Health Care

Teen who got vaccinated against parents’ wishes testifying before Congress

An Ohio teenager who made headlines for receiving his first-ever vaccines despite his parents’ wishes will testify this week in front of a Senate committee.

Ethan Lindenberger, 18, of Norwalk, Ohio, said in a video Saturday that he had accepted an invitation from the Senate Health Committee to testify about his experience on Tuesday.

Lindenberger said in the video that his testimony would address “preventable diseases, spreading and outbreaks of preventable diseases, as well as addressing misinformation that causes these outbreaks.”{mosads}

“I’ll be testifying along the likes of people such as [John] Wiesman, who is the secretary of Health for Washington [state],” Lindenberger says in the video.

Lindenberger’s testimony comes as the U.S. has faced measles outbreaks in states including Washington that have been credited largely to skepticism surrounding vaccinations and unsubstantiated accusations of links between vaccines and autism.

In a previous interview, the teen told NPR News of his mother’s reaction to information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention countering misinformation on vaccines.

“Her response was simply ‘that’s what they want you to think,’ ” Lindenberger told NPR. “I was just blown away that you know, the largest health organization in the entire world would be written off with a kind of conspiracy theory-like statement like that.”

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