media vaccinations
There is a bitter war going on, and it's not over Trumpcare or immigration: It is about vaccines.




Suggest that some vaccines, including those such as the highly promoted HPV Gardasil and Cervarix (both of which have been linked to adverse reactions and death) are not exactly "life-saving," and you might as well yell "bring back polio."

The media routinely discredits parents of vaccine-injured children, accusing them of not knowing anything about medicine (except raising their own challenged child of course) and of "imagining" or even causing their child's deficits.

Progressive news sites that would never defend corporate media coverage of Monsanto or GMOs drink the vaccines-are-safe Kool-Aid. Last month, Jezebel ran this headline: "Robert De Niro and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Call Vaccines Dangerous, Which They Are Not." In a 2015 article, the Atlantic sneered that "Vaccines Are Profitable, So What?" And the Daily Beast has gone so far as to praise Paul Offit, perhaps the nation's most extreme vaccine promoter.

Comment: According to Robert F, Kennedy Jr: Dr. Offit is a "thorough charlatan, a snake oil salesman and he has everyone flimflammed. That made me angry. After that, I learned that he was also venal."
RS: What do you mean "venal"?


RS: How so?

RFK, JR: He is on permanent retainer to Merck to "right vaccine wrongs". And, both Merck and the CDC have rewarded his service with extraordinarily lucrative opportunities. In 1999, the CDC allowed him to sit on the committee that voted the rotavirus vaccine onto the schedule, even though he was working on his own rotavirus patent. Electing not to recuse himself, he cast his vote to add rotavirus to the schedule. That version of the rotavirus vaccine caused so many agonizing childhood deaths from intussusception that the CDC had to withdraw it a year later, making room for Offit's version, a turn of events that made him a vaccine tycoon. His rotavirus vaccine patent sold for $182 million; his cut was at least $29 million. When I learned about this caper and his other money schemes, I just thought, "Well, he's a hoodlum."

RS: He's also a misogynist and a bully.

RFK, JR: It's disturbing because the media treats him like a deity. And, like all bullies, he's a coward. He dismisses women who question him as superstitious hysterics. He lobs vicious bombs at the mothers of vaccine-injured children from the editorial pages and national TV shows which give him a platform for his poison. But, he refuses to debate me or anyone else who knows what they are talking about.


RFK, JR: I don't feel competent to psychoanalyze Offit. It's hard to look into another person's mind. And Offit's brain has got to be a really dark and scary zip code where I don't really want to spend time. In his defense, we all have some capacity for self-deception and it's possible that Offit is as gifted at deceiving himself as he is at deceiving the public. Upton Sinclair observed that, "It's difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." But I do think it's more likely that he knows that what he's saying is dishonest. For years, he claimed Bill Thompson's 2004 study was "the definitive proof" of thimerosal safety. He's been silent about that since Thompson disavowed his own study. That suggests a purposeful mendacity. Like a lot of other people, Offit seems to have made the self-serving calculation that all of the dead and damaged children are just collateral damage—unfortunate sacrifices in a program that serves the greater good.

RS: Is that even a legitimate moral calculation?

RFK, JR: You mean to kill one child in order to save fifty? Ethicists and theologians could argue the point. But that isn't Offit's real moral dilemma. Offit's moral Donnybrook is his absolutist defense of the industry position that all vaccines are always safe for all people and that the safety of thimerosal is unassailable. That approach has unnecessarily damaged vulnerable subgroups that could easily have been protected and sacrificed millions of kids, not for the greater good but for the bottom line. As the vaccine industry's lead pitchman for thimerosal, Offit's been extraordinarily successful at crafting a persuasive alternative to fact-based reality and selling it like a carnival barker. He has made himself the high priest of the weird dogma that it's somehow safe to inject mercury into babies.


The fact is vaccines are not all safe. That's why the National Vaccine Injury Compensation (VICP) program, established to provide monetary compensation to victims of vaccine injuries, exists. The VICP website states:
Even the very pro-Pharma Forbes reports: "It's true that there have been 24,000 reports of adverse events with Gardasil" and "106 deaths." But the author of the Forbes article rationalizes: "There have also been 60,000 reports of adverse events with the mumps, measles, and rubella vaccine, and 26,000 following vaccination with . . . Prevnar, for pneumococcus bacteria."

We ask: Do two wrongs make a right, Forbes?


EurekaAlert submitted that reading VAERS info "may not build public trust or adherence."

That is an understatement.

Profiteering and conflicts of interest not even hidden


Comment: Doctors pushing vaccines receive 'Merck Vaccination Service Awards'
Where does your doctor's allegiance lie? Does your healthcare professional listen to your needs and wants as a parent or are they nothing more than affiliate distributors for pharmaceutical companies? It was reported by independent journalist recently that some doctors offices are now demanding their patients sign an immunization contract. What's an immunization contract you ask? The contract—created outside of law and denying informed consent—requires prospective patients to agree, by signature, to allow 25 vaccines to be injected into their child over a series of visits. Also uncovered in the same investigation, doctors can receive up to $225 per service achieved in the insurance provider category of "childhood immunization [combo 2]".

There are brazen and unhidden conflicts of interest between mainstream media and vaccine makers who influence reporting and discourage healthy debate about vaccine safety. Mike Papantonio, of the America's Lawyer TV show, reports:
The Gates Foundation is deeply entangled with vaccine makers, as are our own government agencies, including the CDC. It's clearly a fox-guarding-the-henhouse situation. The vaccine industry also "gives millions to the Academy of Pediatrics for conferences, grants, medical education classes and even helped build their headquarters," reports CBS.


What does the science say?



Though they are scientists, pro-vaccine researchers use embarrassing non-logic in their vaccine defenses—they actually employ the "Raven Paradox" which many of us learned in Logic 101. It declares that "all ravens are black; that bird is black; it must be a raven." In other words, according to logic-challenged researchers: "Mercury is safe—and it doesn't cause autism—so all vaccines are safe."



When a scientific paper appears to clearly show a link between childhood vaccines recommended in the U.S. and impaired neurodevelopment, pro-vaccine scientists savage it. A 2010 paper published in Acta Neurobiologiae Experimentalis, a quarterly peer-reviewed scientific journal covering neuroscience, found that "rhesus macaque infants receiving the complete U.S. childhood vaccine schedule" did not "undergo the maturational changes over time in amygdala volume that was observed in unexposed animals."

Why does the amygdala matter? The researchers wrote:
"Neuropathological and neuroimaging studies of individuals with an ASD [autism spectrum disorder] . . . have provided growing evidence of a central role for the amygdala." Specifically, it is enlarged in such children "compared with neurotypical controls."

Insulting illogic

On behalf of Pharma, mainstream science and media set up a strawman called "vaccines cause autism." Then they knocked it down and declared vaccines safe. It is an insult to the public's intelligence, especially in light of clear injuries that exist, including those documented in the VAERS database—not to mention injured people, especially parents of injured children. The National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program alone has awarded $3.18 billion in 16,000 claims since 1988.

Do vaccine injury cases prove that vaccines are always unsafe and should always be avoided? Of course not. But those cases do prove that vaccines are not "completely safe" as the well-funded vaccine dogma continues to insultingly tell us.

About the author

Martha Rosenberg is a contributing writer for the Organic Consumers Association.