This week’s special episode—produced in partnership with Challenging Pseudoscience, at the Royal Institution, with support from the Open Society Foundation—features two storytellers who share just how easy it is to fall for scientific misinformation, and how difficult it can be to find your way back.
Part 1: When Lydia Greene’s infant daughter has a troubling reaction to a routine vaccine and her concerns are dismissed by a healthcare professional, she turns to an online parenting forum for answers.
Lydia Greene, nurse, wife, mother, geek, and vaccine advocate. Co-founder of Back to the Vax.
Part 2: After moving to a new town and feeling isolated, Sarah Ott looks for connection through talk radio and a local church—only to find herself pulled into a world of climate denial and conspiracy thinking.
Sarah Ott is a science educator and climate activist. Her work is focused on building resilience locally and nationally as we adapt to a changing climate. As the granddaughter of a Pennsylvania coal miner and former doubter of the science of climate change, she uses her personal story to shine a light on the path away from science denial and toward a life based in evidence.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
PART 1
18 years ago, I'm a quality control chemist at a pharmaceutical manufacturing plant. My job is to test raw materials, monitor reactions, ensure purification processes are flawless. In that environment, we document everything. We don't throw away a single scrap piece of paper and you can't even fart in there without writing it down.
I know firsthand how much care goes into producing these medications and products. I love my career and I am very good at it, but it's time for me to settle down and have a family, so I leave my career behind.
I'm 26 when I become pregnant with my daughter and I'm determined to give her the best start in life. I'm planning to breastfeed and cloth diaper and make my own baby food and, of course, I plan to vaccinate her. I even got a flu shot while pregnant.
It's my daughter's eight‑week appointment and we go to the public health office. The walls are this off‑white sickly color. There's faded pictures of cats and cartoons on the wall. I feel really uneasy. I look at her. She's so teeny tiny and I think, “Shouldn't she be bigger before getting these shots? What if something goes wrong? I can't undo it.”
But I don't say anything as the nurse walks into the room. She pulls out the needles and my heart starts racing. She injects my daughter and I quickly comfort her by breastfeeding.
Later that evening, she's screaming this high‑pitched, repetitive robotic cry. She was such a good baby. I never heard her cry like that in my life. I'm terrified and I do my best to comfort her all night long.
The next day, I call the public health nurse in a panic. I tell her about being up all night with my screaming baby. She brushes me off saying, “That sounds normal. You're just being a first‑time mom.”
I feel defeated, I feel embarrassed and still very worried.
She later follows up to schedule the next round of vaccinations, and she lies to me telling me my daughter wouldn't be allowed in school without them and that there was a polio outbreak in Toronto, of all places, caused by immigrants.
I quickly Google to find that neither of those things are true. That was the moment I lost trust. I knew I could not trust that nurse. I needed answers and I didn't get them from public health. So, I turned to the internet.
Weeks earlier, I went to my doctor because I was having breastfeeding issues and he just told me, “Don't be so brokenhearted. If it doesn't work out, there's formula.”
So I turned to this internet forum of mothers and they helped me work through the issue. There was already a trust built when healthcare failed me and that's where I found other moms who had similar experiences with vaccines. They had answers. They had emotional videos. They told me my baby had cry encephalitis, a sign of brain inflammation. They share these PubMed studies and snippets of vaccine inserts, blog posts, horror stories about SIDS, autism, and autoimmune diseases. They said vaccines were to blame, and I believed them. I believed I was saving my baby.
By the time I had two more kids, I'd fully fallen into this anti‑vaccine rabbit hole. I didn't vaccinate them at all. I surrounded myself with like‑minded parents. We kept quiet about our choices because we knew the judgment that would come our way. My mother‑in‑law was a nurse and she was not happy with my choices. But in my mind, I wasn't anti‑vaccine. I just believed in informed consent. I believed every parent should make the best choice for their child.
However, when I heard that my friends and family were vaccinating their children, I was actually worried about their children and thought they were making the wrong choice.
