History We Should Know: The, Don’t Tell Me What To Do Movement
Many believe, and I also do, that the anti-vaccine movement can be traced to 1998.
Fact: that a group of doctors and scientists held a news conference in London. That they were to discuss what was soon to appear in the Lancet Medical Journal: a proposed link between the MMR vaccine for children, the first dose commonly given during a child’s second year of life, and regressive autism, a mysterious condition that also presented around the same time, and whose prevalence seemed to be spreading.
Dr. Andrew Wakefield wrote: “I cannot support the continued use of the three vaccines given together. My concerns are that one more case of this (autism) is too many.”
Wakefield’s words created a firestorm. His doubts about the relatively new childhood vaccine (the combination MMR had only been introduced in Britain in 1988) started a wave of fear of vaccines that continues to this day.
SO WHAT HAPPENED?
Then and now, what was lost on the non-medical public, were important facts: how scientifically weak the study was in the original Lancet publication. The study was small, only 12 subjects. The study had no comparison group. The subjects were not selected randomly. Wakefield’s paper should only have been used to make more scientists do stronger and better organized studies. But instead, 60 Minutes treated “Wakefield as one side in an ongoing scientific debate about MMR vaccine safety, when in reality there wasn’t much debate at all among scientists.” And though he got lots of publicity, Wakefield’s theory soon began to unravel.
His co-authors issued a retraction. Medical records indicated that some of the children he used as subjects had developmental problems before they received the vaccine. Thus, in Great Britain, Wakefield was stripped of his medical license, and the Lancet retracted Wakefield’s paper, describing it as “probably the worst paper” ever published in the journal’s history.
BUT THEN…
Wakefield created a film: “Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe” which made its way to the public, though people like Robert De Niro denounced its science. And while other researches around the world failed to find a link between vaccines and autism, Wakefield refused to abandon his theory. He loved the spotlight, and began to travel the world, insisting that vaccines caused autism.
OTHER CONSEQUENCES…
Seven years after the notorious Lancet paper, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., son of the beloved and assassinated RFK, decided he totally agreed with Wakefield. He wrote an article, arguing that thimerosal, the mercury-laden preservative used in some vaccines, was damaging children’s brains and could be contributing to what some were calling, “the autism epidemic.” Kennedy attacked the CDC for secrecy, even though as time went on, there were once again holes in his argument. And then when Kennedy got his numbers wrong, Salon, his publisher, removed the article.
Not to be deterred, Kennedy shifted his focus from blaming mercury, to blaming the aluminum present in some vaccine adjuvants, though again, studies have failed to show any link between small amounts in vaccines and a subsequent disorder.
Now Kennedy claims that vaccine mandates are a form of totalitarian oppression. The New York Times article from which I took much of my research, quotes him: “We have witnessed over the past 20 months, a coup d’etat against democracy and the demolition, the controlled demolition, of the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights.” WOW!
My reaction: when men become desperate to hold on to their followers, they stretch the argument to such a breaking point, that all logic and sensible wording disappears. Kennedy now sounds like a crazy person.
DAMAGE DONE: THE RESULTS
In 2014, a case of measles at Disneyland in Orange County, California spread. 147 people across the U.S. contracted a virus that should be gone from our country. Of those who became ill, many children in California, at least 45%, were unvaccinated, due to a popular doctor in Orange Country who would provide parents with signed paperwork, allowing them to avoid vaccination required in California for entrance to Kindergarten. And another reason—celebrity Jenny McCarthy, who has always claimed that her son developed autism after receiving his childhood vaccines, didn’t stay silent, using her notoriety to convince other parents to not vaccinate their children. Also, regarding the Disneyland outbreak, 43% of the victims had an unknown vaccination status, meaning they could have been unvaccinated as well.
Then in 2015, Richard Pan, a pediatrician and California state senator, played a major role in forming and writing SB277—a bill that supported vaccination for children in California’s public schools. But when the law was being debated, lawmakers began getting death threats. And though Jerry Brown, then California’s governor, did sign the bill into law, things got worse.
1.There were major measles outbreaks in Washington State, New York, California, and other states—1,282 cases.
2. The outbreaks were nearly enough to make the virus endemic again—meaning: that after its eradication from the United States 19 years earlier, measles ALMOST became re-established in this country.
3. Certain doctors in California were “selling vaccine exemptions” and making money doing so.
4. After SB277 was signed, “a woman threw a menstrual cup filled with what appeared to be blood on the legislators, while yelling: “that’s for the dead babies!”
Dr. Pan responded, saying that in the entire history of the California Legislature—during which there were many difficult issues debated from slavery to abortion to gun rights, no one had ever thrown anything at the legislators. “So far, the only ones to do that are the antivaxxers,” Dr. Pan said.
FINAL THOUGHTS
But as my readers know, this has only been the beginning of ordinary folks taking it upon themselves to let anger and violence guide them.
Robert Kennedy has gone so far as to call it “turnkey totalitarianism. They are putting into place all these technological mechanism for control that we’ve never seen before.” He then referenced Anne Frank, saying that even then she could hide in an attic. Reaction came immediately. Kennedy had gone too far, his wife saying in Twitter, that the Anne Frank reference was “reprehensible and insensitive.”
CONCLUSION: After all the chaos in California over vaccination, Eric Ball, another pediatrician from Orange Country, CA, says that trying to give children vaccines remains a battle.
“We’re completely on the defensive. Now we just want to hold on to what we have. I worry about what’s going to happen in the next several years and that we’ll start seeing more kids with measles and whooping cough.”
Thanks for reading, and thanks for the New York Times May 29, 2022
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