Vaccine Information Failure

An article titled "'Science isn’t enough': Queensland Health admits vaccine info 'failure' " appeared in the online version of The Brisbane Times dated Sunday, December 15th 2019. The article begins:

Queensland Health admits it has failed to do enough to encourage vaccinations as it calls for social media companies to do more to stop the spread of misinformation. Queensland is experiencing one of its worst years for measles cases in the last two decades, with 71 cases recorded by the first week of December. It's the third-worst year for measles since 1997, when a spike saw 267 people diagnosed with the dangerous virus. There were 72 cases in 2014. But Queensland’s experience pales in comparison to that seen recently in Samoa, where a major outbreak has infected nearly 5000 people and claimed 72 lives, 61 of those children under four years old.

Figure 1

In the current Queensland "epidemic", no one has died or suffered any long term consequences but the example of Samoa is invoked nonetheless to remind the readership of might happen if they become complacent. Thankfully Instagram has come to the rescue of anyone who might inadvertently stumble upon anti-vaccination material (see Figure 1).

As Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital (RBWH) acting director of infectious diseases, Andrew Redmond, says:

... the idea there was a “debate” around vaccinations was entirely false.

As another spokesperson, Robert Hoge, the Executive Director of Queensland Health’s strategic communications branch, said in the article: "If you look at anything from obesity to climate change to vaccination the science isn’t enough. The science has to be accompanied by good and effective communication and storytelling."

Ironically, he's right about the "storytelling". For communication, one could substitute propaganda and it's the propaganda that is being lamented as being ineffective by these health administrators. The culprit of course is social media, lambasted recently by Sasha Baron Cohen in his ADL award acceptance speech. The mindless masses are being swayed by misinformation and disinformation in the debate over vaccinations.

However, as Andrew Redmond said, there is no debate. The science is settled. Why can't people just accept that and live up or line their children up for their vaccinations? Of course, this approach is entirely antithetical to the way science should operate. There should always be debate as well as proper studies regarding vaccine safety.

This is same approach that global warmists or global warming alarmists take against climate skeptics or climate deniers. There is no room for debate. The science is settled. Just accept the reality of anthropogenic global warming and get ready to make the necessary sacrifices. In both cases, science has become politicised and is no longer true science.

The article referred to in this post also carries a photo of a woman praying in front of a portrait of her child who she lost to measles in Samoa, earlier this month. To the Australian readership toward whom the story is directed, the implication is clear: get your child vaccinated or you could be doing the same.

The next stage in the propaganda war against rational debate on the subject of vaccinations or climate change is more and more interception and redirection of suspicious content toward approved sites. Inevitably, users who post this suspicious material will, if repeat offenders, have their accounts shut down and all of their content deleted. Thus chances of users of social media accessing alternative viewpoints regarding these subjects will continue to diminish.

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.

Measles in the Democratic Republic of Congo

"DR Congo measles: Nearly 5,000 dead in major outbreak", the headline screamed from the BBC website today. "Experts warn there are not enough available vaccines in the country" was the caption under a generic photo of a syringe extracting vaccine from a vial. It's interesting to follow the statistics. On August 17th 2019, www.france24.com reported that "Measles has killed 2758 people in the DR Congo since January". On September 19th, Newsweek reported a figure of 2,074 dead. Clearly, no one has any clear idea as to what the exact figure is so why not round up to the nearest 5,000?

As the BBC article informs us: The Congolese government and the WHO launched an emergency vaccination programme in September that aimed to inoculate more than 800,000 children. Good old WHO, selflessly helping out the African masses and helping to divert attention and government funds away from the real problems of poor sanitation, overcrowding, deficient diet, crumbling infrastructure etc. There's no doubt that measles is killing people, especially children, just as it did in 19th century Britain. The problems back then were exactly the same as in the DR Congo now and, once they were addressed, the death rate from measles plummeted towards zero.

I found another article, on the WHO website, from April of 2011 with the title: DR Congo introduces new vaccine against one of its leading causes of child death. The article continues:

Kinshasa, 4 April 2011 -- In an effort to drastically improve the chances of children reaching their fifth birthday, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) today stepped up its immunisation programme by including vaccines to combat pneumonia. Initially the expanded programme will be in two of the 11 provinces. Pneumonia is one of the biggest killers of children worldwide and is responsible for a quarter of all child deaths under five in DRC. 

DRC First Lady Olive Lembe Kabila and Minister of Health Victor Makwenge Kaput joined parents and health workers in Kinshasa to witness the first child being immunised as part of the official introduction of pneumococcal vaccine into the national routine immunisation programme. 

On the same day in Paris, GAVI founding partner Bill Gates launched a European-wide awareness campaign to highlight the extraordinary life-saving opportunity that vaccines represent for donor countries.

Good old bastard Bill, selflessly promoting "the extraordinary life-saving opportunity that vaccines represent for donor countries" while being coy about the bonanza reaped by pharmaceutical countries. In healthy children, pneumonia is not a killer and it is not even recommended a childhood vaccine in Western countries to my knowledge. The children in the DR Congo are not healthy and vaccinations will compromise their already weakened immune systems even more. There will be no statistics to show how many children were adversely affected by vaccinations because no statistics are being gathered.

