During the past year there has been a deliberate assault on medical sanity by the Silicon Valley’s internet giants and popular social media platforms to abolish and censor voices and websites challenging the orthodoxy of the CDC’s vaccination policies. Last March, the American Medical Association’s CEO James Madara sent personal letters to the heads of Amazon, Facebook Google, Pinterest, Twitter and YouTube “to do your part to ensure that users have access to scientifically valid information on vaccinations, so they can make informed decisions about their families’ health. We also urge you to make public your plans to ensure that users have access to accurate, timely, scientifically sound information on vaccines.” For the AMA, “valid information” simply means that vaccines are completely safe and effective and the only means at civilization’s disposal for combating infectious diseases.
In 2015, the AMA publicly announced it endorsed the elimination of religious and philosophical exemptions from immunization. It is curious therefore to find that the Association’s Code of Ethics states, “Patient autonomy is the overarching ethical consideration that forms the core of informed consent.” Clearly the AMA abides by a double standard, but Association’s critics have never recognized the organization’s record as representing the public’s best interests. Instead it has a decades long history of being fully compromised by corporate interests and political influence out of Washington. And now it is again parroting the federal government’s efforts to establish a vaccine police state.
A month earlier, Democrat Representative Adam Schiff (image on the right) likewise wrote to the CEOs of Facebook and Google with similar demands. All the contacted companies have now complied with the AMA’s requests to expunge anti-vaccination content and erect the false idol of vaccine safety. The American Academy of Pediatrics has also sent written requests to large Silicon tech companies to confront what it calls “the spread of vaccine misinformation online.” Increasingly, many more sites and publications climbing upon the vaccine wagon train. This week Huffington Post erased all content submitted by its contributing authors who questioned vaccine safety and efficacy. The nation’s leading newspapers, such as the New York Times and Washington Post, the major television networks, as well as liberal magazines and online sites such AlterNet and Mother Jones have frequently acted as CDC’s mouthpieces to ridicule the anti-vaccine parents with injured children and wrongfully accuse parents of vaccine-exempt children as enemies of public health.
Even public crowdfunding sites are joining the adrenaline-rush of pro-vaccine frenzy. Several months ago, Indiegogo reported it would no longer permit fundraising for anti-vaccination projects or what the company termed unscientific “health campaigns.” Last year, the documentary Vaxxed 2, featuring parents with autistic children damaged from vaccines, raised over $86,000 on the Indiegogo site. Likewise, the crowdfunding site GoFundMe has banned anti-vaccination content.
Following a CNN Business report that ridiculed Amazon for including films such as Vaxxed and We Don’t Vaccinate! on its Amazon Prime Video streaming service, the company quickly had them removed. More recently Vimeo, YouTube’s competitor, announced it will purge videos that provide the scientific evidence supporting the Supreme Court’s ruling in the case of Bruesewitz vs. Wyeth that vaccines are “unavoidably unsafe.” Vimeo attorney Michael Cheah argued in the company’s statement that “Content that falsely claims that vaccines are unsafe is at the forefront of an unfolding public health crisis.” Curiously, Vimeo has been a leading supporter of internet neutrality and sued Trump’s FCC last year over its order to repeal the 2015 neutrality rules. Seemingly, Vimeo’s persona of free speech is simply a ruse.
The national campaign to black-out and silence efforts to bring to public light the scientific evidence that should make a rational person stop and think critically about the federal health agencies’ claims about vaccine safety and efficacy is well under way. And it is proceeding far more swiftly than we anticipated.
Even while researching this article, we have noticed the dramatic changes underway in trying to access truthful scientific references and analyses that challenge vaccinations. Therefore, we performed identical queries on several internet search engines, beginning with Google. On all queries, such as “measles outbreaks in vaccinated populations,” Google results produced a litany of pro-vaccine propaganda. The top hits all led to federal vaccine information sites, shortly followed by Wikipedia. On the other hand, the same queries on encrypted and non-compromised search engines, such as DuckDuckGo and StartPage, more readily brought up unfiltered references specific to our queries as well as actual peer-reviewed studies. And as we reported in a previous article, Wikipedia now walks parallel in goose-step with Google on matters of medicine and health.
