Category Archives: Trust and Distrust

Religious Vaccine Exemptions

Epidemics/Pandemics, Mennonites, Trust and Distrust

 

I recall that during the Covid-19 pandemic religion became intertwined in the vaccine issue.  To me that seemed weird. What do vaccines have to do with religion?

 

Well religion is involved in many issues: sex, gender, politics, war, and many others. So why not vaccines too?

 

For a while, some people were requesting religious exemptions for vaccine mandates. I was puzzled by this.

 

Mennonite Church Canada (often called The General Conference of Mennonites) got involved and published this in its October 1, 2021 edition of Canadian Mennonite:

 

“Mennonite Church Canada’s executive ministers released a statement earlier this week responding to inquiries from constituents regarding exemption from COVID-19 vaccines.

 

The message, signed by Doug Klassen (Mennonite Church Canada), Garry Janzen (MC B.C.), Tim Wiebe-Neufeld (MC Alberta), Ryan Siemens (MC Saskatchewan), Michael Pahl (MC Manitoba) and Leah Reesor-Keller (MC Eastern Canada), states the following:

 

For a religious exemption to be granted, rationale for exemption must be clearly indicated within our sacred texts or confessional statements.

We wish to clarify that there is nothing in the Bible, in our historic confessions of faith, in our theology or in our ecclesiology that justifies granting a religious exemption from vaccinations against COVID-19.

“I have heard concerns from some members of our constituency regarding the vaccines. However, we do not believe these concerns justify an exemption from COVID-19 vaccinations on religious grounds from within a Mennonite faith tradition.”

 

 

Other religious groups felt differently. In Winnipeg the Springs Church, which is attended by many Mennonites but I don’t believe is affiliated with any Mennonite organizations, made the decision to provide religious exemptions to their members.

 

The Canadian Mennonite justified their position this way:

“For a religious exemption to be granted, rationale for exemption must be clearly indicated within our sacred texts or confessional statements.

We wish to clarify that there is nothing in the Bible, in our historic confessions of faith, in our theology or in our ecclesiology that justifies granting a religious exemption from vaccinations against COVID-19.

We have heard concerns from some members of our constituency regarding the vaccines. However, we do not believe these concerns justify an exemption from COVID-19 vaccinations on religious grounds from within a Mennonite faith tradition.”

 

Presumably similar issues would apply in the case of measles vaccines though they have been around for decades.

 

Mennonites are a very diverse group. But the facts clearly indicate that many communities with large numbers of Mennonites also have large numbers of people who decline to take vaccines. This is particularly true in those communities where there is a significant distrust of government and authority. That is why some governments have chosen to provide messaging to the people in Low German. I believe that in the areas particularly hard hit by measles in Ontario, there are significant numbers of such Mennonites.

 

A Sad Tale of Measles in Canada

Epidemics/Pandemics, Health, Trust and Distrust, Vaccines

 

In 1988 Canada declared measles was totally eliminated from the country.  That was a happy day. But that was then; this is now. Sadly, things have changed and not for the better.  And Mennonites are central to this sad tale.

First, let’s look at Ontario, then let’s look at Alberta, and then Manitoba.

In May of this year, just over a month ago, CBC’s podcast  Front Burner tackled the subject of what it called “a measles epidemic in Canada.”  That is pretty strong language. Is it justified?

On that show Jayme Poisson pointed out that “Measles case numbers in Ontario are higher than the total registered cases of the entire United States. As of today, it is 1,646 cases since January.” Shockingly, she pointed out that measles was spreading on a per capita basis even faster in Alberta!

 Public health experts have said that unless Canada turns this around measles will again be endemic to our country. Why?  Because ignorance is on the rise. She did not say that. I said that.

CBC senior health reporter Jennifer Yoon explained how things had got out of control in Canada.

Hm. Just sticking with Ontario here, what do we know about how this outbreak started and spread? Yoon then jumped right in to a Mennonite connection:

 

“We know that it really started in October. So there was a wedding, a Mennonite wedding, in New Brunswick. Somebody went to the wedding and then came back to Ontario, and they started spreading measles. Public health officials said they never really got it under control, and the cases that we’re seeing right now are by and large connected with that outbreak. Not all, but most of them are.”

