Just in Time For SB277: The Case Against Vaccinations, Demolished

In June this year, the California State legislature passed SB-277, which made vaccinations compulsory for Californian children who attend public school and don't have a valid medical reason for avoiding vaccination. That makes Californa one of only three US states, along with Mississippi and West Virginia, that gives parents three relatively narrow choices. In California, you can do one of three things: get your child vaccinated, homeschool them or face prison under anti-truancy legislation.

How you feel about SB277 obviously has bearing on your views on civil liberties and other issues, but it's cut to the heart of the vaccination debate. Few of the parents protesting outside Sacramento's State Senate were there because of an abstract attachment to individualism: they're the anti-vaxxxers.

Who Are Anti-Vaxxxers, And What Do They Want?

At first glance, anti-vaxxxers are a disparate group of people who have come together out of concern for the risks that vaccinations pose to their children's health. You don't have to agree with them, obviously, but they're doing what we all have a right and maybe even an obligation to do. Where people feel their kids aren't safe, they should protest. Look twice and things get murkier.

The anti-vaxxx movement isn't a conspiracy — but plenty of those within it see conspiracies, and not just in the link between government and big pharma. It's not a dangerous, quasi-terror organization — but it attracts some pretty scary people. And it's not a money-making operation, but there are plenty of opportunities to be parted from your hard-earned here too. 

Anti-vaxxxers usually say they want an end to compulsory vaccination. Some, like Jim Carey, are clear that they're not anti-vaccination per se, only "anti-thimerosal, anti-mercury." His objection is that "they have taken some of the mercury-laden thimerosal out of vaccines. Not ALL!" (Source: Twitter/Huffington Post, Carey's emphasis.) Others oppose the germ theory of disease, liberal democracy, the scientific method and the United States Government. It won't surprise you that many are vocally unfriendly to Barack Obama, but what might shock them is the company they're keeping: in the Middle East, the most strident opponents of vaccination are the Taliban. The sleep of reason brings forth wearingly familiar monsters.

1: The Germ Theory Of Disease Is Mistaken

On her blog, NatureOfHealing, Rosanne Lindsay starts a blog post entitled "Say goodbye to the germ theory of disease," with:

"Once upon a time people were afraid of germs. They blamed the germ as a cause of contagious disease because they didn’t have any other ideas. They didn’t question why germs affected only some people, and not others. They didn’t analyze why some people got well, and not others. So they chose to kill the lot of them.

She continues: "Few questioned the authorities who demonized the germ, and developed various strategies to eliminate them – pasteurization, sterilization, irradiation, chemicals, pesticides, antibiotics, heavy metal preservatives (mercury), and vaccines. Those who controlled the science believed that sterilizing the body and the soil was the answer that would save humanity. And the people believed them. They never thought to ask the germs.

Welcome to 2014 where America, the nation that prescribes the most antibiotics and touts the highest vaccinated populations in the world also has the highest infant mortality rates, the second-highest rate of death by coronary artery disease, the second-highest rate of death by lung disease, and the highest rate of women dying due to complications of pregnancy and childbirth. Here is where 45% of the population has at least one chronic disease and one in thirty-two kids suffer from neurological and gastrointestinal degeneration known as autism."

Some of these inaccuracies (germ theory is relatively new; far from being uncontested, there were plenty of other ideas floating around at the time when germ theory became generally accepted, including those Ms Lindsay advocates; questioning why some people became ill and not others was an integral part of the development of the germ theory of disease; technically, mercury isn't a preservative, and while a mercury salt, thimerosal, is, common table salt contains both chlorine and sodium, respectively a fatal poison and an explosive metal; no-one is trying to sterilize the soil or the body, and bacteriologists are actively interested in preserving the biome; and asking germs wouldn't be that helpful) can be left aside for now. 

But some deserve real scrutiny. Ms Lindsay implies that the US has the highest infant mortality rate in the world; in fact, according to the Atlantic article she links to, it's only the highest among 17 developed nations, in many of which "vaccination compliance is high, using only recommendations." In world terms the USA has good infant mortality rates, ranking 169th in the world — behind Western Europe, Japan and Scandinavia, yes, but hardly "the highest."

