Anti Vaccines Quotes

Vaccination is a barbarous practice and one of the most fatal of all the delusions current in our time. Conscientious objectors to vaccination should stand alone, if need be, against the whole world, in defense of their conviction.

At present, intelligent people do not have their children vaccinated, nor does the law now compel them to. The result is not, as the Jennerians prophesied, the extermination of the human race by smallpox; on the contrary, more people are now killed by vaccination than by smallpox.

The greatest lie ever told is that vaccines are safe and effective.

I am no longer 'trying to dig up evidence to prove' vaccines cause autism. There is already abundant evidence....This debate is not scientific but is political

The more it (vaccination) is supported by public authorities, the more will its dangers and disadvantages be concealed or denied.

So it's an absolute lie that has killed thousands of kids. Because the mothers who heard that lie, many of them didn't have their kids take either pertussis or measles vaccine, and their children are dead today. And so the people who go and engage in those anti-vaccine efforts -- you know, they, they kill children. It's a very sad thing, because these vaccines are important.

Immunization is total nonsense! More than that is what's hidden from people about vaccines. They are dangerous. One child out of five has overwhelming disabilities from vaccines -- neurological problems, seizures.

I am & have been for years a confirmed anti-vaccinationist. Anti-vaccination has no backing from the orthodox medical opinion. A medical man who expresses himself against vaccination loses caste. Tremendous pecuniary interests too have grown around vaccination.

One of the medical profession's greatest boasts is that it eradicated smallpox through the use of the smallpox vaccine. I myself believed this claim for many years. But it simply isn't true!

Nothing but the natural ignorance of the public, countenanced by the inoculated erroneousness of the ordinary general medical practitioners, makes such a barbarism as vaccination possible.......Recent developments have shown that an inoculation made in the usual general practitioner's light-hearted way, without previous highly skilled examination of the state of the patient's blood, is just as likely to be a simple manslaughter as a cure or preventive. But vaccination is nothing short of attempted murder. A skilled bacteriologist would just as soon think of cutting his child's arm and rubbing the contents of the dustpan into the wound, as vaccinating it in the same.

I am no longer 'trying to dig up evidence to prove' vaccines cause autism. There is already abundant evidence. This debate is not scientific but is political

The fact is that sooner or later, Andrew Wakefield will be exonerated, his theory will be accepted, and a vaccine-autism connection will be proven.

At the highest levels of the medical cartel, vaccines are a top priority because they cause a weakening of the immune system. I know that may be hard to accept, but its true. The medical cartel, at the highest level, is not out to help people, it is out to harm them, to weaken them. To kill them. At one point in my career, I had a long conversation with a man who occupied a high government position in an African nation. He told me that he was well aware of this. He told me that WHO is a front for these depopulation interests

Parents may be free to become martyrs themselves, but it does not follow that they are free, in identical circumstances, to make martyrs of their children.

No one knows any longer whether the reintroduction of the bear in Pyrenees, kolkhozes, aerosols, the Green Revolution, the anti-smallpox vaccine, Star Wars, the Muslim religion, partridge hunting, the French Revolution, service industries, labour unions, cold fusion, Bolshevism, relativity, Slovak nationalism, commercial sailboats, and so on, are outmoded, up to date, futuristic, atemporal, nonexistent, or permanent.

Most anti-vaccine books claim that all shots are bad, the diseases aren't really anything to fear, and as long as you live a natural and healthy lifestyle, you don't have to worry. I think this is a very irresponsible approach to the vaccine issue. Vaccines are beneficial in ridding our population of both serious and nonserious diseases.

Her conclusion: "You just have to follow your own heart" when it comes to medical decision-making.