The Wikipedia Foundation avoids taking any official position on vaccination. Rather, relying upon its public image as an open-source resource, these kinds of decisions are supposed to be left for volunteer Wikipedia editors to battle out. Nevertheless, even an elementary review of its many vaccine-related vaccine pages makes it clear that Wikipedia is grossly biased. After a more thorough review, one is likely to arrive at the conclusion that the encyclopedia realistically serves as a propaganda arm of pro-vaccination advocacy groups, the federal health agencies and Big Pharma. It is not so much the textual content and references in the entries offered that is most worrisome; instead, the important scientific data contesting vaccine efficacy and safety is sorely missing. Consequently, Wikipedia inquirers are only receiving a small sliver of truth in return for numerous examples of Skeptical evangelicalism with the goal to indoctrinate the public to accept national vaccine mandates.
Federal and individual state efforts to pass bills that would enforce vaccination mandates have entered hyper-drive, especially after this year’s measles outbreaks. What is being concealed from the public, and very likely state legislatures as well, is that there is strong scientific evidence that many of those infected were fully vaccinated or that the vaccine’s measles virus was in part responsible for the outbreaks. Vera Sharav from the Alliance for Human Research Protection summarized the CDC’s full knowledge of the problem. It was not until 2017 that the Journal of Clinical Microbiology published a study that the CDC knew about individuals who contracted measles during the 2015 Disney Land outbreak that captured national news headlines. The study that showed the outbreak was “in part caused by the vaccine” was conducted by Rebecca McNall, an official at the CDC’s Division of Viral Diseases. The study reports:
“During the measles outbreak in California in 2015, a large number of suspected cases occurred in recent vaccinees. Of the 194 measles virus sequences obtained in the United States in 2015, 73 were identified as vaccine sequences.”
The CDC was fully aware of this finding but kept it hidden from the media and public for two years to enable a window of opportunity for states to mobilize their efforts to remove non-medical exemptions and pass vaccination mandate bills. An earlier groundbreaking study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, which included authors associated with the CDC and New York’s department of health, provided a case example showing that the 2011 measles outbreak in New York City originated from a fully vaccinated woman with vaccine immunity. The study’s conclusion was that the measles vaccine is capable of both infecting the vaccine recipient and as well as infecting others. How many of the recent measles outbreaks this year can be attributed to the MMR vaccine? Certainly, the CDC has this information, but patient sequence data of measles cases is locked away.
Since the passage of draconian vaccine bills to eliminate religious and philosophical exemption in some states, health authorities have been alarmed at the rise in vaccine medical exemptions. The measles-mumps-rubella vaccine or MMR is perhaps one of the two most feared vaccines on the market, the other being Merck’s HPV vaccine Gardasil. Over the past ten years in the U.S., there has been one reported death from the measles, and it is unclear based on the medical history of the patient whether and how measles played a role in this death. A second person died of measles this year. Two deaths from a wild measles infection in over a decade. Yet as of March 31, 2018, there have been 89,355 reports of measles vaccine reactions, hospitalizations, injuries and deaths cataloged in the government’s Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS). This figure includes 445 vaccine-related deaths, 6,196 hospitalizations, and 1,657 severe disabilities. A fundamental failure in the VAERS system is that it is a passive surveillance system that relies upon voluntary reporting of vaccine adverse events. The CDC acknowledges that the VAERS system is not ideal and only represents about 10 percent of all annual vaccine adverse reactions. Therefore, conservatively we are looking at approximately 803,000 injuries from the MMR vaccine alone. If we follow a Harvard study’s conclusion that only about 2 percent of vaccine injuries are reported, then the actual number is substantially higher. But you will not find any of this information on Wikipedia for the measles vaccine.
Pharmaceutical funded state legislators, such as California’s Senator Richard Pan, are now accusing pediatricians and doctors for this increase in vaccine medical exemptions. He and his supporters are now making the irrational accusation that doctors are simply satisfying parents’ legitimate vaccine fears. Therefore, Pan has embarked on a Stalinist crusade to even prevent clinical physicians and pediatricians from determining for themselves whether or not a person should be medically exempt. On the other hand, we may want to consider another possibility that parents of children who were religiously or philosophically exempt have no other alternative but to request a medical examination from their doctors in order to determine whether their children are more highly susceptible to a potential vaccine injury.
Consider the list of medical conditions that are acknowledged to warrant exemption from the measles vaccine. These are listed in Merck’s product insert for its ProQuad MMR/varicella vaccine: past experience of allergic reactions or anaphylaxsis from previous MMR vaccination, allergies to gelatin and neomycin (ingredients found in the MMR), persons on immunosuppressive drug therapy, pregnant women and women planning to become pregnant, persons with leukemia, lymphoma, blood dyscrasias, blood plasma and bone marrow disorders, febrile respiratory or active febrile infections, advanced cases of AIDS, and a family history of hereditary or congenital immunodeficiency condition. You will never learn this from Wikipedia, which only contraindicates the vaccine for pregnant women or nursing mothers.
