Who's really responsible for vaccine hesitancy, Dr. Hotez?
"Disinformation Empire" must be "shut down at its source"
In a recent interview, discussed by Paul Thacker, for the Brownstone Institute, vaccinologist Dr. Peter Hotez called on the government to wage a campaign against those he considers to be "anti-vaxxers."
Social media went a little bonkers last week when an interview with Texas Children’s Hospital’s Dr. Peter Hotez began circulating with the Big Pharma insider calling for the United Nations and NATO to deploy security forces against “anti-vaxxers” in the United States. Dr. Hotez’s statements first appeared on the YouTube channel of an international pediatric conference that took place in Colombia, but the interview then jumped onto X.
Hotez stated that unless the “Disinformation Empire” is shut down at the source, no amount of messaging will stop the problem of vaccine hesitancy. (Edited for clarity.)
I've been on . . . Zoom calls you know every day for the last year and a half and a lot of them . . . in anticipation of vaccine hesitancy [ask] how do we fix it, and the whole discussion, though, is about amplifying the message. . . getting the word out. You know, trying to reach communities that we think are going to be vaccine hesitant. And all that's good. And then I tend to take the wind out of people's sails by saying . . . ”All this good work, it's important. It'll get us 20 30% of the way there, because the problem is [that] the “Disinformation Empire” is so vast and pervasive that until we do something more definitive to get to the source of the disinformation and stop [it], it's not going to have that much of an impact.”
He further stated that the US needs to get government agencies involved in quashing vaccine hesitancy, calling it anti-science.
The health sector has gone about as far as it can I think in terms of amplifying the message. Now we need to bring in some heavy weights. We need to bring in people from Homeland Security, from the Justice Department, the Commerce Department, State Department and really ask them: “Okay, what did you do to diffuse global terrorism and cyber-attacks and nuclear proliferation and stop it at the source? Because anti-science is as big a threat to the health and security of the US population.”
In March 2021, the Center for Countering Digital Hate publicized its report on the “disinformation dozen,” the twelve people they said were most responsible for spreading vaccine disinformation on social media. They claimed that it could be fixed if social media platforms enforced their standards and censored those 12 activists. However, since anti-vaxxers are still a problem according to Hotez, he is calling for more action. Following are some additional "anti-vaxxers" who may be fueling vaccine hesitancy as well.
Vaccine safety
Dr. Stanley A. Plotkin
Called the “Godfather of Vaccines,” Dr. Plotkin is the co-author of Plotkin’s Vaccines. He recently co-authored a paper, “ Funding Postauthorization Vaccine-Safety Science” published (under a paywall) in the NEJM (New England Journal of Medicine). In the paper, Plotkin, et al. admitted that they have not done needed vaccine safety studies.
The Highwire host Del Bigtree reviewed the paper, noting that in a paragraph from the paper, image below, the authors wrote that the "widespread vaccine hesitancy" seen during COVID-19 suggests that the public no longer believes that it’s enough to do a vaccine risk assessment after the vaccine has been authorized for use. The public wants manufacturers to identify and prevent even rare serious adverse effects because once they are rolled out to millions and billions of people, they no longer seem to be rare.
Dr. Plotkin, et al. also admit that the prelicensure clinical trials are inadequate to test safety — there are not enough people in the trial, the follow up time is too short, and there is too much similarity among the people in the trials, according to this paragraph, in the image below:
In the following paragraph (image below), the authors state that they have yet to identify how adverse reactions occur and who would be adversely affected by the vaccines, information which is necessary in order to develop safer vaccines and properly compensate those adversely affected. As Bigtree commented on the paragraph:
Meaning “we have never done it.” . . . Vaccine injury is real and they are doing no science looking into it.
Watch Bigtree as he reviews the paper in the video below:
Can't do studies on autism
Dr. Paul Offit, co-creator of RotaTeq rotavirus vaccine and co-author of Plotkin’s vaccines
Referencing the above paper in which the authors not only stated that they didn’t do pre-licensure safety trials but also couldn’t afford to do post-licensure safety studies, Bigtree wanted to know how they could be sure that vaccines don't cause autism. Bigtree featured Dr. Offit who claimed that it is impossible to do prospective or retrospective studies to determine whether or not vaccines cause autism.
Dr. Katherine Edwards, co-author of Plotkin's Vaccines
This tweet by Dr. Judy Mikovits, taken from the above Highwire episode, features lawyer Aaron Siri’s 2020 deposition of another author of Plotkin’s Vaccines, Dr. Kathyrn Edwards (Aaron Siri had deposed Dr. Plotkin in 2018). Edwards asserted that "the issue of whether vaccines cause autism has been thoroughly researched and rejected," yet she then admitted that there have been no studies done to show whether vaccines do or don’t cause autism.
(The fourth (honorary) author of Plotkin’s Vaccines, Dr. Walter A. Orenstein, DSc, was an author on the above cited paper.)
WHO can't answer questions about vaccine deaths
WHO Chief Scientist Dr. Soumya Swaminathan admitted at the WHO Global Vaccine Safety Summit, held in early December 2019, that the WHO does not have the ability to provide answers when people question the deaths of children following vaccination, which she says then get blown up in the media because of their obfuscation. Bigtree, in the video clip below, showed not only Dr. Swaminathan's comments at the vaccine summit, but the WHO's ad just four days before the summit, in which she claims that the WHO has all the necessary facilities in order to answer any vaccine questions that may arise.
