A noose, a menstrual cup, Hitler’s mustache: The anti-vaxxers’ shameful toolbox

It’s ugly, the way a small but vocal band of activists are fighting to keep kids from having to get mandatory — and necessary — vaccinations to attend public schools and keep our communities safe. Really ugly.

Take what happened to Florida Sen. Lauren Book of Plantation after she filed a bill to end the religious exemption for public school vaccinations and create a medical review panel to examine any unusual trends in medical exemptions.

Someone on social media posted a doctored photo of Book, who is Jewish, in Nazi regalia with a Hitler mustache. Another criticized her children and her father. Another accused her of being a medical rapist — of holding and injecting children against their will. If you know anything about Book’s crusade against child sexual abuse, you know such comments are both cruel and absurd.

Or take what happened in California in October after state senators passed a bill that tightens the rules on vaccine exemptions. A woman in the Senate gallery threw a menstrual cup down upon them, splashing several.

Or take what happened to U.S. Rep. Frederica Wilson of Miami Gardens in June, after she refiled a bill to stop states from allowing non-medical exemptions for school vaccines. A man left a voicemail threatening to kill her.

“I’m gonna kill your ass if you do that bill, I swear. I will f—-ing come down and kill your f—-ing ass. This is the United States of America, bitch. Get the f—- out. I’ll tell you what. I’ll come down to Miami, bitch. I’ll f— you up,” said the man, whom federal officials later identified as Darryl Varnum, a Maryland anti-vaxxer and cybersecurity engineer for a Pentagon contractor. Sadly, it wasn’t Wilson’s only death threat on the issue. Earlier this year, someone else mailed her a noose.

Leaders of the anti-vaxxer movement may not intend violence, but they have fostered an environment where followers feel emboldened to bully, threaten and attack people who stand up for science and public health.

“I’ve been in public life a long time and I’ve never experienced anything like this,” Wilson told us. “I’ve had people say, “‘We don’t agree with you.’ But nobody wants to kill you.”

Unfortunately, the protesters’ bullying tactics are delivering success. They are convincing some Florida lawmakers that childhood vaccines are a political issue, not a serious public health issue.

Republican Sen. Gayle Harrell of Stuart, who chairs the Florida Senate’s Health Policy Committee, is refusing to hear Book’s bill because she doesn’t support eliminating the religious exemption or creating a panel to review medical exemptions.

Harrell told us she believes in vaccinations, but when her legislative delegation met in West Palm Beach some weeks back, about 25 people — including one rabbi — showed up to testify against Book’s bill. They were concerned about fetal DNA being in the vaccines that protect children and teens from 16 deadly diseases. Opposed to abortion, the speakers said they were opposed to vaccinating children for religious reasons.

In an accompanying editorial, we call attention to the growing public health threat facing Florida because of the growing number of unvaccinated schoolchildren. The CDC counted Miami-Dade,

Broward, Orange and Hillsborough among the Top 25 counties most at risk for a measles outbreak this year.

In it, we note that vaccines are highly purified, though they may contain traces of DNA from the human or animal cells they were grown in, the New York Times reports. These include ancestor cells from aborted fetuses never exposed to pathogens, the paper reports.

Nonetheless, “religious authorities have meticulously studied how vaccines are made and what is in them, and still have ruled that they do not violate Jewish, Islamic or Catholic law,” the paper reports.

If all the major religions support the use of vaccines that have saved more than 10 million lives around the globe, why should Florida do otherwise?

“I haven’t found a religion yet that prohibits it,” said Rabbi David Shabtai of Boca Raton. “It’s often just people who are hiding their personal choice.

“Whenever I talk to someone who has a religious exemption, they believe they don’t work, they aren’t necessary or they’re dangerous. They’re couching their concerns in religious terms and that’s fraud. That’s just fraud.”

Harrell told us she also objects to the creation of a medical review panel. “We’re going to have everyone who needs a medical exemption go before a panel?” Imagine the cost of having five doctors examine every child, review their medical records and talk to their parents, she says.

But that’s not what Book’s bill suggests at all. Rather, a medical review would be triggered only if a high concentration of medical exemptions arises from one physician or one practice. Such a mechanism is justified given the experience in other states that have ended religious exemptions, only to see medical exemptions surge.

Book said she got involved after a coalition of religious leaders approached her following last spring’s measles outbreak in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in New York. They were concerned about the anti-Semitism that came from that.

Book hoped to start a conversation. A committee hearing or workshop would unquestionably help everyone, including Harrell, better understand what’s at risk and what Book’s bill proposes. But it’s not going to happen, at least not this year.

“They have succeeded in making people believe it’s about religious freedom, when it’s really about the health and safety of children and folks across our state,” Book says.

“God bless them, they’re organized. They’ve been to every single delegation meeting, some group of them. There’s not any member of the Legislature that doesn’t know that 674 is that crazy vaccine bill Sen. Book is doing. They don’t know what it is, or what it does, but they know they’ve gotten got emails about it. It’s a dangerous way to look at this issue.

“This is something that’s not going away,” Book says. “We know we’re going to have an outbreak.”

When that outbreak happens, who should we hold accountable? The ugly posters on social media? Or the people elected to keep us safe?

Editorials are the opinion of the Sun Sentinel Editorial Board and written by one of its members or a designee. The Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Rosemary O’Hara, Sergio Bustos, Steve Bousquet and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson.