'I often wish that anti-vaxxers could spend some time in my world, to see what their evangelism has perpetuated, all the ways that children and their families have needlessly suffered'
Photo-Illustration: by the Cut; Photo Getty Images I’m in my morning huddle at the hospital. The NICU nurse gives an update from the labor ward, running through names and details of expectant mothers, before moving on to a new part of the meeting that’s become routine since the start of the pandemic: the list of pregnant people with COVID-19 admitted to the general floor and the ICU.
Vaccine refusal is nothing new for pediatricians. The modern-day anti-vaccination movement — which began in the ’90s and early aughts, sparked by a now-discredited study by ex-doctor Andrew Wakefield that falsely linked vaccines to autism and was later amplified by celebrities like Jenny McCarthy — has now entered its third decade.
Yet even among so much death and suffering of the unvaccinated, this group’s screed of “wellness” sounds on: I don’t need a shot because I have a healthy lifestyle ; only obese people with underlying conditions get really sick ; I’ll just keep my children safe, feed them nourishing food, let them run around outside, homeschool them ; I healed my child’s eczema/food allergies/ADHD by using natural remedies ; I don’t trust pharmaceutical companies .
Absent from this ideology is acknowledging how someone they see as “the other” might nonetheless be affected by their choices, how an act as personal as getting or refusing a shot has profound repercussions on people they’ll never meet. We know with certainty that COVID-19 most severely affects low-income populations of color. Anecdotally, this has borne out in my pediatric populations as well — not just in medical COVID disease, but in the way it has torn apart families.
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