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An Ohio teenager who made headlines last month for defying his mother's anti-vaccine beliefs will testify about his experience before a congressional committee on Tuesday.
Eighteen-year-old Ethan Lindenberger tweeted that he was eager to discuss the spread of vaccine misinformation at the next Senate Health Committee hearing on preventable disease epidemics.
"I grew up in an anti-vaxx household," Lindenberger said in a YouTube video about the audience. "My mother did not believe that vaccines were good for the health and safety of society."
Her mother, Jill Wheeler, vaccinated her two eldest, but refused to do the same for her five youngest children, including Ethan, when she realized the law did not require her.
But after reading scientific articles about the benefits of vaccination, Lindeberger decided that it was in his best interest to get vaccinated. He sought advice on how to do this without his parents' permission in a Reddit post in mid-November, which has since become viral.
"My parents think vaccines are a kind of government program," he wrote at the time. "It's stupid and I've had countless arguments on the subject. But because of their convictions, I have never been vaccinated, god knows how much I'm still alive. "
A little over a month later, Lindenberger received vaccines against hepatitis A, hepatitis B, influenza and HPV in an office of the Ohio Department of Health, the Washington Post reported.
The committee hearing Tuesday follows the measles outbreaks in New York and Washington State. The outbreaks are caused by unvaccinated people traveling to countries such as Israel and Ukraine, where measles outbreaks occur and return to the United States.
The disease, which can pose serious and sometimes fatal risks to the health of young children, is highly contagious and can spread quickly through pockets of unvaccinated people.
The number of anti-vaxxers has increased in recent years, largely because of the spread of misinformation about vaccines, including the myth that such injections are the cause of # 39; autism. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention do not report any link between vaccines and autism.
Lindenberger will be joined on Tuesday by several other members of the committee, including Washington Health Secretary John Wiesman and the President and CEO of the Immune Deficiency Foundation, John Boyle.
Listen to the live hearing on Tuesday at 10 am on the Senate Committee on Health website.
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