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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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Vaccine Disinformation Moves To Congress

 “War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.”
―George Orwell, in 1984

“Anecdote is science.”

That silly notion can now be added to the Orwellian Newspeak Catechism thanks to those who prefer confirmation bias over empirical data to determine their “alternative facts.” This seems to include several  members of Congress.

The war on objective science recently spilled over to Congress where a group of anti-vaccine Congressmen and women and one Senator held an impromptu meeting to confirm their disinformation about so-called injuries caused by the COVID mRNA vaccines (note: the technology just won the Nobel Prize for Medicine). This was not a meeting called by a regular committee but an ad hoc gathering of some committed anti-vaccine rogues. It was held in a tiny back room in the Capitol and was poorly attended, poorly staffed, poorly equipped, and, thankfully, poorly publicized. It was described as a meeting of the “shadow Congress;” accurately named as it dabbled in the penumbra of truth.

Leading this November 13 meeting was Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R, Georgia). Greene, no stranger to fantasy, has previously claimed that Jewish space lasers caused recent wildfires in California, that the shootings in Parkland, Sandy Hook and Las Vegas were staged, and that 9/11 was an inside job. Because of these and other extremist reflections, the House sensibly stripped Greene of several committee assignments.

Others on the “committee” included Congressmen Clay Higgins (R, Louisiana), Thomas Massie (R, Kentucky), Warren Davidson (R, Ohio), and Andy Biggs (R, Arizona). Also attending was Senator Ron Johnson (R) from my own State of Wisconsin who has been a vaccine dissembler for a while, claiming, for instance, that the vaccines have killed many people. I recently contacted the Senator’s office and asked why he believed that. They quickly responded and sent me to a web site that was very professional looking and had very many graphs and tables claiming to show that the vaccines caused hundreds of thousands of deaths. The problem is that the data they used to put said graphs and tables together were bogus. The statistics were fraudulent (for example to test the site, an MD submitted a claim saying that the vax turned him into the Incredible Hulk. His claim was accepted!). Anti-vaccine crusaders with radio and blog platforms have urged their audiences to post false information on the site, and the website itself had been debunked numerous times by the investigative press and in science journals for incorrectly reporting the data. I pointed this out to Sen. Johnson’s office and never heard back, in contrast to their earlier quick response. Go figure.

Back to the Shadow Congress Committee meeting: Three people testified: A lawyer, an obstetrician-gynecologist, and a scientist. A summary of the testimony of each, with my comments follows.  

The lawyer. Forty-six-year-old Thomas Renz, went first. He passed the Ohio bar exam in 2019 after five tries and since has made a name for himself, along with the MyPillow guy, Mike Lindell and others, as a COVID conspiracy buff. Renz made three unsupported claims enumerated below: 

1. First, Renz declared without any evidence, that it is vaccinated people who are dying. However, a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that in 2021, unvaccinated adults were 12 times more likely to be hospitalized and in 2022, that they were 6 times more likely to die after infection. Science shows that COVID vaccines have been estimated to have saved the lives of more than 3 million Americans. Renz’s says otherwise. Who are you going to believe, science or the lawyer, Renz?
2. The lawyer also claimed, again without proof (a lawyer without evidence?), that “COVID is not as bad as SARS or MERS but about as dangerous as a bad flu season.” Well. The first human coronavirus outbreak, SARS-1, was identified in Asia in February 2003. It infected a tad more than 8,000 people, killing ~800. By July 2003, the outbreak was contained without a vaccine. The second coronavirus outbreak, called MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome), appeared in June 2012, in Saudi Arabia. That virus infected >2,500 people, killed about 900 and also was contained in a short while without a vaccine. Compare those numbers to SARS-CoV-2, which so far has killed almost 2 million people in the United States and 7 million people in the world. And four years later it continues; it is not contained even though we have several vaccines. Except for the 1918 flu pandemic, which killed more than 50 million people worldwide (that was before flu vaccines) COVID is worse than any other flu in history and much worse than SARS or MERS. Renz’s lawyerly opinion is bunk. Why is he even testifying on a medical matter?
3. Renz saved the best for last. With the help of an “unnamed whistleblower,” Renz claimed, without proof, of course, that "something suspicious" happened in November 2014 at Fort Riley, Kansas, when the Department of Defense (DOD) and the CIA, in collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, created SARS-CoV-2 virus. Not in the Wuhan lab mind you, but in Kansas in 2014! To support his claim, Renz offered nothing! It was just his opinion. Renz also asserted that Tony Fauci, the CDC, FDA, and the DOD played a part in a massive cover-up of all this (so how in the world does HE know?). He unbelievably stated that Hunter Biden was also involved (why not?). Funny how the FBI hasn’t picked up on any of that. Renz knows because he says he does. Trust him, he’s a lawyer without evidence. But that is good enough for the Shadow Congress.
   

The Ob/Gyn. Next up was Kimberly Biss, MD, a well credentialed obstetrician and gynecologist practicing in Tampa Bay and St. Petersburg, Florida, which makes her testimony all-the-more-difficult to understand.

