Lee Kuhnle

But eventually, it comes down to it might have been a reaction to the HPV vaccine that they had received about two months earlier.

Now, again, I'm not an epidemiologist or anything, but all evidence that I have read indicates that there is absolutely no connection to the vaccine that could be made at all.

But the new element here that didn't plague Salem or the dancers is that we have the news media, which, of course, can spread this panic to a lot more people.

So a lot of people in Colombia start turning on their afternoon news and see more and more cases of these desperate parents rushing their kids to hospital and more and more that link is being made with vaccines.

So this happens in Colombia, it then happens in Brazil, something similar happens in Australia, and it happens in Japan as well.

Now in Japan,

the outcry gets so big that the government actually steps back from their position that HPV vaccines is something that you should be getting, right?

Now, they didn't do it based on the science.

They did it based on the public outcry and the worry that was being spread around based on these very real symptoms.

Exactly.

Right.

And then maybe those symptoms that you get are then very real symptoms.

And now you start to get scared.

Yeah, and that's what I'm starting to think about, and this is how I'm using it in my pedagogy in the classroom and in the podcast as well, is that a lot of this stuff works or we get swept up in it because we just can't come up with any other reasonable explanation, right?

I didn't know anything about mass psychogenic illness, so I'm like, well, okay, 500 people go to hospital.

There's got to be a reason for that, right?

Yeah, I'm nodding my head very vociferously.

I even have it in my notes.

We are much more like our ancestors than we think.

You're absolutely right.