What does Ms Lindsay propose in place of the germ theory? She points away from Louis Pasteur and toward his two dissenting colleagues, Claude Bernard and Antoine Bechamp. These men, she says, proposed the "theory of the land," the idea that germs are a part of the response to a disease state brought about by poor nutrition and toxicity. She's not alone: NaturalNews explains how Antoine Bechamp was able to: 

"scientifically prove that germs are the chemical by-products and constituents of pleomorphic microorganisms enacting upon the unbalanced, malfunctioning cell metabolism and dead tissue that actually produces disease. Bechamp found that the diseased, acidic, low-oxygen cellular environment is created by a toxic/nutrient deficient diet, toxic emotions, and a toxic lifestyle. His findings demonstrate how cancer develops through the morbid changes of germs to bacteria, bacteria to viruses, viruses to fungal forms and fungal forms to cancer cells."

Of course, for that to be true, we'd have to be wrong about more than the germ theory of disease: we'd also have to be mistaken about DNA, for instance, since bacteria, viruses, fungi and human tissue aren't genetically related. 

Ms Lindsay goes on to report that "soon thereafter, in 1796, Edward Jenner invented the vaccine against smallpox." In fact, Bechamp wasn't even born until 1816 and his major work took place in the 1860s. So for this version of events to be true we'd also have to be wrong about chronology. 

In part, this argument is advanced by a series of straw men. No-one is really trying to sterilize the body, and similarly, no-one disputes that health is related to healthy living, good diet, and reasonable emotional health. Certainly no-one disputes the advantages of a robust immune system. 

That would be wildly unethical, of course. But fortunately for science (and this article), it's what happened in London, in 1854. During one of the capital's periodic cholera outbreaks, with mortality rates around 12 percent for young, healthy people, Dr John Snow had a brilliant idea. At that time, all the doctors were shamelessly profiteering from the germ theory of disease... oh, wait, my bad. They were strong believers in the miasmatic theory, that illness was caused by "bad air." They still got paid, but their patients died a lot more. John Snow looked at a map and figured out what the victims had in common: they drew their water from the same pump. A man of action, Dr Snow removed the handle. In memorial to him, the handle is still missing.

READ Long-Acting Allergy Vaccines On The Way

Hard to say that about Dr Barry Marshall, though. Dr Marshall is the man who, with two colleagues, proved that stomach ulcers are caused by helicobacter pylori. Not by acidification, tissue breakdown, spicy food, stress, bad posture, or breathing loathesome odors: a bacterium. How did he prove it? Well, this peon of Big Pharma had a prestigious job at the University of Western Australia to protect, so he wouldn't eat some and give himself a dangerous, painful ulcer, would he?

Yep.

Then he took an antibiotic specific to helicobacter pylori and cured himself again

A germ. 

2: Vaccines Don't Work

To mainstream medicine, vaccination is one of the most unqualified success stories ever, hands down. But to opponents of vaccination, it's just a scare story to allow children to become profit pincushions for big pharma. (A brief comparison of the cost-benefit analyses of alternative health treatments and one-dose oral vaccinations should be enough to put this one to bed, but we're dealing with argument here, not motive.) How do they figure that?

First, they have some facts on their side. Mortality from infectious diseases did begin to decline in developed countries before the introduction of mass vaccination campaigns. Slum clearance programs, rising affluence (as opposed to the rising effluence that plagued Dr Snow's patients) and better food and housing, together with improved sanitation practices, brought a sharp decline in the diseases of overcrowded cities. And better immune systems ensured that those who did become ill didn't die so often, making the mortality — as opposed to the morbidity — statistics tell one story: in the headline of anti-vaxxxer blog childhealthsafety, "Vaccines Did Not Save Us." 

To take a set of results at random, let's look at diphtheria. Diptheria used to be a common childhood disease which caused Sore throat and cough, often leading to inflammation of the throat and sometimes clotting problems, as well as the throat swelling up and preventing the patient from breathing. In the UK, diphtheria vaccines didn't really reach us til 1940. But UK diphtheria rates fell hard from the 1920s onward, according to a graph drawn by childhealthsafety from another anti-vaxxx author's book on the subject.

And according to the website childhealtsafety, the British Journal of Nursing reported in 1948 that "about 36 percent of the children had been immunized but only about 19 percent of the younger ones." I was unable to verify this source because the link leads to a 404, and a Google search didn't produce anything either. Assuming for a moment that the facts are on the nail, though, it's always possible that diphtheria rates fell because of homebuilding programs and improving nutrition. That is what we'd expect to find. Slum clearance programs that began after WW1 also resulted in people living much further apart, so that infections weren't so easy to spread; we still don't need to invoke pestilential odors or toxic lifestyles to explain that one.

