Much has been said about “vaccine misinformation” in recent weeks. A Senate hearing was recently convened to address this crisis of “misinformation”, with a panel of doctors all speaking in unison regarding vaccine policy. At the request of California representative Adam Schiff, Facebook has pledged to combat the “misinformation”, Pinterest has removed anti-vaccine content, and Amazon has removed many documentaries containing this “misinformation”, with the hope that censoring the content will halt its spread. But what is strange about all this is that nowhere is this content ever addressed directly. What is this “misinformation” that scares them so much that they’re willing to censor it rather than address it directly? Rather than misinformation, could it be that parents find the widely-available facts surrounding current vaccine policy deeply disconcerting, and voice that concern? Those concerns warrant serious discussion, not censorship.
Just one of these concerns is the simple fact that vaccine manufacturers are exempt from liability in the event of an adverse reaction to a vaccine. This is due to the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, signed into law by Ronald Reagan in 1986, which also created the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, which funnels petitioners to the “vaccine court”, where the families of the vaccine-injured must make their case in order to receive compensation. Over $4 billion have been paid out as part of vaccine injury settlements by this program since its inception, according to NVIC.org. And in just the first quarter of this year, the Department of Justice has reported that $110 million in settlements has been paid out to victims. The program, ostensibly created to put an end to the wave of lawsuits that vaccine-injured individuals were bringing against vaccine manufacturers, has now clearly created a very dangerous, textbook example of moral hazard.
A possible result of this moral hazard is found in disturbing video footage of a 2018 meeting of the Advisory Council on Immunization Practices, which shows a vote being held on a vaccine containing an adjuvant with unknown side effects and safety, yet receives unanimous ‘yes’ votes. After the vote, the members appeared to discuss when the data on the new vaccine would be available, implying that the general population would, in effect, be the test subjects for the unproven vaccine for the next several years.
This is reckless in the extreme, and clear evidence that we have every reason to distrust regulatory bodies that operate in this manner, as well as distrust any policy or product emerging from their deliberations.
After the passage of the 1986 Act, Congress assigned responsibility for monitoring vaccine safety to the Secretary of Health and Human Services, who was required to submit a report to Congress every two years that details the state of vaccine safety. Thanks to a lawsuit filed by the Informed Consent Action Network and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., it has been revealed that HHS has not filed a single vaccine safety report since the creation of the program 30 years prior. This isn’t misinformation, it’s fact. Inconvenient, but fact nonetheless.
Vaccine safety isn’t some idle concern among parents. Autism, autoimmune disorders, and chronic illness are rising at alarming rates among children. This is a serious concern for children and their parents. A 2010 EPA study, “Timing of Increased Autistic Disorder Cumulative Evidence”, traced the origin of the modern autism “epidemic” to 1988, when cases began spiking dramatically. As of 2018, according to the CDC’s own stats, approximately 1 in 37 boys is diagnosed with autism, whereas 1 in 151 girls receives the diagnosis.
And, more fundamentally, what number of vaccines would be too many? The standard schedule calls for around 28 doses of 13 separate vaccines by age 2, 35 by age 5. At what point would it be considered excessive by even the most pro-vaccine advocate? 50 before age 2? 100? The misgivings of parents are informed and entirely rational. Marginalizing these people, and attempting to silence them will not make them go away. A demand for censorship is an implicit admission that you have no faith in your ability to persuasively respond to your opponent’s argument. It is an admission of defeat.
Parents who have even the slightest misgivings over the number of doses, their contents, and their possible dangers find their concerns dismissed with an eye roll, and eventually, if they continue to voice their concerns or network with like-minded individuals, find themselves marginalized by the medical establishment at large. They find themselves dismissed as the “useful idiots of the anti-vaccine lobby”, as Peter Hotez did when he smugly spat it at the mothers of vaccine-injured children after a Senate hearing on vaccines on March 5th. Later, they listen to an interview in which Hotez, rather than address any of the arguments of the “anti-vaccine lobby” or even affirm the value of some type of public debate, says that “some of this anti-vaccine media empire needs to be dismantled”, blatantly calling for censorship, regardless of any First Amendment violations. Does he really have such little faith in his arguments in favor of mandatory and expanded vaccine policy that the only option is to silence his critics? A real debate must happen, it can’t be swept under the rug. Something is wrong with vaccine policy and our entire approach to health in general. It requires discussion, no matter how uncomfortable that discussion may be for either side. The future of health and the future of our children vitally depend on it.