 

Think about that “most” measles cases in Canada are connected to that outbreak.  Poisson stepped in to make it clear that the CBC did not want to be heard blaming Mennonites. It wouldn’t do for the CBC to do that. This is what she said,

 

“I wanna be careful here about not blaming or unfairly singling out Mennonite communities, because, of course, we know that there are cases not in Mennonite communities. But we do know also that many of the outbreaks in the U.S. as well have been in Mennonite and other Anabaptist communities. And what do we know about why that is?”

I of course have no such limitations. Actually I do. I live here and would prefer not to be run out of town. Yoon did not want to stigmatize Mennonites:

 

“So what you said there about stigma is absolutely what public health officials are thinking about. We know for sure that these are communities that, um, have historic objections for vaccinations for generations. Public health officials have said that they have religious objections, they have historically low vaccination rates. But some of them have not said that these are Mennonite communities. Ontario’s top doctor, Kieran Moore, did come out at the beginning and said that these are Mennonite communities. But it doesn’t really matter if you’re Mennonite or not. If you’re unvaccinated, you’re not protected. So that’s the kind of messaging that public health has been trying to give.”

 

Let me say that I was brought up in a Mennonite community and attended regularly, a Mennonite church until I was 18.  And I have never heard anything about the ill effects of vaccines in church.  But a lot has changed since I was 18. Some Mennonites—not all—have developed some strange ideas about vaccines.

This issue came up in 2021 when there were discussions about religious freedom and Covid-19 vaccines. This astonished me. Like I said, I had never heard in our church or anywhere else that this was a religious issue.

What does religion have to do with vaccines? That’s for my next post.

Mennonites Spearhead the Charge of the Ignorant

Epidemics/Pandemics, Health, Mennonites, The Sleep of Reason, Trust and Distrust, Vaccines

 

I have already commented on how the dangerous measles outbreak in the southern USA.  Now there is more news of Mennonite leading the charge of the ignorant in Canada.

Decades of research around the world has shown that there are no miracle treatment for measles, but the M.M.R. measles vaccine is 97 percent effective in preventing the disease. That really is stunning success, yet it does not seem to impress the impressionable vaccine deniers in both Canada and the US. And many of those deniers, it turns out, are Mennonites.  Mennonites seem to be punching above their weight in turns of measles vaccine denial. This is not a record we Mennonites of which  should be proud.

 

Mennonites have been encouraged in their denial by Donald Trump and his Secretary of State.  In the United States approximately 82% of Evangelical Christians have consistently supported Donald Trump. No other group has been as loyal to Trump no matter what crimes he commits. Felon or not, Evangelicals like Trump. As a result, they also like Trump’s Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy Jr.  I want to pursue that link. What is the fundamental basis of Evangelicals’ “faith” in Trump? Why is it so unshakeable?

I think that word “faith” is important and will come back to in future posts. Recently in the US the Americans have experienced the largest single measles outbreak in the past 25 years. I have already posted about this on March 1, 2025  (see https://themeanderer.ca/mennonites-lead-the-charge-against-health-protections/) I want to dig deeper into this weird connection between science denial and Mennonites. Actaully it is not that weird.

 

Recently, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has directed American health officials  to explore potential new treatments for the measles disease such as the effectiveness of vitamins, even though there is no significant scientific evidence to suggest vitamins might be the answer.  And let me be clear, there is nothing wrong with testing or studying new approaches to public health problems.  However, we must be careful not to deflect attention or resources away from more likely solutions as a result of such research.  It could be that knowing there is a possibility that vitamins will protect people, many might think it would be smart to avoid the proven and effective vaccines in favor of false hopes of more acceptable measures such as vitamins.

Frankly, I was very surprised to read in the New York Times about Mennonites have such a profoundly unwelcome influence in the United State. What is up with that? That is what I want to know. It will take me a few posts to get to the bottom of this.

 

This is what Teddy Rosenbluth of the New York Times said about Kennedy’s new approach:

“The decision is the latest in a series of actions by the nation’s top health official that experts fear will undermine public confidence in vaccines as an essential public health tool.”

 

 

Kennedy made the direction to his officials just as he was starting to feel a lot of backlash from the scientific community about his approach to the measles outbreak. Measles is sweeping through the American South-west, particularly in Mennonite communities where vaccination rates are so very low. Low vaccination rates inevitably mean more cases of measles because low rates erode group immunity.

