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Documentary Examines Debate Around Vaccines Amid Growing Politicization

As winter turned to spring in early 2020, Laura Davis and Tjardus Greidanus were working on a film about vaccines. They were focused on the increasingly politicized debate around them, especially in California, and explored how laws were tightened after a notorious measles outbreak at Disneyland in 2014, despite some protests and organized opposition.

"Wait a minute, measles was declared eradicated in the United States in the year 2000, so what is going on?" Davis, based in Los Angeles,  said in an interview with the Bay Area News Group. They started talking to experts, "trying to paint a picture for our viewers of what a pandemic looks like," she said. "Then maybe two months after we started the film, COVID hits."

The novel coronavirus would have profound effects on the film, the global conversation around vaccines and the greater world.

As the ground-breaking mRNA COVID vaccine was being developed, at "warp speed," the filmmakers adjusted their angle. "Now we're not talking about Ebola or something that happened in Asia, we're talking about something that is sweeping our country."

COVID would result in over 800,000 deaths around the country in the first two years.

The roll-out of a COVID-19 vaccine in late 2020 and early 2021 marked at least a symbolic end to the most extreme pandemic precautions, like school closures and work-from-home orders, allowing those most at risk some protection amid continued widespread community transmission of the virus.

But the COVID vaccine would also bring a renewed public debate around vaccines. "Sadly, the anti-vaccine community began to co-opt the pandemic and started spinning conspiracy theories," said Dr. Todd Wolynn, a Pennsylvania-based pediatrician interviewed in the film.

The message of the film, Virulent: The Vaccine War, is more important now than when they first started working on it, Davis believes. While the COVID vaccine proved effective at lowering serious illness, hospitalization and deaths, vaccine mandates were not received well by many, and vaccine skepticism grew.

One of the experts interviewed in the film had a prescient prediction, that skepticism and fear of the COVID vaccine would create fear of all vaccines. "I said, I hope you're wrong," Davis recalls. "But he was right."

Now, fewer people are getting the annual COVID vaccine than in the first two years it was available, and vaccination rates for other infectious diseases have also dropped in the past few years. Childhood vaccinations were delayed during pandemic shutdowns and overall progress on vaccination rates for measles in California was stalled.

This year saw the country's first measles deaths in over a decade; two unvaccinated children died amid a large outbreak in Texas.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Is the nation's health secretary now, and in his first press conference announced his intentions to to research "the origins" of the "epidemic" of autism, which he said now affects 1 in 31 children. Autism and childhood vaccinations have long been falsely associated, including by the non-profit Kennedy founded, Children's Health Defense. And Kennedy's comments about those with autism never paying taxes or playing baseball have been met with widespread criticism.

Kennedy was interviewed for the film, and did not hold back his opinions, Davis said. Kennedy had many citations, she sad, but some of the research he cited did not back up the conclusions he claimed they did.

The filmmakers went beyond celebrities and experts, also talking to regular people, including some residents of the Bay Area, about their own hesitancy, and how their views have or have not changed.

"We come down hard on the people that are making bank," Davis said of those who are profiting off of stoking fears about vaccine safety, "but we take a very sympathetic approach, an empathetic approach" to the regular people who are just afraid. Davis said many people worry about the vaccine not being "natural." "We get into that a lot in the film… but disease is natural, you know? So nature is not automatically better."

The filmmakers were surprised and grateful that PBS chose to distribute the film amid the political and public health climate of Trumps' second administration. PBS is making the available for anyone to watch online.

Originally Published: April 24, 2025 at 10:42 AM PDT

How To Talk About Vaccines In An Era Of Scientific Mistrust

When Carli Leon heard the news of a child who died in February during the current measles outbreak in West Texas—the first child to die of measles in the U.S. Since 2003—her initial reaction was "That could have been my kid."

Leon, a 42-year-old mother of two in Cleveland, Ohio, had always intended to vaccinate her children. But then, while pregnant with her first child in 2012, a family she nannied for suggested she read a book that claimed to describe the dangers of vaccines. "It just snowballed from there," Leon recalls. As a soon-to-be first-time mom, Leon says, she was lonely, and the idea that vaccines could injure her kids scared her. She was quickly welcomed into the antivaccine community, where she found a sense of belonging. She began fearing the risks of vaccines more than the risks of diseases she had never seen—precisely because vaccination had made them so rare.

"I wasn't stupid," she says. "I was just getting brainwashed."

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Fears about vaccines have been around since the first one was developed against smallpox in the late 1700s, but vaccine hesitancy has risen in recent years. Now ongoing measles outbreaks reveal the growing threat it poses to public health. Researchers are learning what contributes to vaccine concerns and how people can effectively address them.

Why Is Vaccine Hesitancy on the Rise?

