Tag: holocaust

What Happened to Kennedy’s Vaccination Safety Committee?

Many folks were surprised by the reports that Donald Trump had selected Robert Kennedy, Jr to head a committee on vaccine safety.

RJK, JR has made a number of outrageous claims about vaccines and autism.
RJK, Jr has made a number of outrageous claims about vaccines and autism.

Or maybe it shouldn’t have been a surprise. Kennedy, an environmental lawyer, once wrote a discredited article on the dangers of mercury in vaccines, and like Trump, continues to believe that vaccines are linked to autism.

But what can we expect from a Kennedy vaccine safety committee?

Robert F Kennedy, Jr on Vaccines

Vaccines have been proven safe and necessary time and again. If this vaccine safety commission happens, most people expect Kennedy to push his conspiracy theories to even more people.

In addition to wasting a lot of time and money, Kennedy has the potential to scare parents away from getting their kids vaccinated and protected against vaccine-preventable diseases.

“The CDC is a subsidiary of the pharmaceutical industry. The agency owns more than 20 vaccine patents and purchases and sells $4.1 billion in vaccines annually.”

Robert F Kennedy, Jr

This is one of RFK, Jr statements about vaccines.

Surprisingly, some parts of this statement are true.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) does own some vaccine patents. And the CDC does buy about $4.1 billion in vaccines each year.

They don’t sell those vaccines though. They are distributed through the Vaccines for Children program to children who can’t afford vaccines.

Other Robert F Kennedy, Jr Vaccine Conspiracy Theories

What else does Kennedy believe?

While many anti-vaccine folks believe in Big Pharma conspiracies, Kennedy takes it to an extreme and believes that they have a “broad reach” and that “virtually all the institutions that are supposed to stand between a rapacious industry and vulnerable children have been compromised,” including “Congress, the regulatory agencies, FDA and CDC, the IOM, the NIH, the AAP, the science journals, the university science departments and the press.”

Kennedy has also stated, or to be more precise, misstated that:

  • “Pharma’s stranglehold on the journals keeps independent vaccine safety science from ever getting published. Just this month, the Swiss journal, Frontiers in Public Health, cancelled publication of the first vaccinated/unvaccinated study. The study showed that vaccinated children had less measles and rubella, but four times as many neurological disorders—including autism –and 30 times the incidence of allergies.” – The very small study had been only provisionally accepted and was rejected upon further review. It wasn’t even the first vaccinated/unvaccinated study. That would be the “Vaccination Status and Health in Children and Adolescents Findings of the German Health Interview and Examination Survey for Children and Adolescents (KiGGS),” which looked at “whether unvaccinated children and adolescents differ from those vaccinated in terms of health.” And not surprisingly, they do. The unvaccinated kids get more vaccine preventable diseases. So what happened to the study? Like many retracted anti-vaccine studies, they republished it in another journal.
  • “…there is an overt conspiracy by a small group within the CDC vaccine division. It’s explicit. You can watch it unfold if you read the Simpsonwood transcripts and the related emails…” – Kennedy wrote extensively about Simpsonwood, the 2000 Scientific Review of Vaccine Safety Datalink Information conference, in his article Deadly Immunity, which was so full of obvious errors (some described them as lies), that it was eventually retracted. In addition to the obvious errors, Kennedy “quote mined the IOM report to make it seem that it said the exact opposite of what it really said.”
  • “…the CDC’s best and most recent science shows that autism spectrum disorder rates in Scandinavia dropped 33 percent following the removal of thimerosal in 1993.” – the article Kennedy cites is actually about recurrence risk, how likely you are to have another child with autism and “supports the role of genetics in ASDs,” and although rates seemed to decrease after a peak, they were still the same as before thimerosal was removed
  • “Vaccine mercury exposures to children today are comparable to exposures in the 1990s, and, for the first time, thimerosal vaccines are being administered to pregnant women in America.” – this is perhaps Kennedy’s most ridiculous claim. I think he mostly bases it on the fact that pregnant women get flu shots, but with the availability of thimerosal free flu vaccines (70% of flu vaccine dosages available this year) and the fact that only about 40% of pregnant women get the flu vaccine during flu season, it is impossible to think that “vaccine mercury exposures to children today are comparable to exposures in the 1990s,” when the hepatitis B, DTaP, and Hib vaccines could all have thimerosal and were all given to infants multiple times.
  • Kennedy has compared getting vaccinated to “a holocaust” and in his mind, there is a conspiracy among the CDC, doctors, and the press that is “akin to what happened to the Catholic Church during the pedophile scandal. The institution suddenly became more important than the children it was supposed to protect. Only a few individuals were actively involved in raping children and shuffling known pedophile priests to unsuspecting dioceses.” – he apologized for the holocaust statement, but not for anything else he has ever said.
  • “I want to apologize to all whom I offended by my use of the word to describe the autism epidemic. I employed the term during an impromptu speech as I struggled to find an expression to convey the catastrophic tragedy of autism, which has now destroyed the lives of over 20 million children and shattered their families.” – of course, his “apology” was just as offensive to many people
  • “First of all, vaccines are not subject to the safety rigors undergone by other pharmaceuticals in the FDA approval process. There are no large scale, double-blind, placebo-controlled studies.” – there actually are…
  • “…in the one 1930 human study of thimerosal that predated its use in vaccines, all the subjects injected with thimerosal died.” – all of the subjects had meningococcal meningitis, a now vaccine-preventable disease that is life-threatening even today
  • “Verstraeten’s original analysis of those datasets found that thimerosal exposures increased autism risk by 760%. The CDC now knew the cause of the autism epidemic.” – it didn’t, although this is a common anti-vaccine conspiracy that involves the CDC hiding data about thimerosal, vaccines, and autism