In May of 2025 America experienced 930 cases of measles, most of which were associated with those communities and specifically Mennonite in those communities.  As Rosenbluth reported, “As an example of such a community, Mr. Kennedy pointed to the Mennonites in West Texas, who have experienced the brunt of the cases and hospitalizations in the current outbreak.”

 

This brings up the question that interests me. Why are Mennonites not trusting the science?

 

Vaccine Skeptic or Anti-vax?

Epidemics/Pandemics, Health, Trust and Distrust, Vaccines

 

R.F.K. Jr. has frequently denied that he is anti-vax despite the ample evidence to the contrary.  Dr. Paul A. Offit is another well-respected American pediatrician specializing in infectious diseases, vaccines, immunology, and virology. He is not a fan of R.F.K. Jr. In an interesting article in the New York Times he explained his view of Kennedy this way,

 

The news media labels Robert F. Kennedy Jr. a vaccine skeptic. He’s not. I’m an actual vaccine skeptic. In fact, everyone who serves with me on the Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine advisory committee is a vaccine skeptic. Pharmaceutical companies must prove to us that a vaccine is safe, that it’s effective. Then and only then will we recommend that it be authorized or licensed for use by Americans.

 

Mr. Kennedy, on the other hand, is a vaccine cynic, failing to accept studies that refute his beliefs. He claims that the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine causes autism, despite more than a dozen studies performed in seven countries on three continents involving thousands of children showing that it doesn’t.

 

Even though childhood vaccines have prevented more than 1 million deaths and 32 million hospitalizations in the past 30 years Kennedy says no vaccine is safe and effective.  That sounds pretty good to me.

Kennedy also claims vaccines were not properly studied before use. This also sounds good, but as Dr. Offit said, “When Mr”. Kennedy says he wants vaccines to be better studied, what he really seems to be saying is he wants studies that confirm his fixed, immutable, science-resistant beliefs. That’s not skepticism.”

 

As I have said before skepticism is good and important. We need skeptics to constantly keep scientists on their toes and alert to potential problems. Complacency is dangerous. But we need   skepticism based on good science and careful analysis. Not blather like that of so many vaccine skeptics. We must always remain skeptical of the skeptics too. Otherwise, they can do serious harm.

 

Dr. Offit says he is a skeptic. He needs proof that vaccines are safe and effective. He pointed out that he was on the Food and Drug Administration advisory committee which voted in favor of the  authorisation of the bivalent Covid vaccine which targeted both the original strain of the virus and Omicron variant, but he voted against its authorization because he was not convinced that the updated vaccine was better than the original. He said he and his colleagues debated the pros and cons vigorously.  Rigorous debate is essential for good science.

 

As a result he and his colleagues constantly ask question and examine new data and when warranted make changes. Sometimes the public is annoyed at the changes, but that is how science works. Nothing is baked in. Nothing is sacred. Even after the clinical trials are done they continue their surveillance systems because not all problems are picked up in the clinical trials. That was how they discovered the mRNA Covid-19 vaccines caused the heart condition myocarditis in about 1 in 50,000 people. They also discovered that the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine caused dangerous blood clotting in about 1 in 250,000. With that data they evaluated these rare harms against the enormous benefits and decided the vaccines should be continued. The benefits out weighed the harms.

 

Despite all this hard and effective scientific work he was annoyed when “Mr. Kennedy, on the other hand, has claimed that the Covid-19 vaccines, which have saved the lives of at least three million Americans, are “deadliest vaccine ever made.”

 

He knows that all vaccines have side-effects. It is impossible to avoid them. But he responded this way: “Yes, vaccines can cause side effects, but forgoing vaccination is also a risk… there are no risk-free choices.”

 

In other words, if you choose not to take the vaccine you are probably taking a much bigger risk.  Skeptics like R.F.K. Jr. make things harder for parents to make the right decision for their children because according to Dr. Offit, he “he has cited and ignored data that doesn’t support his conclusions.”  And that creates mistrust of vaccines and the authorities in charge of them and that can be very dangerous for society.