Then 2020 happened. The pandemic starts and everything seems uncertain, especially the economy. People are hoarding toilet paper, they're rationing meat and milk at my grocery store. And being the child of immigrant parents from a country that no longer exists, I knew that economic collapse and natural disasters could create perfect conditions for these diseases to return.
Measles and diphtheria came back to Venezuela when their healthcare system crumbled. It has happened before and it can happen again. If my children weren't vaccinated, would they be safe? So I was contemplating giving my kids a few vaccines, but my youngest is two years old. I always heard that the blood‑brain barrier doesn't form until age two or three. But is it two or is it three?
So I go looking for this exact age. I search through studies for days and find nothing. I try so hard to soothe my cognitive dissonance, but I am shocked to find zero evidence and actually learn that babies are born with a fully functioning blood‑brain barrier. I am wrong. And not just a little wrong, a lot wrong and I have to sit in that wrongness. If I'm wrong about that, what else am I wrong about?
That made me question everything. I start reading scientific rebuttals to everything I once believed. I learned that the anti‑vaccine movement isn't just misguided. It's predatory. They prey on the anxiety of parents.
I read about a SIDS tragedy, where a mother's baby tragically suffocates, and the anti‑vaxxers convince her that vaccines are to blame.
I learn how grieving parents are targeted and manipulated. I see how these groups are obsessed with purity and how they see vaccinated kids as contaminated. And I start seeing crossovers with all the conspiracy groups, flatterthers, homeopathy enthusiasts. I also find out that I have been wrong about my daughter's own reaction. The cry encephalitis I feared, it's just localized injection site pain.
This left me feeling a discomfort I can't describe. So I do what I thought was impossible and unthinkable. After weeks of sleepless nights, I work up the courage and decide to call public health and admit that my kids are not vaccinated. I tell myself I don't have to make a decision and that we can just talk about my concerns. I don't have to vaccinate my kids if I don't want to.
I call public health and tell the nurse that my children are not vaccinated. This time, I'm met with kindness instead of dismissal and judgment. The nurse makes plans with me to get my kids caught up. We schedule an appointment for next week and she says I can do as many as I want. One, two, as long as I'm comfortable with it, she'll just keep track of what's remaining. Even one vaccine is better than none.
The day of the vaccination comes. I logically, in my mind, know that this is the right thing but my fears take over. I'm so nervous. All I can picture is having a reflex to just slap the needle out of the nurse's hand before it could even make it to my child.
I take an Ativan before their first shots. I explain to my kids that this is for their health and the nurse I talked to on the phone greets me. The kids are playing with the toys and my husband and I prepare them for what's going to happen.
My kids are much older now and they put up a fight. We console them, we offer treats and do you know what happened? Nothing. Not even so much as a red mark. They get their vaccines, eat their Ring Pops, move on with their day.
That night, I check on all three of them. And in the morning, they're totally fine. Their boosters are scheduled for a month later and I'm not nervous anymore. I'm just relieved.
But it's not enough for me to change my mind. I want to help other parents do the same, so I co‑found Back to the Vax, a project dedicated to helping hesitant parents understand the science behind vaccines. We offer educational resources, podcasts, and even continuing education for healthcare professionals to learn how to reach parents like me, because fear isn't cured by facts alone. It also takes trust.
Looking back, I now see that I was never really anti‑science. I was just afraid and I wanted to be perfect to the point of severe anxiety. I didn't want to do anything that could potentially harm my children. By doing so, I ended up putting them at risk.
Over a year ago, I finished nursing school. I want to be the kind of healthcare professional who listens to people, who provides real answers, who doesn't dismiss concerns. Because if someone like me, a former scientist, can fall for anti‑vaccine rhetoric, anybody can. But if someone like me can change their mind, so can they. And I'll be there to help them find their way back to the facts.