She claimed that after receiving COVID vaccines, an unspecified number of women in her practice suffered unsubstantiated menstrual cycle irregularities including severe, persistent bleeding. However, the only way to reliably determine whether COVID vaccines caused these  changes in menstruation is to compare the symptoms in women who got the vaccine to women who did not. She didn’t do this. Anecdotal observations like these offered by Biss usually don’t include both groups, which is why medical science considers anecdotes to be unreliable and instead rely on controlled clinical trials to base medical science opinions.

Furthermore, real scientific comparisons between vaccinated and unvaccinated women have been done but these were not entered into evidence at the Shadow Congress Hearing. A study of more than 1,100 women performed by the Boston School of Public Health found that there was no association between COVID-19 vaccination and cycle irregularity, bleed length, heaviness of bleed, or menstrual pain. So, which is more credible, Biss’s personal uncontrolled anecdote on an unknown number of patients whose medical history is unknown vs a controlled scientific study on over 1000 patients with carefully documented medical histories and compared to a comparable cohort of unvaccinated menstruating women?  

Biss further testified that in her practice miscarriage rates went up in vaccinated women, again without indicating the number of patients she saw and without providing any medical documentation. She again failed to note the miscarriage rates in unvaccinated women (why does she always leave out the data from unvaxed women?). Another scientific study of 40,000 pregnant women showed that vaccination was not at all associated with an increased risk of premature births. And other controlled studies have shown that COVID vaccination during pregnancy does not increase the risk of birth defects. Again, what would you believe, Biss’s anecdotes or several well controlled peer-reviewed and published science studies?

Biss continued her misleading anecdotal testimony by claiming that it was unsafe for vaccinated women to breastfeed because she "heard" it caused myocarditis in babies in Scotland. She failed to provide any substantiation for her wild claim that no one else seems to have heard. Not only has breastfeeding proven to be safe in women who have received COVID vaccines, newborn infants benefit from vaccine-induced antibodies in breast milk. This provides newborns with their initial protection against COVID as they develop their own immune system. That is a normal part of the maternal-fetal immune system that newborns immensely benefit from. That is basic immunology.  

Finally, and most outrageous was Biss’s stance on vaccinating children. She advised against vaccinating kids falsely claiming that only “three in one million children will die from COVID.” One wonders where she gets her facts like this and like those about myocarditis in breast fed babies in Scotland. As of January 2023, COVID was the leading cause of infectious disease deaths in children. Contrary to Biss’s claims, the COVID death rate for children less than one year of age was 43 per million. Hundreds of young children have died from COVID and many, many more have been hospitalized long term with the very serious condition called multisystem inflammatory syndrome, or MIS, which I have written about in these pages. COVID is much more serious than the flu for kids. None of those deaths or serious illnesses in kids are acceptable. Her claims to the contrary are simply irresponsible for a physician to make.

Finally, the scientist. Perhaps the silliest testimony in front of MTG’s “shadow” committee came from a scientist and physician named Robert Malone who recently has gone around claiming he “invented” the mRNA vaccine. He did not. In the late 1980s and early 90s, labs around the world were fixated with the idea of trying to express genes in cells via transferring DNA into cell cultures. The technique was called “transfection.” It promised to be a powerful tool for studying the function of genes in cells, but proved enormously difficult as I wrote about earlier. My own lab considered trying it, but discarded the idea in favor of another approach, viral-based gene transfer, which we often used to study gene function, and which some might call routine gain-of-function research as I also described earlier in these pages.

Meanwhile, Malone was a small part of the “transfection” bandwagon and in the late 80s published two papers showing it was possible to transfect fragile mRNA protected by a lipid micro-bubble into cells (most labs transfected DNA, which was easier to work with than mRNA). Undoubtedly, his research represented a stepping stone on the path to developing the vaccines, but he had no role in vaccine development. He was one of very many scientists who contributed incremental advances that ultimately made the vaccines possible. He is now way overselling his role. The technology that produced the mRNA COVID vaccines recently won a Nobel Prize and Malone was never mentioned in the invention. He is only a giant in his own mind.

More to the point, Malone testified that the vaccines are contaminated with fragments of DNA and dangerous. He argued, without evidence and contrary to all other science, that these DNA fragments alter cellular DNA of vaccine recipients, causing cancers, autoimmune diseases, and a variety of other disorders. For pregnant women, Malone further opined, again without a shred of proof and contrary to common science, that these DNA fragments could cross the placenta and cause birth defects. Furthermore, according to Malone, the FDA, the CIA, and other government agencies know about this DNA contamination but are covering it up (is Hunter involved in this too??). Again, he offered no evidence at all for this allegation. But, maybe we can excuse him, because there is no evidence to offer.

The idea that the vaccines are contaminated with DNA detritus is old news. All vaccines contain DNA of different sorts, which has never caused any harm as long as vaccines have been given. In fact it is biologically impossible that miniscule amounts of DNA detritus could mess up our cellular DNA. It is irresponsible, and scientifically ignorant of Malone to simply throw this out without elaborating. He didn’t elaborate because to do so would have ruined his “Frankenscience” innuendo that seemed to duly impress the scientifically naïve Shadow Congressional audience he spoke to.