I have blogged previously about the dangerous and deadly effects of science denialism, from the innocent babies unnecessarily exposed to deadly diseases by other kids whose parents are anti-vaxxers, to the frequent examples of how acceptance of evolution helps us stop diseases and pests (and in the case of Baby Fae, rejection of evolution was fatal), to the long-term effects of climate denial to the future of the planet we all depend upon. But one of the strangest forms of denialism is the weird coalition of people who refuse to accept the medical fact that the HIV virus causes AIDS. What the heck? Didn’t we resolve this issue in the 1980s when the AIDS condition first became epidemic and the HIV virus was discovered and linked to AIDS? Yes, we did—but for people who want to deny scientific reality, it doesn’t matter how many studies have been done, or how strong the scientific consensus is. There are a significant number of people out there (especially among countries and communities with high rates of AIDS infections) that refuse to accept medical reality. I described all of these at greater length in my new book Reality Check: How Science Deniers Threaten our Future.

Barbara Loe Fisher failed to note that many scientists before Wakefield had published papers proving the rare tragic consequences of vaccines without risking their career—for example, William Sawyer, who showed that a yellow fever vaccine had been contaminated with hepatitis B virus; Neil Nathanson, who showed that a polio vaccine wasn’t properly inactivated, causing children to become paralyzed and die; and Trudy Murphy, who showed that an early rotavirus vaccine caused intestinal blockage, killing one child. Scientists and public health officials didn’t marginalize Wakefield because he had challenged the belief that vaccines are absolutely safe; they did it because he was wrong—clearly and inescapably wrong.

Christians believe, as is reported in the New Testament scriptures, that Jesus of Nazareth healed 10 men with leprosy. It sounds like an astounding feat, but compare that to Jacinto Convit who saved thousands of lives when he developed the vaccine that protects us from it. In 1988, Convit was nominated for a Nobel Prize in Medicine for his anti-leprosy vaccine. So, while the promise of Jesus’ healing power is a centerpiece of the Christian myth, the demigod’s results leave something to be desired when compared to the rigor of man’s scientific inquiry.

Let us honestly state the facts. Our America has a bad name for superficialness. Great men, great nations have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it.

In 1999, Daniel Salmon and co-workers from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health found that the risk of contracting measles in five- to nine-year-olds whose parents had chosen not to vaccinate them was one hundred and seventy times greater than for vaccinated children.

Sonnet of Conspiracy Perhaps there's a monster under the bed, Perhaps there's a boogeyman in the closet. Perhaps they're sterilizing kids with vaccine, Perhaps they're controlling all with a radio set. Yes our science is well advanced, But not advanced enough to control minds. Besides mind-control needs no fancy tech, When people are run by smartphone chimes. Tales like these are good for entertainment, Amongst a bunch of kindergarteners. But being adult requires the use of reason, Without submitting to prehistoric fears. Treating insecurities with common sense, Anyone can manifest civilized sentience.

science and reason, which has found itself in recent decades under attack on many fronts: right-wing ideologues who do not understand science; religious-right conservatives who fear science; left-wing postmodernists who do not trust science when it doesn’t support progressive tenets about human nature; extreme environmentalists who want to return to a prescientific and preindustrial agrarian society; antivaxxers who wrongly imagine that vaccinations cause autism and other maladies; anti-GMO (genetically modified food) activists who worry about Frankenfoods; and educators of all stripes who cannot articulate why Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) are so vital to a modern democratic nation.

In fact, the CDC would later implicitly acknowledge the system’s value when it admitted in June that the mRNA vaccines could cause myocarditis—a potentially serious heart problem—in young men. Side effect reports from VAERS formed the core of the agency’s analysis.37 Yet even after that finding, the stories dismissing the value of the VAERS reports went on.38 I am not an “anti-vaxxer.

Pasteur had no sooner injected an anti-rabies vaccine into Joseph Meister than the hygienists were already declaring the ‘end of infectious diseases’; Sony gets the heads of two anthropomorphic robots to nod, and voilà, posthumanism is already declared to have arrived! The Moderns could never check a fact or promote a technique except by combining the ideal of objective knowledge with magic. They were always looking for a magic bullet.

