COMMENT
Before Leilani* had her baby, she announced on Instagram that she had chosen to not vaccinate her child. “Our little tokouso is a strong Fob #vaccinefree”. Years of dealing with cousins, cousins of cousins and cousins of cousins of cousins, has taught me not to engage with antivaxxer rhetoric.
For some reason, antivaxxers always have a retort up their sleeve, like that measles “cause” autism and that there are “safer” and “natural” alternatives.
After she had her baby, Leilani attended a $200 per head ‘Making Informed Choices’ workshop in western Sydney about vaccination by prominent Australian-Samoan antivaxxer, Taylor Winterstein.
Winterstein, social media ‘influencer’ and wife of NRL player Frank Winterstein, has been heavily criticised for espousing antivaxxer rhetoric at her workshops and on social media.
After she had her baby, Leilani attended a $200 per head ‘Making Informed Choices’ workshop about vaccination by prominent Australian-Samoan antivaxxer, Taylor Winterstein.
As Leilani drove over to visit us after the workshop, I saw baby Aaliyah’s* wrinkly new skin and grey-milk eyes, and felt her tiny breaths flutter near my chest when I held her. She was so vulnerable to the whims of her 16-year-old mother. In that newborn, I saw the future of our Polynesian people forever made vulnerable and dying. I had to say something, anything.
When I asked Leilani if she knew that there was a recent study that once again debunked the myth that vaccines cause autism and that she never “contracted” autism since she herself had been vaccinated as a child, she rolled her brown eyes at me and said, "Forged evidence.”
When I told Leilani in a high-pitched voice that vaccines are the only thing that have made many diseases like the measles preventable, she scoffed as she breastfed and replied, “My milk has everything Aaliyah needs to be healthy, naturally.”
I remember my heart beating in my head at each of Leilani’s replies. Then I started screaming. “Are you actually crazy? Your baby could die! Just die! Do you even understand what I’m really telling you? No! Because you didn’t bother to graduate high school and now look, your baby is going to die because you’re f----d in the head!”
She scoffed as she breastfed and replied, “My milk has everything Aaliyah needs to be healthy, naturally.”
A redness pooled under her brown cheeks. Her voice tore as if she was giving birth through her throat. “How could you say that to me?” Leilani sobbed, aiming a pillow at my head and narrowly missing. “Just because you went to uni doesn’t mean you’re smarter than everyone.”
It took me a long while to realise that Leilani is one of the many victims of historical and global anti-vaxxer campaigns, and that my frustrations were not directed at her personally, but at the intersections of race, class and gender that have made members of my family and community susceptible to such beliefs.
Samoa has closed its schools and has restricted travel to the country due to a devastating measles outbreak that has already taken 70 lives, with most of them being infants and children.
Samoa’s vaccinations rates were at 31 per cent the time of the measles outbreak, which the World Health Organisation (WHO) accredits to “anti-vaccine messaging”, which took hold after two babies died from receiving a faulty measles vaccine in 2018.
In the wake of those deaths, which were “later established to have been due to the nurses mixing the vaccine with an expired muscle relaxant, instead of water”, Samoa temporarily halted its immunisation programme, and anti-vaccination messages were able to gain traction.
I have seen first-hand how poverty and relative poverty, combined with limited access to knowledge about vaccinations, has affected Pacific Islander communities, both in Australia and in the Pacific.
I have seen first-hand how poverty and relative poverty, combined with limited access to knowledge about vaccinations, has affected Pacific Islander communities, both in Australia and in the Pacific. Within our alternative facts’ era, it has become much easier for someone like my cousin to gather her knowledge from social media than it is finding a doctor she can trust, medicine she can afford or an article that isn’t pumped up with medical jargon and statistics.
In June 2019, anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a nephew of the late President John F. Kennedy, was seen next to government officials at Samoan independence celebrations. His visit was “for a program that is not government-related,” as quoted by the Samoan Observer. Taylor Winterstein, who cancelled her planned anti-vaccination tour in Samoa that month, still went ahead with her visit and posted a picture on Instagram with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., with the caption: “The past few days have been profoundly monumental for me, my family and for this movement [referring to the anti-vaccination movement] to date. I am deeply honoured to have been in the presence of a man I believe is, can and will change the course of history.”
Since the measles outbreak in Samoa, which has culminated into Black Death strategies to contain the spread of the deadly disease, Winterstein has gone on record to suggest that the door-to-door vaccinations that are currently being implemented in Samoa to prevent future outbreaks are “barbaric”, a word choice that is reflective of racist and self-hating stereotypes about Pacific Islanders, and somehow – according to Winterstein – like the state of Nazi Germany.
While Pacific people have been devastated by the deaths of children, a comic recently drawn by Garrick Tremain and published by Otago Daily Times, reveals the dehumanising and indifferent gaze that some members of white settler colonies project toward the Pacific. Tremain’s comic depicts two women walking out of a travel agency, with one saying to the other: "I asked, 'What are the least popular spots at the moment?' She said: 'The ones people are picking up in Samoa'." This blatant dehumanisation of Samoan people, paired with the large anti-vaccination movement that has recently swept the country, Samoans, and Pacific peoples more broadly, are receiving the message that they are barbaric for either vaccinating or not vaccinating their children and that the world reduces their pain and loss to a joke.
Author Lani Wendt Young has been a critically conscious Samoan voice in debunking anti-vaxxer logic. As a mother of three children, which she had prematurely, Young recently took to Twitter to explain that she “was especially afraid of both vaccines and the illnesses they were supposed to protect against. But we researched, weighed the risks and decided they were worth it. Vaccines save lives and yes we made an informed choice.” In her Twitter thread, Young goes on to explain that her choice to vaccinate was informed by the fact that she grew up in Samoa surrounded by stories of relatives dying from influenza, leprosy and tuberculosis. “For us, these sicknesses are not just words on a vaccine label, concepts from a long distant past. They’re painful parts of our family history and inform our present.”
The number of measles cases are up worldwide by 300 per cent, with countries like the Philippines and New Zealand also experiencing measles outbreaks this year.
The number of measles cases are up worldwide by 300 per cent, with countries like the Philippines and New Zealand also experiencing measles outbreaks this year. With the immense loss of children’s lives to preventable diseases, there is no denying that high vaccination rates effectively reduces the number of deaths by preventable illnesses. Now is not the time for alternative facts.
At family meetups, when Leilani isn’t looking, I’ll scoop Aaliyah into my arms, and we’ll watch Sesame Street together. In those moments, I kiss her crown, her thick black hair almost covering my face. Even though Aaliyah lives in Australia where almost 95 per cent of children aged five and under are fully immunised and has the benefit of herd immunity, I still worry for her. Five years ago, Australia was once measles free but has seen a small yet worrisome spike in cases in recent years. But I shouldn’t have to use Aaliyah as an extension of empathy. At the time of writing, scores of Samoan children and infants have died. That should be reason enough to reject anti-vaccine sentiment for good.
*names have been changed.
Winnie Dunn is a Tongan-Australian from Mount Druitt. She is a Manager and Editor at Sweatshop: Western Sydney Literacy Movement and a Bachelor of Arts graduate from Western Sydney University. She is editor of Sweatshop Women: Volume One.
