Unvaccinated Under God: Kira Ganga Kieffer on Religion and Vaccine Hesitancy in Modern America

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. Religion is never far from the surface, of course, of American life. A couple of months ago, we did a show with the historian of American religion, Matthew Avery Sutton, who described America as a Chosen Land for a chosen people, at least in the minds of its settlers. His new book, Chosen Land, How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity, makes Christianity—or American Christianity at least—central in American history. And my guest today, I think, also makes Christianity or religiosity central in contemporary American events. Kira Ganga Kieffer is a scholar with a PhD in American religion, and the author of an intriguing new book, Unvaccinated Under God: Religion and Vaccine Hesitancy in Modern America. It's out this week. It's published by Princeton University Press. And Kira is joining us from Westport, Connecticut, where she lives and where, indeed, she was born. Kira, I'm not sure if you're familiar with Matthew Avery Sutton's work or his thesis in Chosen Land. But would you concur that if we're to make sense of American history, it needs to be done under the prism of religion?

00:02:09 Kira Ganga Kieffer: I am familiar with Matthew Avery Sutton's work, just not that book, but now I'm going to add it to my to-read list. And I would absolutely agree that religion is central to understanding American history and American culture. And in my work, I try to expand beyond only Christianity, although I think Christianity is the driving religious force for certain in American culture, but also to expand that to a more secularized type of religion where we see and make meaning out of troubling events, difficult quandaries, politics, health—through moral lenses that sometimes come from Christianity but also, at times, from alternative spirituality increasingly.

00:03:03 Andrew Keen: So the thesis of your book—and please correct me if I'm wrong—this new book, Unvaccinated Under God: Religion and Vaccine Hesitancy in Modern America, is that many critics, particularly on the left, suggest that people who are hesitant about vaccines are conspiratorial cranks, who are anti-scientific. But you argue that some of the hesitancy—

00:03:44 Kira Ganga Kieffer: One of the main things I wanted to do with this book is, as you noted, to push back on this prevailing narrative, certainly among mainstream news, liberal Democrats, and the medical establishment and public health, too, I think, which has for a long time depicted vaccine-hesitant people, way prior to COVID, as people who lack scientific facts, who are maybe ignorant of the effectiveness or efficacy of vaccines, or are serving their own individual agendas, whether well-intentioned or not. And so my goal with the book is to provide a different narrative that explains vaccine hesitancy from, I think, a fairer point of view—thinking about it as a form of religious expression. I know that's a broad way of thinking about religion. But here I'm thinking about when I look at people in the 1980s and 1990s through the 2000s who have had qualms or concerns about vaccinating, especially their children. When I really look at what they're saying and what I have found in my research is that they're oftentimes talking about very moral conundrums that they put a lot of meaning onto this decision—a presumed decision to vaccinate or not vaccinate—or a fear that the vaccine is going to cause some internal transformation of the child that isn't intended. They perhaps will have an adverse reaction, a sickness that will come as a result of the vaccine, and that they will feel responsible as a parent, for having wrought that on them—especially if they didn't question or do enough research about its effects. Now we could say that is perhaps anti-scientific or rather unscientific or irrational, but that doesn't actually get us to understanding where it comes from. So when we apply this idea of meaning-making, morality, and understanding of the self—the parental role especially, but also the individual American role as being a very individualistic one driven by an internal intuition or spiritual sense—which is actually a rather evangelical Christian vibe and also an alternative-spiritual vibe, or maybe we could say impulse or instinct—I think that helps to explain vaccine hesitancy a lot better.

00:06:40 Andrew Keen: Are you yourself vaccine-hesitant?

00:06:45 Kira Ganga Kieffer: No. I wouldn't say I'm vaccine-hesitant. I think it's important, first of all, to note the difference between vaccine hesitancy and vaccine refusal. So hesitancy being attitudes of ambivalence, refusal being oppositional or actively abstaining from a mandatory vaccine or a highly recommended one. I wouldn't say I'm hesitant really at all, and I've always gone ahead and been vaccinated. Vaccinated my daughter, was vaccinated against COVID while I was pregnant. But that's not really part of the story so much as I think that my experience with chronic illness at times in my life and also seeing others that I have loved experiencing chronic illness, I've noticed a lot of similar patterns in the kinds of existential fears and existential bodily concerns about purity, about goodness, about individual intentions, individual care of the body—I see a lot of the same ideas there that I've seen in vaccine hesitancy literature.

