Pro Vaccines Quotes

Perhaps there is something within the genetic make-up of specific individuals which predisposes them to accumulate and retain aluminium in their brain, as is similarly suggested for individuals with familial Alzheimer’s disease. The new evidence strongly suggests that aluminium is entering the brain in ASD via pro-inflammatory cells which have become loaded up with aluminium in the blood and/or lymph, much as has been demonstrated for monocytes at injection sites for vaccines including aluminium adjuvants. Perhaps we now have the putative link between vaccination and ASD, the link being the inclusion of an aluminium adjuvant in the vaccine.

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.

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 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.)

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.

This is where conspiracy theories come in handy. It’s not just that vaccines cause autism; it’s that the medical and pharmaceutical industries are getting rich by destroying everyone’s families. It’s not just that pro-choicers have a different view on the biological status of a fetus; it’s that they’re soldiers sent by Satan to destroy good Christian families. It’s not just that climate change is a hoax; it’s that it’s a hoax created by the Chinese government to slow the U.S. economy and take over the world.37