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Injecting People Isn’t a Religious Right

by Jun 3, 2019Health Freedom, Articles, Economic Freedom31 comments

The New York Times editorial board, ever faithful to the vaccine religion, argues that you don’t have a right to informed consent with vaccinations.

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Today in the United States, the practice of vaccination has become a religion. We are supposed to believe uniquely in the pharmaceutical products called vaccines as a matter of faith. We are supposed to blindly place our trust in public health officials, the high priests of this state religion, who tell us we must all strictly comply with the recommendations of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). And we are not supposed to believe that vaccination is a matter of individual choice. We are not supposed to maintain our appreciation and respect for that most fundamental medical ethic, the right to informed consent.

We are not supposed to question, dissent from, or challenge public vaccine policy. Anyone who does so is treated as a heretic.

The New York Times editorial board, for example, attacks “anti-vaxxers”—the media’s derogatory label for dissenters—as “the enemy”. Yet as I demonstrated in my article “How to Immunize Yourself Against Vaccine Propaganda”, it is the hypocritical Times editors who are dangerously ignorant of the science and guilty of grossly misinforming the public. (For another systematic dismantling of blatantly deceitful vaccine propaganda from the Times, see also my article “Should You Get the Flu Shot Every Year? Don’t Ask the New York Times.” And to see how the Times gives government health officials a platform from which to broadcast blatant lies about vaccine safety to the public, see my article “Top US Health Officials Lie that Vaccines Don’t Contain Toxic Chemicals”.)

Vaccination has become a religious rite—and increasingly underlying mainstream media coverage of the subject is the assumption that we have no right to informed consent.

The Times provided a useful example on May 21, 2019, with its editorial “Infecting People Isn’t a Religious Right”. The title communicates the idea that you do not have a right to not get vaccinated. You must do it, and you do not have a choice. As a matter of moral principle, we are being instructed, that choice cannot be left up to you, but must be made for you by our wise government overlords. You have no right to informed consent. Instead, it is the state’s “right” to vaccinate you or your child against your will.

The article teaser below the headline reinforces the message: “The measles outbreak makes it vital for New York lawmakers to end religious exemptions for vaccinations.” Of course, it’s not really about the reason for the exemption. It doesn’t matter whether an exemption is for religious reasons, philosophical reasons, or any other reasons apart from the narrow criteria by which public vaccine policy allows for “medical” exemptions to vaccination (such as having almost died from a previous vaccination).

In California, Senator Richard Pan has explained this viewpoint succinctly. He was one of the key players in getting legislation passed after the 2015 Disney measles outbreak that eliminated all non-“medical” exemptions to vaccination. I place the word “medical” in quotation marks there because the way Senator Pan sees it, the granting of “medical” exemptions to vaccinations “is not the practice of medicine but of a state authority to licensed physicians”.

So there you have it: the state, not the parents or their child’s doctor, should make the determination whether that child should get vaccinated—even though government bureaucrats in Washington or state capitals have none of the necessary knowledge about the individual child required to be in any kind of position to be able to make that decision.

“Essentially,” to again quote Pan’s own words, by writing a “medical” exemption, “physicians are fulfilling an administrative role”.

Similarly, from the perspective of the Times editors, it should not be up to individuals to decide whether to get vaccinated, or for parents to decide whether to vaccinate their children. Instead, when it comes to vaccination, personal choice is not an option.

Of course, parents choosing not to vaccinate their children strictly according to the CDC’s recommendations do not do so because they feel they have a “right” to have their child infect other people’s children with some disease. To actively try to cause another person to become infected with a viral or bacterial pathogen would certainly violate libertarianism’s non-aggression principle. But, needless to say, that’s not among the reasons why parents choose not to vaccinate their children. Nobody argues that choosing not to vaccinate is okay because we have a right to infect other people with pathogens. The Times’ headline presents an idiotic strawman argument designed to deflect attention away from the real issue, which is our right to informed consent.

Beyond its transparent disingenuousness, though, the Times is implicitly asserting that people do have some kind of “right” to be free from exposure to any viruses or bacteria for which there exists a CDC-recommended vaccine. But that is ludicrous. There is no such right. If your mom has the flu and you give her a hug and likewise come down with it, has she committed aggression against you? And if we are to regard it as aggression if someone who hasn’t been vaccinated infects you, what if someone infects you who has been fully vaccinated? Are they then somehow exempt from the charge of aggression? What about vaccines that don’t even prevent transmission? What if vaccination actually increases the risk of a person infecting another, such as with pertussis, because the vaccinated person thinks that the vaccine prevents transmission when it doesn’t? How is it that this doesn’t even matter and is not even a consideration insofar as the Times editors have thought it through for us?