00:07:54 Andrew Keen: Would it be fair to say that the way you're presenting this, it might be described as another version of a spiritual reawakening? America has gone through a series of these in its 250-year history.

00:08:14 Kira Ganga Kieffer: I don't think so. I would not characterize it as a spiritual awakening. Mostly because I don't see it as alone, or as particularly new. I really contextualize and show that vaccine hesitancy has been around since the beginning of vaccines back to the eighteenth century with the smallpox vaccine. And so, as we go along, through major developments in vaccine history, we also see this corresponding hesitant contingent that, of course, changes over time. It's different people, but they oftentimes share many of the same core concerns. And they express them, I would say, through very religious or spiritual language and instincts—less so scientific and more so about purity, morality, goodness, those types of things. I don't think it's part of a current spiritual awakening in the way that you're talking about.

00:09:21 Andrew Keen: Kira, you know better than I do that whilst this is an academic book—as I said, it's published by Princeton University Press, which comes with the stamp of academic approval or authority. This argument about vaccine hesitancy and you're connecting it with religion in America is going to annoy a lot of people. They're going to say these vaccine skeptics or people who are hesitant are just reactionaries. They're conspiracy theorists. They spend too much time online. Why do you think this vaccine issue brings out so much frustration and anger on both sides? I want to come back to vaccine hesitancy itself. But why do you think it angers so many people perhaps within the scientific establishment, often people within the coastal elites? I'm talking to you from San Francisco. I'm guessing that vaccine hesitancy is not particularly popular in San Francisco, probably not much on the East Coast in Connecticut and New York City. Why does it annoy progressives so much or at least progressives who think of themselves as enlightened?

00:10:45 Kira Ganga Kieffer: A good question. I think it annoys progressives so much, especially recently for a few reasons. I think taking a little bit longer view, kind of going back to the early 2000s, as the debunked theory of mercury in the MMR—measles, mumps, rubella—vaccine causing, or being correlated to, autism is debunked scientifically and retracted from The Lancet, which had originally published it in 1998. It's retracted about ten years later, ten or twelve years later. And I think that there is a huge backlash, from people who were in the medical community and in the public health community and then also in the increasingly politically polarized media sphere, which many would say is rather liberal—or at least have always called so—saying, 'Oh, why don't people just go along with what doctors say?' Why don't they just go along with what the new data says, which is that it was wrongheaded. It was an incorrect study. We can't corroborate the results. We've done many, many, many other studies that show us that we don't have a causation or correlation between this vaccine and autism. People are barking up the wrong tree and they're putting their faith in this kind of gibberish or conspiracy that is not reflected in reality. And I think that was upsetting because of the fact that people hung on to it. We have a lot of studies that show how ingrained that belief became. And that's really something that drives my religion framework here. It shows that the authority of the medical field, of scientific research—and really of the communicators of scientific research—had declined so much over decades. And I think that was very frustrating because it was signaling a shift, that we are seeing very much the fruits of, in American culture, away from that very authoritative, expertise-driven coastal elite, as you put it—a sense of this is how we decide what is right; this is how we decide what is wrong. I think it was also extremely frustrating because—and other scholars have talked about this as well—science and the language of science had seemed to be in the eighties, the nineties, and the 2000s even, the common-ground language. It wasn't liberal. It wasn't conservative. It wasn't evangelical. It wasn't secular. Right? It was something we could all, as Americans, come together and say: okay, well, science is science. Facts are facts. And as this, say, MMR-autism theory really continues to hold even after being debunked, it's also showing this inability for Americans to find facts and truth in common. That is frustrating for those who believe that they own the facts and the truth. And that doesn't just necessarily implicate, you know, coastal elites. It also implicates people who may be on the very conservative end of the spectrum, who also feel that they own the facts and the truth through religious morals or values from Christianity or the Bible. So it pointed to this sense of entrenchment in maybe more ideological camps, or strongly ideological camps and away from a common-ground language.

00:15:06 Andrew Keen: I'm always amazed with the way in which Anthony Fauci has been turned into either a political hero or a villain. I was doing some online research before we talked. I found an op-ed in the New York Post by someone called Miranda Devine who suggests that Fauci should be put in jail for all his COVID sins, of one kind or another, associated with vaccines. How do you position Fauci in all this? Why is he such a lightning rod? And how does he play out in terms of your theory of American religiosity and vaccine hesitancy?

