Measles Outbreak: Correcting the Record with the Philadelphia Inquirer
This past Tuesday, January 9th, the Philadelphia Editorial Board produced an opinion piece concerning the measles outbreak in Philadelphia, which at the time was suspected to be affecting six children. Their statement is produced below. It is followed by CHD PA’s response in the hope of correcting the record for the sake of honesty in journalism and to shine light on a more honest path to public health.
Dear Inquirer Editorial Board,
Your editorial titled Importance of Vaccines on January 9th contains misrepresentations and factual errors that are imperative to correct. Your statement that Robert Kennedy Jr., Children’s Health Defense Chairman on Leave, is an “anti-vaccine advocate” is disingenuous. Mr. Kennedy and CHD are advocates for safe and effective vaccines. Calling that anti-vaccine is equivalent to calling Ralph Nader anti-automobile for his advocacy of car safety.
You state that by taking this position on medical interventions given to healthy children, one is selfish. Advocating for childhood vaccines to receive the same vigorous safety testing as other classes of pharmaceuticals is not a selfish act but clearly threatens a powerful industry. Pharma will do anything to protect its monopoly on a $100 billion tort-free product line mandated for over 60 million children a year. Making false statements regarding vaccine safety and the blanket censorship of any science from the pages of the Inquirer that support statements made by RFK Jr. in no way serves the public or its readership. If we are indeed wrong, prove to us and your readers that our facts are dangerously incorrect instead of resorting to ad hominem attacks.
Pharma has spent billions over the past four decades on public relations and government influence operations to create a false impression that the reduced child mortality and morbidity we witnessed in the second half of the 20th century came from their medicines.
Medical interventions are, in fact, at the bottom of the list of public health miracles. Hygiene, more bountiful and safer foods, public water, and sewer authorities achieved a far greater impact in establishing these achievements than medicine. Medical textbooks acknowledged these facts until the 1980s, when pharmaceutical largess began flooding medical schools and their hospitals.
You make significant assumptions that the people infected in the measles outbreak of six cases were unvaccinated, but that is not what recent history tells us. The measles vaccine is not as effective as it was decades ago. The CDC conducted a study on waning immunity after two doses of the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine in 2007. They conducted another study in 2016, published in The Journal of Infectious Diseases, which stated that “MMR3 [a third dose of MMR] is unlikely to solve the problem of waning immunity in the United States… We did not find compelling data to support a routine third dose of the MMR vaccine.” These are some important facts that should underline your reporting on this outbreak.
The bigger story is the cul-de-sac public health entered when President Reagan signed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, which guaranteed Pharma would never have any incentive to produce better or safer vaccines. It is no surprise that Pharma and its agents would seek to find a scapegoat for the obvious failures of this arrangement. You cannot put the blame on parents for wanting to keep their children as far away from an industry with the most felonious record in the history of corporate crime and an unprecedented protection from product liability.
You cited the work of Andrew Wakefield, who was attacked because he only suggested further research into the connections between gut health, MMR vaccination, and neurological health, calling his Lancet study fraudulent. That would be defamation if you had the courage to identify Wakefield by name in your editorial. Wakefield’s persecution is a text-book case of how Pharma, through its media representatives, subverts further inquiry into important findings that would harm their enterprise.
It would be hard to imagine any medical journal publishing a study making a link between the MMR shot and autism, as so many of these journals are dependent on pharma for their operation budgets. When science does come to light, it is quickly sandbagged. Research on the MMR has connected cases of autism in African-American boys given shots before 36 months of age, and this was affirmed by Dr. William Thompson, Senior Scientist at the CDC. He has testified that the CDC leadership ordered that research be destroyed.
It has been stated again and again by vaccine insiders like Paul Offit that no doubts will be permitted to be expressed publicly about the potential harms like autism that vaccines pose to children, as this may upend public trust in the vaccine program. However, the obscurity surrounding vaccine safety leads to the same outcome, distrust. Medical interventions imposed on healthy subjects need to exhibit a greater degree of safety than those designed to aid the sick. First Do No Harm is the most enduring and important principle in medicine. The theory of herd immunity needs to be measured against the level of sacrifice our children face from poorly and unethically tested products.
The CDC holds records of thousands of injuries and hundreds of deaths, voluntarily reported, that have been attributed to the MMR vaccine. Parents must be able to weigh the risks and benefits of this intervention and not be lied to into believing that there are no safety concerns. Measles infection rarely kills except in circumstances of extreme malnutrition. The WHO states that vitamin A supplementation in two doses over 24 hours will cut the chances of death from measles by 50%.
Furthermore, the federal vaccine court has acknowledged that autism, or, if you prefer, autism-like symptoms, is a condition that the federal government can compensate victims of the MMR vaccine for. Please recall the Hannah Poling case and others that have forced the government to pay out millions of dollars for cases of lifelong neurological disability directly linked to MMR vaccination.
Despite health authorities and the media’s blackout on MMR vaccine harm, thousands of parents have made the connection with their child’s sudden onset of autism. The bullying and gaslighting of these families has become a hallmark of the pharmaceutical/media complex and is one of its more shameful acts.
A plague of corruption exists within this pharmaceutical/media cartel, the extent of which is perhaps too frightening to tell. We do not expect corporate media, like the Inquirer, to be able to engage with this topic. Mainstream media’s existence now deeply depends on living with this plague and giving it the cover and censorship it requires.
We do request and expect the Inquirer to at least stand down from this propaganda campaign that spreads falsehoods, half truths, and myths produced by Pharma’s PR industry. CHD supports a parent’s right to vaccinate their child, but this cannot and should not be done without also upholding the right to honest disclosure and informed consent as to the risks and benefits of any medical intervention. This is fundamental and a position from which our organizations and the tens of millions who support CHD will never be deterred.