PART 2
I was born a tree hugger, surrounded from an early age with science all around me. I grew up listening to stories from the hospital from my mom and my dad owned a scientific supply company in Pennsylvania. We spent a lot of time looking at the natural microscopic world.
I was curious about everything and I loved to learn, but science fascinated me especially. So when I graduated from high school, I went to university to study to be a teacher.
I loved college. I loved meeting new people. I loved learning new things. Years later, once I graduated, my husband and I moved to the North Georgia Mountains. We wanted to be closer to the mountains and wild life, but also not that far away from our family.
Our spiritual life was really important to us. So we called lots of churches, but one really stood out. The people were so friendly. They helped us find jobs. They let us stay at their homes when we were interviewing. They helped get both of us our first jobs.
Over time, this church just became everything to us. They were our friends and our support system when our own family was really far away.
This denomination is very intellectual. I've always been a thinker and so I appreciated the opportunity to read and learn in my spiritual life. My husband and I joined a new member class with the pastor. Most of our lessons revolved around the nature of God and how the church modeled what was the best path for His people.
One day, I'm sitting in the fellowship hall at this plastic table and the pastor is speaking about how transitional fossils are completely fake. He says transitional fossils have never been found and they don't exist. Evolution is false.
I was shocked, but also ready to help anyone understand a scientific theory. I excitedly say, "Oh, there are two well‑known transitional fossils that I love to teach about, Archaeopteryx and Tiktaalik, and there are so many more.”
I'm just getting ready to speak about evolution's endless iterations, but he cuts me short. His face turns red and he quickly shuts me down. He stated again that transitional fossils have never been found and they do not exist, so I dropped the subject.
His dismissal of evidence seemed at odds with the intellectual rigor we had been applying to the Bible in this very class. I was told that all truth was God's truth, but maybe there's some kind of glitch. I didn't really know.
Whenever I was off from school, I enjoyed listening to talk radio. I really loved Rush Limbaugh. He helped entertain my mind for three hours a day. My husband worked really long shifts and so I had a lot of time on my own. We were new to town and we didn't have a lot of friends and so I had a lot of housework to do. I had dinners to cook and I listened to Rush while I hung out at home by myself. I needed to keep my mind occupied.
I didn't always agree with whatever Rush said but after a while, I trusted him. The trust formed through the mundane work of listening consistently while doing housework.
In 2009, the emails of climate scientists at the University of East Anglia were leaked. During a long road trip to Pennsylvania to visit my family, we were listening to Rush detail the scandal that became known as “Climategate”.
Filtered through Rush's interpretation, he said that the scientists were "using tricks” to "hide the decline". These were all quotes from the emails.
I was completely shocked. I had dedicated my life to teaching science as a lens through which to see the world. I placed my entire career in what I thought was the noble pursuit of truth through scientific inquiry, but the scientists had been lying to me.
I turned to my husband and said how furious I was going to be if they hijacked my issue, environmentalism, in order to pursue a one‑world government.
Now, that might seem like a leap to you but, at the time, it made perfect sense, because that's what Rush was saying. If climate change were real, then it would require multinational cooperation, which could only be successful under the UN supervision, which would, in turn, lead to an erosion of American sovereignty. Obviously.
In 2012, my husband and I started building our family. We welcomed two fierce daughters in two short years. New parenthood is always a time when everybody expects big changes, but what I was not expecting was the enormous love for every human being that came with me becoming a mother.
One bright Sunday morning, we were sitting in a pew in the middle of our church sanctuary. The late summer light was pouring in the arch windows and I was holding my sleeping baby. We were singing songs about love and forgiveness, and I could see my friends. Suddenly, I became overwhelmed by the love of mothers who had helped us get to this very mundane moment. I left that church that day with a determined and protective love, not only for my own daughters but for all of humanity.
Although I loved becoming a mother, it was really a hard time for me. My first daughter was very difficult. I realize now I probably had some postpartum depression. The drudgery and loneliness of relentless housework that comes with being a stay‑at‑home mom was very difficult to endure.