Ironically, Kennedy is the nephew of President John F Kennedy, who signed the Vaccination Assistance Act in 1962 (Section 317 of the Public Health Service Act). President Kennedy’s vaccine law started as a three year program to help get kids vaccinated against polio, diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis, and has been continuously reauthorized ever since.

What Happened to Kennedy’s Vaccination Safety Committee

Kennedy never did get appointed to head Trump’s vaccine safety commission.

“In both of those two meetings he asked me if vaccines weren’t a bad thing because he was considering a commission to look into ill-effects of vaccines,” Gates recalled, noting that Robert Kennedy Jr. had been urging Trump to launch such an effort. Gates said he told Trump, “that’s a dead end, that would be a bad thing, don’t do that.”

In fact, Trump never even created a vaccine safety commission, perhaps because he got some good advice from Bill Gates.

What to Know About Robert F Kennedy, Jr’s Vaccination Safety Committee

Plans for a Vaccine Safety Commission, which would help Robert F Kennedy, Jr gain a bigger audience for his ideas about thimerosal and autism, seem to be on hold.

More on Robert F Kennedy, Jr’s Vaccination Safety Committee

What Is Vaccine Injury Denial?

Few people deny that vaccine injury is real.

Vaccine injuries, while rare, are certainly real.

That’s why we have table injuries, the Vaccine Court, and the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.

What Is Vaccine Injury Denial?

Again though, vaccine injuries are rare.

“Vaccine Injury Denialism is rampant across the mainstream media, where child-abusing vaccine pushers like the New York Times, Washington Post and CNN deliberately contribute to the holocaust of vaccine injuries now devastating humanity’s children. Sadly, the same denialism about the alarming growth in medical injuries caused by vaccines is also endemic across universities, science journals and medical schools, where doctors are indoctrinated into a kind of “Flat Earth” denialism of vaccine injury reality.”

Mike Adams on Vaccine Injury Denialism is the denial of fundamental human dignity

Claims of vaccine injury denial come when we are skeptical or don’t believe that anything and everything is a vaccine injury.

Barbara Loe Fisher's NVIC even claims that Shaken Baby Syndrome can be a vaccine injury.
Barbara Loe Fisher’s NVIC even claims that Shaken Baby Syndrome can be a vaccine injury.

For example, in some circles, if you point out that vaccines do not cause asthma, ADHD, autism, Celiac disease, diabetes, eczema, food allergies, infertility, multiple sclerosis, POTS, SIDS, or transverse myelitis, etc., then claims of vaccine injury denial begin to fly.

