A man stands on a wooden cart at a fairground, passionately holding up two large bottles labeled “HORSE POX CURE” and “AUTISM CURE.” Behind him is a banner that reads, “GUARANTEED NATURAL REMEDIES — GOVERNMENT CAN’T STOP THE TRUTH!” On the cart beside him sit bottles labeled “JUST HEROIN,” “CURE FOR BIRD FLU,” “BRAIN WORMS,” and “COVID CURE.” Several skeptical onlookers wearing old-fashioned hats and clothing watch him. Red-and-white tents are visible in the background under a partly cloudy sky.

There’s a stubborn myth that the modern anti-vax crusade is a spontaneous grassroots uprising of concerned parents who “did their own research” on Facebook at 2 a.m. It’s not. The rhetoric and the posture are older than your great-grandparents. And if you follow the tributaries far enough upstream, two of the headwaters keep returning: Ellen G. White’s 19th-century prophetic authority among early Seventh-day Adventists and her direct intellectual heir in flood geology, George McCready Price. From Price you get Henry Morris and the creation-science movement that still insists the Grand Canyon was a weekend DIY project. Meanwhile, the anti-vaccine script, with its libertarian shouts of “medical tyranny,” has been echoing since the Victorian era. Today those two rivers regularly meet in the same basins: conservative media ecosystems, wellness-influencer circles, and, recently, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, where Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is still selling the vaccine-autism story like it’s a timeshare.

Ellen G. White didn’t launch anti-vax. She did supercharge young-Earth creationism.

White’s visions helped set Adventism’s health reforms and a literalist reading of Genesis. But on vaccines specifically, the record is not what anti-vaxxers want. White never issued prophetic counsel against vaccination; on the contrary, contemporary Adventist sources document that she and close associates chose smallpox vaccination when warranted. See the denomination’s official White Estate summary and correspondence (“I have been vaccinated… I have every reason to be thankful to the Lord” is how her family described her practice) and a clarifying she took X-ray therapy and was no enemy of medicine. The current church position is explicit: vaccines are encouraged as a public-health good; there is no faith-based reason to refuse; decisions are left to individual conscience in consultation with medical advice. In a readable lay overview from the Adventist Record , the church stressed that missionaries are expected to be appropriately vaccinated and that White offered no religious-liberty argument against vaccine requirements. ( 2021 reaffirmation ; ; White Estate Q&A ; Adventist Record explainer ). Adventist Newsroom statement NAD statement

From Price it’s a short hop to Henry M. Morris and John Whitcomb’s 1961 bestseller, The Genesis Flood , which functionally launched the modern creation-science movement, institutionalized at the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) and later amplified by Answers in Genesis. The creationist world itself brags about this lineage. ( ; ICR on the impact of The Genesis Flood ; ICR founder page ). AIG/ICR retrospectives

Bottom line: White is not the grandmother of anti-vax. She is, through Price, a grandmother of American flood-geology creationism, which pours into a larger anti-science reservoir alongside anti-vax activism.

Anti-vax isn’t new either. The Victorian pamphlets read like Twitter threads.

If you think slogans like “medical tyranny,” “toxins,” and “my body, my choice” are fresh, meet Alfred Russel Wallace. Yes, Darwin’s co-theorist, who spent the 1880s and 1890s publishing bangers like Vaccination Proved Useless and Dangerous (1889) and (1898). Wallace’s arguments and style would crush on Substack even now. (For the receipts, see peer-reviewed histories and primary texts via Vaccination a Delusion, Its Penal Enforcement a Crime , CDC’s Emerging Infectious Diseases , and .) The legal framework was set in the U.S. by Cambridge University Press , in which the Supreme Court held that states can enact compulsory vaccination laws as reasonable public-health regulation. ( ; ; Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905) ; CDC/EID on Wallace ). Cambridge UP Wallace chapter PubMed review Jacobson full text at Justia

The 20th-century reboot: TV panic, “toxins,” and the autism detour

The modern U.S. anti-vax infrastructure got a boost in the early 1980s after a local TV special, Vaccine Roulette , scared parents about the DPT shot. Barbara Loe Fisher co-founded Dissatisfied Parents Together, later renamed the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), which still pushes “informed consent” rhetoric against mandates. Their own materials and outside histories confirm the origin story. ( ; HHS historical deck citing Mnookin ; NVIC “About” page ). NVIC homepage

Despite the retraction, the “toxins and timing” myth metastasized. In 2008, the “Green Our Vaccines” rally in Washington featured Jenny McCarthy, Jim Carrey, and a keynote by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., pushing the idea that the schedule is “too many, too soon” and that “toxins” are the culprit. Media captured it in real time. ( ABC News hit ; ; FierceHealthcare item noting RFK Jr. keynote ). PBS interview

So where’s the creationism overlap?