It is unfortunate that in some places, especially in the United States, people have resisted making choices that will keep them and their families safer. I don’t agree with these choices, but I also think it’s unhelpful to simply label them “anti-science,” as so many people do. In her book On Immunity, Eula Biss looks at vaccine hesitancy in a way that I think also helps explain the resentment we’re seeing toward other public health measures. The distrust of science is just one factor, she says, and it is compounded by other things that trigger fear and suspicion: pharmaceutical companies, big government, elites, the medical establishment, male authority. For some people, invisible benefits that might materialize in the future are not enough to get them past the worry that someone is trying to pull the wool over their eyes. The problem is even worse in periods of severe political polarization, such as the one we’re in now.

They also observed that the amygdala in the vaccinated monkeys didn’t mature with time as it was supposed to. The amygdala, incidentally, plays an important role in social interactions. Maybe it’s not so surprising they also observed that in the vaccinated monkeys the opioid antagonist diprenorphine (DPN) levels never lowered throughout the study. In the placebo group, the DPN levels decreased noticeably. One function of DPN is to block social interaction. What this means is the research showed that the social behavior of those monkeys that received the actual vaccines, where the DPN levels did not decrease, turned anti-social. We found there was at least one more study undertaken to verify the association between DPN and social behavior. Performed in 1981[141]. The authors of that study believe the release of opioids in the brain encourages social interactions. So, when the body fails to decrease the amount of the antagonist DPN, it not only blocks the opioids that encourage social interactions, but it blocks the desire to socially interact.

Today, however, anti-vaccine activists go out of their way to claim that they are not anti-vaccine; they’re pro-vaccine. They just want vaccines to be safer. This is a much softer, less radical, more tolerable message, allowing them greater access to the media. However, because anti-vaccine activists today define safe as free from side effects such as autism, learning disabilities, attention deficit disorder, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, strokes, heart attacks, and blood clots—conditions that aren’t caused by vaccines—safer vaccines, using their definition, can never be made.

The faith in body mass index and the existence of mental illness is unquestioned, like the Christian belief in the Holy Trinity. And like in the Church, there is a rule of infallibility: any attempt at questioning these dogmas meets with an anathema and excommunication. Extra medicinam nulla salus preaches the new religion. There is nor can be any alternative to medicine. Consequently, the medical heresies which question the truth of the new gospel of health: the anti-vaccination movement (James 1988), AIDS (Duesberg 1996) and cancer (Efron 1984) denialists, the critical psychiatry (Szasz 2003) and alternative medicine (Piątkowski 2008) are the source of the same fears as Medieval witches, quacks and sects and are persecuted and punished alike

Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class—A Status Update by Rob Henderson The chief purpose of luxury beliefs is to indicate evidence of the believer’s social class and education. ... When an affluent person advocates for drug legalization, or anti-vaccination policies, or open borders, or loose sexual norms, or uses the term “white privilege,” they are engaging in a status display. They are trying to tell you, “I am a member of the upper class.” ... Affluent people promote open borders or the decriminalization of drugs because it advances their social standing, not least because they know that the adoption of those policies will cost them less than others. ... Unfortunately, the luxury beliefs of the upper class often trickle down and are adopted by people lower down the food chain, which means many of these beliefs end up causing social harm.

I visited with American diplomats at the U.S. embassy just before they became entangled in the impeachment of President Donald Trump. On the day I visited, they were overwhelmed by Russia’s latest disinformation campaign: Russian trolls had been inundating Facebook pages frequented by young Ukrainian mothers with anti-vaccination propaganda. This, as the country reeled from the worst measles outbreak in modern history. Ukraine now had one of the lowest vaccination rates in the world and the Kremlin was capitalizing on the chaos. Ukraine’s outbreak was already spreading back to the States, where Russian trolls were now pushing anti-vaxxer memes on Americans. American officials seemed at a loss for how to contain it. (And they were no better prepared when, one year later, Russians seized on the pandemic to push conspiracy theories that Covid-19 was an American-made bioweapon, or a sinister plot by Bill Gates to profit off vaccines.) There seemed no bottom to the lengths Russia was willing to go to divide and conquer.