GAVI of course is just one of many nefarious fronts for Big Pharma, pretending to work for the welfare of the world's poorest inhabitants. Here is part of its stated mission:

Gavi is an international organisation that was created in 2000 to improve access to new and underused vaccines for children living in the world’s poorest countries. Based in Geneva, Switzerland, Gavi is the Vaccine Alliance, which brings together public and private sectors with the shared goal of creating equal access to vaccines for children, wherever they live.

For "new" read "experimental" and for "underused" read "discontinued in the West". Of course, "DRC First Lady Olive Lembe Kabila and Minister of Health Victor Makwenge Kaput" back in 2011 would have been only too happy to oversee the first pneumococcal vaccination in the country. The occasion makes for a good news story. As children line up to get their shots, it very much looks the Government is doing something positive to fight the frightful death rate amongst young children in the country. 

On the other hand, improving access to clean water, improving sanitation, relieving overcrowding and so on are less newsworthy and nobody benefits but the people. In fact, it diverts much needed money away from the vaccination programs that are touted as the best way to fight infant mortality. 

Anyway, this is the BBC and clearly the main purpose of the article is to remind the BBC readership yet again that measles is a killer and vaccination is the only sure way to combat it. Just to drive home the point, there is a link to video at the end of the article titled "My daughter's life was destroyed by measles". 

This is simply:

Madagascar and Measles

The heading of The Sydney Morning Herald article screamed:

More than 900 dead in Madagascar measles epidemic

Geneva: At least 922 people have died in a measles outbreak in Madagascar, the majority of them children, the World Health Organisation said on Friday.

I haven't even read the article yet but I thought it would be an interesting article to dissect as its clearly sending a message, namely that measles is a very dangerous disease and you'd better make sure your children are protected against this threat. The actual article is very short and continues:

Since the beginning of the outbreak in September, more than 66,000 people in the African island nation have been infected with the highly contagious virus, the WHO said. Measles is easily preventable through vaccination. The WHO has launched a campaign in collaboration with local authorities to vaccinate more than 6 million children in Madagascar. The campaign also includes efforts to educate the population and counter negative perceptions about vaccinations.

In a report released last week, the WHO wrote that the outbreak was "unprecedented" and "occurred in a context of poor performance of routine vaccination." That report listed 300 deaths and 53,000 infections. The dramatic increase in such a short time is due to a more complete collection of data in Madagascar, a spokesman said on Friday.

There were 229,000 reported measles cases worldwide in 2018 - double the number of the previous year, according to preliminary WHO figures. WHO experts say the actual number of cases is likely to be many times higher. The former French colony of Madagascar has a population of about 25 million and is one of the 30 poorest nations in the world, according to the United Nations.

In a slightly lengthier article from Reuters, there is an inadvertent allusion to the real reason behind the deaths:

Madagascar has Africa’s highest children’s malnutrition rate, at 47 percent. The condition can increase the risk of serious complications and death from measles infection, the WHO says. 

Malnourished children are what made measles such a killer in the 19th century and that is the real killer here. Once the poverty, poor sanitation and crowded living conditions are reduced, a measles infection is easily shrugged off by a healthy immune system. The statistics quoted in the article are largely meaningless because they don't differentiate between vaccinated and unvaccinated children. The assumption is that everybody who was infected was unvaccinated and this assumption is not justified. Measles outbreaks can occur in vaccinated populations. The impact of the vaccination on the already compromised immune systems of these malnourished children is also not taken into account. The money spent by governments in Madagascar and elsewhere would be far more profitably spent in improving public health infrastructure but of course this doesn't generate any money for the pharmaceutical companies.

Meanwhile, the headlines and hysteria continue. For example, this editorial from The Sydney Morning Herald warns:

NSW must not drop its guard against measles

It's not worth the space in this blog post to quote from the nonsense contained in this editorial but it's just one of many examples of the unrelenting media message to the masses: vaccinate, vaccinate, vaccinate! Movies and television series about pathogen-induced zombie apocalypses reinforce this further and possibly more deeply. A worldview is being promoted of a planet full of potentially lethal pathogens that its human inhabitants need to protect themselves against. How? By regular vaccinations of course. If the vaccinations sometimes prove ineffective as children become adults, then this indicates a need for booster jabs at regular intervals throughout adulthood.

Perhaps every age has been an Age of Propaganda but it seems that the propaganda is intensifying in terms of us getting us to accept that vaccinations are good for us. When persuasion fails there is always legislation like preventing unvaccinated children from entering schools and kindergartens and withholding child support payments from parents who don't vaccinate their children. In the Australian state of New South Wales, the following describes the flu vaccine schedule for children under five:

To develop strong protection, children who are aged from six months to under five years are recommended to have two vaccine doses in the first year they receive a flu vaccine, with at least four weeks between doses. Children who have been immunised against flu previously will only require one dose each year. Source

These shots are free so if this schedule is followed by responsible parents, the child will have six flu shots (all containing Mercury of course) by the time she or he turns five years old. This is in addition to all the other vaccinations containing aluminium and all sorts of other additives. There is a nice synergy in the toxic effects of mercury and aluminium.