Not doctrinally. White’s own denomination today endorses vaccination and, inconveniently for a clean narrative, says outright there’s no Adventist religious basis for refusals. But sociologically and psychologically, the Venn diagram between creationism and vaccine skepticism has substantial overlap: distrust in mainstream science, conspiratorial thinking, partisan sorting, and Christian-nationalist identity correlate with lower vaccine uptake. Multiple studies, including peer-reviewed analyses in , , and public-health venues, document how conspiracy beliefs and Christian nationalism predict vaccine hesitancy and refusal. Nature-affiliated journals and have repeatedly found white evangelicals to be the least likely religious group to get COVID-19 vaccines, especially early in the rollout. ( ; ; PNAS on conspiracy beliefs and vaccination ; ; Christian nationalism paper ). Nature Humanities & Social Sciences Comm. Pew, Aug. 2021 PRRI, March 2021

Tie it together with history: the anti-vax movement didn’t need Adventist theology to thrive. It already had 19th-century libertarianism, spiritualism, and anti-establishment medicine to draw from. What creationism adds is a ready-made skepticism toward scientific consensus and a media ecosystem primed to think peer review is a deep-state ritual. That’s why you see influencers who rebut radiometric dating on Monday and warn about “toxic shots” on Tuesday. No central command is required, just shared assumptions about how the world works.

The present is the part where things should be better. They’re not. RFK Jr. has spent two decades insisting vaccines drive an “autism epidemic.” As HHS Secretary, he declined to say vaccines don’t cause autism in confirmation hearings and has leaned on low-quality or flawed studies to keep the possibility alive. Fact-checkers have debunked his specific claims and showed how he misrepresents prevalence and causation; mainstream medical bodies keep repeating the same conclusion: no link. ( FactCheck.org confirmation coverage ; ; FactCheck on his autism claims ; ). CDC “Autism and Vaccines”

Meanwhile, reality keeps issuing corrections. Measles came roaring back in 2019, then again in 2025, with CDC reporting the second-highest annual count in a quarter-century by mid-April and more than a thousand cases by summer, concentrated in low-coverage communities. Hospitalizations and deaths followed, exactly as textbooks predict when immunization rates drop below herd-immunity thresholds. ( CDC MMWR update, Apr. 2025 ; ; CDC measles data page ). KFF explainer on elimination status

So is there a straight line from White to anti-vax today?

No. There’s a straight line from White to Price to Morris to modern creationism. There’s a separate line from 19th-century anti-vaccination leagues and cranks like Alfred Russel Wallace to McCarthy/Kennedy-era autism panic and today’s monetized outrage. Those lines intersect not because Adventists secretly control Instagram, but because anti-science movements share tactics and audiences.

The overlaps show up in three places:

Epistemology : distrust of mainstream expertise and a preference for charismatic authorities with “secret knowledge.” Price positioned himself against geological consensus; Wakefield, McCarthy, Mercola, and Kennedy position themselves against epidemiological consensus. Same playbook, different field. ( ESDA on Price’s method ; ). BMJ on Wakefield fraud

Rhetoric : recycled talking points about “medical tyranny” in the 1890s and the 2020s; “toxins” then and now; the framing of public-health measures as rights violations. (Jacobson settled the state’s power to regulate for health, but the myth persists that liberty means “no one can tell me to vaccinate ever.”) ( History of Vaccines legal explainer ; ). Victorian anti-vax discourse

What modern Adventists actually say now

The take-home, before anyone tries to “both sides” this

Sources worth your time

Originally published at https://vagabondvisions.beehiiv.com.