Smallpox.

We don't think about smallpox very often, for one very good reason: vaccination has exterminated it. 

There are only two places on earth smallpox still exists: a lab in the former USSR and a lab in the USA's CDC. Otherwise, thanks to an aggressive program of vaccination across the entire world, it has been utterly destroyed. 

We met smallpox in passing in the "germ theory" section. Edward Jenner found that cowpox, a relatively mild illness, made you immune to smallpox. So he started deliberately infecting people with cowpox. His method was disgusting - he cut his patients with a scalpel and rubbed infected pus into the wound. But it worked: when he cut the same patients with a scalpel and rubbed pus from smallpox patients into the wound, they didn't get sick. That's not an airy-fairy theory based on blobs down an electron microscope that could be anything, to the untrained eye at least: that's a disease with a 40 percent mortality rate being prevented with a dirty knife. You can't have "toxic lifestyles," noxious odors or lack of exercise: these were robust country people, mostly agricultural laborers and milkmaids. So it wasn't that they weren't exposed to enough good, honest dirt either. The problem was germs. The solution was vaccination.

If smallpox seems too long ago, too far away, how about polio? Smallpox wasn't an American problem in the 20th century, by and large, but polio? That's what put FDR in a wheelchair. That's what terrified American parents all summer, every summer, because no-one could figure out what caused it. Swimming? Everyone stopped swimming, but they still got polio. Maybe it was something in the air? Or something people ate? Preventative measures and treatments included:

"giving oxygen through the lower extremities, by positive electricity. Frequent baths using almond meal, or oxidizing the water. Applications of poultices of Roman chamomile, slippery elm, arnica, mustard, cantharis, amygdalae dulcis oil, and of special merit, spikenard oil and Xanthoxolinum. Internally use caffeine, Fl Kola, dry muriate of quinnine, elixir of cinchone, radium water, chloride of gold, liquor calcis and wine of pepsin."

It was a little early for reiki and acupuncture, and a little late for bleeding, but they gave everything else the old college try. Result? People still got polio, still got paralyzed, and still wound up in iron lungs. Parents still watched their children in terror or locked them indoors for whole summers, fearing the first fever-like symptoms that led in just hours to permanent paralysis.

What saved us?

Vaccines. Now, nobody gets polio. Because polio is caused by a virus, and we're all vaccinated. 

READ Rare Polio-Like Virus Strikes California

Nobody in the West, anyway. Now there's a single-dose, oral polio vaccine, we've almost exterminated the disease across Africa and Asia too. There are only a couple of places where you can still find people with Polio: Afghanistan is one. The Taliban officially fears the US government is using polio vaccination teams to carry out espionage, but on the ground, Taliban fighters and officials warn village mothers that the vaccine will make their children infertile or kill them. Pakistan is another. One Pakistani Taliban cleric used his radio show to warn mothers that anti-polio workers were "part of a conspiracy of Jews and Christians to make Muslims impotent and stunt the growth of Muslims". American Anti-Vaxxxers eschew conspiracies of Jews and Christians (for the most part) and prefer to point the finger at the New World Order, the Bavarian Illuminati and other baroque edifices of inventive self-deception which, usually at least, don't smack so much of antisemitism.

3: Vaccines Cause Autism

We don't know for sure what causes autism. But we know for sure that vaccines don't. It's not an open case. But let's crack it anyway and go over the arguments.

The case that vaccines cause autism was advanced by a British doctor called Andrew Wakefield. Wakefield wasn't an antivaxxxer. He was just a crook. When his research was analyzed by his colleagues during the effectively endless process of peer review that all scientific work faces, being constantly probed for credibility and reliability by other scientists, here's what they found:

His sample size was tiny: just twelve children. And of those, he suggested that eight had symptoms of inflammatory bowel disease and developmental problems that could have been autism. (Actually, all 12 of them did, but Wakefield thought eight looked more credible so he lied.) In his original paper Wakefield didn't explicitly claim that MMR (Measles, Mumps and Rubella vaccine) caused autism. He saved that for a patent application filed just after he published his paper, and before he had begun his campaign against MMR. In that patent, Wakefield said "it has now been shown that use of the MMR vaccine...results in... autism, in some infants." 