Several examples stand out where pro-vaccine Skeptic editors on Wikipedia have intentionally distorted the history and medical science about vaccines and federal vaccination policy in order to twist the entries into blatant propaganda for private vaccine makers. Regarding Wikipedia’s entry for the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) passed by President Reagan in 1986, we read,
“Public health safety, according to backers of the legislation, depends upon the financial viability of pharmaceutical companies, whose ability to produce sufficient supplies in a timely manner could be imperiled by civil litigation on behalf of vaccine injury victims that was mounting rapidly at the time of its passage. Vaccination against infectious illnesses provides protection against contagious diseases and afflictions which may cause permanent disability or even death. Vaccines have reduced morbidity caused by infectious disease; e.g., in the case of smallpox, mass vaccination programs have eradicated a once life-threatening illness.”
This paragraph immediately appears to have little or no relevance to an entry about the NCVIA. This is a common public relations pitch that frequently pops up on Wikipedia to swoon users into a stupor and to reinforce faith in the vaccine regime and Skepticism’s extremism. The entry also fundamentally ignores the more important message underlying Reagan’s signing of the bill; that is, the nation’s medical consensus at that time was that vaccines cause serious injuries and even death and rising lawsuits were crippling the vaccine industry’s bottom line.
The acellular or killed pertussis bacterium used in current DTaP vaccines has been shown to be far safer than its predecessor that relied upon a whole-cell pertussis toxin. On the other hand, it is also less effective. This has raised a recent debate as to whether to reintroduce a new version of the whole-cell, live pertussis vaccine that was responsible for numerous adverse reactions. This conversation continues despite the fact that Dr. Paul Offit (image on the left), one of the country’s most outspoken vaccine advocates and a hero among Wikipedia’s Skeptics, has discouraged the return of the whole-cell pertussis vaccine because of “safety concerns.” Furthermore, recent whooping cough outbreaks have been occurring among fully vaccinated children. This is in part due to a new strain of pertussis bacteria that is resistant to current vaccines. Researchers in Australia, where the strain was first identified, suspect this might be a case of an infectious disease mutating because of over-vaccination.
The whole-cell vaccine was a horrible product. Due to pharma companies’ large payouts for injury, developing and manufacturing vaccines was becoming too risky and no longer profitable for the amount of investment necessary. Peer-reviewed studies have concluded that the whole cell pertussis vaccine caused far more serious reactions than other vaccines including hypotonic/hyporesponsive episodes, febrile or afebrile convulsions, and brain inflammation (also known as encephalitis, encephalomyelitis and encephalopathy). A 1981 U.S. study funded by the FDA and conducted at UCLA found that convulsions occurred as frequently as 1 in every 875 DPT shots. The history of the vaccine’s damaging effects resulted in the 1982 award-winning television documentary DPT: Vaccine Roulette. The film in turn inspired the creation of the public advocacy organization the National Vaccine Information Center to push Congress to abandon the whole-cell vaccine and adopt the acellular pertussis vaccine, which the Japanese had developed in 1981 after Japan suspended the whole-cell vaccine due to the dramatic rise in neurologically damaged kids and vaccine-related deaths.
Knowing this history, Wikipedia’s misinformation about the whole-cell pertussis vaccine’s risks is in our opinion tantamount to medical malfeasance. It is contrary to volumes of evidence validating the contrary. The entry states,
“No studies showed a causal connection, and later studies showed no connection of any type between the DPT vaccine and permanent brain injury. The alleged vaccine-induced brain damage proved to be an unrelated condition, infantile epilepsy.”
In fact, Wikipedia references one source that suggests incidents of seizures after receiving the pertussis vaccine may be due to an unrelated “known or suspected neurological disorder.”
But even the safer DTaP vaccine is a leading contributor to vaccine injuries. As of June 2018, the VAERS database recorded 150,043 serious adverse reactions from pertussis-containing vaccines since 1990 and half occurring in children under age three. Among these injuries were 2,745 deaths, over 90 percent of those being small children. One can do the math as was done with the measles injury statistics in VAERS and get the more accurate figure for pertussis vaccine casualties. And again, as to be expected, none of this information based upon CDC sources is provided to Wikipedia users.