That shouldn’t be surprising, as these and other so-called vaccine induced diseases make up the bulk of the vaccine injury stories that scare many parents.

“IMAGINE YOU LIVE IN A COUNTRY in which a minority of people are taken in the middle of the night, and beaten, kicked, poisoned, half-drowned… they are crippled for life, maimed, and they are expected to accept a doctor’s or a judge’s view that “It wasn’t the Gestapo” or “It’s not even an injury”.

Imagine that minority amounted to tens of millions of people.

Now imagine that these victims are lured into traps by their own doctors with promises of medicine that will prevent illness – but in reality the doctors are paid for every patient they manage to convince to show up – and the doctors determine which injuries they caused and which were just “coincidences”.

Now imagine the media is primed to tell the world that no such injuries ever occur. Now your neighbors are denying it, calling you crazy for thinking there is a link…”

James Lyons-Weiler on Should Vaccine Risk/Injury Denial Be Prosecutable Offenses?

But doctors and the media, and your neighbors for that matter, don’t deny that claims of vaccine injury are real because of some grand conspiracy or simply because they want to.

It is because of research and science, understanding the difference between correlation and causation, and more research. And we understand that vaccines are both passively and actively monitored for side effects.

Vaccine injuries, although real, are rare.

The only denialism about vaccines that is important, is among those who deny that vaccines work and that they are safe and necessary.

What to Know About Vaccine Injury Denial

Anti-vaccine folks like to claim that anyone who doesn’t believe that vaccines cause all of their vaccine-induced diseases are part of a conspiracy of vaccine injury denial.

More on Vaccine Injury Denial

Money and Motivation of the Anti-Vaccine Movement

We often hear the argument that anyone who supports the ideas that vaccines work and that they are safe and necessary must be a shill for Big Pharma. And that pediatricians, even though they are among the lowest paid doctors, are making tons of money from vaccines and even getting bonuses to get kids vaccinated.

Of course, none of these myths and conspiracy theories are true.

Money and Motivation of the Anti-Vaccine Movement

But guess what motivates many of the folks in the anti-vaccine movement?

“Vaccines are a holocaust of poison on our children’s brains and immune systems.”

Claire Dwoskin

For some, it is the idea that vaccines damaged their child.

And then there’s the money.

CNN did a report several years ago on how a few groups were funding researchers and organizations that put out much of the material that scare parents away from vaccinating and protecting their kids.

It wasn’t a surprise though. Many others had been saying the same things for years about:

  • the Dwoskin Family Foundation and CMSRI
  • Barry Segal and Focus for Health
  • JB Handley and Generation Rescue

But anti-vaccine experts aren’t just motivated by the money they directly get from those with deep pockets.

Selling supplements is big business for integrative, holistic, and anti-vaccine folks.
Selling supplements is big business for integrative, holistic, and anti-vaccine folks.

They have discovered many ways to turn the anti-vaccine movement into a money making industry.

Paul Thomas doesn't mention that he gets a big cut of the sales for a "free" summit that costs $197 as he promotes his anti-vaccine lecture.
Paul Thomas doesn’t mention that he gets a big cut of the sales for a “free” summit that costs $197 as he promotes his anti-vaccine lecture.

Many of these folks also get money by:

  • selling anti-vaccine books, e-books, videos, seminars, and movies
  • getting paid to speak at anti-vaccine conferences and summits, often for chiropractors or folks like Gwyneth Paltrow, pushing her GOOP
  • selling supplements and vitamins in a “wellness” store, either online or in their offices, that they claim can detox you from vaccines, protect you from toxins, and even prevent autism
  • ads on their websites and Facebook pages
  • appearing as “experts” in court, as they push the idea that everything is a vaccine injury
  • soliciting donations

Those who are health care providers can also establish integrative or holistic medical practices that don’t accept insurance and only see patients that can pay cash. In addition to selling supplements, these providers offer unproven and disproven alternative therapies, like homeopathy, integrative testing, IV therapy, and cranio-sacral therapy.