By 2004, after six years during which no other scientists were able to show a link between bowel inflammation and autism, or between autism and MMR, Wakefield was under serious scrutiny and by 2010 the editor of the Lancet, the journal that had published Wakefield's paper, was saying it had been "deceived" and that Wakefield's work was "utterly false." A Fitness to Practice Tribunal found Wakefield guilty of abuse, misconduct and dishonesty and struck him off the register, forbidding him to practice medicine in the UK

There's now little doubt that Wakefield falsified his results, acted unethically and committed fraud: he had several businesses in the pipeline intended to profit from his MMR/autism "research" at the time he was found out and had been paid almost half a million pounds ($750k) by a group of solicitors acting on behalf of parents who thought their children had been damaged by vaccinations to conduct his research. He didn't think the gravy train would stop there, though. Once public confidence in the MMR vaccine was damaged, Wakefield told the father on one of the boys in his study, it would be possible to make a fortune selling diagnostic kits to concerned parents. Wakefield expected to net about £43m a year (c. $64m) this way and he and the boy's father were in the process of setting the company up when the GMC caught wind and the bottom fell out.

Wakefield initially launched a libel suit against investigative reporter Brian Deer, who brought to light the discrepancies in his work that made the GMC pick up the case. He claimed that "Mr Deer’s implications of fraud against me are claims that a trained physician and researcher of good standing had suddenly decided he was going to fake data for his own enrichment," but after being found guilty and struck off by the GMC and having his companies to sell diagnostic kits and work on replacement vaccines closed down under him, he dropped his many libel suits and fled to the USA when the facts emerged, where he continues to publish anti-vaccination literature based on "research" the British Medical Journal said was "falsified."

In the United States, Wakefield's equivalent was Dr James Bradstreet. Bradstreet, like Wakefield, sought to profit from dodgy research: he published evidence that didn't support his conclusions, then used the conclusions to market his own system of "curing" children of the ostensible negative effects of vaccines, using dangerous, untested chelation therapies, hyperbaric (high-pressure) oxygen chambers, and experimental hormone treatment (yes, really). He also performed exorcisms. Again, yes, really. The sleep of reason brings forth the same superstitious spasms: generations after the polio epidemics that convulsed the USA and had desperate doctors (and even more desperate parents) trying almond baths and electric currents, we're back with the leeches, the fleams, the mumbled incantations, and, yes, incredibly, the casting out of the Evil One.

Like Wakefield, Bradstreet had a hard time in the courts, and like Wakefield he had plans to profit from his work that went beyond his immediate practice. When word of his "treatments" reached the FBI, they raided his lab and discovered evidence of grey-area and outright illegal drug dealing. Bradstreet was involved in a web of groups selling untested, possibly contaminated "medicines" manufactured in underground laboratories and black-market factories. Shortly thereafter Bradstreet was discovered in a local creek bed, dead from a gunshot wound to the chest that the local coroner's office ruled self-inflicted.

READ Autism - Should You Try a Casein and Gluten Free Diet for Your Child?

So there you have it: the nearest we've ever come to a convincing piece of evidence that there's any link between vaccines, autism and childhood developmental diseases. It comes from a fraud who treated children unethically, lied for money and had plans to lie more to make more, and now resides at the very beating heart of the anti-vaxxx movement where he continues to publish material like his 2010 book Callous Disregard — ironically, the words the GMC used to describe Wakefield's idea of professional ethics.

And it comes from a fraud and quack and black marketeer who was lucky not to kill any his "patients" outright: one of the drugs he used, a cancer treatment called GcMAF, killed five children in Switzerland the very day Bradstreet's offices were raided.

(It's possible Wakefield will take offense at the description I've given of him, or even think I am one of the bloggers who are paid by the pharmaceutical industry to spread false rumors, based on nothing more than court records and the records and pronouncements of the General Medical Council, about his misdeeds. Indeed Wakefield has sued many times for libel on this very issue and on every occasion, his suits have been withdrawn or abandoned, with one exception when a judge in Texas threw his case out. Don't hold your breath.)

We still don't know what causes autism; we do know it's not MMR. 

4: There's Mercury In Vaccines

Well, it's always good to start with a fact on your side. Actually it's a little more complex than that: there's some mercury in some vaccines. In case you didn't know the details, mercury accumulates in the body because we lack a mechanism for removing it, a phenomenon called "bioaccumulation." It causes neurological symptoms similar to lead poisoning. Yes, mercury is something you don't want. But the mercury in some vaccines is in the form of  thiomersal, which is a salt. Salts are chemically and electrically neutral, pH-neutral combinations of an acid and an alkali, usually involving a metal. It's the name for a class of substances, but it's common table salt in most people's minds. Table salt is made of sodium, a metal so volatile that it has to be stored in oil to prevent it exploding on contact with moist air, and chlorine, a lethal poison that's also horribly caustic, causing chemical burns to skin and eyes.