 

Dr. Offit in his article ended with the expression of an ominous concern: “Given the lack of appropriate guardrails that would normally prevent an anti-vaccine activist, science denialist and conspiracy theorist from heading the country’s most important public health agency, it’s a dangerous time to be a child in the United States.”

 

I would add, that is also true of Canada.

 

And that’s not where we want to be.

Robert Kennedy After the Pandemic

Epidemics/Pandemics, Health, Trust and Distrust

 

After the pandemic, PBS Newshour had this to say about RFK Jr.:

 

“Post-pandemic, Kennedy has continued to criticize the recommended vaccine schedule for children that is put out by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as adult COVID and flu vaccines.”

 

At the same time he vociferously denied he was anti-vax when he was trying to get approved by the Senate for the position of Secretary of Health, arguably the most important position in government in relation to public health.

 Here is Kennedy’s exact statement which was shown on PBS News Hour:

 

Question:

 

Can you name any vaccines that you think are good?

 

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Health and Human Services Secretary Nominee:

 

I think some of the live virus vaccines are probably solve — averting more problems than they’re causing. There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective.

Kennedy has claimed he is not anti-vax but that seems about as clearly anti-vax as you can get. And Trump appointed him to be his Secretary of Health, nonetheless.

 

Dr. Michael Osterholm put it very clearly:

 

“Let’s be really clear about the fact he is an anti-vaccine messenger, and he has continued to be, and we have many, many examples of that.

 

The second thing is, is that, in this country, and, for that matter, throughout the world, when vaccines are licensed and approved, all the safety data that goes into licensing that vaccine is made public, nothing hidden in a vault somewhere that, if it were just opened up, the public would now have sunshine on a vaccine issue they didn’t have before.

 

Dr. Osterholm also warned that by appointing R.F.K. to such a prestigious position, it will inevitably weaken the vaccine policy of the government and limit uptake of vaccines across the country,

“by lending a veneer of legitimacy to his many disproven claims, allowing him to influence the licensing of new vaccines, and by firing many of the public health experts at HHS.”

 

And as we have seen by the Measles outbreaks in the US and Canada, this is exactly what happened. Unfortunately, Dr. Osterholm was proven right. He then ominously concluded,

 

“As we have more and more infections occur as a result of fewer and fewer people being vaccinated, within literally a few years, we could be back into a period not that dissimilar to what we had happening in the early 1900s, before vaccines. That’s hard for people to imagine.”

 

It may be hard to imagine, but that is precisely where we now are. Thanks to Trump and Kennedy and others, we have regressed more than 100 years.

 

Recently, Kennedy fired all 17 physicians on his Vaccine Advisory Panel. He didn’t like the advice he got from any of them!  Some of the physicians he has replaced them with have been far from conventional.  Does Kennedy know what he is doing? There is no evidence that he does.  Frankly, to me, the fact that he was appointed by Trump makes me think he does not. It would be an unusual Trump appointment if he did. I hope I am wrong. These positions are two important to get it wrong.

 

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: the Lawyer who Thinks he is a physician

Conspiracy Theories, Death of Truth, Epidemics/Pandemics, Health, Trust and Distrust

 

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (R.F.K.Jr.) became famous early in life as an environmental lawyer. He was a pretty good one too.

Later he morphed into a conspiracy theorist and a maverick health advocate. How did that happen?  Perhaps it happened because his years of fighting corporations and the government he developed scepticism about everything the authorities told him.  That was likely a rational response to the situations he was in.

Sadly, after that promising start, RFK Jr. started to flounder. In a way he began to think that as a smart lawyer he knew everything and was virtually a physician. He is not a physician. I hate to say it, but lawyers have this uncomfortable tendency.

As a result, the scientific community has been strongly opposed to many of his views, which are in their opinion, not just maverick, but contrary to good science. We need good science, but we also need dissenters.  They keep us on our toes. They can show us how the comfortable majority can be wrong. We must always remember that we can be wrong. However, we must not let our scepticism poison us to good evidence, good science, and good reasoning.

Michael Thomas Osterholm is an American epidemiologist, and Regents Professor at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, and director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. He is also a vocal opponent of R.F.K. Jr.

This is what he said about R.F.K. Jr. on PBS Newshour: “He is a voice machine that continues to put out dis and mis-information in such a way that it sounds believable to the public.”

