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Deadly Vaccine Disinformation

“There is no vaccine that is safe and effective.”

-RFK, Jr.

Debut: On July 6, 2023, RFK, Jr. (aka “Junior”) made the above minatory quote on a podcast. It sums up his decades-long quixotic crusade against all vaccines and his many more screwball contrarian stands on various topics. Basically, if mainline medicine has an opinion on something, Junior, will claim to have some special knowledge that the opposite is true. For example, he believes that AIDS is not caused by the HIV virus, that 5G cell phone towers causes cancer, that an herbicide causes teens to become transgender, and so on. The reams of scientific evidence  contrary to these special insights of his he simply dismisses as vague, conspiratorial plots invented by “big” government, “big” pharma, and “big” others designed to control you and me, or depopulate the world,….or something.

Unfortunately, there are others like Junior who too readily eschew normal standards of logic and evidence and buy into such febrile musings. Also, unfortunately, such bias-confirming fabulism is dangerous—it costs people their health and lives. Junior is indeed directly responsible for misery and even deaths caused by his vaccine disinformation. I relate two such examples below.

Disinformation is false information which is deliberately intended to mislead. In contrast, misinformation is wrong information that is spread without malicious intent.

Measles: Kennedy played a part in one of the worst measles outbreaks in recent memory—one that caused the deaths of several children. It began in 2018 when two 12-month old infants in American Samoa tragically died when nurses mistakenly prepared the combined measles, mumps and rubella, or MMR, vaccine with expired muscle relaxant rather than with sterile water as they should have. The muscle relaxant killed the children. It was an egregious medical error that should not have happened. The Samoan government overreacted and temporarily suspended the entire vaccination program, which enticed anti-vaccine advocates—including Kennedy and his nonprofit, the Children’s Health Defense—to manipulate the Samoan tragedy for their own interests in order to spread their vaccine disinformation. Junior falsely claimed on his Facebook page that the Samoan tragedy “proved” that the MMR vaccine was deadly. Even after it had become abundantly evident that the MMR vaccine wasn’t responsible for the infant deaths, Junior visited Samoa and met with senior officials to convince them that the MMR vaccine was deadly. Influenced in part by his actions, the Samoan government suspended its measles vaccination program.

As a result, the vaccination rate dropped precipitously from 74 percent in 2017 to 31 percent in late 2018, well below the level needed for “herd immunity.” The next year, 2019, a traveler brought measles to the islands, which precipitated a rapid measles epidemic in the under-vaccinated population (note: measles is the most infectious virus we know. Measles epidemics are explosive). Between September and December of that year, at least 5,700 people contracted the disease and 83 died. Most deaths were in children under four years old, who should have just received their MMR vaccines. During the outbreak, in a 4-page letter to the Samoan prime minister, Junior claimed that the measles deaths were caused by the vaccine, not the virus. But, the deaths were in unvaccinated children! The deaths were wholly preventable and Kennedy should have been held at least partly culpable for this preventable tragedy and the deaths of the children.

Hepatitis B: Junior often claims that the “big” US government is not to be trusted. We can go back and forth on that—it depends on what the topic is. An unfortunate topic of his at one point, however, was the hepatitis B vaccine. In the early 90s, the CDC recommended hep B vaccines for all newborns. Junior, of course, not believing that any vaccine is safe or effective needed to find some way to dissent.  He pointed out that there are only three ways to contract  hepatitis B: 1) from sharing needles as a drug addict, 2) from unprotected sex with a prostitute, or 3) unprotected gay sex. He was correct on these three points, but completely ignored an important fourth group, childen.

If sinning adults are the only ones at risk for catching hep B, why in the world would the CDC recommend the vaccine for newborns? According to Junior’s elastic logic, it was because the prostitutes, drug addicts and promiscuous gay males didn’t want to buy the vaccine so the vaccine makers, Merck and Glaxo, were losing money! And behold, a compliant “big” CDC began recommending the vaccine for newborns so “big” pharma could continue to rake in the dough. This was according to Junior, without any evidence.

Then, Junior also made the accusation that the hep B vaccine was the cause of sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS! His “evidence” was that SIDS “first appeared” about the time the CDC recommended that infants be vaccinated for hep B. The problem is that SIDS, or crib death, was around way before infants were ever given the vaccine. It was just that the medical establishment was just then beginning to recognize crib death as a recurring pattern with a definite cause and the press began reporting on it. According to Junior’s simple logic, it would be more accurate to blame crib death on the press coverage of it instead of the vaccine itself. Junior and other vaccine disinformation spreaders tend to ignore such inconvenient facts that distract from their preconceived biases. Junior needed to find some way to make the hep B vaccine sinister so he invented a dishonest link between the vaccine and crib death that had just popped up in the news.