Vaccine criticism not misinformation
Prof. Heidi Larson of The Vaccine Confidence Project was one of the presenters at the Summit. She explained that vaccine safety science needs new investment. Medical professionals are questioning vaccines, she says, and confirmed that much of the criticism aimed at vaccines is not misinformation, going so far as to state:.
We have a lot of ambiguity in the safety field and we have to come to terms with it.
Vaccine efficacy
Measles
Dr. Gregory A. Poland, vaccinologist
Author of "The Re-Emergence of Measles in Developed Countries: Time to Develop the Next-Generation Measles Vaccines?"
This leads to a paradoxical situation whereby measles in highly immunized societies occurs primarily among those previously immunized.
In the clip below, Dr. Offit shares his experience with measles that resulted in far superior immunity than that of the vaccine.
Since the mid-1900s, when mortality from childhood diseases decreased about 95% in developed countries before most vaccines were rolled out, measles has not been a deadly illness.
Flu and mumps vaccines
Dr. Plotkin authored papers on the flu and mumps vaccines, explaining that they don't work very well:
By and large, we think of vaccines as highly efficacious . . . Not so with inactivated influenza vaccine, which we recommend each year for both children and adults but without expecting high efficacy.
A radical improvement in the mumps vaccine is preferable [to a third dose] to solve the problem of waning immunity.
Vaccine policy
Anthropologist Dr. Peter Aaby, Professor Bandim Health Project, Guinea-Bisau and Denmark
During his lecture at the Symposium about Scientific Freedom, Copenhagen, 9 March2019: WHO is the brain in the system - The sound of silence? A case study of how public health vaccinology deals with fundamental contradictions of current policy Dr. Aaby stated that vaccines have not been tested for all cause mortality and that scientists do not understand what vaccines do (at 0:53).
This is about vaccines, and I think it's important to recognize that no routine vaccine was tested for all the effect on mortality in randomized trials before being introduced. I guess most of you think that we know what all our vaccines are doing. We don't.
Coronavirus vaccine
Joseph Kim, CEO of Inovio Pharmaceuticals, was quoted by Ryan Cross in his C&EN article "Will the coronavirus help mRNA and DNA vaccines prove their worth?" as stating that the way the mRNA vaccine development and trials were being rushed was akin to building a plane in the air.
They are moving new technologies from the computer into the clinic at an unprecedented rate, and normally distinct phases of a drug program—preclinical animal models, clinical testing, and manufacturing—are happening all at once. “It is like building an airplane while you are flying,” Kim says. (Emphasis added.)
The Atlantic authors Graeme Wood and David A. Spiegel, professor of chemistry and pharmacology at Yale University, explained that it was a gamble whether the mRNA vaccines would work like they were meant to:
The RNA is like the blueprints or schematics that tell the workers on the factory floor what to build. An RNA vaccine injects instructions to your cells, and hopes that your cells receive these instructions and follow them, and build the proteins that will teach your immune system to fight a virus. It is a bit like wadding up plans for a Cessna, throwing them through the ventilation shaft of a Ford factory, and hoping that someone inside finds them, and that the factory starts rolling airplanes out its doors instead of pickups. (Emphasis added.)
Former NIAID (National Institutes of Allergies and Infectious Disease) head Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Offit, Stephen Schleifer, CEO of Regeneron, and Dr. Hotez all warn against rushing COVID-19 vaccines in the video collage below. They explain that certain respiratory vaccines have been shown to make the person worse and rushing a coronavirus vaccine without proper testing could have disastrous consequences:
Dr. Fauci:
. . . The worst possible thing you could do is vaccinate somebody to prevent infection and actually make them worse.
Dr. Offit:
Dr. Fauci says he thinks this could be done as early as 12 to 18 months. That's really optimistic. Do extensive testing of this vaccine before you put it out there into millions of people, because i think there now is this kind of break the glass mentality of full speed ahead, cut the corners you need to cut. And I don't, I really really really hope we don't do that. . . .
Leonard Schleifer:
Vaccines have to be tested because there's precedent for vaccines to actually make diseases worse. And you really don't want to make it, you [don't]want to rush and treat a million people and find out you're making 900,000 one them worse.
Dr. Hotez:
One of the things that we're not hearing a lot about is the unique potential safety problem of coronavirus vaccines. This was first found in the early 1960s with respiratory syncytial virus vaccines. Some of those kids who got the vaccine actually did worse and I believe there were two deaths in the consequence of that study. Because what happens with certain types of respiratory virus vaccines you get immunized and then when you get actually exposed to the virus you get this kind of paradoxical immune enhancement phenomenon . . . .
When we started developing coronavirus vaccines and our colleagues, we noticed in laboratory animals that they started to show some of the same immune pathology that resembled what had happened 50 years earlier, so we said: "Oh my God, this is going to be problematic."
Perhaps it's time for Dr. Hotez to rethink his stance on "anti-vaxxers."
The information contained in this article is for educational and information purposes only and is not intended as health, medical, financial or legal advice. Always consult a physician, lawyer or other qualified professional regarding any questions you may have about a medical condition, health objectives or legal or financial issues.
Related articles:
- Tedros demands aggressive pushback against 'anti-vaxxers' — but is the science on his side?
- COVID-19 and our culture of vaccines
- What Covid vaccine manufacturers did not check
- Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine - Here's what Ben Shapiro could have known
- Aborted fetal cells and vaccines - a scandal much bigger than Pfizer's whistleblower ever imagined
- Saving children or saving the vaccine program?
- Big Pharma, biotech and the runaway mRNA vaccine profit machine
