On Saturday, anti-vaccine activists temporarily disrupted access to Los Angeles’s Dodger Stadium, one of the largest mass vaccination sites in the country, yelling at healthcare workers and calling the many older individuals patiently waiting for a vaccine in their cars “lab rats”.
To Dr Richard Pan, a state senator who has authored one of the toughest pro-vaccination laws in the country, the misguided, anti-science messaging was nothing new. Over the last decade, Pan has unwillingly become an expert in the anti-vaccine movement, having been a target of protests, death threats and an assault himself.
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But that didn’t make this weekend’s protest any less concerning, Pan said. The unrest was organized on Facebook, yet another sign the social network is failing to clamp down on vaccine misinformation. The anti-vaccine movement has noted ties to extremism and militias, and some of the protesters at Dodger Stadium appeared to have been present at rallies leading up to the 6 January Capitol attack, Pan said.
“This is part of an escalation of violence that we’re seeing in the anti-vaccine movement,” Pan said. “It’s not an isolated incident. Unfortunately, as they have continued to become more and more violent, they have suffered few consequences for that, and without consequences they will continue to increase their extremism and their violence.”
The following Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.
What was your reaction when you heard about what happened in Dodger Stadium this weekend?
I was outraged, certainly, that people had tried to block other people from getting access to vaccines. I think that event demonstrated a lie that anti-vaxxers often proclaim, that it’s about choice and freedom – yet here they were denying people their choice to get the vaccine and denying our community and our country the opportunity to be free from this terrible disease that has killed more people than world war two at this point.
The greatest fear has always been that people will die who didn’t need to die
In your opinion, has the anti-vaccine movement grown bolder and more dangerous in recent years?
When I first did my bill on educating people about vaccines back in 2010, they would put forth their myths, but generally, you could have a conversation. When it came to 2015 [when Pan sought to get rid of personal belief exemptions and allow only medical exemptions for vaccinations – legislation that ultimately passed], they engaged in death threats. You had death threats coming not just to me, but my staff and other legislators. Some legislators actually had to close their district offices because they worried about the safety of their staff. You had Robert F Kennedy come and call vaccines the Holocaust and use violent imagery. He did apologize for that, but then he subsequently used that analogy in other venues.
Then you move ahead to 2019, when I introduced senate bill 276 (which required medical exemptions be approved by the California department of public health, and ultimately passed). They stepped it up. Not only do they show up in large numbers, which is fine, that’s their right to do so, but then they engaged in things like pounding on the walls, basically sounding like they’re trying to break into the legislative chambers during debate.
They would try to interfere with the legislature by standing on chairs and screaming, or screaming in the galleries not just when we’re discussing the vaccine bill, but overall, just trying to stop the legislature from doing its business. They invited a militia to come join them at the state capitol, so they demonstrated an open tie to other extremist groups, and the death threats continued. But then one of the anti-vaxxers actually assaulted me on the street and livestreamed it on Facebook.
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[The assailant] didn’t run away from the police when they showed up, and Facebook allowed him to leave that video up because they claimed it wasn’t violent enough [to take down], since I wasn’t injured severely. So he continued to get praise and adulation from the anti-vaccine community for actually laying hands on me.
And then after that yet another [anti-vaccine activist] threw blood on to the senate floor. Just to put that in the context, the California state legislature has been meeting in those legislative chambers for 150 years and those public galleries have been up there in that same building for that same amount of time. It was the first example I have found of someone intentionally throwing something from the public gallery at legislators while they were conducting the people’s business on the floor below.
One hundred fifty years: just think about all the different issues that came up in that chamber, everything ranging from abortion, gun control, civil rights. And that’s the group that does it, and the legislature had to go into recess and all the senators splattered with blood had to go get checked out and biohazard had to go deep clean the site.
What are the responsibilities of local officials and local law enforcement when confronted with situations like throwing blood into the state legislature, or the protest at Dodger Stadium?
As far as people look around, there are no consequences. The people at Dodger Stadium, there were no arrests, no citations, nothing.
They should have been cited for violating public health orders. Someone needs to look into if they violated other laws by obstructing entry into the vaccination site, and interference with people trying to get medical care during a pandemic – if there’s no law against that, maybe it’s time to create a law against that.
Then we talk about anti-vaccine violence. There was that pharmacist in Wisconsin – someone intentionally trying to ruin vaccines, allowing people to get the spoiled vaccine intentionally. That’s violence, isn’t it?
The lies themselves, discouraging people from getting vaccines, those are already risking people’s lives, but they’re taking it to the next level where they’re directly threatening people’s lives. When you go unmasked and you shout at elderly people, you’re potentially spreading a disease.
The real challenge is this: why don’t we see it that way? People just say, ‘Oh, they just have some crazy beliefs. People can believe what they want. Oh, they’re like my crazy uncle or something, I can’t reason with you, you believe the earth is flat’ or whatever. But this is the real-world consequence and people’s lives are being put in danger.
This is a public safety issue. We have a public health crisis, but this is a public safety issue. People are dying.
What was your greatest fear when it came to the anti-vaccine movement, pre-Covid?
The greatest fear has always been that people will die who didn’t need to die. We eliminated measles in 2000. In 2019, we almost lost our measles elimination status in the United States because we had so many cases of measles and that’s traced directly to lower vaccination rates.
We know that the anti-vaccine people are targeting particular communities. The measles outbreak that happened among Somali refugees in Minnesota, we know that Andrew Wakefield [the discredited anti-vax doctor] went and told them that vaccines cause autism [they don’t] and drove down the vaccination rate. The vaccine outbreak in the state of Washington, we know that Larry Cook [the anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist who founded the Stop Mandatory Vaccination website and Facebook group] went and bought Facebook ads specifically targeting women who were of childbearing age.
We need to take anti-vaccine propaganda seriously and deal with it because it has real-life consequences – both in terms of people’s lives and preventable disease, but also as organizing tools to enact violence against people who try to support vaccines.
What about now, with extremism and Covid – what is your greatest fear when it comes to the anti-vaccine movement?
As tired as people are of Covid, I’m really concerned that we do not get this virus under control because of the anti-vaccine movement. They are fueling unwarranted anxiety about the vaccines through the lies they’re telling, but in addition to that, the anti-vaccine movement has opposed every public health effort to stop this disease.
They oppose masking, they oppose testing, they oppose physical distancing and avoiding gatherings. They have been out there opposing every effort to stop this disease. One of their leaders, Del Bigtree, actually had a video that was taken down, where he basically said, “If you die of Covid it’s your fault because you made bad health choices and didn’t eat right. This thing is as mild as a cold and we should spread it as much as possible.” This group is actively trying to get us sick. They’re also threatening the lives of those who are trying to stop that from happening.
Think about that. We have a pandemic that has killed more people than world war two and in less time. Yet we have a movement of people who not only want to spread the disease but have aligned with other extremist groups to actively stop people who are trying to stop this disease. And there are very few consequences for their actions.
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