Anti-vaxxers spruiking their silly ideas put lives at risk

Ignore Taylor Winterstein. Listen to Mickey McKellar, who knows what she’s on about.

Mickey McKellar.

Is this how the world ends? Death by wellness blogger? They’ve been out in force this week, spreading dangerous nonsense about vaccines, which is enough to make most sensible people switch off.

Don’t switch off.

Let’s listen, instead, to somebody who knows a little something about immunisation. Also about polio, from the ground up.

Mickey McKellar, 71, was born and raised in the Burdekin, which is the name given to the small towns in the delta by the Burdekin River in north Queensland.

It’s sugar country. They still burn the cane at night, which is something to see. The whole place smells like molasses.

Mickey is well known in town, as founder, organiser, curator — look, she was the chief cook and bottle washer — of the Burdekin Readers & Writers Festival. She announced her retirement at a dinner and show, under fairy lights, with bats swirling and light rain falling, on a warm night last October.

Mickey came on to the stage to announce the news, with her cane in one hand. She sat down centrestage in a fine-looking armchair. From that chair, Mickey spoke about how much she loved the Burdekin, and the festival. She recounted some of the struggles, and some of the highlights, from over the years. Towards the end of her talk, she added a personal note.

“I should explain why I chose to address you sitting down,” she said. “I am living proof that immunisation is so important.”

Mickey did not tell her whole story that night, but she is happy to share it with Inquirer readers.

She was still a baby — just 15 months old — when in 1947 she contracted polio, which causes muscle wasting and paralysis. An older brother had already died at birth, and so began a fight for her life. “I was to spend years in hospital,” she says. “It was during this time I developed my love of books and reading.”

Mickey was, as a toddler, fitted with calipers but then doctors told her parents that she would likely need surgery, and that she should stay in Brisbane for a full year for daily physiotherapy, to prepare her withered legs.

From January through December 1954, she lived on the ward, communicating with her family mostly in letters sent via “snail mail”. Three or four times a year, she also got a pre-booked phone call from her parents, which the telephone exchange girl would interrupt to say: “Your three minutes are up. Do you wish to extend the call?” In 1957, Mickey spent another year in hospital, before surgery by John Lahz, who returned to her some control of her foot. Twelve months on she was able to throw away the “ugly leg irons”.

Her first purchase? A pair of pretty shoes.

Polio was painful, and Mickey’s long stints in hospital were difficult and lonely, and yet she felt lucky, as indeed she was. An aunt who contracted polio at age 21 had lived in an iron lung for nine years, before dying at the age of 30.

Mickey these days loves it when kids ask her: “What is polio?”

It barely exists any more, having been eradicated by two men who unfortunately, in these days of self-promotion, don’t have Instagram wellness accounts from which to flaunt their stunning achievements: Jonas Salk, who developed the Salk vaccine in 1955; and Albert Sabin, who followed it up with an oral vaccine in 1961.

Sabin and Salk. We should hashtag them to heaven.

It perhaps goes without saying that Mickey feels dismayed when she sees bloggers spreading bumptious nonsense about vaccines. This week, we’ve had the honey-coloured celebrity chef Pete Evans directing parents toward anti-vax podcasts; and Sherri Tenpenny on a new podcast, saying: “When you see an unvaccinated child, they’re inquisitive, they’re bright. They have normal body rhythms, meaning they go to bed on time, they’re growing normally, they don’t have snotty, runny noses, they’re not sick.”

That’s a very appealing idea for a new and anxious parent, but actually when people saw little Mickey — a real unvaccinated child in an unvaccinated world — they saw somebody terribly sick.

Also this week, there came the announcement of a new tour (Sydney is already sold out) by blogger Taylor Winterstein, who has started something she calls “Tay’s Way” for parents “to take back control of their family’s health”.

“We are wide awake trailblazers creating our own path,” she says. Actually, no.

Tay is not a “fearless truth seeker” and nor is she a doctor. She runs an online program — An Hour of Power with Tay — in which she invites her thousands of followers to “explore different options on how to build your child’s immune system naturally”.

Taylor Winterstein runs ‘Tay’s Way’.

“Want to know how to raise healthy, vaccine-free children in a broken system designed to exclude them?” she asks. Then buy an hour of her time (she also sells $150 bottles of purple “royalty rice”, which you’re supposed to eat by the spoonful to get waste out of your hair, or something).

Winterstein is getting traction because she’s a WAG — the wife of an NRL player — and she says: “The amount of NRL players and their partners who consciously choose not to vaccinate would seriously surprise you.” Maybe.

What’s for sure is that misinformation spreads quickly down the information superhighway, and you won’t be surprised to hear social media’s ­algorithms are mostly to blame: nonsense blogs spruiking gobbledygook get pushed up the rankings because they’re “controversial”, making them more ­visible to new mums who want to do the best by their children.

Facebook is at least on the front foot, announcing plans last week to “down rank” vaccine misinformation, after children in the hippie state — California, where Mark Zuckerberg is raising children — started contracting measles. But Twitter still hums with nonsense from bubbleheads, and it’s a shame that we can’t resurrect Sabin and Salk to tackle them, but wait … we still have Mickey.

“Polio is not like a cold. It lingers in some form forever,” she told the audience at last year’s dinner. She battled on for a very long time, but “these legs of mine can no longer tolerate lengthy periods of standing. But at 71, I think I’ve earned the right to sit down,” she said, as friends and family rose and gave her a standing ovation.