Lagos, typically for a nonbusinessman, had a fatal flaw: he thought too small. He figured that with a little venture capital, this neurolinguistic hacking could be developed as a new technology that would enable Rife to maintain possession of information that had passed into the brains of his programmers. Which, moral considerations aside, wasn't a bad idea. "Rife likes to think big. He immediately saw that this idea could be much more powerful. He took Lagos's idea and told Lagos himself to buzz off. Then he started dumping a lot of money into Pentecostal churches. He took a small church in Bayview, Texas, and built it up into a university. He took a smalltime preacher, the Reverend Wayne Bedford, and made him more important than the Pope. He constructed a string of self-supporting religious franchises all over the world, and used his university, and its Metaverse campus, to crank out tens of thousands of missionaries, who fanned out all over the Third World and began converting people by the hundreds of thousands, just like St. Louis Bertrand. L. Bob Rife's glossolalia cult is the most successful religion since the creation of Islam. They do a lot of talking about Jesus, but like many selfdescribed Christian churches, it has nothing to do with Christianity except that they use his name. It's a postrational religion. "He also wanted to spread the biological virus as a promoter or enhancer of the cult, but he couldn't really get away with doing that through the use of cult prostitution because it is flagrantly anti-Christian. But one of the major functions of his Third World missionaries was to go out into the hinterlands and vaccinate people -- and there was more than just vaccine in those needles. "Here in the First World, everyone has already been vaccinated, and we don't let religious fanatics come up and poke needles into us. But we do take a lot of drugs. So for us, he devised a means for extracting the virus from human blood serum and packaged it as a drug known as Snow Crash.

Measles has killed hundreds of millions of people throughout history, and even today accounts for hundreds of thousands of deaths annually. The disease was almost entirely eliminated in America by modern vaccination programs in the late twentieth century, but a rising anti-vaccination movement has led to a predictable uptick in the number of cases.

We believe that modern-day Hitlers have deliberately adulterated the oral polio vaccines with anti-fertility drugs and contaminated it with certain viruses which are known to cause HIV and AIDS,” the chairman of the Supreme Council for Sharia in Nigeria maintained, urging parents to refuse vaccination.

The United States is primarily a guilt-based culture. The dominant method of social control in this country involves teaching people to feel guilt about not living up to personal expectations. Contrast this with shame-based cultures like Japan. As researchers Ying Wong and Jeanne Tsai explain in their paper, Cultural Models of Shame and Guilt, shame is “associated with the fear of exposing one’s defective self to others. Guilt, on the other hand, is associated with the fear of not living up to one’s own standards.” In this formulation, guilt is based on failing to achieve personal ideals; shame is based on social exposure ["The Anti-Vaccine Movement Should Be Ridiculed, Because Shame Works," Gizmodo, February 6, 2015].

A rise in anti-vaccine sentiment has put everyone at risk

Such anti-tobacco animus helps explain a glaring paradox within public-health circles: Many public-health experts avidly embrace harm reduction for other conditions—needle exchange and methadone for heroin addicts, “wet” public housing for people who continue to drink, condom distribution and HPV vaccination for sexually active adolescents—but, for nicotine addiction, they urge abstinence and downplay the importance of a less risky alternative.

