Politics and Vaccines

RFK Jr. has dropped out of the race (kind of….)¹ and endorsed Trump. One of RFK Jr.’s talking points has been his opposition to vaccines and especially the COVID vaccine.² Trump has also recently seemed to escalate this same type of rhetoric in his own speeches vowing to defund schools that require vaccines for admission.³ Trump has also hinted that RFK Jr. would make a good candidate for secretary of health and human services⁴ something that would very much place RFJ Jr. in a place to enforce his anti-vax views.

I think the majority of people would laugh at some of the extremism in RFK Jr’s speeches. He’s part of a group of people that believe that vaccines cause autism.⁵ Spread lies that the government is “feminizing” men.⁶ Also he’s indicated that he believes that antidepressants are the cause of mass shootings in America.⁷ But I would argue that all of those “wild” and “laughable” beliefs directly affects someone.

When 2020 rolled around my family (especially my mother) dove deeply into antivax conspiracies. My family has been antivax since the early 2000s, but the intensity of the conspiratorial thinking escalated during the start of the covid pandemic. During that time I worked in healthcare in a rural area. And I slowly watched covid enter our community. Covid killed 1/3 of our local retirement home and caused the deaths of numerous family friends. My father’s Chiropractor died suddenly in his 60s. One of my dad’s best men from his wedding lost his mother due to covid. And a church member died from complications after her covid diagnosis. These were not unknown people. Numerous other individuals from their faith community also had extended hospital stays due to covid. Many individuals required long term supplemental oxygen to live for weeks. These individuals were not some distant relative or unknown my parents knew these people and had interacted with them every week.

Despite all the evidence for the severity of the problem and the need for a vaccine my parents refused to take any precautions to shelter themselves. I still hold some anger for the way the local churches responded as well. With the Deckerville First Baptist Church loudly protesting the stay at home order from governor Gretchen Whitmer. Instead of staying home these individuals gathered together unmasked to worship as a formal protest.

My mother begged me to not get the vaccine. Despite my almost daily work exposure to covid. She had numerous vaccine conspiracies she believed at the time. The vaccine would remove my ability to worship god. Covid vaccines contained nanochips that would be tracked by bill gates. The devil’s mark (666) was on the vaccine. For several months every time I saw my mother she would bring up the topic encouraging me not to receive the vaccine.

I tried for a long time to have a rational conversation with her about it, but she was unable to hear anything I had to say as truth. This added a lot of unnecessary stress into our lives. Our son was a NICU baby and had respiratory distress after birth, and I had a personal history of asthma. We were both scared – me and my mother; but we both had opposite reactions to that fear. My mother’s fear and anti-vax beliefs pushed her away from any medical solution to the pandemic. And I looked forward to a day when I could have an effective solution to how to protect myself from covid.

This isn’t the first time anti-vax views have cause tension between me and my family. My mom routinely pushed me and my spouse not to get our daughter vaccinated as she entered the school district. She’s also tried to start arguments that our vaccinated children should not be around her other non-vaccinated grandkids due to vaccine shedding.⁸ This is something that is very serious to anti-vax individuals. They aren’t just doing this for a “bit” or a joke. They have been convinced this a life or death issue.

My spouse has also been sent anti-vax posts like “God does not support vaccines.”⁹ When my partner was at a low point her friend was trying to tell her that god hates that she vaccinates her kids. This same article posits that vaccines contain aborted babies, hazardous waste, and monkey kidneys. While I could stop to debunk that misinformation, I think it’s more import to see a trend of how anti-vax views can push family and friends away.

My mom has had multiple arguments with her own parents about vaccines. She believes that vaccines and traditional medicine are slowly killing her parents. And she has no qualms about saying as much. Something my Grandmother has no patience for. This can make visits and simple conversation hard. As my mother wishes to interject every time a medication or doctor’s visit is brought up around the kitchen table.

Religion and religious views are often used to justify anti-vax views. Conspiracies about how covid vaccines contain the mark of the beast¹⁰ or how they contain “luciferase” all use Christian language to create fear around the vaccine.¹¹ The article that was sent to my partner used verses to back each of her anti-vax views up.

