MATT CHINWORTH
When Nadine Gartner was pregnant with her daughter six years ago, she was surprised by the number of Portlanders who refused to give their kids early childhood vaccines.
“So many smart, educated parents in my social circles weren’t vaccinating their kids,” said Gartner, who at the time worked as a class-action lawyer. “I thought, these are my peers, these are really smart people. There must be something to this.”
Gartner was alarmed by the amount of seemingly authoritative information available online about vaccines: that they caused autism and neurological disorders; that children were given more vaccines than their immune systems could handle; that vaccines contained toxins.
So she met with her pediatrician.