Bergoglio’s talks show him developing two major vaccinations against the lure of ideology. The first was the God’s-holy-faithful-people idea: following Congar, God’s power was to be discerned not in elite schemes but in the ordinary believing poor. The second was a series of governing “Christian principles,” a kind of sapiential wisdom captured in a series of criteria for discernment. In 1974, when he addressed the provincial congregation, there were three: unity comes before conflict, the whole comes before the part, time comes before space. By 1980, he had added a fourth, anti-ideological principle: reality comes before the idea. They were principles deduced from various of his heroes—the early companions of Saint Ignatius, the Paraguay missionaries, even the nineteenth-century caudillo Rosas—and one major source: what he called “the special wisdom of the people whom we call faithful, the people which is the people of God.”13 Those four principles, said Bergoglio, “are the axis around which reconciliation can revolve.” They would constantly appear from now on in his writing and speeches—and were shared with the world in Evangelii Gaudium (The Joy of the Gospel), Pope Francis’s first authored document, released in November 2013.

All horror movies start the same way. Whether the scene is an abandoned cabin, a dark alley, or a peaceful cottage, one line of dialogue, quietly uttered five minutes before the carnage starts, is inevitable: “Did you hear something?

In May 2010, Wakefield and Walker-Smith were found guilty and had their medical licenses revoked. Murch was found not guilty. Wakefield is unrepentant. He has since published a book entitled Callous Disregard: Autism and Vaccines: The Truth Behind a Tragedy (2010) with an introduction by actress Jenny McCarthy. (McCarthy denies that she is anti-vaccine. She claims she is pro safe vaccine, yet she seems to think there is no such thing as a safe vaccine.)

But when Samuel Berkovic finally found the answer to the question of what had actually caused the problem, no one noticed. Not a single newspaper, magazine, or radio or television program carried the story.

Like Mendelsohn, Stewart believed the decline in pertussis in the United Kingdom had nothing to do with the vaccine; it was simply a matter of improved sanitation.

In the mid-1800s, antivaccine activists claimed that vaccines contained the “poison of adders, the blood, entrails, and excretions of bats, toads and suckling whelps.” When, a hundred and fifty years later, Jenny McCarthy said that she wanted the ether and anti-freeze removed from vaccines, she had carried forward the centuries-old tradition of claiming that vaccines contain ingredients that aren’t there.

In the 1980s, Australia had a few home-grown immunisation sceptics, although the great majority of parents immunised their children. In 1996, a film-maker made a supposedly scientific documentary for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). She interviewed people who were both pro- and anti-immunisation in equal numbers, ‘for balance’. She was pregnant with her first child, and concluded the documentary by saying that she had not yet decided whether or not to get her baby immunised. I was one of the doctors interviewed. When the documentary was shown in Australia it generated considerable debate and controversy. Two weeks later I was in Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea, and gave a presentation to the hospital about immunisation. A number of the audience told me they recognised me from the documentary, which had been shown that week on PNG television. They were puzzled as to why anyone would make such a film. Their wards were filled with children with severe tuberculosis, newborns dying from tetanus, and babies with severe rotavirus gastroenteritis, all preventable by immunisation. On their streets were people crippled forever by poliomyelitis. But Papua New Guinea did not have the money or the public health infrastructure to deliver vaccines effectively to its population. Papua New Guineans knew vaccines could prevent the devastating diseases they saw every day, and could not understand why anyone in Australia would dream of not immunising their child. Immunisation scepticism is very much a first-world problem.

The FBI opened hundreds of investigations. Among the ironies was the fact that more than $850,000 went to five anti-vaccine groups.

Anti-vaccination movements are high-pressure, highly conformist organizations in which dissenting views are discouraged. To the extent that people reject science because they wish to present a self-image as critical and skeptical, it can be useful to communicate to them the inherently skeptical nature of science and to portray antiscientific thinking as an example of unthinking conformity (Hornsey & Fielding, 2017).

Republican Arizona congressman Paul Gosar sent Meadows several texts between November and December 2020 warning about “dead voters” and Dominion, the voting machines destined to become a lightning rod in the months to come. (It was a line of inquiry that even Meadows repeatedly indicated he doubted in emails to other associates.) One of Gosar’s texts included a link to a movie about “cyber warfare” and voting machines from an anti-vaccine conspiracy blog called Some Bitch Told Me. Republicans in Washington mined briefings from very dubious sources.