Here are more compelling facts that Junior ignored when he spread this disinformation. Before the hepatitis B vaccine was recommended for all infants, every year the virus infected about 18,000 children less than 10 years of age!! What?? If it only infects sexually active adults and drugs users, as Junior claimed, how does he account for this fact? He clearly chose to ignore it! Worse, infection with hep B virus early in life dramatically increases the chance of liver cancer or chronic liver disease later in life.

While it is true that hepatitis B virus usually is transmitted through sexual contact or needle sharing, that isn’t how the virus is transmitted to young children. Babies are infected with hepatitis B during birth to a mother who is infected. And young children can also contract hepatitis B when living with someone who is infected and sharing personal items like toothbrushes. Then, there are several studies that have confirmed that the hepatitis B vaccine is not at all related to SIDS. The most common cause of crib death occurs when babies sleep face down. For that reason, in the early 1990s, at the same time that the CDC recommended the hepatitis B vaccine for babies, the American Academy of Pediatrics launched its “Back to Sleep” program, encouraging parents to lay their babies on their backs at bedtime to prevent crib death. It worked.

So, RFK, Jr falsely claimed, with no data, that the infant hepatitis B vaccine caused SIDS. Meanwhile, the number of babies vaccinated with hep B increased, and the “Back to Sleep” program was implemented to prevent SIDS, and the incidence of SIDS sharply dropped clearly showing Kennedy’s lie. How many kids went unvaccinated and are now walking around with liver cancer thanks to RFK, Jr’s lies?

Other spreaders of deadly disinformation: RFK, Jr. a lawyer, and his anti-vaccine non-profit, the Children’s Health Defense, by far are not the only miscreants spreading anti-vaccine disinformation. But, they are among the top of the “Disinformation Dozen” according to The Hill. This “dozen” is responsible for 65% of the disinformation promulgated on social media platforms according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate. But, since the COVID vaccines arrived on the scene, a number of medical doctors also have jumped on the anti-vaccine bandwagon. A few have been professionally sanctioned. A short rogues’ gallery of the most notable MD scofflaws follows:

1. Sherri Tenpenny—said the COVID vaccines cause “magnetism” and that metal objects would stick to people, and that there was some sort of connection between vaccines and 5G towers. Her medical license was temporarily suspended until she paid a fine for these flagrant lies.

2. Joseph Mercola—one of the “Disinformation Dozen” called the vaccines a “medical fraud” in order to promote his own online supplement business that included unapproved treatments for COVID—a business worth $100 million! The FDA sent several letters warning him about selling unapproved health products and making false claims about COVID treatments. His YouTube account was permanently banned for this disinformation but his alternative drug business thrives.

3. Simone Gold—one of America’s Frontline Doctors, an anti-vaccine group that has been mentioned in these pages, discouraged the COVID vaccines while promoting hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin long after they were proven ineffective and disapproved by the CDC. She was disciplined by the California Medical Board, but kept her medical license.

4. Stella Immanuel—also one of America’s Frontline Doctors also promoted hydroxychloroquine after it had been disapproved. She was disciplined by the Texas Medical Board and had her social media posts removed. Amazingly, she has claimed that 1) alien DNA is being used in medical treatments, 2) gynecological problems are caused by having sex with demons and 3) that vaccines to prevent people from becoming religious are being developed. As of March 2023, she was, by several orders of magnitude, the highest prescriber of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine in the US. For some reason, she retains her medical license.

5. Lee Merritt—claimed that COVID was a genetically engineered bioweapon designed to exert some sort of social control and that the vaccination dramatically increases the risk of death from COVID itself. The opposite clearly is true. She too  still has her license.

6. Paul Thomas—A pediatrician has spread general vaccine disinformation to his patients, including about the COVID vaccine, causing many of them to get vaccine-preventable diseases. His license was suspended by the Oregon Medical Board for violating standard medical practices.

7. Scott Jensen—A Minnesota state senator and family doc spread disinformation about COVID death certificates and the vaccines. He signed up with America’s Frontline Doctors and faced multiple investigations by the Minnesota Medical Board, which were eventually dropped. He has been banned from several social media platforms for promoting COVID disinformation. He is running for governor.

8. Rashid Buttar—claimed that the vaccine was a depopulation plan and that most people who were vaccinated would be dead by 2025. He has been reprimanded more than once by the North Carolina Medical Board for unprofessional conduct and malpractice. He still practices medicine.

9. Christiane Northrup—Also one of the “Disinformation Dozen,” promotes alternative medicine and anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, especially disinformation about COVID vaccines. She has used Tarot cards to help her diagnose illness and believes that trauma from a past life can cause chronic illness, and that in a past life she lived in Atlantis, etc, etc, etc. She denied the existence of COVID and believes the vaccines contain artificial intelligence that integrates into DNA making the recipient the intellectual property of the vax patent holders. etc, etc, etc.  Her Instragram account was blocked. She voluntarily gave up medical practice in order to write and publicize these ideas.

