Staggering Exaggeration

Figure 1

The BBC it would seem knows no shame in pushing its pro-vaccination campaign. The graphic shown in Figure 1 was prominently displayed in a news article on its home page today, Friday 6th December 2019. A figure of 142,000 dead is bound to catch any reader's attention. Anticipating that there might be some skepticism regarding such an alarming figure, the article includes a How are numbers calculated section?

The technique is worth quoting:

Every single case of measles cannot be counted. In 2018, only 353,236 cases were officially recorded (out of the 7.8 million estimated). So scientists perform complex maths for each country. They take reported cases, the population size, deaths rates, the proportion of children vaccinated and more to eventually produce a global estimate. Dr Minal Patel, who performed the number-crunching, told the BBC: "We've had a general trajectory downwards for deaths, which is great. Everyone involved in vaccination programmes should be very proud. "But we've been stagnating in numbers of deaths for about the past seven years, and what's really concerning is from last year we've gone up, and it looks like we've gone backwards."

This verbiage can be boiled down to a simple "we made the numbers up". The article includes a video titled "Vaccine fears cost me my children" and another titled "It's a numbers game... if some people are not vaccinated, it can cause a big problem for us all". There are the inevitable quotes from experts working for our favourite Big-Pharma fronts like Gavi:

Dr Seth Berkley, chief executive of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, said: "It is a tragedy that the world is seeing a rapid increase in cases and deaths from a disease that is easily preventable with a vaccine.

The message is clear. If you are a parent living in a country with easy access to the Measles vaccine then it is irresponsible to not vaccinate your children against this killer disease. If you don't then the children can't go to school and child-care allowances are withheld until a certificate of compliance is produced. Down the track, your children may be taken from you and placed in foster care. Anything is possible as politicians respond to pressure from the Big Pharma and the Medical Mafia. As another "expert" says in the article:

Prof Larson said: "These numbers are staggering. Measles, the most contagious of all vaccine-preventable diseases, is the tip of the iceberg of other vaccine-preventable disease threats and should be a wake-up call."

Measles is indeed "the tip of the iceberg". It's not hard to imagine that adult booster vaccinations for Measles and other childhood diseases may be soon be mandatory. Flu vaccinations will be likewise mandatory if you want to enter your workplace or board an airplane. Once social credit scores are operative, those who can produce their certificates will earn merit points (the carrot) and, later, those who refuse to be vaccinated will attract demerit points (the stick).

What's astounding about this BBC article is that it's so blatantly propaganda. And it works. A colleague of mine from a school where I used to teach posted a photo of himself and his daughter on Instagram with the comment: "That's it. We're fighting back! K**** and I both got our flu shots!"

THE NEXT DAY

Samoa was mentioned in the earlier story and it's in the news again today. The arrest of a so-called anti-vaxxer represents an escalation in the measures that governments are willing to go to in order to vaccinate citizens:

Samoa arrests vaccination critic amid deadly measles crisis 

Edwin Tamasese was charged with incitement against a government order after he was detained on Thursday. The outbreak - which has killed at least 63 people, mostly young children, since October - is in part blamed on people spreading false information, claiming vaccinations are dangerous. Samoa declared a state of emergency, and made vaccinations compulsory. 

Mr Tamasese had spoken out against vaccines on Facebook, instead promoting using ineffective remedies such as papaya leaf extract to treat the deadly illness. Before his arrest, he had described the government's mass vaccination programme as "the greatest crime against our people", and falsely claimed vitamin C could cure the infected children.

As the Unicef representative to the Pacific Dr Sheldon Yett, told the BBC earlier this month: "people who are spreading lies and misinformation about vaccinations are killing children". This is likely to be the way forward, simply label anyway to questions a government's vaccination policies as a child killers and put them in jail.

So what has gone wrong in Samoa? This recent Forbes article sheds some light on the matter:

What’s happening on the island of Samoa is not fictional, though. It’s a real declared national crisis. Why is it happening? Could it be related to the fact that measles vaccination rates have been dropping precipitously in Samoa? According to World Health Organization (WHO) surveillance data, the percentage of infants in Samoa who received at least one dose of the measles vaccine fell from 90% in 2013 to just 31% in 2018. 

As Helen Petousis-Harris, PhD, a vaccinologist and senior lecturer at the University of Auckland, explained, the low vaccination rates have probably been due to mistrust in the Samoan heath system and vaccines, further fueled by anti-vaccination messages. For example, anti-vaccination messages have been claiming that the measles vaccine killed two infants last year in Samoa when the culprit was not the measles vaccine itself but Attracurium, a muscle relaxant that nurses accidentally added to the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine, according to Barbara Dreaver reporting for One News Pacific. Hmm, what could possibly be causing the measles outbreak?

Of course, other things have gone wrong in Samoa. This report about countries with high obesity rates among its citizens includes the following about Samoa:

43.4 percent of Samoans were found to be obese in a CNN survey, while 9 out of 10 adults are deemed to be overweight. Poor diet and reduced levels of physical activity have become major public health concerns in Samoa, where residents have a genetic predisposition to developing type 2 diabetes. Stroke and heart disease is also increasing across the country, an epidemic which has been linked to an increase in cheap, nutritionally lacking Western food imports. The Guardian reports Samoans view locally sourced, fresh ingredients as somehow socially inferior, leading to a preference for calorific, sugary drinks and tinned, processed goods. 

Whatever is going on, it can't be denied that Samoa has turned into a battle of wills against those who are pro and anti vaccinations. The former have all the usual blunt instruments to employ in the battle: supportive media, health professionals, compliant politicians, the legal system, journalists. Let's quote from the Forbes article again that was written by a certain Bruce Y. Lee. Clearly the "Y" was inserted to differentiate himself from that other Bruce Lee. He describes himself as "a writer, journalist, professor, systems modeler, computational and digital health expert, avocado-eater, and entrepreneur, not always in that order". The following quote shows Bruce's deep grasp of the issues:

Numerous scientific studies have shown over and over and over again that measles vaccination is by far the most effective way of protecting against the measles. 

As the 19th century showed, measles will rip through communities and kill people if their immune systems have been weakened by poor diet and they live in unhealthy, overcrowded living conditions. Samoa is being held up as an example of what happens when you don't vaccinate but there's more going on here. However, there'll be no public debate about it and instead extreme measures will be taken to stifle any form of debate.