Many factors that are now driving vaccine hesitancy have been around for centuries, such as uneasiness with injecting a foreign substance into a healthy body and the impossible expectations for vaccines to be "100 percent safe," says Alison Buttenheim, a professor of nursing and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania. "What's different now," she says, "is the double whammy of the politicization of the pandemic and COVID vaccine and now the new [federal] administration."

Before COVID, vaccine hesitancy mostly clustered in certain groups, but the pandemic's barrage of misinformation amplified questions and doubts about vaccines. "A lot of people had no clue how toxic the [vaccine misinformation] environment was," says Heidi Larson, who studies vaccine hesitancy at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. "People who were taking vaccines for granted got exposed [to misinformation], and now there's no turning back."

Missed wellness appointments for children during the pandemic contributed to the recent national dip in childhood immunizations, but another factor was the spillover from COVID vaccine concerns. Multiple studies have documented the effect of COVID vaccine hesitancy on childhood immunization rates, including a reduced willingness among parents to vaccinate against measles.

"Certainly we're seeing more hesitancy across the board," says Nathan Boonstra, a pediatrician at Blank Children's Hospital in Des Moines, Iowa, and chair of the state's immunization coalition. Historically vaccination has had bipartisan support, and Boonstra has been frustrated as it has become increasingly politically polarized. "I'm worried that identity will strengthen, and we're going to see more hesitancy from people who align politically in a certain direction."

The problem is not confined to the U.S. A 2023 UNICEF report found childhood vaccine confidence declined during the pandemic in 52 out of 55 countries studied, and other countries are seeing similar political polarization around vaccines.

"The biggest driver of the decline [globally] was 18- to 34-year-olds, an age cohort that felt they had to compromise their lives the most for something that wasn't affecting them as badly," Larson says. But that age group is also most likely to make vaccination decisions for their children in the coming years.

The current spread of measles—with more than 700 cases across 24 states—is an alarming reminder of the high stakes around falling vaccination rates, says Paul Offit, an infectious diseases physician and director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

"The outbreak happened because a critical percentage of parents are choosing not to vaccinate their children because they're scared of vaccines," Offit says. He adds that a large part of that fear is a result of the decades-long advocacy against vaccines from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the new secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

In the weeks since taking the helm of the HHS, Kennedy has made several moves to stymie vaccine confidence, including canceling the Food and Drug Administration's advisory committee meeting to determine next year's flu vaccine, suggesting he will replace key vaccine advisors and postponing the next Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory committee meeting on vaccines. Recently, the National Institutes of Health—an agency overseen by the HHS—announced it will terminate dozens of grants for vaccine hesitancy research. "[Kennedy] believes there is a poison being given to children in this country that is causing chronic disease, and that poison is vaccines," Offit says. "It doesn't matter how many studies are done to show he's wrong."

In response to inquiries sent to Kennedy, HHS spokesperson Emily Hilliard said, "We can confirm the NIH is adjusting its funding priorities to better serve the American people, which includes a reduction in funding for vaccine hesitancy research." Hilliard also directed Scientific American to Kennedy's Fox News opinion piece about the current measles outbreak, where he notes the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine's effectiveness in prevention but also promotes vitamin A as a treatment. (Several children in West Texas are now receiving treatment for vitamin A toxicity.)

Shortly after publishing the op-ed, Kennedy made false or unsupported statements about measles and the measles vaccine during a Fox Nation interview. Offit also drew attention to Kennedy repeatedly stating that "the decision to vaccinate is a personal one," even though a population needs high, uniform levels of immunity—as high as 95 percent—to prevent the spread of measles because it's very contagious.

After a second child with measles died this month, Kennedy wrote on social media, "The most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine."

How to Effectively Discuss Vaccine Safety

In the response to Scientific American, the HHS's Hilliard highlighted "ongoing research into the safety and efficacy of vaccines" as a priority. Daniel Salmon, a vaccine safety researcher at Johns Hopkins University, is waiting to see how that pans out. Vaccine safety research has historically "been underfunded, slow and not very responsive to public concerns," he says. "I've long argued for the need for more ongoing vaccine safety science resources, but it's got to be good science—robust, objective, rigorous." Salmon, however, is nervous about how Kennedy might define high-quality vaccine safety science. In March federal officials announced the CDC—which is under the HHS—will conduct a study on vaccines and autism. Reportedly this investigation will be led by a widely discredited researcher who has published antivaccine papers and was disciplined for practicing medicine without a license.

Salmon says that subtle changes in how people talk about vaccine safety can help rebuild trust. For instance, he suggests stating that "vaccines are very safe" instead of broadly saying that "vaccines are safe." This can prevent mistrust when someone learns about extremely rare but possible adverse effects of vaccines. "Then explain that adverse reactions are either mild and transient or very rare," Salmon says. "People can handle the truth."

