#2797: Sheila Lewis Ealey

Sheila Ealey is – surprise, surprise – an antivaccine activist, speaker, self-declared “educator” and general critical thinking-challenged moron who appears to have absolutely no background in medicine but who has, over the last few years, become something of a de facto ambassador to the African American community on behalf of Andrew Wakefield and other antivaxxers. Ealey figured prominently in the antivaccine propaganda films Vaxxed and The Greater Good, and she is a board director for Robert F. Kennedy, jr.’s organization Children’s Health Defense. She is also a frequent speaker at anti-vaccine rallies, such as the 2017 “Revolution for Truth” march in D.C. and the 2019 Harlem Vaccine Forum (which we’ve written about before).

 

At least Ealey is honest that she is genuinely anti-vaccine and that, as she sees it, there is “no such thing as a save vaccine” – a refreshing departure from the “I’m not antivaccine but pro-safe vaccine” gambit most antivaxxers, including Kennedy, favor. Ealey’s reasoning, however, is arguably crazier than most – in addition to standard antivaccine talking points, Ealey has for instance argued against the need for vaccines by pointing out that in the Bible, before vaccines, “people were living, and they were living up to 200 years of age and beyond.”

 

For the most part, however, Ealey invokes racially charged gambits: She is on record likening the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 to Dredd Scott and claiming that the NCVIA made children “property, not people”, just as the Dredd Scott decision reinforced that slaves were property. She refrained from explaining the details of how that comparison is supposed to work, but at least it allowed her to conclude that antivaxxers are the “new abolitionists”. That strategy has won some popularity in the antivaccine movement, by the way; RFK jr. has himself produced another misinformation and propaganda movie called Medical Racism: The New Apartheid designed to scare people in Black communities with antivaccine misinformation (the movie isn’t about medical racism) – prominently featuring Ealey, of course.

 

Indeed, Ealey isn’t just opposed to vaccines; she also urges her listeners – in particular Black people – to avoid medicine altogether and instead take their children to chiropractors, often by citing historical atrocities like the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, which, ironically, didn’t concern victims being harmed by medicine but victims being harmed by being prevented from accessing medicine – such details don’t figure in Ealey’s narratives, of course. But since she isn’t too concerned with details or accuracy, she also links these medical atrocities to vaccines, blaming for instance the mythical “autism epidemic” on a vaccine “holocaust”. You should take your kid out of schools, too, by the way, presumably just in case schools risk making your kids more disposed to care about details than Ealey would like them to be.

 

Like so many other antivaxxers, Ealey is the mother of a son with autism, and like so many of them, she has deluded herself into believing that vaccines are responsible, which they demonstrably aren’t. Her story also has some gaps in it, with Ealey citing conspiracies orchestrated by pharmaceutical companies to claim that her son’s medical records were stolen from her evacuated apartment in New Orleans (so she can’t show them to you as part of antivaccine propaganda) and to explain why her lawsuit was thrown out.

 

Diagnosis: Batshit crazy conspiracy theorist who don’t even bother to appear semi-coherent or reasonable; but she has nonetheless managed to find targets for her conspiracy rantings and misinformation in underserved groups that are otherwise particularly likely to suffer devastating consequences if they trust her lies. This is bound to end badly.