06.03.2026 21:53
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In 2007, I heard Madeleine Albright speak & someone asked about Rice having Albright’s father as a mentor. She said that once she commented to Rice that it was unfathomable that they both could have learned the same things from the same person and come to such incredibly different conclusions.
I cant stop thinking about this case: he was thrown away like trash.
I’m in Upstate SC working directly on the measles outbreak. What’s helping reduce cases lately isn’t writing parents off. It’s clear, credible communication that addresses confusion and misinformation. Many families just need trustworthy information from leaders they trust.
I have a kid in college who’s a political science major who was too young during 45 to know a lot of what was going on, so yesterday when she was talking about Noem I got to tell her how Tillerson read the tweet about his firing while on the toilet.
I was trying to be really hyperbolic in response to the idea that there were hundreds of thousands of parents who were deliberately choosing to murder others’ and their own children by deciding not to vaccinate
Again, my kids are fully vaxxed. But I have a lot of sympathy for parents who are navigating this sludge of information while they get 5 minutes of face time with a trusted clinician (if they have one).
I 100% think that if someone had sat me down when I was refusing vaccines and talked to me about it, addressed my fears, validated my prior experiences feeling unseen by clinicians, etc, I would have made different choices. This wouldn’t work for everyone, but one more kid vaccinated is good.
Rather than seeing my children as special snowflakes who could survive chicken pox or measles, I saw them as the vectors they were for infecting other people’s kids. I could not imagine deciding that my (incorrect) risk assessment for my own kids could then cause harm to someone else’s.
I can’t remember exactly what led me to a course correction, but I know I read Seth Mnookin’s book The Panic Virus and that really helped put into relief how utterly ridiculous the anti-vax movement is. It also cemented for me the importance of my individual role in protecting the community.
And a lot of people had deliberately sought out the communities I was a part of b/c of their negative experiences with clinicians, especially around wanting an unmedicated birth and things like breastfeeding on demand, bed sharing, etc. It’s easy to think someone knows their stuff when they help you
This ideology was RAMPANT in the communities I was a part of at the time. And people could cite scientific literature and use terminology to make their stance sound reasonable, and, more importantly, RIGHT. Like, there were discussions about the type of mercury in vaccines.
I opted for Vitamin K and Hep B at birth, but deliberately selected a provider for my kids who was known to be flexible on vaccination schedules. I was going by the Dr. Sears (and RFK ally) schedule. I was a SAHM and my kids were breastfed, so I figured most didn’t apply to them anyway.
She never said why and this was many years ago, so I’d be surprised if she delays it now, but that was hard to ignore. Then I got pregnant again, and, deciding that I wanted more autonomy over my care, I fell headfirst into all things natural childbirth and parenting. This was 2009.
However. I developed HELLP Syndrome with my 1st child and my OB missed a lot of the signs. Additionally, he was rabidly anti-choice (south GA), so it was easy to dismiss his expertise. Then my 1st child’s pediatrician used a somewhat modified vaccine schedule that delayed the MMR vaccine.
I really never talk about this because it was so long ago and it’s embarrassing, but maybe it’s worth sharing while this debate rages—and it’s something I myself am interested in the research around. Caveat before starting: my kids are FULLY vaccinated including annual Covid and flu shots.
I’m hoping it’s his strong opinions on the subject that compel Nick Saban to have anything to do with the president’s anything.
I have been neck deep in pre and post Dobbs abortion policies in each state in the US for weeks now and I cannot overstate how difficult a task this is. I’m even finding outdated information on sites that are only accessible with a paid subscription.
Look, like many things, it landed much better in my head! 🤣
It was joke referencing the post that called parents who don’t vaccinate murderers
Yeah, exactly
Have you considered the fact that there may be hundreds of thousands of parents who want to murder other people’s children to get a leg up in the college admissions process (unclear what this means for their own unvaccinated children’s future).
Awesome, can’t wait to read it!
This is amazing and I’d love to see how it works in practice (do you and Greer get into that in the paper?).
Fingers crossed you’re able to salvage something!
She also told me that while people died from abortion all the time, no one had ever died from being pregnant.
Which I recalled several months later when I was diagnosed with HELLP Syndrome, a severe form of preeclampsia that definitely causes death and is only addressed by ending the pregnancy.
This is such an important article.
I visited a CPC in Maryland when I was doing repro work there in 2007. The way these people will lie with impunity is just astounding. The “counselor” I had told me that the local PP—which I worked for—had had several deaths “recently,” which was a blatant lie.
From what I saw, it often started during pregnancy and around childbirth and got worse with information around breastfeeding, all of which led people to seek information in environments that were ripe for vaccine mis and disinformation.
This is what I’m most interested in. What are the disruptions to the pathways to being anti-vaxx? IME, a lot of it starts when people develop a mistrust of clinicians that stems from a lack of knowledge, understanding, or flexibility on the part of the clinician.
