Attacking Dissent in Defense of Vaccination

The media's odd fixation with Jenny McCarthy continues. Last night I came across this laughable attack on Ms. McCarthy by New York Times writer and vaccine fanboy Frank Bruni.

He begins his piece with an unsupportable assertion couched as a question:

“What do you call someone who sows misinformation, stokes fear, abets behavior that endangers people’s health”

I don’t know, Frankie. What do YOU call it. It really doesn't matter since the actions you describe are not descriptive of those of Ms. McCarty. 

The type of speech Ms. McCarthy engaged in endangered no one. If her personal experience dissuaded some from vaccinating, those people simply failed to protect themselves from generally mild illnesses or illnesses for which their children were not at risk.

They did not endanger anyone.

Mr. Bruni then raises the entirely irrelevant point that:

“Because she posed nude for Playboy”

Which is curious since he fails to point out the heroin addiction of Mr. Seth Mnookin - a prominent vaccine evangelist whose talking points are featured prominently in the article

Mr. Bruni proceeds by sharing Ms. McCarthy’s claim that, “I am surely not going to tell anyone to vaccinate,” which seems to be an unusual claim from someone who is “antivaccine”

But “antivaccine” is just a meaningless propaganda term parroted by vaccine cheerleaders such as Mr. Bruni in order to stigmatize those who choose to spare their children a lifetime of vaccines.

Mr. Bruni continues his nonsense stating:

“And on The Huffington Post a year after that, she responded to experts who insisted that vaccines didn’t cause autism and were crucial to public health with this declaration..”

As to the claim regarding vaccines and autism, it is important to realize only one vaccine, the MMR, and one vaccine ingredient, thimerosal, has ever been seriously investigated. So how experts would know “vaccines didn’t cause autism” is a mystery. Perhaps they are clairvoyants.

As to vaccines being “crucial to public health” I’m sure being able to force vaccines on America’s children is crucial to the vested interests comprising the public health establishment, but it’s certainly not crucial to the health of individual children - the vast majority of whom dealt with mild childhood illnesses quite well before the deluge of vaccines that began in the mid-forties.

Mr. Bruni goes on asking:

“When did it become O.K. to present gut feelings like hers as something in legitimate competition with real science?”

It’s always been O.K. She has a right to free speech as guaranteed by the constitution – you know that founding document so hated by main stream media publications such as The Times

He concludes with this:

“Are the eyeballs drawn by someone like McCarthy more compelling than public health and truth?”

I don’t know the source of the “truth” about which you speak. Perhaps it’s the science statists revere so deeply. But science, especially science conducted by the very interests dedicated to foisting vaccine after vaccine upon an unsuspecting public, is not the “truth.” Science is a way of investigating the natural world. It’s not “the truth”

USA Today: Manipulation on Display

Here we go again. The mainstream media sinks to a new low in this piece of rubbish that, considering the number of professional hucksters quoted, appears to have been written by the vaccine establishment itself.

The article,  ostensibly written by a one Yamiche Alcindor, gets off to a bad start even before it starts. The inane title “Anti-vaccine movement is giving diseases a 2nd life” foreshadows the manipulation and deception to follow.

The underlying goal of  Ms. Alcindor's article is to make it appear that people are blameworthy or responsible for events that they took no action to cause. To do this the authors attempt to create the false perception that we are doing SOMETHING when we are doing NOTHING.

Let's begin our deconstruction of this piece and its assertions with an examination of the title, "giving diseases a 2nd life."

Giving second life can be seen in two ways. The first is stopping an action you were already engaged in. For example if I were a boxer winning a match, I could slow my attack and allow my opponent to recover thus giving him a second life. Or I could do something like donate a kidney to someone close to death. One is an action while the other is the cessation of an action. In the case of infectious illnesses, I’m certainly not actively helping the germ as in the kidney analogy. And I’m not pulling back from a vaccination commitment because I’ve never made such a commitment. As such, I think the “giving a second life” claim fails badly.

The piece continues with the shopworn claim that those who become infected without their knowledge are "spreaders, infectors and transmitters."

• people who carry the bacteria can sometimes transmit it to others, who will in turn become sick. 

• Yet as Samantha Purkiss learned, bringing infected people to the emergency department is simply another way to spread disease. 

• Schuchat says, the infected spread it in their communities. 

• Many might not know they are carrying a disease but can still be contagious and pass it on before symptoms arrive.

Germs use people to spread themselves. We do not ACT to spread them. Since the incessant use of the words spread and transmit are employed to create the impression we are to blame for acts of nature or God, it is vital to understand that only actions (or the failure to take actions we’ve voluntarily accepted) justify blame. As such attempts to blame us for being used by another organism against our will and knowledge are ridiculous. Remember, being acted upon is not the same as acting.

The article continues it's theme in another form with this charge:

people actively choosing not to are helping diseases once largely relegated to the pages of history books — including measles — make a comeback in cities across the nation,

“…actively choosing not to?? LOL. Looks like they’re trying to make it look like we’re DOING something when were not. Ironic that the people asking us to trust them with our children’s health are so blatantly deceptive.

As to the “helping” part, it’s another laughable attempt to make non-actions seems like actions. What did we do to help the germs? Well since we didn’t DO anything, we didn’t do anything to help the germs. It's not a difficult concept to grasp but somehow it seems to elude the vaccine cheerleaders in the media.

Now that we've debunked the clumsy attempts to demonize parents who don't vaccinate, let's move on to the specific cases mentioned in the article and accompanying video. The first case deals with an infant who sadly died of a pertussis infection: a rare outcome in infants - most often those under six months of age. Ms. Alcindor states:

The mother, who was inoculated years before giving birth to Brady, later learned that she could have gotten a booster shot during her pregnancy that likely would have saved Brady's life.

