Recording intelligenceAI-generated brief · check the source for context

From Anti-Vax Mom to Vaccine Advocate

1:07:04 recording · AUTO · 2 speakers

Listen to the original

Listen to the episode

Brief overview

A once anti-vaccine mother explains how community, a pediatrician and one course changed her mind.

  1. Legislation shapes parents' vaccination behaviourNew York and North Carolina ran all-or-nothing exemptions, while Oregon's checkbox form let parents pick and choose.
  2. Staying in the practice kept the door openHer pediatrician never fired her for refusing shots, so she could come back to him when fear of measles grew.
  3. Hesitant parents have already done the readingTalking to them as fellow thinkers, not as people who never heard of vaccines, is what actually lands.
Executive Summary AI
  • Cindy Leifer opens a special Immune booster recorded November 23rd, 2025, on how people change their minds about vaccines, introducing her friend Ellen Mary Woods, a firefighter, paramedic and leader of Ithaca is Immunized who once opposed vaccination.0:13
  • Ellen describes becoming a mother in Ithaca in 2006 inside the home birth community, reading Dr. Sears and Aviva Ram, believing she had done more homework than other parents, and choosing a delayed schedule because she feared thimerosal was still sitting on shelves.3:20
  • After her son got DTaP and Hib at about six months and screamed that afternoon, she read it as the "DTAP scream" described on mothering.com, went down the rabbit hole, and did not immunize him again until he was seven.6:27
  • Expecting Oregon to require per-disease exemption modules, she enrolled in Paul Offit's Coursera course through Children's Hospital of Philadelphia while moms she met through the "rational Catholics", including Karen Ernst of Voices for Vaccines, gently questioned whether her son's reaction had ever needed a doctor.20:17
  • Pregnant with her third in 2013, she took prenatal Tdap as her "gateway back vaccine", and with measles outbreaks in Washington and California, fear of SSPE and a pediatrician who kept her in his practice, she caught all three children up and now advocates publicly.24:31
Key Quote
“I definitely considered myself like an educated anti-vaccine mom.”
— Ellen Mary Woods10:48
Key Quote
“I was convinced that I was much smarter than the state, right?”
— Ellen Mary Woods19:58
Key Quote
“But basically in immunization advocacy, I think the most important thing for people to remember is most vaccine hesitant parents have really thought deeply about the issues around immunization.”
— Ellen Mary Woods49:00