"Anti-Vaxxers" and the Dangerous Scourge of Social Media.

                                             (Edit: The coloured words in the text link to articles and studies)

In 2014 a whistleblower called William Thompson came forward and admitted that he had been part of a coverup that showed a higher incidence of autism in a certain vulnerable subset of children who received the MMR vaccine. His story actually formed the basis of the movie VAXXED. There was almost nothing about this breaking story on mainstream media, even though the story was horrifying, groundbreaking, and showed that the CDC were actively involved in vaccine safety fraud,  knowingly putting millions of children in harms way. Vaccine sceptics the world over celebrated as they thought that finally they were going to be vindicated and there would be an investigation into the crimes that the CDC was being accused of. But there was nothing. Silence from the mainstream media. Thompson was given immunity from prosecution and was supposed to be able to testify in front of congress, but still, nothing.

Photo courtesy of Pxhere

And then, suddenly, there was something. An outbreak in Disneyland - the symbol of American childhood. In 2015 the CDC, the Pharmaceautical companies and the US government went on a social media frenzy. Vaccine sceptics, called Anti-Vaxxers, were to blame! Without any proof, they said that an unvaccinated child was responsible for the outbreak. Later, once the data was released, it showed that they had no idea who patient zero was, but still, they pointed their fingers at the people they knew society was itching to blame, the Anti-Vaxxers. They used that term over and over again, whipping up a frenzy on social media using a well known technique called "astroturfing". For the first time, a properly targeted attack on social media against vaccine sceptics began. People started posting angry messages, accusing vaccine sceptics of being a danger to society, of spreading disease, parents posting heartbreaking pictures of their immuno-compromised children, posting articles about how dangerous the movement was and heaping vitriol on the unvaccinated. Some of the people who went viral were tracked back to Pharmaceutical companies.

It was unprecedented. And hugely successful. They managed to change the language people used when addressing the targeted groups, and to make people so angry that they were prepared to attack the sceptics on social media in ways we had never seen before. Threatening to intentionally infect unvaccinated kids, wishing death upon them, attacking, stalking and outing parents who didn't vaccinate and encouraging the public at large to dismiss sceptics as anti-science, far right (I'm far left) conspiracy theorists. Making videos linking vaccine safety activists to flat-earthers and UFOlogists to try to further discredit them by lumping them with people who are considered by the mainstream to be terribly stupid,  anti-science and beneath contempt. The CDC deleted info that showed serious flaws in the DTP vaccine, like they had previously removed the pages on their site that showed that the polio vaccine had been contaminated with SV40, a simian virus that causes cancer in humans. Websites disappeared. Google filtered their search engines algorithms so that any vaccine safety groups were pushed to the second or third page instead of the first, and some sites were suddenly totally omitted. Searching vaccine death or vaccine autism on Google yields very different results to searching on platforms like Duckduckgo, which doesn't track or filter.

The State of California managed to get laws passed, mandating vaccines and disallowing religious and philosophical exemptions, insisting on medical exemptions only. Dr Pan, a senator from California was the driving force behind this legislation.

We have now had 4 years of a more focused and angry social media language and awareness.

And so, when the CDC's expert witness on vaccines and autism, Dr Andrew Zimmerman, a Paediatric Neurologist came forward in 2018 and said that in 2007, in a landmark case against thousands of autism parents, he took the DOJ lawyers aside and said that vaccines DID indeed cause autism-like symptoms in some children and that he saw them in his practice often. He was summarily dismissed from the case but the lawyers went on to misrepresent his position and falsely use his redacted testimony to win the case. Those children and their families were left to suffer without any help.

And there was, yet again, no response from mainstream media. Utter silence. Vaccine sceptics have come to expect this bias from mainstream media.

What happened instead was chilling. The WHO came forward naming Anti-Vaxxers as one of the biggest threats to human health. This was what went viral, with everyone from Forbes to Rolling Stone climbing on the bandwagon to broadcast that the REAL threat was the 2% of parents who choose not to vaccinate their children.

And then, another "outbreak" was announced on social media, whipping people into a new frenzy of hate against the Anti-Vaxxers who they were now trained to vociferously attack. 101 cases - which is, if you look at the data, not a huge amount - there were 667 cases in 2014. What make THIS "outbreak" different, is the fact that it has happened in a small, mostly non-vaccinating population, and usually the outbreaks happen in vaccinated communities. (This also applied to Pertussis and Mumps)

CDC Measles chart

What is even more interesting here is that the outbreaks in previous years have been skewed in the opposite direction, often with almost half of the infected being fully vaccinated, and many more being partially vaccinated. According to the CDC in the 2015 outbreak, 45% were fully vaccinated and a further 68 people were reported as unvaccinated but when this was broken down further we saw that some of those were children who had received 1 or 2 MMR vaccines and were still too young for their next booster. So this vaccine, even if you have had all the shots, is not at all effective in preventing measles, because almost half of those infected were FULLY vaccinated.