00:15:50 Kira Ganga Kieffer: So Fauci, obviously, has a long career in public health, but really the thing we're talking about when we talk about Fauci now is the COVID pandemic. And so with the COVID pandemic, I really note—and I show this in the book—that the tenor and impulse of the religiosity that I see in earlier vaccine hesitancy does change to become much more conspiracy-driven and much more politically partisan, and Fauci really is—I mean, he is really caught in that web of conspiracies that comes about circa COVID that has so much to do with a large subset of Americans, particularly those in the Make America Great Again coalition, at the time of COVID, who are just deeply, deeply angry at anybody who seems to be entrenched in the government and entrenched in the main systems. And Fauci is the communicator of the scientific and medical field, the public health field, and he's also a government communicator. So he's really holding—I think he's a lightning rod because he was holding so many different roles in that one personhood of being the primary public health teacher during the pandemic. And he becomes seen as this devilish figure, satanic figure, by a lot of people in the conspiracy-cult-driven culture on the right—as this essential liar, or as this person who has evil intentions. And I think there's where you see some religiosity in that context, which is to ascribe this sense of evilness to Fauci that really goes beyond just a political dislike or even a fervent disagreement. Right? There's something much deeper there, as you're saying.

00:18:10 Andrew Keen: So I take your point that the devilish, or perceived devilish, quality of Fauci is why some people want to put him in jail. Some have even offered threats against his life. And the satanic quality—explain that in a religious sense. Why are characters like Fauci—for some people, maybe they're more than vaccine-hesitant, maybe they're deeply skeptical—why is the traditional Christian iconography wheeled out for somebody like Fauci?

00:18:54 Kira Ganga Kieffer: So, again, I just want to be clear in my differentiation between two different periods in vaccine hesitancy history. So prior to COVID—and prior to, honestly, the Trump era—I don't think Fauci would have ever really been seen in that light, to the degree he was during COVID. But during COVID, it was apocalyptic. Right? We were seeing a lot of apocalyptic end-of-the-world scenarios. And I think there was a sense—there was definitely a sense. I know there was a strong sense amongst a lot of Americans who were very religious, evangelical Christians for the most part—white evangelical Christians, who were starting to read this sort of end-times scenario biblically onto the COVID pandemic. But instead of seeing the pandemic as the apocalyptic end-times thing, they ended up flipping it, so to speak, to see the powers that be really personified by Fauci and others, but Fauci in particular, as a symbol of all that was wrong in the world, all that was corrupt. And I think they saw him as a very corrupted figure. And the corruption they perceived—and I don't ascribe to this at all—but the corruption they perceived was definitely of a Christian devil-versus-good category, for sure.

00:21:01 Andrew Keen: I know, as you say, the book isn't centrally about COVID. You focus more, in some ways, on the MMR vaccine, against measles, mumps, and rubella, which has become very controversial because of autism. Autism, as a condition, has—like Fauci—become a kind of lightning rod. I know you mentioned the mother warriors. There was a book by Jenny McCarthy on mother warriors and autism and MMR hesitancy. Explain why and talk a little bit more, please, Kira, about this MMR vaccine and why, for you, it's perhaps a better example of vaccine hesitancy than the COVID one.

00:21:51 Kira Ganga Kieffer: Yeah. I think this is a better example of vaccine hesitancy because, first of all, we have a much longer runway of understanding its effects, having been widely accepted beginning in the late sixties and seventies, and was made part of every state's recommended vaccine list for incoming students—kindergarteners had to be vaccinated against measles, mumps, and rubella. And then, beginning in the late nineties in particular, we see some pretty clear watershed moments, that I talk about in the book. One I already alluded to, which was the publication of the Lancet article by Andrew Wakefield, which said there was an ingredient within the MMR vaccine that could cause—or did cause, for some children—autism to arise almost spontaneously. And then at the same time, The US Government—or the FDA—had put out an act saying that they were going to remove certain forms of mercury from all drugs and other products, like food products in the US. And those seemed to be very corroborating pieces of evidence for people who are already on the lookout, I would say. And then from there, you have people, especially Jenny McCarthy, the well-known MTV personality, actress, and model. And then someone who then kind of emerges almost as a new person, a mother in this very maternal role, saying, 'My son got autism.' It's ruined my life. My life has become catastrophically difficult and terrible and hopeless. And she describes on TV, in many interviews, on Oprah and Larry King, and in books—she's everywhere talking about this transformation in her child that is very difficult and very scary. And it elicits a lot of fear from, predominantly, moms who are, you know, the people most in charge of their children's medical care and their care generally. And I think it gets at this very religious impulse, which is this: I have this maternal role of being a protector of my child—and that corresponds to a period in the '90s and 2000s of intensive mothering, which really taught moms to sacralize—to make their children into sacred beings that they had all this control over. And with control comes great responsibility and great burden.

