Recently formed non-profit hopes to address great health crises: vaccine hesitancy, information disorders
PART ONE OF TWO PARTS
By JOHN KEREZY, eyeoncleveland.com founder
CLEVELAND, Mar 12 – Most of today’s Baby Boomers are retired, and many of them are enjoying the special privilege of being grandparents. Some Boomers have also come to realize that something which they enjoyed – a childhood free of preventable diseases – may not be the case for their own grandchildren and other infants and toddlers.
Diseases which were eradicated two generations ago, such as measles, are making a preventable comeback, lamentably. Here are two examples:
- Pertussis — According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), there were six times as many reported cases of whooping cough, or pertussis, in 2024 compared to 2023. Whooping cough is a highly contagious respiratory infection, and those infected find it hard to eat, breathe or sleep. Infants contracting whooping cough may even struggle to breath if they don’t cough. The younger the person infected, the greater the risk of a life-ending infection. According to the Cleveland Clinic, if your baby has a severe cough, bluish discoloration around the mouth, and/or trouble breathing, seek emergency care immediately.
- Measles –- a viral infection which was declared eliminated from the United States in 2000 – has now been invited back, and is at 35-year high levels. The year 2025 saw the highest number of cases in the US, 2,283. Three people – all unvaccinated – died of measles in the US. We’ve already had 1,281 cases in the first nine weeks of 2026. Nearly all of the reported cases are among unvaccinated people. Beginning in 2023-2024, the percentage of kindergartners with the recommended two doses of the MMR (mumps, measles, rubella) vaccine fell below the CDC’s 95% target level. Florida, for example, is at only 88%.
Changing societal attitudes about vaccinations are sounding alarm bells, particularly among many retired Baby Boomer medical professionals who understand the many benefits of infant and toddler vaccinations. According to a July 2025 study by Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health:
- 48% of first-time expectant parents were UNDECIDED about vaccinating their children with all recommended vaccines.
- 1 in 3 parents of young children refused some or all recommended childhood vaccines.
- 18% of pregnant participants with prior pregnancies were still undecided about vaccinating their unborn child after birth with all recommended vaccines.
PARENTS: Want to know the 2026 American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) Recommended Immunization Schedule for your children? Here are links to them.
For Children Birth Through Six Years Old:
For Adolescents 7-18 Years Old
Dr. Arthur Lavin, a Shaker Heights resident who’s a retired pediatrician and the grandfather of four, shudders at the thought that diseases which were once under control are making a comeback. It is like a multiple-alarm fire to him, because measles, whooping cough, meningitis and other such infections are nearly 100 percent preventable.
“When we (as a society) drop our vaccination rate, that’s basically issuing an invitation for the diseases to reappear in the lives of our most vulnerable, especially the elderly, infants and young children,” says Dr. Lavin. “We grandparents know what the world looked like before we achieved community immunity. Some of us have seen people with polio, meningitis, and other preventable diseases. We don’t want to witness today’s children dying, becoming paralyzed, or being permanently medically harmed because we’re not protecting them with vaccinations.”
Dr. Lavin is the founder and board president of the 501-c-3 nonprofit organization Grandparents For Vaccines, begun in the fall of 2025. The group’s purpose: to ensure America’s grandchildren have their best start in life without the threat of vaccine-preventable diseases. The group is actively seeking grandparents to join (it has thousands) and also to share stories about loved ones or friends who suffered from diseases before the advent of polio and other modern vaccinations. (See some news stories at the bottom of this story.)
Here’s a link to the group’s website: https://grandparentsforvaccines.org/
Community immunity, also known as herd immunity, works because if enough people have had the infection, or better yet the immunization, the germ causing the infection can no longer spread, everyone around is immune. If a lot of a house’s contents are “flammable” (or susceptible to fire) then — if a fire hits — flames will spread quickly. But if enough people are “fireproofed” (or become immune) the spread won’t happen. The flames – or the viral disease — die out. Community immunity protects vulnerable groups, such as the newborn, infants, elderly, people with weakened immune systems, from the disease.
Grandparents for Vaccines
For example, immunology research decades ago determined that the community immunity target level to stop the spread of measles is 95 percent. In response, by the late 1960s, most every public school district in the U.S. required students to have MMR vaccinations. That stopped measles from spreading in highly contagious classroom settings.
But a combination of politicization of immunizations and a new malady affecting our society – Information Disorders (misinformation, disinformation, mal-information) – have changed that in a harmful way. There are counties in Ohio and elsewhere in the U.S. where the vaccination rate has fallen to the range of 80 percent or lower. And in these areas, diseases such as measles are coming back.