When you put them together you get table salt, which is neither explosive nor poisonous. So is it the same story with thiomersal?

The anti-vaxxxers want to have it both ways here. On the one hand, they want thiomersal to be bad because it contains mercury. On the other hand, they want the way to remove mercury from the body to be chelation therapy, which involves binding dangerous heavy metals to a reactive chemical partner to make them metabolically discoverable so the body can flush them out. Mercury salts are bad, except when you make them by chelation; then they're good. But mercury salts aren't metabolized inside the body, and as we've seen, salts don't have the chemical properties of their chemical constituents. (It's also worth pointing out that chelation therapy only works for certain types of mercury. If you've been exposed to metallic mercury fumes, chelation is for you. If you've eaten too much tuna or otherwise been exposed to "biomercury" then it's not.)

So is there any health risk associated with thiomersal?

The truth is, it's hard to say for certain. That doesn't mean, "Aha! So they admit it's a deadly poison and then try to use weasel words to get out of it!" It means, thiomersal toxicity is not understood very well. There are two types of mercury, ethyl and methyl, and they react differently to all sorts of things, including being inside you. So it's not easy to be clear about the dangers of the ethylymercury in thiomersal when most toxicity research has been on methylmercury. We do know it doesn't bioaccumulate in the same way. To be on the safe side, and despite a scientific review by the IOM and 9 studies by the CDC clearly showing that there's no link between thiomersal and autism, the CDC pulled it from the majority of vaccines as a precautionary measure.

READ Why Parents Should Still Say Yes To Childhood Vaccines

The general picture looks like this, though: If there was as much thiomersal in every single childhood vaccine as there is in the most thiomersal-rich of modern vaccines, the Fluzone vaccine, then by eleven, that child would have absorbed 0.55 milligrams of ethylmercury. How dangerous is that, exactly? In the medical literature there are records of experiments with thiomersal which show acute mercury toxicity symptoms, but those were in cases of acute (short term) exposure to quantities of thiomersal ranging from 3mg per kilo bodyweight (c. 1.4mg per pound) to "several hundred mg/kg," meaning the average adult man (who weighs 195 pounds) would have been exposed to around 300mg of thiomersal or more: at least 600 times the amount a child would be exposed to over more than ten years if every vaccine contained a high thiomersal dose like Fluzone.

There's some evidence that thimerasol can yield metallic mercury in aqueous solution (dissolved in water) and that this can damage mitochondrial DNA. The study also argues that mercury tends to build up inside cells as lipophillic (fat, attracted) cations (electrically charged particles). Thus, the authors state, mercury levels inside cells may be up to 1000 times higher than in the body as a whole. That's obviously bad, but there are several things we should note. First, the study authors pointed out that their findings "may be clinically relevant in the setting of a patient who harbors a known or unknown mitochondrial disorder" since "in the setting of a mitochondrial disorder, a specific mitochondrial toxin could be life altering or life threatening." Also, it's a lab experiment carried out on grown tissues, not on living animals or people, where effects can be different. 

Obviously the ideal amount of mercury to be exposed to would be zero. But thimerosal doesn't look that dangerous ranged against other toxic heavy metal exposures. It's been removed from the majority of vaccines worldwide and is now found mainly in flu vaccines. If you took the flu vaccine every year like clockwork your whole adult life, you'd wind up exposed to 1.6mg of mercury, in total. By comparison, the average US adult is walking around with a blood lead level two orders of magnitude higher than a natural, baseline level.

5: The Anti-Vaxxxers Just Want To Make Their Own Choices

The big trouble with this can be summed up in two words: 

Herd immunity.

Anti-vaxxxers say they just want to choose what happens to their kids, or decide the schedule of vaccinations they'll partake of without regard to anyone else. But there's a little more to it than that.

Vaccinations are there to prevent communicable diseases, diseases that can be passed from one person to another. When person A gets sick, it's not just person B who gets it; it's every person, B though Z and beyond, who touches that door handle, gets coughed on or whatever. This is why diseases spread so fast in overcrowded conditions: they jump their vectors and start spreading super-fast from person to person. Before the person A can be isolated there's a whole alphabet full of people out there being their very own person As ans spreading the germs that cause the disease. The worst case scenario is where you have a big group of people, all kept together for long periods of time in unsanitary conditions and eating a substandard diet. If one person is sick, pretty soon everyone's sick. That's why some American jails have an MRSA rate 50 times the normal level and why one of the biggest sources of multidrug resistant tuberculosis is the Russian prison system.

