Diphtheria cases in Mogadishu jumped from 49 to nearly 1,000 this year, with 80% affecting children. TJ Walker traces the resurgence to vaccine hesitancy spread by online influencers, estimating over 300,000 preventable deaths worldwide in the last decade as U.S. vaccination rates drop below the 85% threshold needed for herd immunity.
Questions this video answers
Nearly 1,000 (up from 49 last year).
80% are kids.
As many as one in four infected children die (25%).
Over 300,000 preventable deaths over the last decade.
About 85% vaccinated to achieve herd immunity for diphtheria.
Chapters
Diphtheria returns Diphtheria, once vanquished, more or less, is back, according to the Times, Stephanie Nolan, reporting from Mogadishu, wards at Dimartino Hospital are packed with gasping children as war, climate displacement and vaccine hesitancy fuel a deadly surge. Admissions jumped to nearly 1,000 this year, up from 49 last year, and 80% are kids. The disease is preventable and treatable if caught early. Yet in low resource settings, as many as one in four infected children die. We didn't even have a diphtheria support modality and now we have to build out a whole new process, said GAVI's Katty Clark. One Somalia mother, after three of her children fell ill, told the Times, I'm going to try to convince him to get them vaccination. Here's the hard context Decade of anti vaccine demagoguery, much of it amplified by right wing and let's be fair, a left wing influencer has helped erode trust worldwide. Cautious evidence based floor for needless deaths tied to vaccine refusal is in the hundreds of thousands globally. Okay, what's the real message here? Diphtheria is making a comeback. Congratulations diphtheria. And it's because a lot of right wing and lefting influencers around the globe are spreading this idea that all vaccines will kill you. Well, you know what has killed about 300,000 people in the world in the last few years? This idea that vaccines are bad. Let's dig a little bit deeper here. You know the United States has a lot of influence. It's not just our economy, it's not just our weapons, it is our cultural power. And the fact is there are a lot of influencers on YouTube, social media, TikTok based in the United not exclusively based in the US but a lot of them are spreading this nonsense about how vaccines are put out by the evil pharmaceutical companies trying to make money off of you and do harm to you. The real harm is being done by more and more children not getting vaccines. Conservative global estimate there have been over 300,000 preventable deaths over the last decade linked to vaccine refusal driven by misinformation. That to me seems an extraordinarily low number because you could make the case that about that many died in the US just because they avoided Covid vaccines. So this is a huge, huge problem. So here's the problem we do have, especially in America. One way of owning the libs is to say I'm not taking vaccines. My children aren't taking vaccines. You liberals. That's become sort of a cute, clever way of scoring cheap political points. The problem is it's not just a cheap political point. It may end up in not only the death of your child, but disease spreading and death of other children in your community. Because it's not just diphtheria, it's measles, it's other diseases. Because at some point a society loses herd immunity. For some diseases and vaccines, it's 95% others it could be 85% but it's, it's dropping. Now, specific to diphtheria, the best evidence is that you need 85% people vaccinated in order to have herd immunity in a, in a community. We were 95% in 2020. I don't have to tell you what happened in 2020. It's now down to 92%. So are we really, do we really want to go back to an era where tons and tons of American of US children are getting diphtheria and dying from diphtheria? You look at the if the current trends continue, we are going to dip below 85%. This is a tough issue. There's so much misinformation about it. In fact, this video right here might get flagged in various social media platforms for even discussing vaccines because there's so much misinformation about. There are oligarchs owning technical. I don't want to get more criticism spreading disinformation. So they actually make it harder a video like this to get eyeballs and to go viral. I'm not focused on going viral here. What I try to do here is give you my own best honest assessment of what's really important going on in the world and then analyzing it together through a communication lens and a personal development lens. And this vaccine thing is fascinating to me for many reasons because for so long there was not a lot of controversy. It didn't matter. Certainly when I was growing up, if a parent considered themselves conservative, liberal, Republican, Democrat, libertarian, everybody got vaccine. It wasn't part of this contentious culture war and this debate. Now that's changed. And here's the problem. So many of us in America and around the world are adopting this tribal mentality that says, okay, here's somebody I don't like for X reasons. They've now said something completely unrelated to that has scientific evidence behind it and that has always been considered apolitical. I'm now simply going to say I disagree with them on this apolitical scientific backed recommendation because I don't like their position on transsexuals. Participating in swim meets or something like that. So that's a problem. And the result is quite often death or severe health problems for the rest of your life. Because I showed the libs that I don't take vaccines. Now, let me be fair here. This is an issue that is not just left, right. There are plenty of people, historically, look at someone like Robert F. Kennedy, whose politics aligned with the liberal side of things, the progressive part of America, they too took this attitude of just, oh, big corporations are bad and evil. Well, you know what? Some big corporations are bad and evil, but not when it comes to making a vaccine. That is partially responsible for why the average age expectancy in the world has gone from about 32 to 70 in just the last hundred years. That's not what makes corporations evil. So yeah, there are plenty of bad big companies in the world. There are plenty of pharmaceutical companies that do release products of dubious value. There's no doubt about that. But you can't then make a jump to say, well, then all pharmaceutical companies are bad and all their products are bad, and, and therefore we have to avoid any vaccine. That's the logical jump. And again, it's not far left, far right. You're both doing that. And I want you to be successful in life. And you can't be successful in life if you're dead. You're not gonna have as much joy in life if your 10 year old who was perfectly healthy is now in a wheelchair the rest of your life because you followed some bozo on the Internet telling you, oh, don't take the vaccine because a big pharmaceutical company made it. Because that's going to, I won't say ruin your life, but severely diminish the quality of life for you, not to mention your child. So it's all well and good to say, do your own research, but it's irrelevant if the research you're getting is from people who don't fundamentally believe in science. If you and I have a debate and you say, well, tj, you're kind of old looking and kind of bald and you know, you're 62, you could pass for 64. And I say, wrong, my research shows that everybody thinks I look like I'm 28 and I have a beautiful head of hair and I've found three blog posts that say that, and it turns out it was my staff doing it as a goof on me to fool me. I could say, well, look, I've done my research and my research proves to you I look like I'm 28 and have a beautiful head of hair. But it's meaningless, because my research is garbage. And that is the problem so many of us face when we say we're doing our own scientific research, not we're just getting confirmation bias.