The very concept of a right to be free from bacteria and viruses is preposterous. We have more bacterial cells than human cells in our own bodies and depend on bacteria to maintain good health, and a considerable percentage of our own DNA has been determined to be viral in origin. The idea that individuals have some kind of right to be free from exposure to viruses and bacteria is insane, and such reductio ad absurdum arguments as I’ve just presented are enough to illustrate how irrational this suggestion is.

It’s obviously true that there are risks from viral or bacterial infections and the diseases they can cause. But the idea that vaccination should not be a personal choice ignores the fact that vaccination is a medical intervention that entails risk, too. The risks from the diseases are not the same for every individual. Likewise, some children are at higher risk of being permanently injured or killed by vaccinations. Part of the problem is that our scientific knowledge has not yet developed to the point that we are able to easily identify which individuals have a genetic or environmental predisposition to vaccine injury. We just don’t know who they are.

The one-size-fits-all approach of public vaccine policy is itself unscientific and ignores the individual variation in risk. It plays Russian roulette with our children. It ignores that the only reasonable basis for a determination with respect to the risk-benefit analysis of vaccination is that it must be made for each individual vaccine and each individual person. Government bureaucrats simply do not have the knowledge that they need to be able to make those judgments for all of us as some kind of collective. They are totally ignorant, and they have no business dictating to us what medical interventions we or our children must undergo.

One of the main tactics being used by the government and the complicit media to eliminate your health freedom is fearmongering. In the pre-vaccine era in the US, measles was recognized as a typically benign illness and virtual childhood rite-of-passage, but today we are supposed to be terrified of it.

“It’s no coincidence that measles is spreading across the United States”, the Times editorial begins, “after a decade in which the number of parents claiming exemption for their children from vaccination has grown.”

Right from the start, the Times is misleading. Vaccination rates have actually remained very high over time. This is what kindergarten vaccination coverage has looked like in the state of New York, for example:

Vaccination rate in New York state

As you can see, the vaccination rate has hovered between a low of 95.6% for the school year starting in 2015 and the high of 98.2% for the prior year.

The Times is right that the exemption rate has gone up in New York, though. In fact, if we want to help sensationalize it for the Times, we could say that it has actually doubled! Here’s what that’s looked like:

Vaccine exemption rate in New York state

As you can see, the exemption rate in New York had held steady at 0.1% until the school year starting in 2016, since which it has been up a whopping 0.1% all the way to 0.2%!

That’s why a major outbreak of measles has occurred this year in New York, according to the New York Times: because the most recent data shows an exemption rate of 0.2% instead of 0.1%.

In 2011, when the kindergarten vaccination rate was at 96.9%—a bit lower than the 97.2% for the most recent school year’s data—there was another outbreak in New York City, which was traced to an adult woman who had received two doses of the measles vaccine.

The authors of a study on that outbreak attributed it to what’s known as “secondary vaccine failure”. That’s when the antibody levels provoked by the vaccine wane over time to become no longer protective against viral infection. “Primary vaccine failure” is when the vaccine just fails to work at all in the first place (i.e., fails to provoke a protective level of antibodies).

The New York Times, like the rest of the mainstream media, never talk about vaccine failure or its implications for the flawed theory that vaccine conferred “herd immunity” can stop outbreaks from occurring. (For a list of other things they refuse to ever discuss, see my article “15 Facts about Measles the Mainstream Media Won’t Tell You”.)

Of course, the Times was referring specifically to religious exemptions, whereas the above data relates to all kinds of exemptions. The Times cites no sources to support its suggestion that the rate of religious exemptions in New York have increased so dramatically as to obviously explain why a major outbreak occurred there this year. There was an oft-cited study published last year looking at rates of non-medical exemptions across states and found that rates had increased in most states allowing them, but its authors only considered states where philosophical exemptions are allowed, which is not the case in New York. So from where did the Times editors get data enabling them to so firmly conclude that an increase in the rate of religious exemptions in New York explains why measles cases have occurred there? While I’m willing to acknowledge the theoretical possibility that they have seen such data, I would like to propose to you that they simply made it up. They don’t need to actually have any data to support their assertions. They are taking up a pro-vaccine position. Supporting evidence isn’t required. It’s enough that they believe it to be true.