00:24:53 Andrew Keen: I take your point. But I don't really understand what this has to do with religion. I mean, this is a secular phenomenon. There are many people who don't believe in God, who fetishize their children, who are obsessed about their kids, and who are deeply troubled by autism and all the cultural and scientific debates about it. Where's the religious element here?

00:25:23 Kira Ganga Kieffer: I think that the religious element are where I'm saying it is that you don't need God for it to be religious. If we want to get to the heart of the problem, we have to separate the very traditional forms of religion and certainly the concept that there is a very Christian or Judeo-Christian God that is in charge of everything, from how religion really functions in our society today, which is often through very secular ways. And so I want to encourage readers, listeners, and viewers to think about it differently. Instead of saying, 'Oh, these aren't necessarily religious things,' because they don't come from the Bible, or from a priest or a pastor, or aren't about God in particular—although sometimes they are framed that way—the underlying logic is the same: I have to maintain a pure body for my child. I may need to maintain a pure body for myself to be good, to maintain health. We could actually put health in as the new form of salvation, so to speak, if we're talking in more secular language of wellness culture now. And oftentimes in religious—in very traditionally religious contexts, but also in secular contexts—we have massive personal transformations that occur based on catastrophic events and we need to make meaning out of them. So whether we say, 'Oh, God caused it and I don't know why, but I'm going to try and figure it out,' or we say, 'My life has totally changed and I now see the world in a different way than I ever could have imagined before. And now I see evil, or I see pollution or toxins in the environment, and the government doesn't care, or my doctors aren't actually the truth-tellers I thought they were.' I would say that's also a crisis of faith, whether in the traditional religious sense or in the more secular sense. And it could also be seen as a conversion. So I'm really hoping that people will start to think about religion as what it does, in our society and not just the ways we've been taught to think it is. Because I think it's helpful to do so, to understand people's motives and ways of making meaning out of the world that we don't otherwise understand.

00:27:55 Andrew Keen: But, Kira, it's a very broad—your definition of religion is a very broad one. It's this search for meaning. One of the reviews of your book in Christianity Today suggests that vaccine hesitancy comes from what it calls vague spirituality, not evangelicalism—which, I think, you would acknowledge. I'm not sure it's necessarily a good thing. I mean, it's pointed, but for you, then, the search for meaning, whether it's monotheistic or just some search without religious language or parameters—is that religion? Is everything associated with meaning religion?

00:28:46 Kira Ganga Kieffer: Good question. I don't think that everything associated with meaning is religion, but I do think that when we are searching for meaning and we set up frameworks of morality in which we have a set of good things and a set of bad things, a set of pure things, impure things. These kinds of distinctions come about when we ascribe meaning to parts of our life that don't necessarily seem religious. We start really getting into very religious territory where there are rules about how we act and what we do that's right and wrong, where we think there is a higher power, or a god, or some sort of transcendent force, that is monitoring us, watching us, that knows what we're doing. And also one that acknowledges a kind of divinity within the world. If you want to talk about a spiritual awakening, I would say the most important spiritual awakening I'm seeing in terms of health culture right now, alternative health culture, is really about saying that nature is what's godly. Nature is what's right and pure. And natural is the most benevolent force we have. We want to counter industrialism, counter corporations, counter biomedicine, counter all of these other authorities that we've trusted before, but now we don't necessarily trust. And that's where you're seeing a lot—to go back to your autism question—this kind of quest for what causes autism or chronic disease or chronic illness. We're seeing that come up so much with people like RFK Jr. And the Make America Healthy Again movement and others who have been historically so much a part of vaccine hesitancy, way predating COVID. And they're talking about this idea that the world is polluted and then that it's hurting us, that's hurting people. I think if we think about that as a religious understanding versus just an environmental-science understanding, we can actually grasp more the import of what they're saying and the depth of their beliefs about what kind of change they want. And I think that's important to understand.

