Anti-vax rhetoric is just one topic that gets caught in an echo chamber, sometimes with tragic consequences.

Echo chambers are a dangerous thing. Pam Marino here, having encountered one such chamber while reporting a story for this week’s edition of the Weekly about Monterey pediatrician Douglas Hulstedt, who lost his medical license for spreading false information about vaccines in a case that ultimately had tragic consequences.

I first met Hulstedt back in 2019 during a statewide measles outbreak when California officials were making it harder for parents to sidestep mandated vaccinations for school. He was the go-to pediatrician in the area for anyone who wanted a medical exemption. The state was cracking down on such exemptions at the time.

Interviewing Hulstedt then, I could tell he had fully embraced anti-vax rhetoric. His answers were nearly a word-for-word recitation of anti-vax propaganda we at the paper have heard from other anti-vax activists and that I’ve seen on anti-vax websites while doing research. Such rhetoric is long on anecdotal evidence, junk science and conspiracy theories, and short on peer-reviewed data produced by credible sources.

During that time I first interviewed Hulstedt, there was a father in the middle of a bitter custody battle who was taking his son to the doctor and receiving written medical exemptions for vaccinations. Hultstedt claimed the boy had allergies and a family history that would preclude taking vaccines. The mother took the boy to doctors in the San Francisco Bay Area who said he had no allergies and no family history that would prevent vaccination. You can read more about what happened in another story I did last year, but the awful reality is that after a judge in 2021 ordered the boy, then aged 9, to be vaccinated, the father shot his son and then himself, killing them both. 

Hulstedt came under scrutiny by the California Medical Board after the incident. Investigators asked him to produce the boy’s medical records and Hulstedt refused, entering into a protracted battle with the board. In the midst of this tussle, Hulstedt appeared in April last year on an anti-vax podcast hosted by another doctor. A second guest was the leader of an anti-vax group based in Roseville.

The podcast was about as classic an echo chamber as could be found. It was also an example of how people with misguided ideas can feed off of each other in a situation, bringing conspiracy theories to a fever pitch. 

The temperature of the discussion kept rising, stretching from such ideas like the Medical Board and the Centers for Disease Control are in league with Big Pharma, to statements that the same two governmental entities are evil. Later—after Hulstedt had exited the broadcast—it ended with an illogical and dark conspiracy theory of murder by some unnamed, shadowy and evil figures who I assume the host and guest thought wanted to keep the real truth about vaccines buried. 

How we help people break out of these echo chambers, I don’t know. I wish I did. We see the results of echo chambers all around us, including at the United States Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Until someone figures it out for all of us as a society, maybe the best way to inoculate ourselves is to be careful about what information we are consuming, don’t depend on one source for news, and keep your critical thinking cap on when reading or listening to anything.

How do you guard yourself against getting trapped inside an echo chamber? I’d like to hear your answers.