There are some indications that Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales is staunchly pro-vaccine. In his 2013 post on Quora, Wales opines that the British paper The Guardian reported that the number of British elderlies receiving the flu shot had declined to under 50 percent. “How many of the other 50 percent,” wrote Wales, “chose not to take it because they believed this hoax remedy [a reference to a popular homeopathic cold remedy] will protect them?” The extent to which Wales has been personally responsible for enabling federal health agencies and private vaccine companies, lobbyists and their public relations firms to monopolize and dictate pages related to vaccination issues is unclear. Nevertheless, the encyclopedia blatantly cherry-picks references that embellish pro-vaccination propaganda. It rejects outright scientific sources contrary to Wikipedia’s covert vaccine public relations. And harsh criticisms against vaccine refusers are permitted without censor. What is certain is that Wales is a loyal follower of the Skeptic movement and an ardent supporter of the Skeptic editors who control many health-related pages, particularly regarding non-conventional medicine. And the leading Skeptic voices advocating for national vaccine mandates, such Paul Offit, David Gorski, and Stephen Barrett, are frequently found as reliable references on Wikipedia’s pages.
The kinship between Google and Wikipedia has led to joint efforts to gather traffic statistics on both sites in order to establish a health monitoring mechanism. For example, the project Google Flu Trends “correlates searches for flu to local outbreaks” while simultaneously monitoring Wikipedia views of flu-related pages. During a flu season, users gain access to Wikipedia’s highly biased and distorted description of the influenza vaccine, including its safety record and adverse effects. Wikipedia’s “Influenza Vaccine” entry makes no mention of the flu shot being the single vaccine still containing toxic levels of methylmercury or thimerosal. The entry’s list of adverse effects is sparse and limited to allergic reactions from the vaccine’s reliance upon chicken eggs as a culture medium, and Guillain-Barre Syndrome (GBS), an autoimmune disease that can cause paralysis of the limbs temporarily or permanently.
The Wiki page references CDC claims that “most studies on modern influenza vaccines have seen no link with Guillain–Barré.” This is contrary to several independent analyses of the government’s vaccine adverse reaction database conducted by Genetic Centers of America, MedCon Inc and IMUNOX confirming that GBS is a well-documented reaction to the flu vaccine. Nor is there any mention of the infamous 1976 flu vaccine debacle against the “swine flu” epidemic that never happened. Under President Ford, a Federally hyped flu scare resulted in almost 50 million Americans being unnecessarily vaccinated. Rather than protecting the population from a new swine flu strain, the $137 million vaccination program produced an epidemic of GBS cases. The flu itself killed only one person, a soldier at Fort Dix in New Jersey, the incident that had launched the panic in the first place. The aftermath of Ford’s fiasco was almost 4,000 claims for vaccine injuries, including over 500 cases of GBS and 1,384 lawsuits. A frightening fact Mike Wallace unearthed during a 60 Minute episode in 1979 was that the 1976 swine flu vaccine was never field tested prior to being launched upon the public. This should be a sharp warning about the lengths the federal government will go to appease the pharmaceutical industry by licensing poorly tested vaccines, such as Merck’s Gardasil.
In conclusion the only responsible and scientifically and warranted proposal to bring reliable and balanced facts to this public health issue is to conduct a four group study of children. Such a study would include a group receiving the current vaccine on the CDC immunization schedule. A second group would receive a scientifically valid inert saline placebo. A third group would receive no vaccine and a fourth group would be placed on a nutritional protocol designed to strengthen and enhance the body’s natural immune system in order to ward off infections.
The children would be tested every six months for three years. This should be conducted by independent researchers unaffiliated to the federal health agencies and private corporate interests, and would toxicologists, immunologists, pediatricians, neurologists, and gastroenterologists. Until that time, the government, at the federal and state levels, the media and the scientific community will continue to make unsubstantiated claims with self-righteous certainty that vaccines are essential to public health, effective and safe. And Wikipedia, as the number one propaganda cult for Skepticism’s scientific materialism, will continue to disseminate what we believe is dangerous and unfounded information.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Richard Gale is the Executive Producer of the Progressive Radio Network and a former Senior Research Analyst in the biotechnology and genomic industries.
Dr. Gary Null is the host of the nation’s longest running public radio program on alternative and nutritional health and a multi-award-winning documentary film director, including The War on Health, Poverty Inc and Silent Epidemic.