00:31:24 Andrew Keen: It's interesting you bring up RFK Jr. Again, an incredibly divisive figure, like Tony Fauci, on many fronts. But this return to nature, the idea that everything is polluted—I'm not sure if RFK Jr. himself is religious. His father, of course, was, and he comes from a Catholic family. Some people will be listening to this and thinking, well, this is very Brentwood. It's very wellness. It's the ideology, if that's the right word, of an upper-class LA set who spend too much time doing yoga and going to organic food stores. Is that a fair critique—maybe not of RFK Jr. himself, but of the wellness element in vaccine skepticism?

00:32:19 Kira Ganga Kieffer: Yeah, I think it's a fair critique, but I don't think it's necessarily an accurate depiction, so to speak. So if we think of it as that is the only driver, then, yes, that's inaccurate. That's a good critique, which would be: where is this really coming from? This seems like a very consumer-driven movement that is hyper-individualistic, and tells you that you can just, like, change your life based on what you put into your body and what you take out of it—through your detoxes and your yoga. But I don't think that's all it is. And I think where we're definitely seeing that is through the mass movement that's come about through Make America Healthy Again, which I see as a very important movement in American health and also in American religious culture. And, again, to your point and to Christianity Today's point, you're not going to see it as just evangelical, because it's not just evangelical. It can encompass evangelicals but also many others. And we're seeing that people have these very moral concerns about what causes disease and how to protect their bodies from an impure world—and therefore purify themselves, purify their children, fortify their homes. And I don't think it serves us—I'm assuming you and your listeners are interested in promoting public health, in making sure people are healthy and follow guidelines, especially around things like pandemic preparedness—I think it's incredibly important to understand where people are coming from and to ascribe more meaning to it than to just critique it as baseless or—I don't know—fluffy.

00:34:26 Andrew Keen: Yeah. The reason I asked that question, in part, is that we've done a number of shows questioning and critiquing the wellness movement. There have been a series of books on that. So coming back to RFK Jr., are you presenting him, even if he himself is not a formal religious leader, as a kind of symbol of a religious movement?

00:34:52 Kira Ganga Kieffer: I think yes. I am. In my very broad conception of religion, yes, I think that he is playing—at least playing the role of—a prophet figure, saying, 'We know that there are these dangerous things that we are doing to ourselves, and it's all going to come back to haunt us'—or it's coming back to haunt us now, in terms of our collective health. He just has a set of things that he's particularly focused on that aren't necessarily the same as what have been the primary drivers of the public health establishment pre-RFK Jr. Although I think there are quite a few things that actually overlap. And I also see that he is quickly being not abandoned but at least critiqued by those who followed him as perhaps slightly a false prophet—or, not necessarily a false prophet. I think he's certainly—

00:36:02 Andrew Keen: Even stronger than slightly a false prophet.

00:36:07 Kira Ganga Kieffer: Or a charlatan. I don't know. I mean, there are lots of things people call him. What I see when I look at the Instagrams and Facebook groups of moms who are super concerned about their children's health in a very existential way—is them really talking about not following the truth as it has been presented but following an alternative truth when it comes to their kids.

00:36:41 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And it's a very interesting position you take, because, of course, there are many people who believe that RFK Jr. is a charlatan. But the history of Christianity and of organized religion in America is one where there's a gray zone between credible religious leaders and charlatans. So in that sense, he very much fits into the tradition.

00:37:07 Kira Ganga Kieffer: Sure. I think, yes. And it's all depending on credibility, so to speak, about where you're sitting, too.

00:37:16 Andrew Keen: And I know you've thought about him in more detail than I have—does he think of himself as a religious leader? Maybe not in a conventional Christian sense, but in a spiritual sense?

00:37:29 Kira Ganga Kieffer: I don't want to put words in his mouth or in his mind, so I don't want to say what he thinks of himself as, because I don't know, and I don't know him. But I see that in his crusade for wellness, I do see those characteristics certainly.