FRAUD, INFORMATION DISORDERS CONTRIBUTE TO VACCINE HESITANCY
A 1998 research paper, published in the British medical journal The Lancet, fraudulently claimed that there were links between the MMR vaccine and autism. The fraud involved both undisclosed conflicts of interest and data manipulation. The main author and researcher, Andrew Wakefield, held a patent for a rival measles vaccine, and his research was funded by a lawyer preparing a lawsuit against vaccine manufacturers. Additionally, Wakefield altered the medical histories of the children in the study to better support his claims.
(Aside: The sample size of children in Wakefield’s study/paper was only 12 subjects.)
By 2004, 10 of the original 13 co-authors of the paper withdrew their support of the study’s findings. In early 2010, The Lancet fully retracted the paper, stating that its claims were utterly false and that the publication had been deceived. Also in 2010, Wakefield was disbarred from practicing medicine in the United Kingdom.
Since the fraudulent paper in The Lancet, there have been several large-scale studies conducted, all showing no association whatsoever between vaccines and autism.
But untold damage had already been done. Some in the scientific community have called Wakefield’s fraud the most damaging medical hoax of the past 100 years. Many influential people, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (whose aunt Rosemary Kennedy was believed to be autistic) widely propagated what became proven to be disinformation about MMR vaccines. The result became a phrase coined to describe parents afraid to get their infants and children innoculated: Vaccine hesitancy
Many others jumped onto the bandwagon. Small business and individual selling their own “remedy” for autism discouraged parents from vaccinating their children. Foreign disinformation campaigners, especially from Russia, began widespread “fake news” efforts discrediting vaccines. And when something which was highly flammable – the Internet – came into prevalence, disinformation about vaccinations spread like wildfire on a drought-stricken prairie.
“WorldTruthTV: Study: Unvaccinated Children Healthier Than The Rest” were the key words which one Russian social media poster spread on “X,” Facebook, and other internet outlets. “Paul: Vaccines can cause mental disorders” was the headline of another’s multiple posts.
In a research paper titled, “Vaccine misinformation types and properties in Russian troll tweets” main author Echo L. Warner (University of Arizona Cancer Center) tracked the social media postings of 200 accounts which originated within the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, Russia. The researchers discovered that misinformation about personal dangers (43.0%), civil liberty violations (20.2%), and vaccine conspiracies (18.6%) were common themes in the Russian disinformation campaigners’ social media posts.
See the study here:
According to a variety of researchers into Information Disorders, the three most common techniques that agents of information disorders use are:
1) DECEPTIONS that involve gaining trust of their recipients through dubious means based on distorted facts, such as authoring messages that have either manipulated contexts, exaggerated facts, fabricated contents, or draw misleading conclusions (Almansa-Martínez et al., 2022; Calvo et al., 2022);
2) Using simple and PLAIN LANGUAGE that resonates well with their recipients, who in most cases have no technical knowledge on the issue. (Calvo et al., 2022) observed in their study that agents of information disorders often preferred creating messages that were simple and easy to understand, but emotionally charged, over those that were neutral but complex. They further observed that disinformation agents also preferred supporting their messages with phony ‘real life situations’, ‘people’, and ‘common sense’ stories, instead of scientific references and citations, to convince their audiences, viewers, or readers; and
3) PACKAGING MESSAGES AS NEWS, interviews with their so called ‘experts,’ ‘big’ announcements, conferences, and investigative documentaries. (Herrera-Peco et al., 2021) classified messages of information disorders into four categories:
- Conspiracy-based messages that purports to simplify or give backgrounds to concepts that are either too complex or requires expert knowledge before one can understand them.
- Denial messages. This category comprises of messages that contradicts tested, verified, and proven scientific principles.
- Anti-vaccine messages, which call to question the efficacy, safety, and importance of vaccines. These types of messages achieve their objectives, of misleading or harming recipients, by evoking negative emotions in them, especially fear, anger, and sadness. Anti-vaccines messages also often advocate for alternative methods for stimulating immunity, other than through vaccination, such as the meditation and yoga.
- Discrediting messages: discrediting health institutions through conspiracy theories, and emotional narratives, such as creating fictitious stories tries to link vaccines with negative health outcomes, such as deaths or permanent disabilities.
Many Northeast Ohio residents find the disinformation and lying about childhood vaccines repulsive. Here is one of them.