Anti-vaccine quackery infected our politics — ironically — and wrought havoc on America’s body politic. And like any other illness, the group with the least amount of protections — in this case, autistic people, who had few allies and little political capital — was the hardest hit.

People are scare-mongering about Covid vaccines based on the most tenuous whiff of an issue, and even on fantasies.

Type II collagen supplements have a novel “oral vaccine” effect that builds immune cell tolerance, reduces autoimmune reactions, and relieves inflammation-based pain.162 Think of collagen protein as a joint builder and type II collagen as an anti-inflammatory pain reliever.

In September 2020, a Daily Kos/Civiqs poll reported that over half of the Republicans surveyed believed either partially or mostly in QAnon’s theories . . . at least the theories they were aware of. Because tumble further down the QAnon rabbit hole, and you’ll find Satanic Panic–esque, flagrantly fascist beliefs that not every subscriber even knows about (at least not at first): theories about Jeffrey Epstein co-conspiring with Tom Hanks to molest hordes of minors, Hillary Clinton drinking the blood of children in order to prolong her life, the Rothschilds running a centuries-old ring of Satan worshippers, and beyond. But QAnon quickly grew to encapsulate much more than stereotypical far-right extremists. Take a soft turn to the left, and you’ll find a more outwardly palatable denomination of conspiritualists whose paranoias might be slightly less focused on Hillary Clinton worshipping Satan and more on Big Pharma forcing evil Western medicine on them and their kids. These believers wield a slightly different glossary of loaded terms, some co-opted from feminist politics—like “forced penetration” (which conflates vaccination with sexual assault) and “my body, my choice” (an antivaxx/anti-mask slogan purloined from the pro-choice movement). Because social media algorithms track people’s keywords in order to feed them only what they’re already interested in, a sprawling spiderweb of customized QAnon offshoots was able to form.

In an entirely different context, the same principle might be useful in explaining why some in the United States have been caught up in the so-called anti-vaccination fad in recent years. Once a disease such as measles is largely eradicated and people do not have experience with the devastation it brings, it is easy to disparage the very vaccines that suppressed the disease and provided the comfort from which vaccine deniers wage their attacks.

We will see in a later chapter that religious exemptions are rarely based on the teachings of any religion and often invite parents to lie.

The diagnosis of autism increased from 1988 to 1999, by seven times, but the vaccination rate had remained relatively stable at about 95 percent.

Ableism has been defined as “the term used to describe the discrimination against and the exclusion of individuals with physical and mental disabilities from full participation and opportunity within society’s systems and activities.” Ableism is a useful lens through which to examine much of the rhetoric generated by the anti-vaccine movement as it pertains to autism.

… as of 2008 over half of the search results returned for “vaccine safety” and “vaccine danger” were inaccurate. About one-quarter of these websites aspire to claims of authority by imitating those of official organizations or by citing dubious literature, and many frame vaccination as a “debate” occurring within the medical community and offer “unbiased” information.

The religions of the world are diverse, representing many different supernatural explanations for the nature of reality, beliefs, and practices, so it is difficult to make blanket statements about whether a religious objection to vaccination can ever accurately reflect a person’s religious beliefs. However, the majority of world religions don’t hold an objection to vaccination as actual official belief. Because many states allow for religious exemptions to vaccination, in effect, religious belief becomes a convenient scapegoat for vaccine objections.

Undervaccinated children are likely to be children whose parents want them to receive health care but cannot afford it, whereas unvaccinated children are likely to be children of parents with vaccine doubt. Indeed, the strongest predictors of vaccine exemptions in California are median household income, higher percentage of white race in the population, and private schools.

Rather than being low-information parents, these are parents who are, if anything, less selective in choosing the sources they get information from. Rather than using information arrived at through the scientific method, they have also incorporated information from websites, alternative health practitioners, and religious leaders.