The mRNA used in the vaccine is produced from a DNA strand. The DNA strand is then digested with an enzyme called DNase which chews up all DNA strands, leaving only the DNA building blocks, or remnants of it behind; DNA detritus. It is like taking a large building and demolishing it into its bricks. The large mRNA molecules are then easily biochemically separated from most of the DNA detritus. Even if there were miniscule traces of DNA detritus left over, it is biologically impossible for it to damage cellular DNA. It simply is recycled and reused by our cells. Our cells do that all the time.

But, maybe larger, intact DNA fragments could mess up our cellular DNA? We are exposed to large fragments of DNA all the time with no adverse effects. Consider the following two points: 1) we eat foreign DNA from plants and animals all the time and that DNA enters our blood stream in intact pieces much larger than the digested detritus we have been talking about. Yet, we are totally unaffected by this. 2) We also get vaccinated with whole DNA virus vaccines and have no concern that they affect our cellular DNA. Studies have shown that there is NO genotoxic effect of any of the vaccines.

Finally, consider the inherent conflict in Malone’s position. On the one hand he goes around promoting himself as the inventor of the vaccine technology. He even laments that he has not been given his due credit for the invention. Then he tries to discredit the same invention as something very dangerous and that should not be given to people because it causes enormous harm.

Which is it? Do we laud Malone as he would like for discovering a lifesaving vaccine, or pillory him for creating the dangerous vaccine he says it is? The man is as confused as his testimony.

This is what some of our Congress people spent their time doing last November. The Congressional Flake Caucus wasting their time and our money on a "hearing" without a single reputable testimony. At least it received the very little attention it deserved.

Last word. In an earlier post in these pages I asked the question if it was criminal to intentionally mislead people about lifesaving vaccines. That question is worth raising again, now.

Vaccines: When the Experts Lie But Claim They Are Right

Adapted from Putting Floridians at Risk, a blog post by infectious disease physician and FDA advisor, Paul Offit, MD.

The lie: In October, the Surgeon General of Florida, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, issued a “Provider Alert”, which recommended that the new COVID booster only be given to everyone over 65. This was contrary to the CDC recommendation, which recommends boosting everyone over 6 months of age. Governor Ron DeSantis agreed with Ladapo, amazingly weighing in with this: “Once again, Florida is the first state in the nation to stand up and provide guidance based on “truth,” not Washington edicts.” I guess edicts from Washington automatically are not truth, but those from the Florida Surgeon General, for some reason are, because DeSantis says so. Why does he believe he knows more than the CDC?

Ladapo amazingly claimed that the COVID boosters don’t work. He too seems to know more than the CDC! To back up this spurious claim he cited a study of 2.2 million people from Qatar who got the booster.

Backstory: At first, the vaccines were hoped to prevent spread of the Cov-2 virus as many vaccines do. Early on they did that. But it soon became apparent that vaccine protection waned faster than expected and the virus mutated faster than expected. That combination meant that the vaccines became less effective at preventing virus spread. They still retard infection early after vaccination, but that protection is quickly lost. What they do well is prevent severe illness and death. That is well documented after  a few years of experience with the vaccines and the pandemic. Therefore, the goal of COVID vaccines is to prevent severe disease—to keep people out of the hospital, out of the intensive care unit, and out of the morgue. The Qatar study showed that the booster does exactly that. Protective efficacy against severe disease was about 75 percent. Pretty good.

Back to the lie: Ladapo unprofessionally ignored this main point of the Qatar study—that the vaccine was highly effective at preventing severe disease—and chose to focus on smaller, less significant, less clinically relevant data that minor infections were not affected by the booster. On this selective date editing, he claimed the booster was entirely ineffective. He either ignorantly interpreted the study or did so dishonestly.

Ladapo also falsely claimed that the COVID boosters are unsafe, stating that, “mRNA COVID-19 vaccines present a risk of subclinical and clinical myocarditis and other cardiovascular conditions among otherwise healthy individuals.” This is an oft cited, unsupportable falsehood. The truth is that very mild myocarditis occurs in about 1 in 100,000 mRNA vaccine recipients.  In contrast, myocarditis occurs in roughly 1 in 5,000 CoV-2 infected patients. Also, myocarditis following vaccination is short-lived and quickly resolves on its own, while myocarditis caused by the virus is more serious often requiring medical intervention. Therefore, regarding myocarditis, the benefits of mRNA vaccination far outweigh the risks. Ladapo is being disingenuous citing this is a vaccine danger. And if Ladapo believes that the COVID boosters are ineffective and unsafe, as he claimed, he is, therefore, irresponsible in recommending them for everyone over 65. That would be malpractice.

In the name of standing up to “Washington edicts” and recommending people not be boosted, DeSantis is following unethical medical advice and putting Floridians at unnecessary risk for preventable serious disease. And he wants to be president. If that were to happen, we would then have real complaints about Washington vaccine edicts.

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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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