“I firmly believe that we almost eradicated these horrible diseases, and its tragic that some of these are coming back. People are dying from a lack of vaccination,” says Debbie Stepoway Vasel of Litchfield, who had a 13-year career as a nurse and nurse manager after raising three of her own children. Debbie now has three grandchildren.
“There’s a woman in my choir who wasn’t vaccinated against polio as a child. She contracted the disease. She can only walk with a brace, and she’s lived with pain all of her life,” Debbie adds. “The phony autism scare turned public opinion against vaccines. We still don’t know what causes autism, but we have young children today who are suffering with other diseases because their moms were afraid of the MMR vaccine.”
POLITICIZATION OF VACCINES
There was a time in America, decades ago, when politics wasn’t an all-consuming activity. You’d frequently hear people talk about separation of politics from religion. Today, it seems to many that politics has become a religion for swarths of the general population.
In general, vaccinations and vaccination campaigns had been non-political in nature. For example, prominent Democrats and Republicans in the Cuyahoga County area unanimously supported and collaborated to help carry out the vaccination of 1.5 million residents in Sabin Oral Sundays in Cleveland in the late spring of 1962. That effort helped eradicate polio in the area.
That all changed when Covid-19 arrived in the US in early 2020. Both the 45th and 46th presidents of the US, Donald Trump and Joe Biden, tried to make a health crisis a political issue as well. A KFF poll showed that in March 2020, 85% of all Americans, 83% of all people calling themselves Republicans and 90% of all people calling themselves Democrats had either a great deal or a fair amount of trust in the CDC to provide accurate information about vaccines, Covid-19 vaccines and the coronavirus. By January 2026, those numbers had dropped remarkably: Only 55% of Democrats, 47% of the general public, and just 43% of Republicans now have either a great deal or a fair amount of trust in the CDC on the same topics. (See chart and graph below).
How did this happen?
We will never know all of the reasons. Part of the decline in trust can be attributed to the fact that neither the CDC, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) nor any other federal government agency provided factual information about what caused the Covid-19 virus in the first place. The news media failed to investigate the cause as well. Nature abhors a vacuum, and over time the public grew increasingly skeptical about the CDC itself.
Disinformation also played a factor. Both the Russians and Chinese launched extensive Information Disorder Efforts aimed at misleading, misinforming, and confusing the American public about Covid-19. In China, even before the Covid-19 outbreak, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was setting up 450 million FAKE social media accounts a year to spread disinformation and misinformation. And the CCP went to extraordinary lengths to both cover up its leading role in the Covid-19 outbreak and to propagate disinformation around the globe about the disease. You can find details here:
But most of all, Covid-19 instantly became a political hot potato. Presidents Trump and Biden both played that game. “The virus and vaccines became politicized through statements by political leaders, media coverage, and partisan divisions, affecting public perception and response,” wrote Professors Toby Bolsena and Risa Palm of Georgia State University. Bolensa and Palm pointed out that in 2020, we witnessed:
- President Trump downplaying COVID-19, and at one point called it a “hoax”
- Republican politicians following President Trump’s lead, while Democrats showed more concern.
- Media outlets, especially Fox News, spread skepticism, calling COVID-19 a “flu” or “political weapon.”
- Social media amplified misinformation, conspiracy theories, and pseudoscience, creating a pandemic “misinfodemic.”
- Partisan differences influenced adherence to nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) like masks and social distancing.
Upon election and then taking office in 2021, President Joseph Biden swung in the opposite direction. His actions included:
- Mask Mandates: imposing mandatory masking on interstate travel via trains and buses.
- Mandatory vaccinations or discharge from the Armed Services.
- The $1.9 trillion American Resue Plan
- Invoking the Defense Production Act to boost vaccine supplies
- Promotion of vaccine confidence strategies.
“Many of us are frustrated with the nearly 80 million Americans who still are not vaccinated, even though the vaccine is safe, effective and free,” Biden said in a speech to the nation in September 2021. “They might be confused about what is true and what is false about Covid-19.”
President Biden also oversaw the discharge of 8,000 members of the U.S. Armed Services for refusing to comply with a vaccination mandate he implemented in August 2021. He ordered the Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA) to issue a federal mandate that any business with 100 or more employees require them to be vaccinated or have the employees subjected to weekly testing. The Supreme Court overturned this OSHA ruling in 2022.
See a study about the politicalization of Covid-19 here:
By 2021, different groups of researchers came to the conclusion that politics most definitely had a factor in how the public responded to the Covid-19 coronavirus. Researchers Ariel Fridman, Rachel Gershon and Ayelet Gneezy ascertained that political party affiliation played a significant role in the public’s assessment of Covid-19 and its vaccines.
