The problem with advocating a position at odds with the prevailing belief on a topic as radioactive as vaccine policy is that you run the risk of triggering the defenses of others almost as soon as the topic comes up. Most people are pro-vaccine by default, thanks to a relentless PR campaign that begins shortly after birth, one that has cultivated a reverence of vaccination bordering on religious awe. But since this reverence has been with them since their earliest years, and is reinforced throughout their lives, they’ve never thought to question it, and so encountering someone who does question it elicits a defensive emotional response that is almost impossible to overcome. Even when confronted with the facts surrounding U.S. vaccine policy, many of the reflexively pro-vaccine will refuse to consider them, or offer in response the internal arguments that maintain their belief in the efficacy and safety of the current vaccine schedule. A representative conversation quickly devolves into personal insults launched almost exclusively by one side, and the vicious attacks can reach appalling heights. Granted, these exchanges occur almost exclusively on social media, but the reflexive faith in current vaccine policy on display in those exchanges is representative of the attitude among many state legislatures, the major news outlets, and social media giants. The latter who have been nudged into censoring content critical of vaccines, which is dismissed as “misinformation” regardless of it’s truthfulness. According to this strange orthodoxy, criticism of current vaccine policy is misinformation by default. Mentioning facts at odds with this orthodoxy will immediately draw the ire of the mob, who will respond with venomous anger and ridicule.
The danger lies in the real-world consequences: a refusal to debate the facts by medical professionals who know better, a uniform dismissal of any and all concerns by parents of vaccine-injured children, a constant witch-hunt of medical professionals and scientists who raise legitimate questions regarding vaccine safety, and state legislatures that seek to force through mandatory vaccination bills, normally on the grounds of one “emergency” or another, with the most convenient and commonly chosen one being the measles, as cases normally crest around the time that pro-vaccine rhetoric has hit an emotionally overwrought milestone. The deluge of fact-free, reflexively pro-vaccine editorials similarly reach a peak around this time as well, sheering off once voting has wrapped up and the public stumbles out of the media-induced hysteria, wondering in what manner they’ve been fleeced this time.
A few facts that draw such a lynch mob reaction include the bizarre legal immunity enjoyed by the vaccine industry, the more than $4 billion in settlements paid out to the vaccine-injured over the past 30 years, the toxic levels of aluminum contained within many of the vaccines given to infants, the fact that the rapid emergence and increase in childhood autoimmune disease coincided with the sudden expansion of the childhood vaccine schedule around 1990, the fact that vaccines weren’t responsible for the precipitous decline in infectious disease that occurred during the early to mid twentieth century (improved hygiene, clean water and food, nutrition, and a rising standard of living were the responsible for that), and that measles is a mild, self-limiting infection that confers lifetime immunity, not the rampant killer that the mainstream media paints it as.
A serious debate must happen. What are pro-vaccine professionals so afraid of that they are unwilling to consider it? Even Peter Hotez, appearing on the Joe Rogan show, refused to even consider a debate, despite advocating for a strong-handed censorship of “anti-vaxxers”. Does he really have so little confidence in his position? And what value does a product really have if it requires censorship of its critics to find any customers? Criticism makes products and their manufacturers better. So does competition, something the vaccine industry is utterly devoid of.
There are far too many questions, far too much evidence that “safe and effective” is a slogan inappropriately applied to a pharmaceutical product that has too often proved to be both unsafe and abysmally ineffective, far too much in the way of conflicts of interest between vaccine manufacturers, regulatory bodies, politicians, and the various trade associations that seek to bring physician independence to heel, to give in to the vitriol, the juvenile promotion of censorship, and the effort to bully into silence anyone who doesn’t blindly accept the safety of a pharmaceutical product just because it comes in an inject-able form.
The injuries that have taken place, the lack of testing regarding a pharmaceutical product we are expected to inject into our children, and the risks, must be discussed frankly. And if the reflexively pro-vaccine truly do care about public health, then they should welcome discussions regarding the safety of vaccines.
Unfortunately, criticizing vaccine policy feels all too similar to criticizing a religion, or some new patriotic war that we all must line up behind. Ironically so.