Leon recalls two pivotal moments that eventually led her to vaccinate her daughters. The first was seeing her antivaccine friends misinterpret study findings on vaccines for pertussis, or whooping cough—helping her to truly understand "cherry-picking" of results or statements in papers to support already held beliefs. The second moment was after her cesarean delivery, when a friend asked her, "Why don't you trust the science behind vaccines, but you trust the science of surgeons who perform that procedure?"

Her friend "just kept asking me very valid, logical questions," Leon says. "There was no animosity."

That approach is similar to motivational interviewing, a technique that University of Colorado vaccine hesitancy researcher Sean O'Leary says can be very effective. "The basic concept is having a conversation in such a way that a person makes a health behavior change because they now understand why that change fits with their own internal motivations," he says.

O'Leary also emphasizes the importance of reminding people that "the vast majority of parents are vaccinating their kids according to the recommended schedule," he says. "Refusing vaccines is still an outlier behavior." A small amount of outlying behavior still endangers the larger community, however, which is why experts agree that a key strategy in building vaccine confidence is to mobilize and engage those who do vaccinate, reinforcing those social norms.

"It's really more about just having good conversations, becoming a trusted messenger." —Sean O'Leary, vaccine hesitancy researcher, University of Colorado

Buttenheim suggests people pay attention to state legislative bills about vaccines, get to know their state legislators and "learn how to have productive conversations about difficult topics with people you love." But, she adds, have realistic expectations. "Beliefs and identity are tightly interwoven, so changing beliefs may require a painful—or impossible—shift in identity," she says.

When engaging in or observing conversations online, Boonstra encourages people to do so "in good faith." "You want them to see that you're presenting a good, logical, compassionate argument for vaccines," he says. "It's never going to happen in the moment. You might change their thinking over time."

It took several months of conversations with her friend before Leon came around. What changed her mind wasn't being bombarded with links from online arguments or "people telling [me] I was abusing my child"—an accusation that made her dig in her heels. O'Leary also advises avoiding arguments, which only "put people off. It's really more about just having good conversations, becoming a trusted messenger," he says.

Voices for Vaccines, a parent-led organization that works to increase vaccine confidence, has tool kits for talking about vaccines and courses on becoming a trusted messenger. Salmon recommends the online tool Let's Talk Shots for vaccine information based on people's specific concerns.

Not everyone may change their mind about vaccines, but some, like Leon, eventually do so with time. "What works is people asking questions and being relatively patient," Leon says. "I'm very thankful for people who helped me and stuck with me."

US Halts Funding For New COVID-19 Vaccines

The stop work orders affect the development of an intranasal vaccine for COVID-19 and an intravenous shot for immunocompromised people.

The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has issued stop work orders to GeoVax and CastleVax on the companies' development of new COVID-19 vaccines.

Development of these vaccines was partially funded by the Project NextGen initiative of the US Center for the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority. These are the second and third stop work orders issued to vaccine developers that received funding through Project NextGen; the first order went to Vaxart in February. Project NextGen is also funding the development of several other COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics.

The three companies issued stop work orders are developing COVID-19 vaccines that use new technology to improve effectiveness and tolerability. Vaxart is developing an oral vaccine pill, CastleVax is working on an intranasal vaccine, and GeoVax is developing a vaccine designed to be effective in immunocompromised people.

In February, Vaxart told C&EN via email that the firm was allowed to continue a 400-person cohort arm of its clinical trials while a 10,000-person cohort trial was paused. The stop work order is valid for 90 days, after which the grant will be extended, canceled, or terminated in its entirety.

Representatives for both GeoVax and CastleVax say their firm expects its grant to be terminated but that it plans to push on without the funding.

A GeoVax press release from earlier this month refers to the stop work order as "the termination of its Project NextGen (PNG) award." In an email to C&EN, GeoVax CEO David Dodd says that "the financial impact to GeoVax is estimated at less than $750,000 annually, toward reimbursement of existing personnel and overhead costs. GeoVax therefore does not anticipate any significant changes to its ongoing operations resulting from the contract termination." On April 24, GeoVax presented positive Phase 2b results of its COVID-19 vaccine at the World Vaccine Congress.

CastleVax CEO Michael Egan spoke to Endpoints News about the stop work order, saying that "it looks [to] me like it's a hard and fast stop-work order leading to termination, unfortunately." He adds that the company intends to continue developing the vaccine on its own.

In the past HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Has criticized vaccines, including repeating misinformation that suggests vaccines cause autism. Under his leadership, other HHS-sponsored vaccine research initiatives have been disrupted, including the cancellation of BioNTech's malaria vaccine trial and terminating grants related to understanding vaccine hesitancy and uptake.

C&EN reached out to the HHS for comment but did not receive a reply by the time of publication. In February, the HHS issued a statement to C&EN via email in response to an inquiry about the stop work order for Vaxart.

"While it is crucial that the U.S. Department and Health and Human Services support pandemic preparedness, four years of the Biden administration's failed oversight have made it necessary to review agreements for vaccine production," the statement reads.

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