“The Bible does not reference vaccines specifically, but it does reference pharmaceutical medication…to which vaccines belong. You know what the Bible calls this? Sorcery (Gal 5:20, Rev 9:21, 18:23, 21:8, and 22:15). Actually the Greek word for sorcery is ‘pharmakeia.’ Pretty ironic don’t ya think?” 

Direct quote from “God Does Not Support Vaccines”^{12 13}

I need to refocus this article, but I want to say that this ant-vax mentality is not harmless and just some joke to laugh at. While religion remains one the main divides between me and my family and ex friends, antivax ideas and conspiracies also have been a long term source of tension in my relationships with others.

There is also a whole other rabbit trail to go down about how many homeschool parents (the ones I was exposed to as a kid) seem to hold anti-medicine views. This can lead to a lot of medical neglect with homeschool children. Even directly in my own family my SIL has avoided traditional medical care with her births (even premature births) with my mother citing possible vaccinations as their reason to avoid hospitals.

Tying it back into RKF Jr and politics, mental health care is one of the things I will always advocate for in homeschool environments. My mother neglected her own mental health care due to her paranoia around mental health care and due to religious pressure and misinformation. Examples of the misinformation would be that prayer or spiritual meditation would cure her mental health. She also believed that anti-depressant medications would cause further harm to her mental health. These same ideas were passed down to me as a teen when I was dealing with depression. Medication or therapy would have never been considered as viable treatment options.

RFK Jr adding to this idea that medications used to treat depression causes school shootings is not adding to the discussion in any positive way. It’s only adding more confusion and fear into an already sensitive subject. This is stuff that can be life or death for young teens.

Children need access to good mental and physical health care in order to thrive. And these antivax and antimedical ideas promoted by Trump and RKF Jr are only going to worsen an already fraught and mistrustful United States. These politicians are causing more division and confusion around topics they do not understand or care to have scientific discussion about. The more disinformation is spread the more vaccine acceptance goes down. And as the vaccine acceptance rate lowers the risk for neonates, children, and those with poor natural immunity goes up.

1. https://www.politifact.com/article/2024/aug/23/rfk-jr-drops-out-of-2024-presidential-race-here-ar/ He’s not withdrawing from his presidential race in all states. But instead just focusing on withdrawing from “battleground states.” ↩︎
2. https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/21/politics/fact-check-rfk-not-anti-vax/index.html ↩︎
3. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/trump-vows-to-defund-schools-requiring-vaccines-for-students-if-hes-reelected ↩︎
4. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/rfk-jr-trump-health-secretary-anti-vaccine-rcna167588 ↩︎
5. This idea was based on a clinical study that has been proven false (many times). There are also many reasons to believe that Andrew Wakefield did not do the study in an ethical and scientific manner. ↩︎
6. This is the same belief that Alex Jones has spread. Remember viral hits like, “They’re turning the (frigging) frogs gay.” ↩︎
7. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/06/us/politics/rfk-conspiracy-theories-fact-check.html ↩︎
8. The belief that vaccinated individuals can spread the illness that they were vaccinated against. This is something that is only mildly possible in live virus vaccines (like the rotavirus vaccine) and still even very uncommon then. There are very few live virus vaccines. ↩︎
9. https://religionnews.com/2014/07/17/religious-exemptions-vaccines-shouldnt-exist/ (Article discusses the popular blog post that was sent to my spouse) ↩︎
10. https://theconversation.com/no-the-covid-19-vaccine-is-not-linked-to-the-mark-of-the-beast-but-a-first-century-roman-tyrant-probably-is-158288 ↩︎
11. https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-10051582995 ↩︎
12. http://www.livingwhole.org/god-does-not-support-vaccines/ (accessed by use of wayback machine) https://web.archive.org/web/20160308030658/http://www.livingwhole.org/god-does-not-support-vaccines/ ↩︎
13. A quick petty argument back is that this individual seems to be arguing that any type of modern medicine is sorcery. Antibiotics and surgical care would be included in that. How “faithful” is the author to avoid any “sorcery” in her or her family’s life? ↩︎