Oooh, boy. Sally Kohn used to be anti-vaxx?
Yep!
Here she is letting the cat out of the bag with an op-ed at the Daily Beast where she talks about her decision not to vaccinate her daughter and to let the reader know she’s totally sorry about it:
When I first told my mother that my partner and I would be taking our daughter to a friend’s wedding in India, my mom cried. “But she’ll have to get vaccinated,” she eventually said, through heavy tears. Because my daughter, who was then 4 years old, still hadn’t been vaccinated. And not vaccinating her is a decision I now regret.
Hilariously, she blames her mom:
So to be honest, when my mom—a mathematician with a fast Internet connection who I love deeply and trust implicitly—sent us a 46-page report on the pros but mostly cons of vaccines, it just seemed like one less decision to make. “In most cases the risk of harm to a healthy, breast-fed infant from a vaccination far exceeds the risk of harm from the disease itself,” my mom wrote on page 1.
The following pages seemed very convincing. The statistics made it look like it was far more likely for our daughter to be hurt by the side effects of the vaccines than to catch the various diseases against which the vaccines protected. We didn’t consult any other sources. We were overwhelmed, and perhaps slightly lazy, new parents.
Nonsense. New parents take their child to a pediatrician literally dozens of times in the first years of its life. Her doctor never once sat Kohn and her partner down to talk about vaccines? And after all those doctor-parent talks, Kohn still believed her mom?
Her child is now vaccinated:
Thanks to our change of heart a few years ago, and our trip to India, my daughter is now fully vaccinated. She attends a wonderful, diverse public school in New York City where she can learn all the good lessons about community and connectivity. And the only thing infectious about her is her laughter.
Reading through Kohn’s timeline, it looks like this India trip happened in 2013:
I'm off to India until March. Let's hear it for vacation! And no, there is no tweeting during vacation. Later…
— Sally Kohn (@sallykohn) February 17, 2013
Will post more pictures from India soon but, for now, this one makes me happy! http://t.co/IOkqb1SGId
— Sally Kohn (@sallykohn) March 20, 2013
Will post more pictures from India soon but, for now, this one makes me happy! http://t.co/IOkqb1SGId
— Sally Kohn (@sallykohn) March 20, 2013
But way back in 2011, Kohn was mocking the HPV vaccine issue during the two GOP September debates:
As long as we don't let those girls wear head scarves… RT @joshgreenman: Mandated HPV vaccine: #creepingsecularsharialaw
— Sally Kohn (@sallykohn) September 13, 2011
! MT @CharlesMBlow: Perry calling HPV vaccine order "erring on the side of life" < This from man who executed more ppl than any other gov
— Sally Kohn (@sallykohn) September 13, 2011
@mattseaton you want some HPV vaccine?
— Sally Kohn (@sallykohn) September 13, 2011
did Perry just get booed for his HPV response? #GOPdebate
— Sally Kohn (@sallykohn) September 23, 2011
Bravo Barro!! Agree! RT @irincarmon: +1 MT @jbarro: I think the popular objections to the HPV vaccine are principally about sex.
— Sally Kohn (@sallykohn) September 13, 2011
Which means she was mocking the GOP for whatever was being said about the HPV vaccine while at the same time harboring anti-science views on vaccines in general. That’s hypocrisy, no?
And more importantly, Kohn should have let her readers know at the time that she was the real anti-vaxxer that night on Twitter, not Governor Perry or anybody in the GOP.
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