READ Study: Adult Vaccination Rates 'Stubbornly Low'

So what does the best case scenario look like? Ideally, you'll have no infections. But there will always be some infections. The game isn't to stop anyone getting sick: it's to stop everyone getting sick. And the best way to achieve that is by surrounding everyone with a barrier of people who are immune from the disease, so they not only can't get infected: they can't infect other people. That's herd immunity. With it, you get the odd case of rare infections like measles or mumps or rubella. Without it, you get flareups that put hundreds of children in hospital and kill dozens. The only diseases herd immunity doesn't work for are those that change so fast, like the cold, that they can't be immunized against. Otherwise, herd immunity is the most effective form of prevention short of stamping out the disease altogether, and the key to achieving both is vaccination.

So when anti-vaxxxers want the freedom of choice to not vaccinate their kids, they're wrong. It's not their choice. It's your choice, to be safe from diseases that used to blight childhoods and kill millions, and they're taking it away from you. Anti-vaxxxers have the right to refuse vaccination for their kids the way Typhoid Mary had a right to go shopping in Times Square.

6: The Anti-Vaxxx Movement Is Peaceful Protest

Again, like our mercury discussion above, this one's a mixture. Plenty of antivaxxxers are incensed that they're no longer allowed to choose not to vaccinate their children. They write to newspapers, post on social media and blogs, call their congressional representatives and make signs, form pickets, yell things, and sometimes even chain themselves to things. So far, so good. Peaceful protest doesn't stop being a fundamental right just because you're fundamentally wrong. But some anti-vaxxxers go a lot further.

Some do it by going further into left field, like the probably-pseudonymous "Kent Heckenlively, Esq." who wrote on blog The Age of Autism that SB277 was the equivalent to the Fugitive Slave Act — before boasting that the opposition to it included "almost the entire Republican party... as well as the Nation of Islam, and the Church of Scientology."

The scientific illiteracy we saw earlier, embodied in claims that bacteria could turn into fungi and then into cancer, runs thick and deep through the Anti-Vaxxx movement's out-there elements too. For example, Jon Rappaport thinks California is "ordering genetic alteration" on the grounds that "vaccination = generation-to-generation genetic changes"

Some of them do it on Facebook. This is the story of the AVWOS, the Anti-Vaxxxers Wall of Shame. That's a Facebook page dedicated to poking fun at anti-vaccination activists. That's fair enough too: the page specifically bans threats, hateful speech, wishing people dead, or publishing the details of individuals. All the rest looks pretty First Amendment from here.

But predictably, there's an opposition Facebook page: Fall of the Wall, which exists to... well, to get back at the AVWOS. It says it's there to "expose" the people behind AVWOS. That includes accusing them of spreading malware intended to discover the IP addresses of antivaxxxers on Facebook, claiming that: "Some photos and links posted previously [by members of AVWOS] were actually embedded with a virus to retrieve your IP address." The AVWOS Fall of the Wall page still exists but is blank. 

READ Are Western Parents Bringing Back Scary Diseases By Rejecting Vaccines?

Maybe that's because members used to post messages that told the children of AVWOS members that "your mother is a fat ugly lazy piece of [deleted] who tried to kill you... she is under investigation for the hate groups and computer crimes she is committing." Worse, that message came from the child's aunt's Facebook account, which had been hacked. The girl it was sent to was 11 years old.

Anti-vaxxxers' dangerous behavior doesn't end there. And it's not just posters comparing vaccination to the Holocaust, or threatening that "4 every kid afflicted, a public figure will die." Stalking and physical threats have become commonplace during the heated months leading up to the passing of SB277, with images of the partners of legislators, taken without their permission, posted to social media under hashtags like "#wearewatchingyou" — treatment that in one case was extended to the five-year-old daughter of lobbyist Jodi Hicks.

"At first we thought it was going to die down, but it progressively got worse,” Hicks told The Guardian newspaper. “People were actually yelling at me on the streets and it was getting more and more aggressive.” And it didn't stop there, either. State police thought death threats against Senator Richard Pan were sufficiently credible that they assigned extra guards.

7: Vaccination Isn't Worth The Risk