In some parts of California, resistance to vaccinations including the MMR shot is stronger than ever, despite cases of measles hitting five US states

For more than three years, Tanya Gottesburen refused to have her son Robert vaccinated. She didn’t like what she read about the ingredients in vaccines – things like mercury, aluminum and bovine serum that she found “really disturbing”. Many of her stay-at-home mum friends on the affluent Westside of Los Angeles felt the same way.

When Robert was an infant, Tanya didn’t think his immune system could handle what the doctors wanted to inject into him. She preferred to keep breast-feeding – until he was almost two and a half – and give him solid food that was organic and healthy.

“I received 12 vaccines when I was a kid, now it’s up to 36,” Gottesburen said. “I could not see myself doing that to him.”

Then came the recent measles outbreak at Disneyland, 45 minutes’ drive from Gottesburen’s house, and an avalanche of media coverage featuring complaints from doctors that the anti-vaccination movement has single-handedly revived an entirely preventable disease.

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Gottesburen felt torn, and fearful. Her family had been at Disneyland in November, three weeks before the outbreak, and now she imagined how if the timing had been different, Robert might have ended up sick in hospital. For the past two weeks, she has worried about what he might pick up at the preschool he has just started attending.

“I don’t know where those other kids have been,” she said. “I don’t know if they were at Disneyland when the outbreak happened. I don’t know if they went to other countries.”

She also worried about the baby she is due to deliver in a few weeks. What if Robert got measles and it affected her newborn?

Still, though, she did not know what to do. She didn’t like feeling bullied into vaccinating her child. She didn’t like parents who shun anti-vaccination advocates and refuse to have unvaccinated children over to their house for playdates. The turning point came when she heard a radio interview with Jay Gordon, a Los Angeles pediatrician known to be sympathetic to vaccine-resistant parents.

Dr Gordon, whose patients include the vocal anti-vaccination celebrity Jenny McCarthy, has been critical of some ingredients in common vaccines and has offered anecdotal evidence – refuted by peer-reviewed studies – of a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. On this occasion, however, Dr Gordon said unequivocally that MMR was “not a dangerous vaccine”. He thought giving it at 12 months, the standard time, was too early, but otherwise he had no objection.

Three hours later, Gottesburen took her son to the doctor and had him inoculated.

Parents in affluent communities all over California have been going through similar agonies since the news broke about the Disneyland outbreak. While the spread of the disease has been relatively modest – fewer than 100 cases in five US states, plus one case in Mexico – media coverage has been intense, almost all of it shining a spotlight on the anti-vaccination movement and the threat it has posed to “herd immunity”, a level of inoculation high enough to protect even the most vulnerable, including newborns, the elderly and those with auto-immune conditions.

California is a lightning rod for such debate, because it has unusually lax rules permitting parents to opt out of vaccination for non-specific personal beliefs. It also has a relatively high population of affluent, protective parents who don’t like to take what they are told on trust and have tapped into an online community of doubters, critics and conspiracy theorists who believe the pharmaceutical industry and the medical establishment are concealing the truth about vaccines.

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The degree of doubt varies widely, from people like Jay Gordon who believe the MMR vaccine should be delayed until the age of 3 – something public-health advocates say has needlessly caused sickness in 1-to-3-year-olds – to much more controversial figures like Joseph Mercola, an osteopath from rural Illinois who mistrusts sunscreen and microwave ovens as well as vaccinations, or Mike Adams, a writer for Natural News who dismisses vaccines as “medical child abuse”.

Anti-vaccination suits part of the political left, which has long been suspicious of the lobbying power of the pharmaceutical industry and its influence on government regulators, and also the fringe political right, which has at different times seen vaccination, fluoridisation and other public-health initiatives as attempts by big government to impose tyrannical limits on personal freedom.

Everyone, however, seem to view the Disneyland outbreak as an important event – a reason either to rethink some of the doubts they have about vaccination, or to dig in and resist even harder.

Certainly, the medical community has been urging wavering parents to get their children vaccinated, and not just in the media. Parents at the main public high school in Santa Monica, a community with a strong anti-vaccination streak, received a note from the school nurse this weekend warning them that unimmunised students risked being banned from school for up to 21 days, the incubation period for measles. Some schools in Orange County, nearer Disneyland, have already issued such orders to unimmunised children.

“Exposure to unimmunized children poses a serious health risk to these students whose immune systems are unable to protect them,” the note from Santa Monica High School went on. “The more district and community members who are immunised, the safer the environment is for our school community and in particular to these fragile children.”

Many previously outspoken parents have gone suddenly quiet – including in response to comment for this story. The Westside Waldorf school, which has only a 20% rate of measles immunisation among its students, did not respond to an invitation to comment. Neither did a parent representative at PS1, a private school in Santa Monica with a 63% measles immunisation rate. Herd immunity kicks in at around 95%.

The more radical voices refused to be silenced, however. Mike Adams of Natural News penned a furious piece titled: “Afraid of the Disneyland measles outbreak? Don’t be fooled by Mickey Mouse science.” He urged parents to read the small print on the vaccine insert, “rather than just blindly injecting your child with toxic chemicals the same way all the obedient sheeple [sic] do”.

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One Los Angeles parent vehemently opposed to vaccination, Michelle Henney, said she hadn’t even been aware of the Disneyland outbreak because she refused on principle to follow the mainstream news media. But she was in no doubt, even without reading the coverage, that “they have skewed the facts in favor of trying to sell people more pharmaceuticals”.

“This whole vaccination thing is just a scam to steal your money,” Henney said.

Two of her three children went to the Calvary Christian School in Pacific Palisades (which had a 75% MMR immunisation rate last year). A third went to public school, but was spared the risk of being sent home in the event of an outbreak because Henney found a doctor willing to falsify her immunisation records.

None ever went to a pediatrician. Henney relied instead on natural medicines, a chiropractor and acupuncture. She actively sought to expose her daughter to chicken pox, preferring what she called “natural immunisation” by contracting the disease to a vaccine.

Henney said she did not reject the concept behind all vaccines – she understood the appeal of eradicating formerly common childhood diseases like measles – but felt they were too dangerous because of “toxins” like formaldehyde, mercury and aluminum (ingredients that the scientific community has deemed to be safe).

“Vaccines are a great idea,” Henney said, “but they are poisoning us, adding things that kick in later in life so they can sell us more drugs.”