Eradicating vaccine hesitancy has never been a bigger priority for the medical and media establishment. The World Health Organization has listed the phenomenon among the top ten threats to global health. Unfavorable media coverage forced Vaxxed filmmaker Del Bigtree to be dropped from a natural health conference in Toronto. Digital billboard ads from Vaccine Choice Canada were removed. YouTube started demonetizing anti-vaccination videos. Facebook and Instagram will remove similar groups, pages, and ads. But is it a great thing to make the pro-vaccination message the only one available?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says no. “I am pro vaccine. I had all of my six children vaccinated,” he insisted in a full-page newspaper article in USA Today in 2015. Nevertheless, he documented a litany of problems with the vaccines and their regulation, backed up with 43 footnotes.
His knowledge is deeper than most. The nephew of President John F. Kennedy edited the book, “Thimerosal: Let the Science Speak” and made the movie “Trace Amounts,” both of which insist that no amount of mercury—trace or not–is safe, including the ethyl mercury that comprises half of the Thimerosal compound. Many flu shots still contain it, including those given to pregnant women and children.
That raised alarm bells for Dr. Brian Hooker. In 2014, he and six co-authors published, “Methodological Issues and Evidence of Malfeasance in Research Purporting to Show Thimerosal in Vaccines is Safe” in BioMed Research International. It lists over 165 studies have found Thimerosal to be harmful and demonstrates flaws with the six studies by the U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that denied any link between Thimerosal and autism.
“This is a puzzling conclusion,” Hooker et. al. write, because the CDC’s own study of 400,000 infants born in Washington, Oregon, and California between 1991 and 1997 showed those in the highest category of exposure to Thimerosal during the first month were at much higher risks. These risks were 7.6 times higher for autism, 5 times higher for non-organic sleep disorders, and 2.1 times higher for speech disorders. It took 100 Freedom of Information requests made over a 10 year period, plus the help of two congressmen, to finally wrestle that 1999 study out of the CDC.
Dr. William Thompson authored three of the six CDC studies that denied a Thimerosal-autism link, but expressed his regrets in a statement in 2014. He acknowledged that his 2004 study in Pediatrics improperly omitted data that suggested an autism link for African American males that received the MMR vaccine before 36 months of age. Thompson turned over piles of documentation over to Congress under the protection of whistleblower legislation. He told of pressure from the CDC to skew studies to demonstrate vaccine safety.
Corruption and conflicts of interest at the CDC were reported in four federal studies in the U.S. A study by the Department of Health and Human Services showed that in 2007, 97 percent of the CDC’s vaccine examiners did not fully complete financial disclosure forms, and that 64 percent had potential conflicts of interest.
This problem is serious because corporations make multiple millions after a vaccine is approved—and especially if it is mandated. Sales were $25 billion annually in 2012 but expected to reach $100 billion by 2025. The pharmaceutical / health product companies spent $4 billion on lobbying U.S. politicians between 1998 and 2018, outpacing the second-place industry, insurance, at $2.7 billion.
Lobbyists got the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act introduced by Congress in 1986 and passed in 1988. It bans the vaccine-injured from suing manufacturers and simultaneously set up a compensation mechanism paid for by taxpayers. The tally for payouts has already reached $4 billion. In 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that vaccines are “unavoidably unsafe.” Manufacturers acknowledge that aluminum compounds are common in vaccines, and some also have formaldehyde or monosodium glutamate.
“My child, my choice”—chanted Dr. Rachel Ross at a rally in 2016. It was not a cry for women like her to abort their children, but to refuse their vaccination. It was only Bigtree–not her professional body or the CDC–that made her aware of the evidence of vaccine harm.
Ontario and New Brunswick have made child vaccination mandatory, and British Columbia will follow this fall. Vaccines caused 696 adverse events in Ontario in 2017, with 26 being serious. But the ignorance of patients and the bias of doctors do nothing and can only suppress such statistics.
“I have a lot of sympathy for those of you sitting up there and trying to parse through the noise and try to nail down the set of facts that we can all agree on,” Robert F. Kennedy told a hearing on vaccine legislation in Washington State in February. Reaching that consensus will be easier if all dissent is outlawed. But the destruction of free speech and parental rights will not make the world healthier or better.
