An anti-vaxxer’s epiphany

Heather Simpson was once a proud and outspoken anti-vaxxer, said Jane Ridley in the New York Post. The Dallas resident started immersing herself in the movement in 2016, when she and her husband were struggling to conceive. After various medical interventions, Simpson changed her diet and got pregnant. “It made me doubt Western medicine,” she says. Simpson began posting anti-vax screeds on Facebook, inciting angry responses from vaccine advocates. “My enemies made me feel that I was standing up for something important.” One of her posts went viral and made headlines in 2019. It featured a photo of Simpson’s face and body covered with red spots, accompanied by the caption “Was trying to think of the least scary thing I could be for Halloween...so I became the measles.” Then, last year, she wrote about her upcoming surgery for endometriosis and was shocked when her followers accused her of taking “the easy way out.” The abuse intensified when Simpson posted that she didn’t want to ban vaccines, just make them safer. Accused of being a government plant, Simpson had a daylong panic attack and started to rethink her anti-science beliefs. This spring, she got a Covid shot and now cringes about her past behavior. “I was horrible. I thought I was smarter than everyone else.”