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.

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 readable lay overview from the Adventist Record 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 2021 reaffirmation, the church stressed that missionaries are expected to be appropriately vaccinated and that White offered no religious-liberty argument against vaccine requirements. (White Estate Q&A; Adventist Record explainer; Adventist Newsroom statement; NAD statement).

Where White's influence absolutely did matter for modern anti-science politics is creationism. Her vivid flood narratives inspired George McCready Price, a prolific early-20th-century Adventist apologist who tried to bulldoze geology into a global-flood timeline. Price's "New Geology" and "law of conformable stratigraphic sequences" tried to deny the fossil record's order to make room for a recent creation. Price directly shaped later creationists, and Adventist historians acknowledge it. (Encyclopedia of Seventh-day Adventists on Price; Ronald Numbers excerpt/summary).

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.

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 Vaccination a Delusion, Its Penal Enforcement a Crime (1898). Wallace's arguments and style would crush on Substack even now. (For the receipts, see peer-reviewed histories and primary texts via CDC's Emerging Infectious Diseases, Cambridge University Press, and PubMed.) The legal framework was set in the U.S. by Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905), in which the Supreme Court held that states can enact compulsory vaccination laws as reasonable public-health regulation. (CDC/EID on Wallace; Cambridge UP Wallace chapter; PubMed review; Jacobson full text at Justia).

That legal baseline still matters. A century later, courts continued citing Jacobson during COVID litigation, even as scholars reminded everyone the original holding was narrow: a small fine in a smallpox outbreak. (AJPH analysis; Blackman, Buffalo L. Rev.).

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).

Then came the big detour: in 1998 Andrew Wakefield implied MMR causes autism. That paper has been retracted and denounced as fraudulent; Wakefield lost his medical license; the evidence against an autism link is overwhelming. (CMAJ on Lancet retraction; BMJ/Deer dossier; CDC "Autism and Vaccines"; AAP fact check).

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).

Around the same time, new anti-vax organizations professionalized the message: Del Bigtree's Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN) launched in 2016 and has filed waves of FOIA-as-PR lawsuits; public health researchers have identified a "Disinformation Dozen" dominating vaccine falsehoods on social platforms (Mercola, RFK Jr., Tenpenny, et al.). (ICAN bio in a U.S. Supreme Court amicus; Time on the "Disinformation Dozen").

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 PNAS, Nature-affiliated journals, and public-health venues, document how conspiracy beliefs and Christian nationalism predict vaccine hesitancy and refusal. Pew and PRRI 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"; AAP 2025).

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).

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).

Sociology: where conservative media, some evangelical subcultures, and wellness/"natural health" influencers mingle, anti-evolution memes and anti-vax memes happily cross-pollinate. Surveys repeatedly find that conspiracy thinking and Christian-nationalist identity predict vaccine refusal, which you can watch in real time whenever a measles outbreak meets a low-MMR enclave. (PNAS, Jamieson et al.; Christian nationalism paper; CDC measles updates).

Because someone will try to drag White into anti-vax anyway: the denomination's official statements are tedious in how clear they are. They encourage "responsible immunization," explicitly say there is no religious reason to refuse, and refuse to provide blanket exemption letters. Church bioethicists and historians point out White had no divine revelation condemning vaccines; safety improved, Adventists used them, missionaries are expected to be vaccinated. (NAD guidance and symposium; NAD symposium recap quoting White Estate; Adventist Review reaffirmation; NAD resource page noting no exemption letters).

Creationism as a movement traces cleanly through White → Price → Morris → ICR/AiG. Anti-vax rhetoric traces through 19th-century activists and re-emerges with modern media amplification; the autism canard is dead in the literature but quite alive in politics. These two currents frequently swirl together because they share a worldview where expertise is corrupt and truth is revealed to the pure-of-heart (or the loud-of-YouTube). That overlap has consequences you can count in pediatric ICU beds. This year's measles waves are not stray raindrops. They're the flood. (CDC MMWR; CDC measles tracker).

On Ellen G. White and vaccines, and the current SDA position: White Estate Q&A; Adventist Record explainer; Global SDA statement; NAD statement.

On creationism lineage: ESDA bio of George McCready Price; Numbers summary; ICR on The Genesis Flood.

On Victorian/early anti-vax: CDC/EID on Wallace; Cambridge UP Wallace text; Jacobson v. Massachusetts.

On the autism myth: CMAJ on retraction; BMJ on Wakefield fraud; CDC autism & vaccines; AAP 2025.

On RFK Jr. and continued misinformation: FactCheck hearing recap; FactCheck on autism prevalence/causes.

On current consequences: CDC MMWR measles 2025; CDC measles tracker; KFF on elimination status risk.