| In early 2015, as news broke that a significant measles outbreak had hit Disneyland, Carl Krawitt was outraged.
His son Rhett had been battling leukemia since he was 2. That meant his immune system was too weak to handle routine childhood vaccines. A disease like measles could be extremely dangerous, so it was crucial that others around Rhett be vaccinated. But there was a problem: Rhett had recently started kindergarten in Marin County, a San Francisco suburb with triple the number of vaccine exemptions of the California average at the time. Measles requires more than 95% of kids to be vaccinated to prevent outbreaks. Krawitt was aghast that children couldn't take peanut butter to school because someone might be allergic, but it was OK for parents to forgo vaccinations for their kids and put his son's life at risk.
As millions of doses of Covid-19 vaccines roll out across the country, Krawitt's story provides an important lesson in the urgent necessity of mass vaccination. Every person who hesitates puts people like Rhett at greater risk. Yet it's a debate that's still raging five years later amid the global pandemic.
In the aftermath of the outbreak, the Krawitts began speaking out in support of a bill that sought to tighten state vaccine laws by getting rid of personal-belief exemptions. Rhett became the face of the bill, which passed. Vaccination rates went up, but there was an unintended consequence.
"The anti-vaxxers came out," Krawitt recalls in the third episode of "Doubt," a new podcast from Bloomberg Prognosis that explores vaccine hesitancy. "They threatened us, they threatened my kid. They told lies. And it was scary."  The Disneyland measles outbreak made clear that the number of people opting out of vaccination was significant. But it also changed the people protesting vaccines. Before that, activists speaking out mainly had been parents concerned about their children's safety. The push to get rid of personal-belief exemptions changed the conversation. It became political. It became about choice and freedom and democracy. And it's where many of the arguments against vaccines that we've seen during the Covid pandemic first took shape. "This is where we really saw this coalescence around the idea of vaccination as a civil liberties issue," says Amelia Jamison, a doctoral student at Johns Hopkins University who studies health misinformation. "The anti-vaxxers kind of felt endangered or in peril. And then they started to mobilize."
In the new episode, we look at how the events of 2015 would foreshadow our current situation, when millions of Americans say they don't trust the government when it comes to public health policy. The anti-vaxx movement that galvanized five years ago may become the biggest threat to ending the Covid pandemic.—Kristen V. Brown | 
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