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Ethan Lindenberger began by questioning his parents' anti-vaccine positions and ended up getting vaccinated, a rebellion that caught the attention of national media – and now Congress.
The 18-year-old from Ohio announced on YouTube Saturday that he was invited to address the Senate Standing Committee on Health, Education, Work and Retirement at a hearing dedicated to the review of outbreaks of preventable diseases. He will be appearing alongside experts such as John Wiesman, Washington State Secretary of State for Health, and Saad B. Omer, a professor at Emory University, according to the committee's website.
"I'm looking forward to speaking in Washington, DC," Lindenberger said in the video.
The story of Lindenberger has begun to become part of a measles epidemic that has affected dozens of people in the United States, attracting more and more attention from parents who do not vaccinate their children. The teenager said he lived for years without being vaccinated because his mother was convinced of the conspiracy of the vaccine. So Lindenberger started doing her own homework, consulting scientific research and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In November, he posted on Reddit asking for advice on how to get vaccinated. In December, Lindenberger visited the Ohio Department of Health in his hometown and received a standard battery of vaccines including hepatitis A, hepatitis B, influenza, and HPV, according to news reports. by the Washington Post. Since he was 18, he could legally make the decision to do it.
"I looked at the situation, it was clear that there was a lot more evidence in the defense of vaccines," he told The Post in February.
His mother, Jill Wheeler, told Undark, an online science magazine that reported for the first time the story of Lindenberger, that his son's decision was "like what he spits on me, saying," You do not know anything, I do not trust you with anything. "
According to Lindenberger's Reddit post, his father was less reluctant to this idea since Ethan was older.
Ohio is one of 17 states that allow parents not to use vaccines for philosophical or moral reasons. Lindenberger has four younger siblings, including a 2-year-old sister who he says will probably not be vaccinated.
"It breaks my heart that she can get measles and that she has finished," Lindenberger told the newspaper.
The Senate hearing comes as 68 people contracted measles in the Pacific Northwest, the Associated Press reported. Oregon and Washington State allow parents not to vaccinate their children for personal or philosophical reasons, and the region is home to a particularly keen concentration of parents who choose not to vaccinate their children. Washington State hopes to pass legislation to restrict vaccine exemptions, but faces opposition from "anti-vaxxers" who believe in a false conspiracy theory that vaccines can cause problems such as autism.
According to the CDC, measles outbreaks can be linked to an increase in the number of people traveling abroad and bring the disease back to the United States and communities with pockets of unvaccinated individuals. According to the CDC, there were 17 homes in Canada last year, mostly concentrated in three states. Epidemics have been associated with some communities of Orthodox Jews who chose not to vaccinate and who contracted the disease when travelers returned from Israel, which was experiencing an epidemic.
In 2017, an epidemic that affected 75 people in an American-Somali community in Minnesota was attributed to inadequate immunization coverage.
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Kayla Epstein is National's social media editor at the Washington Post. She specializes in mixing traditional storytelling and social media to tell stories and engage readers. Previously, she worked for the US Guardian, part of the Pulitzer Prize winning team, which broke the stories of the National Security Agency. Alex Horton of the Washington Post contributed to this report.
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