Frankly, Kennedy has a history of spreading misinformation. As William Brangham of PBS News Hour reported in December of 2024,

“In 2005, Kennedy wrote an article for “Rolling Stone” magazine and Salon that asserted a connection between autism and a mercury-containing vaccine additive called thimerosal. Thimerosal was removed from childhood vaccines in 2001 and it was never used in the MMR vaccine. After that piece ran, the two publications discovered multiple errors in his work and they retracted it. A decade later, Kennedy joined a group called the World Mercury Project, which a few years later became the Children’s Health Defense, which is a nonprofit that has been a principal promoter of misinformation about vaccines.”

 

According to Derek Beres, Co-Host of Conspirituality: “That’s when it seems that he really got embedded in the anti-vax world.” Beres, according to PBS Newshour, has long been tracking RFK. Jr. and his influence about the intersection of the wellness industry and online conspiracies.

According to William Brangham from PBS Newshour,

“Months before the COVID pandemic began, Kennedy met with anti-vaccine advocates on the island nation of Samoa, which had seen a huge drop in its vaccine rates after a medical mistake killed two children. In late 2019, there was a Measles outbreak there; 83 people died, many of them young children.”

 

Kennedy later called the outbreak — quote — “mild” and denied playing any role in it. When COVID-19 arrived in the U.S., many Americans became frustrated with the evolving and sometimes conflicting guidance on wearing masks and the protections provided by vaccines, as well as the many stay-at-home orders, which impacted schools, churches, and businesses across the nation. That frustration became highly politicized, and donations surged to Kennedy’s non-profit, which went on to finance the documentary series called “Plandemic,” which alleged that a shadowy group was using the coronavirus and vaccines to get rich and powerful.

 Would you call 83 deaths on a small island a “mild” outbreak?

 That documentary series has had an enormous effect on Americans and Canadians, including the Reeve of the R.M. of Labroquerie Louis Weiss, a few miles from my house,  when he quoted misinformation during the Covid-19 pandemic here in Manitoba that got him into trouble and helped to make this area here, for awhile at least, the hotbed of Canadian anti-vax hysteria.

This is what Beres told PBS about that documentary series supported by R.F.K. Jr.:

“I cannot think of anything more consequential for the anti-vax movement than “Plandemic.” It struck an emotional chord at a time when everyone was locked inside and really confused about their own lives and about existence in general. And it’s understandable that you would be confused by what’s happening if you have never experienced it, but that doesn’t give people the right to spread misinformation to the level that “Plandemic” did. And I think we’re going to be feeling the consequences of that propaganda film for generations.”

 

People began to believe that bad actors had planned the pandemic. This led to a spate of wild conspiracy theories. That is the fruit of Kennedy’s work. And now, thanks to Trump, he is the US Secretary of Health.

 

Vaccine Success Story

Critical thinking, Epidemics/Pandemics, Health, Trust and Distrust

 

I first heard about Robert F. Kennedy many years ago when he was a well-respected environmental lawyer. But that was then. This is now.

 

Now many people consider him an extremist on matters of health and the environment. They think he has gone over the top. Yet Donald Trump appointed him as Secretary of Health. Then things got crazy. As Trump himself, “I told him to go wild with health.” He seemed to some to a radical but good choice. Others have gone apoplectic in opposition. Where does the truth lie?

 

This past winter Christiane and I spent 2 months living on Vancouver Island.  My hiking companion, let’s call him Bob, was an enthusiast for health and was an iconoclast who greatly admired Robert F. Kennedy Jr.  He was a little younger and a lot more fit than I was. We had a friendly argument on our way home after a marvelous hike in the local rain forest. In the end we agreed to disagree on friendly terms.  But I decided I should do a little more research on my own as my friend Bob had done.  I wanted my research which would be conducted on line to include only reliable sources such as internationally respected infectious disease specialists I knew about from my experiences listening to speakers on TV during the Covid-19 pandemics about whom some of them are.

 

One of those was Dr. Michael Osterholm who directs the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. I had heard him many times and he was frequently consulted by many others. I decided I would respect his opinion.  Fortunately, he had recently been interviewed by PBS News Hour, another trusted source in my opinion.

