Recently, the phenomenon of anti-vaccine ideology came up in the composition class I teach. I ended the conversational detour by, joking, “If you’re an anti-vaxxer, come talk to me and I’ll set you straight” and one of my students took me up on the offer, approaching me after class to tell me that he, the child of two doctors, was not vaccinated. To say I was floored is an understatement. I was happy that he was out seeking information in order to make an informed decision about whether or not to get vaccinated. But despite my previous joking confidence, I was unsure of how to assert the importance of vaccines to this 18-year-old capitalist business major, who frequently (but politely) challenged me in class on issues about societal problems. I could impart facts and reasoning as he requested, but the anti-vaccination lens he’d inherited from his parents remained.
It will be, I think, little surprise that my student is a white male. The face of the modern anti-vaccine movement is that of a white mother—and, more specifically, that of Jenny McCarthy. The former model/actress began talking publicly in 2007 about her belief that her son’s “autism” (from which he has since “recovered”) was caused by vaccines, and quickly became a figurehead for the anti-vaccination movement. Her books on the subject (including Louder than Words: A Mother’s Journey in Healing Autism and Mother Warriors: A Nation of Parents Healing Autism Against All Odds), as well as her cohosting gig on The View gave her a massive platform, from which she launched Generation Rescue, an organization that advocates the scientifically debunked notion that developmental disorders like autism are linked to environmental factors including vaccines.
Despite no degrees or medical expertise (other than what she’s called the “University of Google”), McCarthy has gotten the likes of Oprah and Time magazine to cover—and, therefore, help spread—information that’s not only inaccurate, but that has been thoroughly discredited. The fact that McCarthy clearly believes what she’s saying does not make her behavior any less harmful. A recent spike in vaccine-eradicated childhood diseases like measles and mumps currently makes confronting the social causes of anti-vaccination ideology particularly urgent. It’s not just that such beliefs reflect a lack of science literacy, though that is a major component. Other facets include the anti-science bent that became a feature of American politics in the George W. Bush era; the increasing distrust in a profit-focused medical establishment; and a deep-seated cultural ableism that leads people to turn down life-saving care and say things, as McCarthy has, like, “If you ask 99.9 percent of parents who have children with autism if we’d rather have the measles versus autism, we’d sign up for the measles.”
Poverty, too, contributes to vaccine hesitancy. The stereotype of anti-vaxxers as white, educated, and wealthy is borne out by vaccination gaps in affluent areas. But similar gaps exist in impoverished communities, where lack of health insurance and access coexist with an inherent distrust of the medical field, where scientific racism still flourishes. But I believe the single largest reason that fringe anti-vaccine beliefs have led to terrifying mainstream realities is a cultural, widespread disavowal of community responsibility. To be crystal clear: Vaccines have saved millions of lives, eradicating smallpox (and, perhaps soon, polio) worldwide and nearly eradicating more than over a dozen other diseases in the United States. Though measles was declared eliminated in the United States in 2000, outbreaks in other countries led to the disease’s reintroduction in U.S. communities with low vaccination rates.
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