My Weekend With the Anti-Vaxxers

The last presentation of the morning was a tour of the anti-vaccine movement’s historical canon by physician Suzanne Humphries. This was, admittedly, difficult to follow; my notes are just full of “!!!!” over and over again. As best as I can recall, among the featured players was a 17-year-old female savant in biochemistry dragooned into research on an injectable cancer that the U.S. government planned to use to kill Castro. At some point in the winding narrative, the CIA had to silence our heroine’s boyfriend by framing him for the murder of the president. And then they had the boyfriend assassinated, after which they killed the boyfriend’s assassin by injecting him with the Castro-killing cancer. You know, as one does! (It was the only time at the conference that a member of the Kennedy clan showed up in the narrative, as a side player.)

You might think it’s a long walk from these stories to the MMR vaccine being primarily responsible for autism and the belief that the Covid pandemic was a full-blown hoax, but Humphries has us covered, constantly circling back to the central spine of all anti-government conspiracies: If they could do this, they can do anything.

Still, movements are sustained by hope, and, sure enough, a living monument to possibility was right there in the room. Introduced from the stage, that aforementioned precocious teenage researcher—Jocelyn Baker Vary—stood to a standing ovation, proof that the government couldn’t silence us all. The doctor at our table leaned over and confided he wanted to write a musical about her. (Incredibly, I later learned there is already such a musical. You can watch a song from Me & Lee, which had a one-day run off-Broadway in 2019.)