Bottom line: The insidiousness and even silliness of anti-vaccine charlatans like RFK, Jr and the others is that while they claim to be saving peoples’ lives, they actually are causing deaths. The Kaiser Family Foundation found that in the nine months between June 2021 and March 2022, 234,000 deaths could have been prevented with the COVID vaccines that these charlatans actively worked to prevent.

How is a death caused by deceitful conspiracies about vaccines different from a death caused by criminally refusing to give insulin to a diabetic in crises, or after telling someone that a loaded gun is unloaded? Both are irresponsible and lead to great harm, just like vaccine disinformation does. Why hasn’t RFK, Jr been prosecuted for the preventable deaths of Samoan children from measles? Why do so many physicians engaging in medical malpractice keep their licenses?

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Is Intentional COVID Vax Disinformation Criminal?

Note: Disinformation is different from misinformation. Disinformation is false information which is deliberately intended to mislead. Misinformation is wrong information spread without malicious intent.

 

“We have met the enemy and he is us.”

--Pogo Possum

Your humble blogger first wrote about vaccine disinformation way back on March 31, 2021, just over two years ago. That was not long after the vaccines, as well as the lies about them began rolling out. Unfortunately, the fiction continues and it is now necessary to provide an update.

In the first quarter of the Monday Night Football game on January 2, 2023, 24 year old NFL player, Damar Hamlin, made a tackle, got up from the play, took a couple of steps, then fell over backward and didn’t rise. He suffered a cardiac arrest and needed to be resuscitated on the field with a defibrillator.

Almost immediately social media came alive with speculation and even outright claims that Hamlin’s collapse was due to the COVID vaccine. Without knowing whether he had even been vaccinated, conspiracy quacks immediately linked old reports of rare post-vax events of cardiomyopathy in young adults and occasional problems with blood clots with Hamlin’s sudden cardiac arrest. They completely ignored other explanations such as how the blow to Hamlin’s chest during the tackle could have caused his heart to fibrillate.

Your still humble blogger attests that this can be a concern to blows to the chest during sporting events. As a 13 year-old, playing first base in a summer league, I was knocked off balance by a runner scrambling to return to the base as the second baseman zinged a fastball to me to pick off the errant opponent after snaring a line drive. The ball hit me square in the chest over my heart and dropped me to ground. I don't remember anything for a few moments, and I was whisked by ambulance to an ER where my heart function was carefully monitored for a few hours before I was released. It was suspected, but not proven, that I had a brief cardiac event but quickly recovered on my own and I was no worse for the wear. It happens.

That conspiratorial chorus in the ether was soon followed by a similarly crazy cacophony of television and radio talking heads also intimating, again without facts, that Hamlin had suffered a vaccine-related cardiac side effect. These pundits included popular host Tucker Carlson who, on his Fox cable show just two days after the game, while Hamlin was still hospitalized in an induced coma, called medical experts “witch doctors” as if he knew more than they did. Dallas cardiologist and anti-vaccine podcaster, Peter McCullough announced on Carlson’s show that ‘vaccine induced myocarditis” likely caused Hamlin’s episode (I guess McCullough was not a “witch doctor” or a “medical expert” according to Tucker's criteria).

Even the very evening that Hamlin collapsed, Charlie Kirk, a radio talk show host, and COVID vax conspiracist claimed on Twitter that many athletes across the country are suddenly dropping like Hamlin did because of the vaccine. And the same evening there was an Instagram post from bodybuilder Louis Uridel showing a screenshot of a tweet stating that Hamlin's cardiac arrest was caused by the COVID vaccine. "24 year old elite athletes in the NFL don't just have a cardiac arrest in the middle of a prime time game," the tweet read. "This is squarely on the back of every single person who pushed that poison…", meaning the vaccine.  

An astonishing statistic is circulating throughout many social media circles claiming that more athletes died suddenly in the last year than have died in the last 38 years, implying that the vaccine is to blame. This originated with the same Peter McCullough who Carlson had on his show right after the football player collapsed. McCullough published a letter on Dec 2022 examining sudden cardiac deaths (SCD) in athletes. The problem, however, is that in his research he did not compare apples to apples. According to an epidemiologist who dug into McCullough’s data, he often compared cardiac events young athletes to events in old athletes(!), he mixed definitions of SCD indiscriminately, he included people who didn’t die of SCD or people who were not even athletes, and he even included people who did not die. But, the damage had been done; McCullough’s letter has spread far and wide and is now conspiracy gospel. Conspiracy buffs don’t really care about data, it is the headlines and talking points confirming their bias that grab and keep their attention. So, the false claim that the vaccine is causing excess deaths in athletes persists.

