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 over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The Majority Report with Sam Seder · 3691 - Bernie & AOC Rally For El-Sayed; The Roots Of Vaccine Hesitancy w/ Kira Ganga Kieffer · 20 Jul 2026 podcast

It sort of doesn't matter is what I'm kind of is my argument here is is because the they were making sense and meaning out of inexplainable events.

And so we see that like idea of like evangelical tropes there, but not necessarily like a Christian idea.

like an ostensibly Christian.

And it wasn't like ostensibly Christian at the time.

And then as we move forward into the 90s and 2000s, if you remember like the MMR autism theory and like Jenny McCarthy and talking a lot about the MMR measles, mumps, rubella vaccine, which we're hearing a lot about these days as well.

there was not overt religion there.

There's a lot of discussion of like bodily purity.

And that purity was about protecting from the sickness that could be, you know, transferred through the vaccine, not like of what the vaccine could be protecting against, but rather like this fear that the vaccine itself could be toxic or have chemicals in it that could

make the body dirty or impure and then therefore ill.

So there's this ongoing fear

that vaccines do more than they say they're going to do, so to speak.

And I think that's where meaning-making is so important and where religion plays into our history of vaccine hesitancy.

And to get to your point now with Trump and him acting as a religious-type figure,

Yes, he does represent a lot of evangelical Christians, and that is his base.

And in the more recent history, in the 2010s, we saw evangelical Christians becoming more engaged on vaccine hesitancy as a medical freedom issue because of very clear ties to threats to religious freedom laws, so to speak, with the idea of removing religious exemptions from vaccines, which

means that there hadn't been a truly religious or Christian reason to oppose vaccination.

But then suddenly when there is more vaccine hesitancy, fewer people are getting vaccinated in the 2010s, 2015, 16, right around Trump's coming into power.

Evangelical Christians see that there is a cause that they can get on board with, and it kind of brings them into the tent of vaccine hesitancy.

Yeah, so you're correct in saying that when Gardasil came out and hit the market in 2006, there was a conservative evangelical and Catholic kind of like outpouring against that vaccine in particular because it's against certain strains of HPV, which is a sexually transmitted infection.

And the way that the vaccine was marketed was as a

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