 

On that television show I heard that

 

“More than 75 Nobel laureates [in December of 2024] signed a letter asking the U.S. Senate not to confirm health and human services secretary nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr., citing his opposition to vaccines among their concerns.”

 

William Brangham, the PBS interviewer began by citing what I had always believed:

 

Vaccines are easily one of modern medicine’s most successful interventions. Over the past two centuries, they virtually eradicated diseases like smallpox, polio, measles, and many others that once regularly disfigured, disabled, and killed hundreds of millions of people around the world, many of them children.

 

 

Yet millions of Americans and Canadians, including people I know personally, believed that vaccines were dangerous, poorly studied, and promulgated by an anxious  government of whom we should be suspicious.

 

Dr. Michael Osterholm made this opening statement:

 

…the bottom line is, for every two days we have lived in the last century, we have gained a day of life expectancy. That’s incredible. And it’s because of these tools, notably vaccines, that that’s happened.

 

Vaccines have truly been a remarkable success. Some have said they might be the greatest medical achievement of the 20th century. We should not reject them out of hand unless we had good reasons for doing so.

As William Brangham, correctly pointed out:

 

That’s not to say there are no risks to them, including occasional allergic reactions, injuries, and, in rare cases, deaths. And public health experts like Osterholm say it is important to examine and continually monitor any adverse effects. But, on balance, those risks are far lower than those of the diseases they’re protecting against.

 

Dr. Michael Osterholm put this into graphic context so even a simple man like I could understand it:

 

If, today, I were in an automobile accident and I had my seat belt on, but somehow the seat belt jammed and I was unfortunately trapped in the car and the car caught on fire, this would be a horrible tragedy. Would anybody say, we’ve got to eliminate seat belts now? No, because, in fact, there have been many, many, many more lives saved because of seat belts as opposed to not.

 

Yet, we face a small but growing and very vocal minority of Americans and Canadians who have been rebelling against the scientific and medical orthodoxy.  These people, such as Bob and the real estate agent I met in Tempe Arizona, at the conference I mentioned in a previous post, as well as Christiane’s cousin have been refusing to accept the majority opinion about all kinds of vaccines. Over the past couple of decades, there has been a small, but growing vocal minority pushing back against vaccines because of what they have perceived to be substantial harms, including the widely debunked claim that the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine causes autism. That was based on an article in a widely respected medical journal “The Lancet” published in England in the 1990s by a doctor Andrew Wakefield. I also learned that he had lost his medical license as a result of that scientific paper which the Lancet subsequently withdrew.

 

Since then, Robert F. Kennedy who was trained as an environmental lawyer became an important player in the anti-vax movement that followed the publication of the original paper, now withdrawn.

 

So where does the truth lie? I think it likely lies with science. We must look at science with a critical eye, but there really is no better source for good health information. Not even lawyers. Not Robert F. Kennedy. And not me either.

Why are Governments not Trusted?

Death of Truth, Decline of the west, Epidemics/Pandemics, Health, Neo-liberalism, Oligarchy, Social democracy, Social Democracy and Trust, Trust and Distrust

 

As I mentioned in my last post, a lot of hesitance to trust vaccines is a result of distrust of government. This is a shame, because particularly in troubling times such as pandemics, it is essential that people trust their government about the information they give about vaccines or other health measures.  Distrust in government is not a laughing matter.  Distrust in government is a very costly matter.

 

Figuring out why governments are not trusted is a tricky thing.  Nesrine Malik said this about citizens of her country of Sudan who believed the government could not be trusted in giving them good vaccines for free:

 

This sounds like completely irrational behaviour, but in fact it is the opposite. In countries such as Sudan, nothing good, and certainly nothing free, comes from the state. The government is an extractive body that exists not to serve citizens, but to rifle through their pockets and charge them for going about their daily business. Corruption is endemic – from bribing one’s way through traffic violations, to being forced to use private hospitals because government cronies have hoarded medical technology. The state is something that you thrive in spite of. The government’s communication reflects this uneasy relationship. Officials speak to the public either to scold them or spread propaganda, and dissent is banned; in Egypt, doctors who contradicted the government’s account of the pandemic were arrested, while oxygen tanks ran out in intensive care units in Cairo.

