Kira Ganga Kieffer
speaker
134 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 20 Jul
Kira Ganga Kieffer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
People have had contentions or fears or concerns or anxieties, I kind of use all those different words, about vaccines since they were invented at the end of the 19th century.
So that has always been the case.
And so when we look back historically and then also now, we can see that they're not always about the same exact issues, but yet we see a lot of kind of higher meaning questions, not questions about do the vaccines work or don't they work or is the science there to support the efficacy of X vaccine or Y vaccine, but rather like
is it a morally good thing for me to vaccinate my child if there is some level of risk to do so?
And what kind of risk management is any individual running?
And so when I think about risk, I think about morality.
I see religion everywhere.
And so religion, not necessarily in the institutional or doctrinal sense, but more in a subtler religion, as I call it,
that works into people's calculuses when they think about vaccinations, especially for their children, but also themselves.
I think it's maybe a fair assessment now and in the past couple of years, and I would include COVID through today, but not necessarily earlier.
And so when we think about how I like to think about religion is not only in that evangelical or Christian sense, but if we broaden it, then we'll see that starting in the 1980s, which is when my book begins its history of modern vaccine hesitancy,
we do see, um, a lot of the kind of evangelical, um, narratives or tropes about what, like what's right and wrong and protecting children, protecting the family.
Um, and also the use of conversion narratives that people, um, use when they are becoming evangelical Christians.
And they say like, I was, I was lost and now I'm found like Jesus has saved me.
I understand the
world better so we saw that happening in the 1980s with the DPT vaccine diphtheria pertussis tetanus when there was a kind of an expose documentary that came out in 82 and it was alleging that there were you know more than
more injuries from that vaccine than there should have been, so to speak.
And a lot of parents came forward and said, oh, this seems to reflect my story.
My child has been sick, has been injured, and now I understand better because the doctors hadn't told me that that could have been the reason, that could have been the cause.
Whether it was the cause or wasn't,
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