In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the myth that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread. Examples include measles, COVID, flu, and polio.
Melody Schreiber at The Guardian:
One of the most prominent anti-vaccine activists in the US says he caught measles in west Texas and traveled back home – but he seems not to have alerted local authorities of his illness, which means the highly transmissible virus may have spread onward.
...
Brian Hooker, chief scientific officer of Children’s Health Defense, filmed an interview in west Texas in March with the parents of the six-year-old child who died from measles – the first measles death in the US in a decade.
The video promoted several dangerous myths about the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine. Two doses of the vaccine are 97% effective at preventing measles, a virus that can be deadly and can cause lifelong harm.
Hooker and Polly Tommey, an anti-vaccine film-maker with Children’s Health Defense, also interviewed other Mennonite families in west Texas. And they visited the medical office of Ben Edwards while patients and Edwards himself had symptomatic measles, they said.
Hooker then traveled home to Redding, California, and developed measles symptoms, he said.
“Full disclosure, 18 days after visiting Seminole, Texas, sitting in a measles clinic and being exposed to Doctor Ben with the measles, I got the measles. So cool,” Hooker said
...
Hooker is a prominent figure in the anti-vaccine community. He testified on Tuesday before a US Senate committee in its first-ever “vaccine injury” hearing, attempting to link MMR vaccination to autism – despite numerous studies showing no relationship.