Human life has always been stalked by disease. For bacteria, viruses, and parasites, our bodies and our cells are perfect incubators. Every life saved and every quantum of suffering avoided by a vaccine is the legacy of all the physicians and scientists who have ever devoted themselves to developing or disseminating these life-saving technologies. The anti-vaccination movement has worked its way into the public discourse, motivated by compassion and distrust of authority, experts, corporations, and governments.

The very presence of those who oppose vaccination are in that way a testament the effectiveness of vaccines.

When opposition to vaccination becomes attached to a person’s identity and values, contradictory information can feel like an attack on that identity and those values.

In the current technological era we are more vulnerable to manipulation via confirmation bias than ever. Take the YouTube algorithm. It recommends videos to you on the basis of those you’ve already watched by analyzing the viewing habits of people who clicked on the same video. It predicts that you are more likely to enjoy their favorite content than a completely random selection of videos, which turns out to be a fair assumption. The trouble is, there are concerns that it can have the effect of plunging the viewer into a confirmation bias odyssey. If you watched a video about aliens visiting rural America and intrusively probing local farmhands, then you are fairly likely to be interested in other bonkers conspiracy theories, such as that the Earth is flat, and that vaccines cause autism. Before long, you may find yourself presented with videos of people telling you that school shootings in the US were faked, and that the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center towers were perpetrated by the US government. People who believe such things are more likely to distrust the government anyway, and to be on the political right. In the run-up to the US presidential election in 2016, virulently anti-Hillary Clinton videos were viewed six times more than anti-Donald Trump videos.

In 1870, antivaccination demonstrations in England drew thousands of people in reaction to an 1853 law requiring vaccinations against smallpox. British businessman and leading antivaxxer William Tebb organized the First International Anti-Vaccination Congress in Paris.

Ask the Aztecs and Incas whether or not they would have liked to have vaccines available to the. Oh, wait--you can't. They're dead. Vaccination is one of the best things that has happened to civilization. Empires toppled like sand castles in the wake of diseases we do not give a second thought to today. If taking a moment to elaborate on that point will make this book unpopular with a large group of anti-vaxxers, that's ok. This feels like a good hill to die on. It's surely a better one than the Incas got.

The term 'intellectual ghetto' was coined by David Bauder in his 2016 Associated Press series "Divided America" and was meant to encapsulate the communities users had segregated themselves into by curating dissenting opinions out of their lives. Because we now have a seemingly infinite number of news outlets to choose from, whether they be historically reputable publications like The New York Times or an anti-vaccine blog that only came online the day before yesterday, Americans can now choose the news they consumer a la carte and filter out anything that overtly challenges their beliefs, even if those challenges are competent and necessary.

In April 2009, Brendalee and Julieanna Flint traveled to Washington, D.C., to speak to congressional staffers about the importance of vaccines. “Parents need to understand that when they choose not to vaccinate, they are making a decision for other people’s children as well,” said Brendalee. “Someone else chose Julieanna’s path. It doesn’t seem fair that someone like Jenny McCarthy can reach so many people while my little girl has no voice.

Following the Supreme Court’s decision in Jacobson v. Massachusetts, an editorial appeared in the New York Times: “The contention that compulsory vaccination is an infraction of personal liberty and an unconstitutional interference with the right of the individual to have the smallpox if he wants it, and to communicate it to others, has been ended. [This] should end the useful life of the societies of cranks formed to resist the operation of laws relative to vaccination. Their occupation is gone.” The prediction couldn’t have been more wrong. Anti-vaccine activism in the United States was just getting started.

By 2009, almost a hundred million doses of the pneumococcal vaccine had been given to American children. As a consequence, the incidence of pneumococcal disease has decreased dramatically.37 Far fewer children now get meningitis, pneumonia, and bloodstream infections caused by pneumococcus.