We had a weather radio in the kitchen and I would listen to Rush Limbaugh in the afternoons and I would listen to NPR in the morning and the evening when I was preparing meals or cleaning the kitchen or just doing normal mom stuff.
I remember spending a lot of time rocking my first daughter for her naps because she loved me so much and she would not let me put her down. So I would sit in the dark and rock her for hours so that she could nap. During this time, I read blogs, I read Twitter, I read articles.
Motherhood opened my heart to humanity and the internet and radio opened my mind to diverse points of view.
In 2013, Rush began talking about a college student named Sandra Fluke. I was in my kitchen cooking dinner. We just bought a new house and it was all so new and exciting. I was listening to Rush in the kitchen and making dinner.
Sandra Fluke, at the time, was part of a movement to ensure that women had access to birth control. I remember listening to the way he spoke about her. It made me really uncomfortable. I myself had been prescribed birth control for painful cramps. This enabled me to graduate college with two degrees. He called her a slut.
Listening to his take on birth control was so at odds with my own experience that I began listening to him less and less. It was really painful to hear. Did he think I was a slut too?
Shortly thereafter, Michael Brown was killed by a police officer in 2014. I was filled with sorrow for him, but also for his mother. I couldn't imagine my child being taken from me. I also saw Michael Brown in the face of my former students who I loved dearly. They made bad decisions on a nearly constant basis, but they never deserved the kind of treatment that this young man received.
I had spent six years nurturing young men and women of color as their teacher. I was heartbroken that someone could just throw another person's life away like that. But the people around me in my church were not. They spent their time rationalizing his death and finding reasons to justify their careless lack of concern.
I thought that we cared about the vulnerable. I thought we supported missions to help indigent communities around the world. Didn't we organize trips to help people in Haiti or South America? Didn't we send gifts to kids for Christmas?
I started to think that maybe I had been hearing messages from the pulpit in a completely different way from everyone else. I couldn't listen to Rush talk about this after listening to him speak about Michael Brown. I started skipping episodes to avoid listening to the segments.
Instead, I found people of color on Twitter and I read their blogs. I learned what it was like to be a person of color in a white church in America and I started to pay attention to the treatment of my friends of color in my own church. I noticed the way that they were treated and they also told me how they were treated. A lot of the stories were pretty ugly.
Day by day, I curiously picked at every thread in my worldview until I found its source. If it was inconsistent with truth and love for humanity, I threw it away. I learned about cognitive biases, other perspectives on God, feminism, history. I read nearly every one of Rachel Held Evans’s books. She was a progressive Christian writer who grew up in the shadow of the Scopes Monkey Trial, where a biology teacher, like me, was found guilty for teaching the Theory of Evolution.
Rachel showed me that I could be a Christian and be confident in scientific evidence‑based claims. I even took a trip to Dayton, Tennessee for a TV show filming in the courthouse where the trial took place. I got to meet Rachel and Edward Larson, the author of one of the historical accounts of the trial. He signed my book and Rachel invited me to sit with both of them for dinner. I'll never forget her generosity and kindness.
One day, I was driving my girls around town while running errands. We were listening to NPR like we always did. I can't even tell you what the news story was. It was so trivial it was forgettable. The NPR version of this story was concise. It was matter of fact. It was presented clearly and without bias. It made complete sense. But listening to Rush, the same story was presented as a scandal. In that simple moment, it was revealed to me that Rush was nothing but a farce.
I was driving by a shopping center and I looked out the window and said, "He's lying to me." My jaw dropped as my inner world fell apart with my two daughters in the backseat. The entire time that I thought climate scientists had tricked me. I, in fact, had been tricked by a conspiracy theory wielded by people that I trusted.
Conservative media and my church led me away from the person I was at my core. They told me what to believe, and I offered myself to be hollowed out. They filled my mind and my mouth with their beliefs and ideas until I was a shell of my former self. I felt small, I felt confined, I couldn't stretch, I couldn't stand, I couldn't speak. I knew I had to get out.