 

We tend to learn from experience. Our own experience. In Sudan the consistent experience of people with the government is that it will try to screw the citizens in favor of their cronies. They are naturally reluctant to believe that free vaccines are given to them for the welfare of the people. After all, their government has rarely considered the welfare of the people. This is called crony capitalism, or in extreme cases, oligarchy. Oligarchs won’t hesitate to use their power to screw us. That is what they do all around the world. And in Canada and the US the trajectory is in the direction of oligarchy.

 

In the US they are increasingly nearing oligarchy, if they are not there already. The rich in the US who have the ear of the government use that power to ensure that money is not “wasted” on public health. Many of the health insurance companies do all they can to maximize their profits even at the expense of their customers. Christiane and I have recently experienced a most bizarre version of this that I must blog about some day.

 

As Nesrine Malik said in her Guardian article: “Suspicion is easily sown, because political systems don’t need to be fully authoritarian to sustain exploitative and dishonest regimes that breed mistrust.” Americans know that pharmaceutical companies earn enormous profits. You might even say, as Malik did, “outrageous profits.”  In the UK during the Covid-19  pandemic people were reluctant to trust the government because journalists revealed how their government kept changing the rules while leaders refused to obey the rules themselves. We had that in Canada too. We have no vaccine against corruption. Or ignorance for that matter.  As Malik said, “State failure breeds paranoia. And when trust in government breaks down, people turn to personal vigilance.”

 

This is what Nesrine Malik said,

 “Vaccine rejection doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It’s easier to dismiss hesitancy and conspiracies as unhinged behaviour; it makes us feel less unnerved by displays of unreason from those who we think are, or should be, rational people. Sure, among vaccine-hesitant people are those who are simply stubborn, misanthropic or selfish. But, just as the pandemic exploited the weaknesses of our economic and public health systems, vaccine hesitancy has exposed the weaknesses of states’ bond with their citizens. There are no easy answers for how to deal with those who repeat conspiracy theories and falsehoods, but scrutinising the systems that lost their trust is perhaps a good place to start.”

 

I think Malik makes a lot of sense. It is not a simple answer to a complex problem. It is a complex answer, as it should be. 

In the west, since the time of extreme neo-liberalism of Saint Ronny Reagan, the Iron Lady, Maggie Thatcher, and to a lesser extent their dedicated follower Brian Mulroney anti-government propaganda has flourished since the 1980s as Americans and Canadians have been fed a steady diet of dubious claims that the state is unreliable and predatory.  As Saint Ronald Reagan said, “the most scary 11 words in the English language are, ‘I am from the government and I have come to help.’ For decades, conservative political leaders have repeated over and over and over again that the government cannot be trusted.

As a result many of us believe this. And that is a costly mistake. This is all part of neo-liberal dogma/propaganda that the government can’t be trusted only the private sector is worth our trust.

Of course, this ideology has for decades served the interests of the wealthy who care most about minimizing their personal or corporate taxes. This ideology is now so prevalent that even people whose best interests would be served by government are reluctant to accept its help. Governments provide many things of enormous value including hospitals, roads, libraries, universities, parks, environmental regulations, health and safety standards to name only a few. Governments are important!  And vaccines are a very important part of this. For decades we have been taught, and many of us believed, that governments are bad and private enterprise is good. Now we are paying a heavy price for blindly following that ideology.

Vaccine Hesitancy and Distrust of Government

Epidemics/Pandemics, Trust and Distrust

 

Years after I first heard about vaccine hesitancy, I learned that a cousin of Christiane and her financial wizard of a husband, also believed the Covid-19 vaccines were unsafe. They tried to persuade their elderly and smart mother not to take them. Remember that at the time scientists were telling us all that the elderly were particularly at risk from Covid-19 and all of them should take the vaccines as soon as possible. The mother of her cousin consulted with her son who was a scientist.  He told his mother, in no uncertain terms, that her daughter and son-in-law were out to lunch. “Trust the scientists,” he said.

Who should you trust?

One of my favorite writers, not a physician, but a smart journalist, is Nesrine Malik writing for The Guardian, a respected political journal.  She understands politics well. Medicine not so much.