Does your holistic pediatrician accept insurance?
Does your holistic pediatrician accept insurance?

But only if you have plenty of cash handy.

Kelly Brogan, MD, for example, who believes in a paleo approach to vaccines and thinks we should co-exist with viruses and bacteria, charges up to $4,497 for your first appointment! But if that’s too much for you, for only $997, you can start living a “happy, healthier life” with her 44 day online program.

“We coexist with bacteria and viruses to a level of enmeshment that makes the perception of ‘vaccine-preventable infections’ a laughable notion.”

Kelly Brogan, MD on Where do Vaccines Fit into a Paleo Lifestyle?

And now, some doctors are even making money by selling vaccine exemptions!

Oliver argued that Sears likes to have it both ways, seeming to support science-based medicine while once in a while saying things like “vaccines don’t cause autism except when they do.”

The line inspired Oliver to fire back with this: “Don’t worry, opportunist quacks writing books that fan the flames of people’s unfounded fears don’t cause a legitimate public health hazard, except when they do.”

John Oliver takes a shot at the anti-vaccine movement and the ‘opportunistic quacks’ behind it

Mostly they just sell fear though.

But that’s all they need to get their foot in the door and keep some parents from vaccinating and protecting their kids.

What to Know About the Money and Motivation of the Anti-Vaccine Movement

Although they cry Big Pharma at the drop of a hat, it should be clear that folks in the anti-vaccine movement are often motivated by money.

More on the Money and Motivation of the Anti-Vaccine Movement

Worst of the Anti-Vaccine Movement

Scaring parents away from vaccinating and protecting their kids from vaccine-preventable diseases is bad.

What’s worse?

Claire Dwoskin of the NVIC and the Dwoskin Family Foundation writing:

At least his daughter is alive, smiling, educated and enjoying life. That cannot be said for the hundreds of thousands of vaccine injured children in the US. What his daughter went through is NOTHING compared to what the families of autistic children go through every day of their lives. No disease can match this record of human devastation. Vaccines are a holocaust of poison on our children’s brains and immune systems. Shame on you all.

Jenny “I’m not anti-vaccine” McCarthy saying:

I do believe sadly it’s going to take some diseases coming back to realize that we need to change and develop vaccines that are safe. If the vaccine companies are not listening to us, it’s their fucking fault that the diseases are coming back. They’re making a product that’s shit. If you give us a safe vaccine, we’ll use it. It shouldn’t be polio versus autism.

Dr. Jerry Kartzinel writing in the forward to Jenny McCarthy’s autism book:

Autism, as I see it, steals the soul from a child…

Andrew Wakefield:

“Who Killed Alex Spourdalakis” – his movie that whitewashes the brutal murder of an autistic child by his own mother

Bob Sears:

…we can’t proclaim from the rooftops that the MMR vaccine causes autism.

Donald Trump:

Healthy young child goes to doctor, gets pumped with massive shot of many vaccines, doesn’t feel good and changes – AUTISM. Many such cases!

Jenny McCarthy:

If you ask a parent of an autistic child if they want the measles or the autism, we will stand in line for the f–king measles.

Jay Gordon:

I think that the public health benefits to vaccinating are grossly overstated.

Rob Schneider:

The idea that vaccines don’t injure people is a fallacy. Two billion dollars have been paid out to people who have been vaccine injured or died in the United States. This is a real thing. Another law has been passed in California to prevent a child from going to school unless he or she has been vaccinated. Kids have to take all the shots on a certain schedule, and it they don’t, they can’t go to school. That’s a human rights issue. When you have taken away parental rights and you’re forcing people to do an invasive medical procedure, it’s against the Nuremberg code. The Nuremberg code states: you have to have informed consent, and you have to have the right to say yes.

Paul Thomas, MD

I want to thank the warrior moms and dads. Those of you who have an autistic child, or a child who is otherwise damaged, you know the damage isn’t always clear-cut autism. Some times it is just some variation – your kids just not quite right.

That’s why I didn’t stand and say that I have an autistic child, because my kids, I tease them and say that they are brain damaged. Uh. Sorry son. (crowd laughs)

More on the Worst of the Anti-Vaccine Movement