“We observed a decrease in intentions of getting a COVID-19 vaccine when one becomes available. We further found a decline in general vaccine attitudes and intentions of getting the influenza vaccine. Analyses of heterogeneity indicated that this decline is driven by participants who identify as Republicans, who showed a negative trend in vaccine attitudes and intentions, whereas Democrats remained largely stable,” the trio write. “Consistent with research on risk perception and behavior, those with less favorable attitudes toward a COVID-19 vaccination also perceived the virus to be less threatening. We provide suggestive evidence that differential exposure to media channels and social networks could explain the observed asymmetric polarization between self-identified Democrats and Republicans.”
See the study here:
Researching at the University of South Alabama, Professor Matt C. Howard reported that ideology, not political preference, caused health alarms in people.
“Our results showed that political ideology has a more pronounced effect than party affiliation, and the vaccine hesitancy dimensions of Health Risks and Healthy mediate many of these relations,” Howard writes.
See the study here:
Whether it is political ideology or party affiliation, regrettably, politics is now firmly entrenched in policy decisions about vaccinations. That’s a tragic situation that can lead to loss of life, in the mind of Dr. Lavin, and the leadership of Grandparents For Vaccines.
“At a time when the director of Health and Human Services is calling for something dangerous – elimination of the polio vaccine – it’s vital to have Americans realize what would happen if a disease such as polio came back,” Dr. Lavin says.
“We’re looking at a ‘bookend’ era,” he adds. “Once cities, schools, churches and all aspects of our society came together to eradicate a disease – polio. We need to return to that consensus again.”
In PART TWO, we’ll explore how Grandparents For Vaccines is planning to help restore the public’s confidence in vaccinations, especially childhood vaccinations.
To learn more about Grandparents For Vaccines or to join the organization, click here: https://grandparentsforvaccines.org/
Stories about Grandparents For Vaccines are linked below. Eyeoncleveland.com recommends viewing the report which WKYC-TV 3 News health reporter Monica Robins did at the inception of Grandparents For Vaccines. It is linked here:
https://www.wkyc.com/video/news/health/grandparents-for-vaccines-founder-explains-mission-on-3news/95-0f37d490-570a-4c11-9a6e-31de0acdc060
https://youcanknowthings.substack.com/p/what-life-was-like-before-vaccinations
SOME ADDITIONAL SOURCES USED FOR THIS STORY
CDC, “Pertussis Surveillance and Trends,” https://www.cdc.gov/pertussis/php/surveillance/index.html
CDC, “Measles Cases and Outbreaks,” https://www.cdc.gov/measles/data-research/index.html
Emory University, Rollins School of Public Health, “Study: Pregnancy Offers Critical Opportunity to Address Vaccine Uncertainty,” https://sph.emory.edu/news/study-pregnancy-offers-critical-opportunity-address-vaccine-uncertainty
People magazine: HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was also criticized for statements he made in April 2025 about people with autism. See this link: https://people.com/rfk-jr-autism-baseball-claims-shriver-family-legacy-11717318
Pew Research Center, “How Do Americans View Childhood Vaccines, Vaccine Research, and Policy?” https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2025/11/18/how-do-americans-view-childhood-vaccines-vaccine-research-and-policy/
Science.org, “British Medical Journal Charges Fraud in Autism-Vaccine Paper,” https://www.science.org/content/article/british-medical-journal-charges-fraud-autism-vaccine-paper
Indian Journal of Psychiatry, “The MMR vaccine and autism: Sensation, refutation, retraction, and fraud,” https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3136032/
KFF, “Tracking Poll on Health Information and Trust….” https://www.kff.org/health-information-trust/trust-in-cdc-and-views-of-federal-childhood-vaccine-schedule-changes/#:~:text=among%20peer%20nations.-,1,in%20September%20of%20last%20year.
Cambridge University Press, “The Effect of Fox News on Health Behavior during COVID-19,” https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/political-analysis/article/effect-of-fox-news-on-health-behavior-during-covid19/426C07EADC0D1E49D4AD26233C4CB9B8
National Federation of Independent Businesses, “U.S. Supreme Court Blocks OSHA Vaccine Mandate,” https://www.nfib.com/news/legal-blog/u-s-supreme-court-blocks-osha-vaccine-mandate/#:~:text=In%20its%20opinion%2C%20the%20Court,notice%2Dand%2Dcomment%20rulemaking.
eyeoncleveland 