Various preparations of aluminum salts have been used in vaccines since the late 1930s. So, the safety of aluminum in vaccines has been assessed for more than seventy years. Aluminum salts act as adjuvants, enhancing the immune response. Inclusion of aluminum salts in vaccines that otherwise wouldn’t evoke a good immune response makes it possible to reduce the number of doses and the quantity of immunological components within each dose.

He lost the popular vote due to massive voter fraud. He agreed with Infowars’ Alex Jones that Hillary Clinton might have taken some form of drugs to enhance her debate performance and demanded, “I think we should take a drug test prior to the debate. I do.”24 Trump attacked his primary opponent Senator Ted Cruz by linking his father to the JFK assassination. He has said that a pillow was found on the Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia’s face and he might have been murdered. He’s sided with the anti-vaccine conspiracy nuts. Most famously, he laid the groundwork for his campaign for the Republican nomination by promising he could prove President Barack Obama was born in Africa. He’s claimed President Obama wore a ring with an Arabic inscription. He’s said global warming is a “hoax,” that windmills cause cancer.

Unfortunately, many of us begin life on this planet with toxins in our cells. Some we inherited from our parents and grandparents, and even more toxins entered our cells at birth. In fact, in those days general anesthesia for women in the delivery room was standard practice! As infants, we received vaccinations, many of which contained mercury. Later, we probably took antibiotics that destroyed the beneficial bacteria we needed for healthy digestion. And as the years passed, we Boomers continued to be assaulted by a “chemical soup” of pollutants—from processed foods in aluminum foil (TV dinners) to household pesticides. I actually remember one summer my brother and I entertained ourselves by taking the mercury from a thermometer, rolling it into a ball, and playing with it—our own version of toxic Play-Doh. No one knew… .

Synthetic biology was the transistor of the twenty-first century. Yet political realities in America made it increasingly unfeasible for entrepreneurs there to tinker with the building blocks of life. Every cluster of human cells was viewed as a baby in America. A quarter of the population wasn’t vaccinated. A majority of Americans didn’t believe in evolution. Social-media-powered opinions carried more influence than peer-reviewed scientific research. In this virulently anti-science atmosphere, synbio research was hounded offshore before it had really begun. Activists crowed over their victory.

Then, as now, anti-vaccination forces fed on anxiety about the individual’s fate in industrialized societies; then, as now, they appealed to knee-jerk populism by conjuring up an imaginary elite with an insatiable hunger for control; then, as now, they preached the superiority of subjective beliefs over objective proofs, of knowledge acquired by personal experience rather than through scientific rigor.

Debates over vaccination, then as now, are often cast as debates over the integrity of science, though they could just as easily be understood as conversations about power. The working-class people who resisted Britain's 1853 provision for free, mandatory vaccination were concerned, in part, with their own freedom. Faced with fines, imprisonment, and the seizure of their property if they did not vaccinate their infants, they sometimes compared their predicament to slavery.  Vaccinations, like slavery, raises some pressing questions about one's rights to one's own body. But as the historian Nadja Durbach has noted, antivaccinators were often more interested in abolition as a metaphor for individual liberty than they were in the cause as a shared purpose. It was not in the recklessly selfless spirit of John Brown, who was hanged with his sons for their doomed effort to free slaves, that white workers resisted vaccination. "Anti-vaccinators were quick to draw on the political, emotive, or rhetorical value of the slave, or of the colonized African," Durbach writes of the movement in Britain. "They were quicker still to claim that the suffering of white English citizens took precedence over that of the oppressed elsewhere." Their primary concern, in other words, was with people like them. 

The Cowan Autoimmune Diet and LDN form the foundation of my treatment for all autoimmune diseases. This, along with complete avoidance of vaccines, acetaminophen, and anti-inflammatory drugs. In addition, patients should spend plenty of time spent in nature—particularly in bare feet, such as walking on the beach—and sunshine. This is often all someone needs to experience a tremendous change in the course of their condition.