Renae Smith, with her daughters Kyah and Paris. Photo: Nic Walker

Renae Smith lived most of her life in fear of vaccines. She grew up in a Jehovah's Witness family, with her mother insisting that doctors were paid by drug companies to give vaccinations. When a friend's baby was diagnosed with autism, Smith's mum blamed it on vaccines.

"Basically I was terrified," the 33-year-old from Newtown, Sydney, recalls. "It was this scary unknown. It could cause health problems, autism, massive fevers."

So when Smith had two daughters of her own, getting them immunised was out of the question. "I thought friends who did vaccinate their children were being negligent because I believed it was such a dangerous thing."


When her friends mentioned the paracetamol they had given their children for post-needle fevers, Smith would secretly think to herself: "Doesn't that tell you something?"

But her own children, Kyah and Paris, endured far worse, coming down with whooping cough, rubella and chickenpox.

Not that Smith was especially bothered by these illnesses. "When they got chickenpox I thought, 'This isn't that bad, you probably don't have to have a personal injection.' "

It was a different story, though, when Paris contracted mumps. "She was in pain, her whole face was distorted," confesses Smith. "I cried for two days. I felt like the worst mum in the world."

But neither that enormous dose of mother guilt, nor the pitying looks of friends when she revealed that her children weren't immunised, swayed her.

The number of Australian parents with entrenched anti-vaccination views is small. About 3 per cent of children aged between one and six have parents who have formally or informally registered as conscientious objectors to vaccination, a figure that has remained stable this century.

Yet whether to vaccinate or not is a hotly debated topic, with the federal government's new "no jab no pay" policy designed to force parents to choose between vaccinating and losing benefits.

But research is helping to shed a more nuanced light on the mindset of the close-knit anti-vaccination community. And what happens when a member of that community turns traitor - and decides to vaccinate?

For Renae Smith, a trip to India last year changed everything. She went to the doctor to see what travel shots she needed, and when it came out that neither she nor her girls had been vaccinated for any diseases, her GP sat her down for a talk.

"He told me that everything I believed was wrong," Smith recalls. "I realised I wasn't only putting my kids at risk, I was putting other kids at risk too."

It helped that she knew her doctor wasn't "a prescription pusher. I just trusted he would know more."

Now the whole family is up to date with their vaccinations, and people no longer give her pitying looks. "I never got the hostility that some anti-vaxxers get," Smith says. "It was more 'you poor thing, you're so dumb'."

Not all anti-vaxxers have such a trouble-free time. One American mother, a member of Facebook groups such as "Great Mothers Questioning Vaccines", was eventually convinced that she had been misguided in not vaccinating her two daughters. But Megan Sandlin recalls that she lost more than 50 friends within a fortnight of "coming out" about her new pro-vaccination status on Facebook.

"People who had cheered me on and supported me through my home birth, who had told me countless times that I was an awesome mother and an inspiration, just dropped me like we'd never been friends at all," Sandlin wrote in a post titled "Leaving the Anti-Vaccine Movement" on the Voices for Vaccines website.

Sandlin was removed from groups, blocked by strangers, accused of being brainwashed and warned that her daughters would get autism now that they'd been vaccinated. "It hurt," she wrote. "I now view the anti-vaccine movement as a sort of cult, where any sort of questioning gets you kicked out."

Closer to home, parents who live in known anti-vaccine cluster areas are so fearful of the wrath of their community they won't say whether their kids are immunised or not.

"It's a conversation where these people believe we have been brainwashed by pharmaceutical companies and will fight to the death about it," one Byron Bay mother, who has immunised her daughter, posted on social media recently. "We just don't go there."

Heidi Robertson, who runs the Northern Rivers Vaccination Supporters group, knows just what this mum means. Having grown up in Sydney, Robertson didn't realise just how taboo the subject was when she moved north.

"People are very reluctant to talk about vaccination, it's one of those topics like politics or religion," she says. "You're not sure what other parents do or don't do, and especially if you've just moved to the area, you don't want to offend anyone."

Robertson is surrounded by people who believe that organic food, fresh air and salt water will inoculate them better than any vaccine can. "If you embrace the organic lifestyle, you don't vaccinate," she explains. "If you do vaccinate, you're not truly accepted."

Robertson has made it her mission to change the minds of those parents who question the benefits of vaccination.

But her group doesn't bother with the dogged anti-vaccinators. "There's a core group of people who will never change their minds," Robertson says. "They truly believe vaccinations are more dangerous than the diseases they're designed to protect against.

If someone has gone that far down the track, there is not much we can do to bring them back."

To better understand the "anti-vaxx" mindset, Edith Cowan University researcher Bronwyn Harman and her colleagues interviewed a group of mothers from Denmark in Western Australia, another well-known anti-vaccination hotspot.

They discovered a general mistrust of authority and suspicions that doctors and the government receive kickbacks from the pharmaceutical companies that supply the vaccines.

"They all said fear is being used intentionally by the government as a means to control the public, and manipulate parents into vaccinating their children," Harman says.

These parents consider the "no jab, no pay" law as another example of this manipulation. They believe they are doing the right thing by their children's health because they suspect adverse consequences to vaccination.

Harman says, "They say, 'We're not sure vaccinating does no harm, so we need to not vaccinate because it might be harming in the long term. We should trust our own intuition and have confidence in our decision-making'."

These parents find the "anti-vaxxer" tag offensive, believing it pits one group of parents against another.

"They think it is a politically charged term which the media and government employ to try and ostracise these people and make them feel fear," Harman explains. They prefer "non-vaccinator".

Many are going underground. "They've started not discussing it in public, because everything gets so heated and people get very emotional. They feel they are being judged as a bad parent by their decision not to vaccinate," Harman says.

She believes "no jab, no pay" will do little to shift this group. "If I think I'm putting my child at risk, no matter how much money you give me, it's not going to change my mind."

For those parents who are worried about immunisations but confused by conflicting evidence, Robertson employs what she calls the "thousand cups of tea" strategy.

"You can't change someone's mind about vaccination with one cup of tea," she explains. "It's more reassuring them over a long period of time. If you bombard people with statistics and information it's too much for them to take in."

Robertson's group tries to change minds gradually, answering questions with a couple of facts about vaccination, and leaving the door open for more discussion if parents choose to return.

In the Tweed Valley area in northern NSW, 6.2 per cent of parents are registered objectors, compared to the city average of 1.8 per cent.

Robertson believes it will take some time to change the anti-vaccination culture. "It's so ingrained here."

The "thousand cups of tea" strategy would probably appeal to Penny*.

The Victorian mother-of-three started questioning the benefits of immunisation when her eldest child had adverse reactions as a baby.

After a doctor brushed off her suspicions there could be more to her daughter's high temperatures, Penny opted not to continue the vaccination schedule. Her children, now aged 11, eight and five, aren't vaccinated.

Penny wishes there was a middle road between the opposing vaccine camps. "There should be a way to acknowledge people's fears," she says. "It is a lonely little road when you decide not to immunise your child."

She has copped "a lot of hate" from other women, including family members who banned their children from playing together, and her ex-partner and mother don't agree with her vaccination stance. She's now trying to decide whether to immunise the children for a trip to Asia with their father. "You're constantly having to look at your decisions."

Despite her new-found support for vaccines, a lifetime of mistrust and fear has left its mark on Renae Smith. She says she would immunise any future baby of hers, "but I'd still be incredibly nervous about it".

And she confesses she'd be too scared to persuade a friend to vaccinate their children, just in case something did happen. "It was something I believed in for so long - to say you should definitely do it, I'm still a little bit fearful."

*Name has been changed