Anti-vaxxers – Herd impunity

Origin Story

Podmasters

Society & Culture, News, News Commentary, History

4.8 • 655 Ratings

🗓️ 26 June 2024

⏱️ 77 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This episode tells the tale of the anti-vaxxers. The word has only been around since 2001 but inoculation has inspired opposition for as long as it has existed in the West. Dorian and Ian chart the life of vaccines and their opponents from the fight against smallpox in the eighteenth century to the vaccine scandals of the post-war decades. Find out why someone threw a bomb through Cotton Mather’s window, why Gandhi changed his mind, and why Leicester became the anti-vaccine capital of the world. The drama accelerates with Dr Andrew Wakefield and the MMR panic of the 2000s, which swept up everyone for Oprah Winfrey to Private Eye, caused a public health disaster and set the stage for the full-blown mania of the backlash against Covid-19 vaccines. How did a rogue British gastroenterologist launch a global movement? How did vaccine scepticism mutate into a giant conspiracy theory? Is Bill Gates really implanting 5G trackers in our blood? (No.) And what’s the best way to get an anti-vaxxer to think again? It’s a gripping story of science, journalism, paranoia, superstition and people who should know better. • Pre-order the forthcoming Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory and get 20% off using the special discount code revealed in the podcast. • Support Origin Story on Patreon Reading list • David Aaronovitch – Voodoo Histories: How Conspiracy Theory Has Shaped Modern History (2010) • Jonathan M. Berman – Anti-Vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement (2020) • Steve Brotherton – Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories (2016) • Brian Deer – The Doctor Who Fooled the World: Andrew Wakefield’s War on Vaccines (2020) • Peter Furtado - Plague, Pestilence and Pandemic: Voices from History (2021) • Naomi Klein – Doppelganger (2023) • Anna Merlan – Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power (2020) • Seth Mnookin – The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy (2011) • Tom Phillips and Jonn Elledge - Conspiracy: A History of Bxllocks Theories and How Not to Fall for Them (2022) • Frank M. Snowden - Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present (2019) Podcasts and articles • You’re Wrong About: The Anti-Vaccine Movement (2021) • Maintenance Phase: RFK Jr. and the Rise of the Anti-Vaxx Movement (2023) • Isaac Chotiner, ‘The Influence of the Anti-Vaccine Movement’, The New Yorker (2020) Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, welcome to origin story. In each episode, we take a word, idea or figure from history,
0:13.7	explain its origins, and talk about how it influences political discourse today. I'm Doreen
0:18.9	Linsky, author of the Ministry of Truth and everything must go.
0:21.8	And I'm Ian Dunst, and I'm a columnist with the Unus paper. I'm not even going to fucking talk about
0:25.1	the book. Why should I? Every time I have to say this terribly long title, it's incredibly tedious
0:29.1	for me and everyone's concerned. If they haven't bought the book by now, then they're clearly
0:31.7	out of their minds. Everyone's got it already. It's like 50 shades of grey. Everyone's got one. This week, we are doing anti-vaxxers, the most delightfully spelt subjects that we've done so far.
0:45.3	Ian, why?
0:47.3	This is your call.
0:48.3	You tell me why.
0:49.1	Okay, well, I'm really enjoyed doing climate denial last time, and I feel like in the first season, we did conspiracy theories.
0:56.7	And obviously, conspiracy theories, it's a vast topic. It's in fact, the subject of one of our
1:00.6	origin story books. And you can see those sort of thought patterns in all of these sort of different
1:06.4	areas. And I feel like, obviously, because of the COVID pandemic, we saw conspiracy theories
1:13.2	supercharged and in particular anti-vaccine theories.
1:18.3	And the history of it is really interesting because I think a lot of people would probably
1:21.6	become aware of it.
1:23.5	In the late 90s, with this maverick, should we say, Dr. Andrew Wakefield and his alleged connection between the MMR vaccine and autism, which we will get into.
1:34.9	And in fact, that is when the word appears, the OED, says anti-vaxxer, a person opposed to vaccination.
1:40.8	Correct.
1:41.8	The first citation is from a Usenet group in 2001.
1:44.9	It had only one X, which was one X too few.
	...

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