This is what Malik  said in an article in that magazine during the Covid-19 pandemic:

“People with the wildest theories about the pandemic can be found in countries even where most people don’t have access to the internet, cable TV or the shock jocks of commercial radio. A common impulse is to write off those espousing conspiracies, consigning them to the casualties claimed by WhatsApp groups, disinformation or silent mental health issues. These things may be true – but vaccine hesitancy is a symptom of broader failures. What all people wary of vaccines have in common, from Khartoum to Kansas is their trust in the state has been eroded. Without understanding this, we will be fated to keep channelling our frustrations towards individuals without grasping why they have lost trust in the first place.”

 

That run a bell for me.  I have attended anti-vax rallies. I have listened to vaccine deniers. I have heard their views.  I have listened to them and talked to them. Mistrust of the state and the government are in fact, from my limited experience, a common element.

In fact, as Malik wrote,

“This mistrust can run so deep that people will trust almost any source of information other than the government. In my birthplace of Sudan, fewer than 1% of the population have been fully vaccinated and ventilators are even rarer than vaccines. The story is much the same in several other African countries, where vaccine availability is so poor that people will drop everything and head to a hospital based on nothing but a rumour that free shots are available that day. But for many other people, those rare lifesaving vaccines sound suspiciously like too much of a good thing.”

 

In some of these places, distrust of government is well-founded.  In places like Canada, mistrust of government by indigenous people is well-founded. They know what it is like to be lied to by the government and to suffer the dangerous consequences.

Malik said that even in her family in Sudan two vulnerable members of her family had heard a rumour that an electrical power shortage, which happens there a lot, had resulted in the vaccines being improperly stored and hence were dangerous. When Sudan got a new batch, many of the people believed that “the West” had sent them rejected vaccines to test them on foreign humans. They wanted first to use African guinea pigs while getting favourable PR before trying the batches on their own people. Again, for a country recently colonized such theories were not as whacky as they might sound to us.

Distrust of governments in such places is understandable. What about Canada or the United States?

The Miracle of Vaccines?

Epidemics/Pandemics, Health, Trust and Distrust

Few things have surprised me as much as vaccine hesitancy.  The first time I remember coming across this phenomenon was at a conference at Arizona State University which Christiane and I attended.  It was a conference organized by SCETL, their School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership. It was our first of many annual conferences we attended there. Attending their annual spring conference was a highlight of our trip down south each year. And they also served us lunch. That year they even gave us wine. All of this for free. They had professors from universities around the country and even Europe and Canada speaking. It was fantastic. And they opened it for members of the public. Christiane and I were a bit nervous the first time we attended, thinking, naturally we did not belong. These were top academics and journalists and thinkers from around the world. But we enjoyed it immensely.

 

For lunch that first year we sat at a round table and were joined by a real estate salesperson. She was also an ordinary citizen like us but enjoyed exploring new ideas, like us.  But she shocked me. She countered a statement that one of the professors had made about autism not being caused by vaccines. She said she had done a lot of research and it was now very clear that vaccines were dangerous and did actually cause autism. “We should never take them,” she said. We should never allow our family members to take them either.

 

I had never heard of this idea before. It surprised me because I had always been a staunch advocate of vaccines since as a young lad terrified of polio during the polio pandemic of the 1950s.  I remember hearing that some people who had polio would have to live most of their entire lives inside an iron lung. Even children my age could be subjected to that. How awful was that? We had a polio victim down the street from us. He was not in an iron lung but I feared for him. Even more I feared for me. It was very scary. The disease affected many young children like me and they were kept alive by these iron lungs.

 

Then like a miracle from God a polio vaccine was discovered.  It could protect us from such a fate. Later I realized this was not a miracle from God, it was a miracle of science. Scientists were so smart they figured out how to save us from these dreadful iron lungs.

 

Then years later as a pretty old man in Arizona State University, I was told that  these vaccines were not safe. How could that be? This was before Covid-19 when I learned many people distrusted the Covid-19 vaccines. I, again, was overjoyed when these vaccines were made available.  Who was I to believe? The real estate agent or scientists I heard on TV or read about in respected journals?  I did a little research too. And it indicated there was a crazy conspiracy theory going around that vaccines caused autism.

 

To me the issue was clear. I would not believe the real estate agent even though she had seemed intelligent and sincere. She knew a lot about vaccines. At least compared to me.  I doubted that she learned more on the Internet than these respected scientists. It just seemed highly unlikely. But I was determined to learn more.