The Spiritual Unscience Underlying the Anti-Vaxxer Movement
Passing what should be considered common sense legislation has led to the kind of frantic demonization represented by the lead graphic to this article.
Assemblyperson Lorena Gonzalez may not be perfect, but she's head and shoulders above officials content to get along to go along. She cares deeply about people and fights hard for what is right.
Battles have been fought in social media and in the state capitol over closing a loophole in the state’s 2015 vaccine legislation, which had already eliminated religious and personal exemptions for school vaccinations.
In recent months a spike of exemptions for medical reasons (PMEs for short) led to investigative reporting suggesting a handful of physicians were enabling those opposed to childhood vaccinations with questionable diagnoses.
Two factors common to these PMEs pointed in the direction of something hinky going on: payment was often in cash/outside the normal insurance claims process, and the children’s primary care physician was usually bypassed.
The new regulations contained in SB 276 create a standardized statewide medical exemption request to prevent doctors from issuing phony medical exemptions. A companion bill, SB 714, requested by Governor Newsom added some clarity to the language used.
State Senator Richard Pan, a practicing pediatrician, and San Diego’s Assemblyperson Lorena Gonzalez shepherded the legislation through both chambers in the face of constant protests and a social media campaign rife with misinformation and not-very-thinly-veiled personal threats.
Senator Pan was shoved in the back by a protester live streaming the confrontation. Assem. Gonzalez endured personal attacks on her family.
To add insult to injury, the opponents of these bill appropriated language of actual oppressed people to frame their cause as a civil rights issue. And then they borrowed a chant used by those who oppose racial justice.
https://twitter.com/LorenaSGonzalez/status/1171192951214526464?s=20
The entire opposition campaign reeked of white privilege. Watching videos of their protests was positively cringe inducing. Yet I’m sure those folks really believed in their cause.
Opposition to this legislation was based on two presumptions, namely that mandatory vaccinations were a conspiracy by big pharmaceutical companies, and an array of conspiratorial theories based on pseudoscience.
Governor Newsom has signed both bills, which take effect in 2021. This should be the end of the story, except that it’s not. I’m not referring to the empty promises of the anti-vaccination crowd about unseating or recalling legislators.
The unresolved part of the furious opposition expressed over the past few months is: “what is it that motivates these folks?
They're not stupid. They're not uneducated. So what gives?
As I was gathering materials for this post, a mention in a Guardian article sent me down an internet rabbit hole to where I stumbled upon some history that provided valuable insight into this question.
New data released this week backs up this analysis. The California schools with the highest exemption rates today—we’re talking rates of 40, 50, even 64 percent of a group of a few dozen kindergartners—had PME rates of zero five years ago. So five years ago, kindergarten classes at these schools had no children whose health was compromised to the degree that they could not medically handle immunizations. At the time, those same schools claimed very high PBE rates—ranging from 35 percent to 87 percent. About half of the schools with the highest PME rates are Waldorf schools. (Waldorf schools follow an educational model developed by Rudolf Steiner and Emil Molt that emphasizes bringing out each child’s individual potential in a way that serves humanity.)
Take Yuba River Charter, a Waldorf-affiliated school in Grass Valley, California. (Grass Valley is northeast of Sacramento, in a county where 10.6 percent of kids have a PME and only 80.3 percent are fully vaccinated.) In 2013, more than two-thirds of Yuba River Charter’s kindergartners claimed personal belief exemptions. Today, that figure is zero. But just 36 percent of students at the school are vaccinated, with the remainder claiming a permanent medical exemption. (Administrators did not respond to a request for comment.)
Let me start out this part of my post by saying I’m not attacking Waldorf schools. They’re not all the same, just as Montessori schools are different.
However, the underlying philosophy at the origin of this particular system has spread way beyond education. Too many outwardly normal people have been contaminated by its tenets.
The original school's curriculum was based on the teachings of Rudolf Steiner, a European mystic who, among other astonishing pronouncements, prophesied a worldwide racial apocalypse.
From a former student’s essay:
Throughout most of each day, throughout most of the curriculum, the spiritualistic vibe persisted. Eurythmy persisted. Misty watercoloring persisted. We sat through lessons on the shortcomings of science and the failings of modern technology. Our math classes were infused with Platonic idealism: The numbers, operators, and geometric figures we worked with were, we learned, rude shadows of their true, perfect counterparts residing in an ideal, supersensory region.
Without going too deeply into the subject, suffice it to say that questioning the scientific method in favor of a more mystical approach is baked into this philosophy. (Those who know more about this subject will undoubtedly be critical of my very abbreviated analysis; sorry about that but I didn’t think a much longer essay would be of value to most readers.)
Steiner and others of his school of thought hold that human beings are the originators of life; everything else has devolved from our “perfectness” over the millennia.
For Steiner and his followers, the truest thinking is not rational cognition or brainwork, which they deem dry and un-heartfelt. Steiner advocated an emotive form of "thinking" that—in contrast to cool, rational conceptualizing—often leads to complication or even mystification rather than to clarity. Ask yourself whether this is what you want for your children. Nothing in the physical world is as it seems. What we see around us isn’t what it is, exactly—there are layers upon layers of hidden deeps. The Anthroposophical solution is to feel one’s way past appearances by opening outwards through imagination or clairvoyance (in Anthroposophy, these terms are sometimes synonymous).
What we are talking about with regard to the most extremist anti-vaxxer types is a sort of individualism based on a spiritual plane, as opposed to ultra-libertarians, who base their world view on an economic plane.
While the anti-vaxxer movement claims concern for the well-being of their children is what motivates them, it’s ultimately about me, me, me… Because I know better than the rest of the world... And if you don’t agree, then you’re one of THEM...
Like the acolytes of Trump, there is little room for reasoning and even less room for fact with these folks. It’s not productive to have debate when basic truths are not shared.
***
I’ll be the first to rail against the evils of late stage corporate capitalism. I can talk for days about the depravity of big pharma, big ag, and/or big tech.
But conspiracy theories are no substitute for realism. In fact, by creating faux crises, they distract and divide us.
Big pharma isn’t going to succumb to protests against its products. One only need look at how they’re weaseling out of culpability for the widespread misery caused by opioids to understand.
We’re looking at a system; a system where the commons is privatized, where the welfare of people doesn’t count nearly as much as stock buybacks.
Changing all this won’t happen overnight. We didn’t get to where we are overnight, either. One leader can’t do this. Many leaders at every level of governance can.
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Email me at DougPorter@WordsAndDeedsBlog.com
Lead image via a Twitter account attacking Lorena Gonzalez.