This is on the media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. On Tuesday, lawmakers in Washington heard from an 18-year-old who, against all odds, got his shots.

Sitting alongside prominent health professionals at today's Senate hearing was an unlikely witness.

My mother would turn to anti-vaccine groups online and on social media.

Ohio High School senior Ethan Lindenberger testified about his fight with his own mother to get vaccinated.

For my mother, her love, affection, and care as a parent was used to push an agenda to create a false distress.

That agenda, the dangerous legacy of a thoroughly debunked 1998 study in the British

Medical Journal Lancet, was dealt yet another devastating, though apparently not mortal blow,

courtesy of epidemiologists from Denmark's Staten Syram Institute.

A new study published yesterday found that the measles, mumps, and rebella vaccine does not raise the risk of autism.

The study also found the vaccine does not trigger autism and children who are at risk for it.

And yet, even in the face of study after study and even as websites like Pinterest have moved to stamp out the spread of anti-vax materials on their websites,

this notion and its impact on public health live on.

With all these important correctives out there, why is it that in 2019, measles continues to spread?

Back in 2012, I spoke with Seth Mnuchin, author of The Panic Virus, a true story of medicine, science, and fear.

He says that this strange rise in preventable diseases has its roots in two groups of

vaccine-averse parents. The first is a very small core of diehard conspiracy theorists.

The people who were most committed to the idea that there's a link between vaccines and autism,

for the most part,

already believed that the medical community and international governments around the world were conspiring to hide evidence. And so any further piece of evidence disproving that link

becomes kind of paradoxically further proof of this

conspiracy. The second and larger group has almost by osmosis picked up on what has now been

almost a decade and a half of these concerns about vaccines. And so they may express those as a fear that children are getting

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