00:37:52 Andrew Keen: And do you think that as we begin to make sense of the changing grounds of twenty-first-century politics, parties, ideologies—do you think that what RFK Jr. and the wellness movement speaks of and its skepticism of perhaps of organized science and of characters like Anthony Fauci, do you think it has longer-term political implications? Could we see the emergence, maybe not of formal political parties, but of organizations and ideologies built around the ideas you present in your book?

00:38:33 Kira Ganga Kieffer: I think so. I do think so. I'm already seeing in the social media I follow for research purposes that there is dissatisfaction with actions that have faltered. So under RFK Jr. and under Trump, by people who supported them and thought they really were true believers, in a much healthier lifestyle and a much healthier recreation of the United States. And there's angst and frustration there, where they're interested in finding someone else to represent them. And I think those ideas—pushing against modernity in general, but localized in the individual body and then broadened to the collective body of our health. We're also seeing some of that in terms of pushback against, say, AI or pushback against hypertechnology, the world of hypertechnology that is dehumanizing a lot of our society—our workflows, the way companies run, and so on. And so I see a similar anti-modern instinct that says we have to capture what is essentially good, which is nature, which is humanity—and packaging that in a more spiritual way for people. I think that could encompass a lot of people actually.

00:40:24 Andrew Keen: I think it's an important observation, Kira. Perhaps one that the traditional Democratic Party would listen to and take to heart. Because, as you say, as there's more and more skepticism about AI technology, the internet, Silicon Valley—as that merges with the wellness movement and the vaccine-skeptical community you write about in the book—you will, I think, begin to see the emergence of a new kind of political figure, not on the right as RFK has become, but on the left. And I don't know whether you've seen the beginnings—younger politicians, younger voices on the left, progressives, beginning to package this up.

00:41:13 Kira Ganga Kieffer: I haven't. I'm eagerly interested to see if that's going to happen because of the kind of—I mean, on the right having really taken on MAHA and also RFK Jr. who wasn't a Republican at all, and could have that packaging—I would assume, as you're saying, that there would be a repackaging on the left in our classic pendulum politics. Haven't seen it yet, though, so I'm interested, because this is what interests me.

00:41:48 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And certainly there's a long history in American formal or informal religion of this playing a role in politics. Let's end with a return to America and Christianity. I wonder—the more I talk about this or think about this, and, Kira, you're the expert here—is the connection you talked about, the hyperindividualism, of the wellness movement or of the movement that's skeptical of vaccines, is that the uniquely American thing? On the one hand the religious idea, on the other hand hyperindividualism—which explains why some people, at least, perhaps fetishize the autonomy of the body, and why vaccines are such a lightning rod when someone wants to stick a needle in you.

00:42:43 Kira Ganga Kieffer: Yeah. I think so, basically, therein lie a lot of the connections. The hyperindividualism of wellness culture, I think, is super aligned and in fact dovetails out of evangelical Christian culture, which is at its core an individualist proposition of being saved by personal choices—that being a totally spiritual one. But also, in the wellness culture, it's about being saved through personal choices, but in your body—in your physical and holistic self—you're going to be saved from illness, from suffering, from aging, from death. And the hyperindividualism is very American, and I think it comes from our very evangelical Christian past and also from an alternative spirituality, from the New Age onward, that also fetishizes the self. And this hyperindividualism has had major, and very bad, implications for our understanding of, and commitment to, public health, as well as many other facets of our country, our politics, etc. I will be interested, and I am looking, in my researcher's brain, to see if someone will tease apart the hyperindividualism of saving yourself through personal choices and wellness choices, and the collective—everybody's breathing the same air and eating the same things. And we all have to reckon with that through our government and our politics. If that can actually come together, that would be very interesting to see, and would change a lot. But I have a sense that the corporations probably will not let that happen.

00:44:58 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Although, of course, the corporations are the problem, at least in the minds of some of the people you write about in Unvaccinated Under God. Fascinating conversation. It seems as if the more technological, the more scientific America becomes, the more we search for meaning—and that search for meaning, especially in our age of AI, I think, will pick up. Very interesting conversation with Kira Ganga Kieffer. Her book, Unvaccinated Under God, is out, and it covers an enormous amount of important territory that we like to dismiss, but, as she notes, is an important reality of the twenty-first century. It's not going to go away. So thank you so much, Kira.

00:45:40 Kira Ganga Kieffer: Thanks so much for having me.