the nerve to say, you all made me this way.
That his fans made his ego big.
It's like, wow, that's... I don't even know what to call that ego failure.
That's just remarkable.
It's just incredible that you're not just vain, you're blaming somebody for making you vain.
Okay.
We'll leave that to you and your therapist, hopefully someday.
I've got a phrase for you, grandiose victimhood.
There you go.
Thank you.
Perfect.
But so she wanted to point that out about Dell and she wanted to have Paul Offit on her podcast to say, let's speak to each other with respect and decency if we have any chance of going forward here.
Thank you for listening to another episode of Conspirituality.