CDC Measles 2015

What we need to be very aware of is that MMR is a problematic vaccine. Even the hyper-pro vaccine doctor and researcher Dr Gregory Poland has been trying to warn the public about the problems with this particular vaccine and why, even if there was 100% coverage, we still would not be able to wipe measles off the planet. The problem with herd immunity is the vaccine cannot provide it. Not the few parents who choose to forego the shots for their children.

Social media has become THE platform the CDC, FDA and the Pharmaceutical companies use to shape the public perception of vaccines so that their schedule - and as a result their profit (by the way, the CDC and the FDA both have patents on vaccines, the CDC alone pulls in 4.6 Billion a year from these vaccines) - remains intact. Also, many watchdog organisations are warning us that congress is owned by pharmaceuticals and that pharmaceuticals basically own mainstream media - the very vast majority of advertising revenue comes form pharmaceutical advertising. Facebook's Marc Zuckerberg has gone public saying that he would limit the freedom that vaccine sceptics have on his platform, and under mounting pressure, Facebook have deleted many groups and pages linked to the movement. Grassroots stories, the "human face" of the "harms caused by the Anti-Vaxxer movement" start appearing. Organisations like Bored Panda and Buzzfeed, "junk media" geared towards Facebook and Twitter put out Anti-Vaxx puff pieces that either encourage denigration or are geared to pluck the heartstrings. Stories like the recent one about Ethan Lindenberg, a son of Anti-Vaxxer parents, who chose to vaccinate himself at age 18 go viral, and then we find out he is a social media expert who is writing a book and has worked for government in health care, an other stories about Anti-Vaxxer parents "seeing the light".. An article about a mother whose severely immuno-compromised daughter died of measles makes the rounds with terribly sad pictures of her baby.

And these stories are touching and sad, devastating sometimes. But you only need to look at some of the vaccine safety advocacy groups on facebook to see pages like this one, which is much more heartbreaking and horrifying because mainstream media ignores these families and the powers that be encourage others to tease, shun or attack them. You can also see some of the bullying comments from the public on this page. (Edit - the page has been removed. Parents of children who died or were severely harmed by their vaccines posted their stories there. Facebook has removed the page as they don't want to allow any negative press for the schedule at all.)

"My child's vaccine reaction" group on Facebook

We also need to be aware of the total media blackout on ANY topic that would show a possible flaw or problem with a vaccine or the vaccine programme. Question the safety of ONE vaccine, and you are immediately labelled an Anti-Vaxxer and people have the licence to treat you like you have no rights whatsoever. When a child dies or is injured from a vaccine, current social media trends have people attacking the parent even though the CDC itself has stated that vaccines are unavoidably unsafe to a small subset of children. Those families get absolutely no respect from social media at large. One thread on Facebook, where a healthy child died within a few days of his vaccine had over 40 comments calling the parents various versions of "idiot anti-vaxxers" (They HAD fully vaccinated their dead baby) and claiming that there could be no connection, that correlation does not = causation. The vitriol was incredible, laughing emoji's on the post and nasty comments tagging the family. The family shut their facebook page down as a result. Which is exactly what the drivers behind this want. A shutdown of any voices calling for research into vaccine safety. But it is acceptable, nay, encouraged, to post articles calling sceptics terrorists.

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/withoutacrystalball/2019/02/anti-vaxxers-are-terrorists-that-kill-and-harm-children/?fbclid=IwAR3BelnxUILka8077MzM3ZQbFryGbbiAjKvogClfXSEFKdy1HMbbb_aTfmM

And now we have Dr Pan, who successfully legislated to enforce mandated vaccines in California, now trying to limit the last recourse parents have to protect their children, the medical exemption.

People often fail to realise that the the very vast majority of parents who are sceptical of vaccines were once PRO vaccine. Polls taken in the vaccine safety advocacy groups show that MOST people came looking for information after a child fell ill or died after a vaccine, and the western medical community had no answers for them. What people also fail to realise is that the vaccine programme is corrupt from the top down. That vaccine manufacturers are piling more and more shots onto the schedule and the safety trials are abysmal. There are still no proper government funded studies on the health outcomes between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated, although there have been some done by the vaccine safety advocacy groups, in which the unvaccinated group scored dramatically better in all categories. The US government, which through their agencies the FDA and the CDC, pretty much set the standard for drug safety throughout the world is totally bought by the Pharmaceutical lobbyists, who pay off more politicians than the oil and gun lobby combined. And when you consider that the US schedule has gone from 24 doses to 74 in the 30 years since the drug companies were given immunity from prosecution, and the vaccine industry, which was unprofitable due to lawsuits in 1983  is now touted as the biggest growth industry in Pharma and projected to be worth $50 billion dollars in 2023, it should give you pause.