What’s driving the anti-vax movement? | The Excerpt

On Sunday’s episode of The Excerpt podcast: Whether someone has or hasn’t been vaccinated for COVID-19, the measles, or even for polio, has become a controversial topic. That’s not new. Resistance to vaccines is well over a century old. What is new, and what’s grabbing headlines right now, are the outbreaks of measles and other vaccine-preventable illnesses that are spreading globally. The CDC recently reported that nearly a third of all U.S. measles cases since 2020 happened in the past three months. Hesitancy around vaccines has even spilled over to pet owners, with some not vaccinating their animals against rabies. Both medical professionals and governments agree that vaccines are good for us, so why do some people remain unconvinced? Ina Pinkney, a passionate speaker who travels around the country advocating for vaccines, joins The Excerpt to discuss the anti-vax movement.

Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

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Dana Taylor:

Hello and welcome to The Excerpt. I’m Dana Taylor. Today is Sunday, May 12th, 2024. Whether someone has or hasn’t been vaccinated for COVID-19, the measles or even polio, has become a controversial topic. It’s not new; resistance to vaccines is well over a century old. What is new and what’s grabbing headlines right now are the outbreaks of measles and other vaccine-preventable illnesses that are spreading globally. The CDC recently reported that nearly a third of all US measles cases since 2020 happened in the past three months. Hesitancy around vaccines has even spilled over to pet owners with some not vaccinating their animals against rabies. Both medical professionals and governments agree that vaccines are good for us, so why do some people remain unconvinced? Our guest today is Ina Pinkney, a passionate speaker who travels around the country advocating for vaccines. Thanks for joining us, Ina.

Ina Pinkney:

Oh, I’m so happy to be here to talk to you about the fact that nobody should suffer from a vaccine-preventable disease because the pain and disability can last a lifetime, which is my story.

Dana Taylor:

Ina, I know that this issue is personal for you, so I’m going to ask you to share your story with us.

Ina Pinkney:

On Labor Day 1944, I was 18 months old, and my father came in to take me out of my crib and I couldn’t stand up. And when he touched my forehead and realized that I had a high fever, in that nanosecond he understood that the polio epidemic that was sweeping New York City had come to Brooklyn New York, and that was the beginning of a lifetime of disability that I have struggled with.

Dana Taylor:

So tell us really how your life changed with polio, your opportunities, your goals. What do you want people to know about your journey?

Ina Pinkney:

I think the most important thing is that we tried so hard to pass for normal for so many years, and we always tried to camouflage. After the original outbreaks, there was a sort of shame around it as well, and we tried to fit in. I was ostracized, marginalized, I was bullied. My whole life was very different than the children around me, and I knew intuitively that I was kinder than they were because I would never do that to anybody else.

Dana Taylor:

Well, as I mentioned, you’ve been a passionate vaccine advocate. You’ve talked to people across the country, across the world on this issue. When did you start this work and how would you characterize the anti-vax movement pre-pandemic?

Ina Pinkney:

I think there’s always been a hesitancy in people, especially years ago when somebody determined and said falsely that autism was as a result of vaccinations. And I don’t think that the medical community got on top of that as fast as the internet got on top of the bad news and the information misinformation. I started with Rotary because Rotary had taken on as its mission along with the Gates Foundation and the World Health Organization to eradicate polio. They started this in the ’80s and that felt so comfortable to me because they were out and about saying, “We can do this.” And to think that polio could be ended in my lifetime was something that was so magical to me.

And when I closed my restaurant 10 years ago, I took on the conversation on a full-time basis as best I could and did lots of in-person and lots of Zooms once COVID hit. So I work very hard to remind people that I had polio 11 years before there was a vaccine. And so I was number one in line to get the COVID.

Dana Taylor:

And then the anti-vaccine movement, I want to talk about that constituency and how they’ve evolved over time. Did the tone of people who are resistant to vaccines change after COVID-19?

Ina Pinkney:

It changed dramatically after that. People said, “Oh, it’s too new. I don’t want to take it. I don’t know what’s in it.” Mind you, the medical world had been working on a vaccine for over 10 years and was able to do one small tweak and then it took on the SARS. And so here it was a 10-year-old study and research on this one safe, safe vaccine, and people were still hesitant to take it.

I spoke to a doctor, a pediatrician in North Carolina when I was there and I said to him, “How do you approach it when someone comes in with their children? How do you approach the vaccine?” He goes, “Very gently and very carefully and I say, ‘We can do it very one at a time. We can wait in between. We don’t have to really do them all at once as we all had.'” And I said, “What is the response?” He goes, “It’s a hard no, a very hard no.” I said, “And then what happens?” He said, “And then they leave my practice and they go to a practice where the doctor doesn’t ask.” And I thought, oh my God, there are medical professionals out there who are just doing the same bad thing that people are doing on the internet, on the conspiracy theories. And I thought, how could this be?

And so I work twice as hard when I speak to groups, twice as hard. I will say to somebody who’s resistant, “So when did you have polio?” And they’ll say, “Well, I didn’t have polio.” And I go, “Oh, that’s right, because you had to get a vaccine before you went to school.” And they just sort of have to push back a little.

Dana Taylor:

So Ina, I want to talk about the biggest hurdles that you face when you’re trying to reach people who are simply against vaccines. What’s your approach?