So, when Donald Trump was elected in 2016 with enthusiastic support from my friends and family, I knew I had to leave. I sat in women's bible study and said that I had noticed that there were no gay people that attended our church. As a teacher and a family member to gay relatives, I noticed their absence in my life during my years as a stay‑at‑home mom. Every single person disagreed with me. I was the only one who thought different.
And my experience with our former pastor over evolution came back to my mind. The words finally sunk in. “You're not one of us. You don't really belong here. We don't value your knowledge or your expertise.”
At the time, I stood up, I went to the nursery, collected my daughters on the verge of a panic attack and left the church quickly. The church was my entire support system. I had my two girls and I couldn't even go to the doctor without the network of babysitters that my church provided, so I needed a plan.
Step one, I would need a new support system. I knew making new friends would take time, it always does, but I knew that the challenges posed when working in a school would be a way to fast‑track new relationships.
I told my family that I was ready to go back to work and, shortly thereafter, I was hired as an eighth grade science teacher at the school where I started my teaching career. It felt like going home.
Second, I knew I had to do something to fight back against the current political moment and so I knew that I could lead an environmental movement in my area. I had done it since I was a child. So, I helped plan the Chattanooga Science March. I started our own Citizens’ Climate Lobby chapter to foster unity and honesty about the state of our world. I traveled to Washington, D.C. to lobby for meaningful action on climate change. I dove into learning all I could about science denial and logical fallacies and social science.
In my own classroom, I changed the way I taught to incorporate my intense love for humanity with climate science, because I wanted to build a world that could nurture and protect our children. I needed to make up for the years that I was in denial. But most importantly, I made new friends. I was honest about my beliefs and I was terrified, but I hoped that I would be accepted in my conservative town.
I was fortunate because my bravery paid off. Those teachers that I worked with have become my chosen family. They don't call me crazy. They cheer me up. They step up to help me when I have wild ideas to send a giant parachute to Washington, D.C. or preserve a whole‑ass mountain. Unlike the support system that I had before, they let me take up as much space as I want. My natural curiosity in the world returned as I reclaimed myself and my mind.
It's a cloudy, crisp day in March and I am walking from my hotel in Fairfax, Virginia to George Mason University. The first flowers from spring are just beginning to show themselves. And when I arrive, the other teachers are taking photos by the sign for George Mason University. How did we even get here? We are so excited. We're ready to begin this important work together.
Inside, the tables are arranged in a U and I choose to sit in between two friendly women. We get to work right away. There is no waiting. We're right on it.
The National Center for Science Education is showing us the lessons, we're making recommendations, we're learning about the research study in which our classes will be participating. After a work session in which we were tasked with making climate change data, understandable to middle and high school students, we had an interview with a famous climate scientist, Ben Santer himself, from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
In my seat, I quietly realize that this is the author of some of the very Climategate emails and I am on the edge of my seat. I am taking long notes. It is finally my turn. I get to ask him a question.
“These are really complicated data sets. How do we make this clear to young people?”
He drew us a really simple diagram showing stratospheric cooling and said, “That is precisely where we come in. It is our job to explain this to the future, to the kids that will inherit our planet.”
The responsibility and the optimism that I felt in that moment have propelled me forward in the years since. This is really embarrassing to admit this to the world. I'm really ashamed of my own complicity in my own deception, but I really feel passionately that, right now, the world needs my story more than ever.
As the granddaughter of a coal miner and a former climate denier, my escape from right‑wing media is an important one of bravery, I think. It is vulnerable to stand in front of the world and tell everyone about your own foolishness, but that's just the point. More people are waking up and realizing that they were wrong too. We are the brave ones.
Admitting you were wrong is one of the most difficult things that a person can do. It requires equal parts intellectual humility and curiosity. It was the hardest thing I've ever done, but on the other side of my transformation, it's also the most fulfilling work of my life.