Unfortunately, if this mother would have contracted pertussis naturally as a child she would have likely had 30 years to life time immunity to the illness. Her immunity would have protected her child. But, because she was vaccinated with a poor vaccine, she assumed she was protected when she wasn't.

It's also odd Ms. Alcindor classifies pertussis as a "vaccine preventable disease" considering the first series of injections does not provide adequate protection until three are given between the ages of 2 and 6 months. After that the vaccine does such a good job of prevention, you need booster after booster after booster well into adulthood.

As to the actual risks of a baby dying from pertussis, they are tiny. In the United States there are about four million births and around 20 deaths each year. And it is estimated that there are between five hundred thousand to a million cases each year. So the death rate is minuscule. Of course the media only want you to engage your emotions and assume that by seeing the story of a rare death you'll abandon reason and assume this tiny risk is something you should be concerned with.

The establishment realizes how they can distort our perceptions with these tactics and is on record encouraging this shameless exploitation of dead or suffering children. Glen Nowak, Director of Communications, Centers for Disease Control, Presentation at the 2004 Vaccine Summit announced:

Vaccination demand...is related to heightened concern, anxiety, and worry. Pictures of children who have died can be particularly motivating

It should reassure readers that Sweden, after unacceptable number of reactions associated with the old-whole cell vaccine abandoned pertussis vaccination for seventeen years and deaths were almost non-existent

Continuing, Ms Alcindor then shares the tragic case of Jeremiah Mitchell, a little boy who lost his arms and legs due to an invasive infection that is so rare the CDC does not even recommend those in Jeremiah's age group be vaccinated against it. She opines:

Jeremiah was exposed because someone brought the disease into their community.

No Jeremiah was exposed because he went into a germ-filled world. Just like we’re exposed to the cold when we leave our home on a cold day. And no one “brought” it into the community because it IS in the community. According to the Minnesota Department of Public Health:

At any given time, about 10-15 percent of all people are believed to carry N. meningitis in their throats and nasal passages.

She also presents a heartbreaking video of Jeremiah dealing with the aftermath of his illness. It's a harrowing story but one that is extraordinarily rare. But rare occurrences do happen in a nation of over three hundred million people. And if someone wants to draw from all those people and travel back far enough in time, examples to further a particular agenda can be found and communicated to us through video or pictures.

But a video or picture, in and of itself, is not an argument to vaccinate or do anything else. That's because a picture appears without context or facts. It does not provide data on actual risks. It does not tell you the circumstances surrounding an illness. It simply attempts to engage the emotions with the hope that those emotions will override reason and create unwarranted fear, turning us into people who can be manipulated and controlled.

A picture does not say if the child had an underlying condition most children don't? It does not say it the child was exposed to second-hand smoke - a risk factor for developing invasive meningococcal disease? And it does not tell us if that child on some medication that made him or her more vulnerable to invasive illness.

Pictures presented in such a way only show us what the presenter wants us to see. They don't reveal a deeper picture.

Moving away from this tragedy, let's examine some ancillary points made by USA Today and it's team of vaccine shills. Ms. Alcindor writes:

Many continue to believe the debunked idea that vaccines cause autism, while others don't trust the federal government or the pharmaceutical companies responsible for these vaccines.

Of course the “idea that vaccines cause autism” hasn’t debunked. It hasn’t even been studied. The only things that have been studied in any serious manner are one vaccine ingredient, thimerosal, and one, that’s right just one vaccine: the MMR. So to say that vaccines have been exonerated as a possible cause of autism is misleading at best and deceitful at worst. As to the author’s apparent surprise that people would be hesitant to trust the government and big pharma, I’d say, based on a long history of untrustworthiness, that distrust is well-earned.

She continues with this quote:

In communities across the nation, Americans of all stripes are making dangerous decisions to reschedule or forgo immunization, says Alan Hinman, a scientist who sits on the scientific advisory board of Voices for Vaccines, which supports and advocates for on-time vaccinations.

For many of us who have looked at this issue, the dangerous decision is bombarding a child’s developing immune system with vaccine after vaccine in an attempt to, as the experts say, “trick” that system. I’m not tricking the development of a system that either evolved or was created a certain, very specific way to prevent illnesses that are either mild, or that are almost certainly not going to happen to me or my child – like the meningitis case exploited so shamelessly here. You decide what’s dangerous for your family and I’ll decide what’s dangerous for mine, Alan.

Ms. Alcindor then shares this odd opinion:

The anti-vaccination movement has picked up steam in the past decade with support from celebrities such …reality TV star Kristin Cavallari, who last month said not vaccinating was "the best decision" for her children.

The assertion that sharing your own personal vaccination decision on a TV program is analogous to supporting some ill-defined “anti-vaccination movement” is quite bizarre. 

Alcindor then claims something about pertussis being nearly forgotten when it has in fact been on the rise for over twenty years ( as a result of a weak vaccine and more aggressive surveillance ) and outbreaks of the illness are covered incessantly by the media.

So there we have it; another shameless piece of vaccine propaganda taken apart and disposed of. With so many of these articles popping up and regurgitating the same hackneyed talking points, one has to wonder if it  is a sign of desperation on the part of the vaccine establishment and their media collaborators. Perhaps they are beginning to sense an awakening talking place among parents across the nation. And because the foundations of the vaccine program are so decrepit, this is an awakening that cannot be allowed to happen

*For an accurate understanding of measles mortality statistics mentioned in the USA Today article, please refer to this post.