Ina Pinkney:

I ask them about any illnesses in their family, and of course some say, “Well, my aunt had polio or somebody I knew had polio.” And I went, “And you will never get it.” 20 million children are walking around the world right now because they had the polio vaccine, 20 million we saved. And then I talk about measles that we have the latest update today, 125 measles outbreak in this country after it was gone. And 63 are in Chicago. And so I try to just be very simple with my facts. I don’t go into a lot of medical stuff. I just say, “We didn’t have measles and now we have measles. And so how do you feel about that? How do you feel that your little baby can get sick and have a lifetime disability from measles?” And they have really no answers. They just spout the words that they’ve read on the internet and that there’s no answer for that for me.

Dana Taylor:

You just shared we are seeing dangerous outbreaks of diseases like measles both here in the US and in Europe. Have you come across anti-vaxxers who have been persuaded by those reports?

Ina Pinkney:

Sometimes when I tell my story or I tell the story of a man I know who’s 84 years old, a virologist, and he was having all kinds of issues with his mobility and his energy level and muscle weakness. And it was only 20 years ago on his aunt’s deathbed that she had admitted to him that he had had polio as a baby because his parents kept it a secret. And he went and got the shots. He went and got his polio vaccine at 84. And so I try to give them stories that are very human. I mean, when I tell them that I was 18 months old and they just look at me. And I said, my whole life, 79 years of my life, I have been dealing with this now, and now with post-polio syndrome, I have more challenges. I have a sign that’s on the back of my wheelchair and on the back of my scooter that nobody, nobody should have to suffer from a vaccine-preventable disease. How do you fight with that?

Dana Taylor:

In your years of doing this work, Ina, what surprised you the most about the resistance that you’ve seen?

Ina Pinkney:

The fact that there are people who had the vaccine when they were little to get into school, who now have grandchildren and their daughters and sons will not vaccinate their children. So I see a grandmother who was suffering because she knows she lived through the polio epidemics and now her grandchildren don’t have the vaccine. That is the most heartbreaking for me. What cheers me is when somebody I know in an extended family has a baby and they take the baby to the doctor for the vaccine, they call me. They call me and they say, “Ina, my baby has gotten the vaccine now.” It makes me cry every time.

Dana Taylor:

As you mentioned, measles was officially eliminated from the United States in 2000. That’s according to the CDC. Now it’s clearly back. What other diseases might we see a resurgence of because of this resistance to vaccines?

Ina Pinkney:

I think every disease is a plane ride away. Every single one that is all over the world that we have not had on our shores is now a plane ride away. The man in Rockland County who got polio two years ago, he was unvaccinated. And a man from Israel who had had the oral vaccine, which sometimes sheds in certain people, he visited his friend in upstate New York, and now that man is paralyzed. And when you think about the accessibility of travel, I mean, there are many migrant shelters where the measles is proliferating now, where they may have gotten it at a doctor’s office just sitting there and waiting, and now they bring it back to a shelter. And more of the children have it there too. I mean, there are some incredible numbers that there’s 250,000 kindergartners that have not gotten any vaccines. That’s a lot of babies that have the potential to be very, very sick and have lifelong disability.

Dana Taylor:

From a medical perspective, there have been some incredible breakthroughs in the last few years in vaccines. We talked about, or you talked about the COVID-19 vaccine being one of those. Are there other exciting possibilities here, including some for cancer and autoimmune diseases? Is it possible that this could be a tipping point for converting people from anti-vax to pro-vax?

Ina Pinkney:

I wish I was that optimistic. I’m more pessimistic. And I think the more vaccines come out, the more resistance there will be because people have already dug in and they have determined vaccines are not okay. I mean, there’s pushback when they try to give babies some vaccine, which are, because their mother may have hepatitis B, they give them the HPV vaccine. And this is the most important thing you can do, but they say, “Why are we immunizing our babies?” Well, because mom had hep C and could have hep C, and the baby’s going to have it.

So how do we get the information out there in a way that matters to people where they actually hear you because the wall is up? They are dug in, and I’m always stunned. I don’t know where to put it. And we talk about this all the time on my global Zooms with people who say, “I can’t believe that my kids don’t want to vaccinate their children.” And we are the proof. We are the proof that you need vaccinations. I don’t know. I’m not as optimistic as your comment was, do you think there’s a tipping point? I am scared that there is never going to be a tipping point.

Dana Taylor:

But you’re doing this work, so I know that you’re not completely without hope. What gives you the most hope, Ina?

Ina Pinkney:

When I finish my talks to the Rotary groups where I speak mostly, at the very end I say, “I need to thank you for every minute you have spent and every dime you have raised for the global eradication of polio. Because to think in my lifetime, I will see the end of that disease that has caused so much despair in the universe, that will be the reason I’m doing everything I do today.” And what gives me hope is that immunization currently prevents 3.5 to 5 million deaths a year.

Dana Taylor:

Ina, thank you so much for being on The Excerpt.

Ina Pinkney:

Oh, it’s an honor to talk to you today and share the news.

Dana Taylor:

Thanks to our senior producers, Shannon Rae Green and Bradley Glanzrock for their production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to podcasts@usatoday.com. Thanks for listening. I’m Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.