More than 70 moms, dads, and community members packed the Faulkner Gallery Sunday evening to discuss what has become a taboo and politically charged topic: childhood vaccines. Most of the parents in attendance were against vaccinating their kids and came to ask the three panelists how the recent laws tightening California’s childhood immunization requirements would affect their families.
“We’re here because our rights have been taken away,” said the moderator, Dr. Hesu Whitten, about Senate Bills 714 and 276 . Whitten is a chiropractor based in Santa Barbara. “We are doctors and college graduates; we’re not just people sitting around on a porch picking our teeth.” The “we” Whitten refers to are anti-vaxxers, or the terms they prefer, “vaccine-educated” or “ex-vaxxers.”
“We don’t like the term ‘anti-vaxxer’ because 90 percent of the people in this group listened to our doctors and believed in vaccines until something went terribly wrong and we were forced to do the research ourselves,” Whitten explained.