It is true that most conspiracies are often anchored in some fact, and on that foundation, the rest of the flimsy house of fantasy is constructed with fakery and fraud. Therefore, it is true that some COVID vaccines have been linked to very rare cases of myocarditis in young men. These cases were mostly very mild and were quickly resolved with no medical intervention needed. In fact, many cases were asymptomatic and were only detected because the sufferers participated in the clinical trials of the vaccines. Hence, trial participants were vaccinated and closely followed for adverse effects. This included regular blood draws which revealed that some vaccinated subjects with no physical symptoms at all still showed abnormal levels of a cardiac protein in their blood indicative of myocarditis, which quickly went away. These cases would have been missed completely if they had not been in the vaccine study. After now vaccinating hundreds of millions of people around the world, it is safely concluded that myocarditis following vaccination is very rare (~1 in 100,000) and not a serious problem. In fact, myocarditis following infection occurs seven-times more often than after vaccination, and is more severe. Therefore, it would have been more logical for Tucker Carlson, Charlie Kirk,  Peter McCoullugh, et al., to conclude that Hamlin’s problem resulted from a recent infection rather than a vaccination.

Then there is the blatantly dishonest video documentary, Died Suddenly, that is wildly popular in the anti-vax sector. It was made by Stew Peters and it asserts that people are dying in droves due to the vaccine, which itself was supposedly engineered by an elite cabal to depopulate the planet (seriously!). This video flashes through many alarming news headlines of people dying and shows videos of people collapsing, supposedly after receiving a vaccine. Whole essays have been written rebutting this video (you can read one here), but here are some quick take away points: 

• Google the news headlines shown in the video and you will learn that many incidents were not caused by the vaccine. In one headline, the person died in a car accident not from the vaccine. Another died before the vaccines were even available! Yet another collapsed during a basketball game, also before the vaccines, but never died. How inconvenient.
• The video alleges that mRNA vaccines are killing people via blood clots. As “evidence” it simply shows images of blood clots being removed from the blood vessels of cadavers. However, it fails to mention that blood normally clots after death! Ooops. No other evidence for vaccine-induced clots causing widespread death is offered.
• The video also showed images of a huge blood clot (a pulmonary embolism) being surgically removed from a lung vessel, letting viewers assume the clot was caused by the vaccine. However, the footage was from a 2019 medical education video, that was made, once again, before vaccines were available!

The Died Suddenly documentary is dishonest to say the least, yet it is regularly trotted out as prime evidence for the danger of the vaccines.

If the vaccines are so dangerous, one wonders why the evidence needs to be fabricated!

In the end, COVID vaccines prevented 18.5 million additional hospitalizations and 3.2 million additional deaths in the US. Prevented not caused. 

Spreading vaccine disinformation can be very lucrative. It can bring in advertising revenue, attract subscribers, and help sell supplements and nostrums.

Twelve people are responsible for 65% of the vaccine disinformation on social media in the US, and they do so for profit. Their impact is mostly seen on Facebook, but there is plenty of vaccine disinformation on Instagram and Twitter as well.  Here are some notable examples.

• A scientific study published in the science journal, Nature, reported that by far most (25%) of the COVID vaccine disinformation posts come from the organization, Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine organization owned by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, the 69 year old son of the late Senator, and recently declared Democratic candidate for US president. RFK, Jr., is a long-time opponent of vaccines. Any vaccine. He gained more than 1 million new paying subscribers in 2020 and traffic to his website rose sharply in March 2021 with 2.35 new million visits in response to his anti-COVID vaccine efforts.
• Joseph Mercola, DO actually claims in hundreds of Facebook articles that the vaccines will alter your DNA and turn you into a viral protein factory. He does this in order to promote the sale of supplements, books, and health food. During the height of the pandemic, he promoted a new website designed to prevent or treat COVID with his alternative remedies. His business has a net worth of $100 million! As I explained earlier in these pages, it is biologically impossible for the mRNA vaccines to affect your cellular DNA in any way. Mercola is selling a flat lie for profit.
• Steve Hotze, MD a Houston based doctor who used social media to unabashedly tell people to not vaccinate, but rather buy his vitamin and mineral concoctions, which, he claims was all one needed to fight the virus and many other diseases. In his case, the FDA found the products and marketing to be misleading and issued a cease and desist order.

Bottom line. The insidiousness of these charlatans is that while they claim to be saving peoples’ lives, they are causing deaths. The Kaiser Family Foundation found that between June 2021 and March 2022, 234,000 deaths could have been prevented in the US with COVID vaccinations. Vaccine disinformation that convinces people to avoid being immunized against the virus that causes COVID, undoubtedly caused many of these deaths.

How is a death caused by these deceitful claims about vaccines different from a death caused by criminally refusing to give insulin to a diabetic in crises?

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