The Times editors elaborate on how they desire for people to have no choice whether to vaccinate, that the choice can only be made by government legislators and compliant medical practitioners. They point out that the industry-funded American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), too, advocates that, when it comes to vaccines, parents have no right to choose, that they have no right to informed consent. Then they describe the criticism that legislation eliminating non-medical exemptions “could violate the First Amendment” as “one of the anti-vaccine movement’s favored talking points—that beliefs about vaccines are protected by the Constitution.”

One of the pro-vaccine movement’s favored talking points is to identify supposed favored talking points of this monolithic “anti-vaccine movement” that they describe, rather than actually addressing any of the real issues.

In this case, the real issue is not that beliefs about vaccines are protected by the Constitution, but that our individual liberty is protected by it, including our right to informed consent. (Or, at least, our individual liberty is supposed to be protected by the Constitution, although of course the government violates the Constitution and individual rights perpetually and is ever seeking to assume even greater powers to dictate us how we ought to go about living our lives.)

Pursuing the strawman argument intended to narrow the scope of the discussion such that the right to informed consent need never be addressed, the Times proceeds by arguing that religious freedom “doesn’t apply” when it comes to vaccines. They quote a federal appeals court that upheld California’s removal of religious exemptions arguing that, “The right to practice religion does not include liberty to expose the community or the child to communicable disease or the latter to ill health or death.”

In other words, in the opinion of both the federal appeals court and the New York Times editors, individuals do not have a right to choose not to vaccinate. In their view, the Constitution does not protect the right to informed consent!

Notice again also that whether the reason for the decision not to vaccinate is religious or otherwise in nature is practically irrelevant: it is the right to choose itself that the Times is arguing must be taken away.

Hence the Times advocates laws mandating vaccinations as “one of the best ways” to “get parents to vaccinate their children.” If they won’t choose to vaccinate willingly, they must be coerced to.

The editors go on to describe the “anti-vaccine campaign” as “factually vacuous”. But, again, the Times editors are in no place at all to judge the truthfulness of others’ views. These hypocrites are not just totally ignorant, but deliberately deceptive. For example, in an editorial earlier this year, they explicitly blamed mumps outbreaks solely on “anti-vaxxers” even though the Times itself reported just last year how outbreaks are occurring “because the immune response provoked by the mumps vaccine weakens significantly over time, and not because people are avoiding vaccination”.

This is the same factually vacuous New York Times that claimed last year that a 2010 study found that the influenza vaccine conferred “a big payoff in public health” when that study actually found that the CDC’s recommendation that everyone aged six months and up receive an annual influenza vaccine is unsupported by scientific evidence. That study found moreover that, in order to support its policy, the CDC had deliberately misrepresented the science!

The New York Times doesn’t give a shit about what the facts are when it comes to the practice of vaccination. Its editors and writers are strict adherents to the vaccine religion. To them, facts don’t matter. What matters to them is that anyone who dares to commit the crime of heresy against their faith is punished for their sin. They have a political agenda, and the “facts” they report follow.

This is not called journalism. It is called public policy advocacy. It is called propaganda.

Recognize that you do have rights. You are entitled to individual liberty. You do have a right to be free from bodily harm; and this does not mean that you have a right to be free from exposure to viruses and bacteria, but it does mean that you have a right to be free from potentially harmful medical interventions forced upon you against your will.

The vaccine religion constitutes a threat to our health and to our liberty. The right to informed consent must be inviolable. Anything else is tyranny.

To learn more about the assault on our health and liberty, read my article “How Public Vaccine Policy Violates Our Right to Informed Consent”.

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  • Kristina Marie Parry says:

    Brilliant. Absolutely spot on.

      • Lilia says:

        If we as a society and individuals have the right to be from exposure to virus and bacteria. Question: what are vaccines made of? They are made of viruses and bacteria! So I guess since that’s my right to be free from exposure to viruses and bacteria than I decline to be exposed to the virus and bacteria in the vaccine! They didnt even thought it through. Their logic Is digging their graves ?.
        Great job!

      • So I guess since that’s my right to be free from exposure to viruses and bacteria than I decline to be exposed to the virus and bacteria in the vaccine!

        I cannot find any flaw in your reasoning. ?

  • Vive D says:

    Hi Jeremy, you hit it out of the park again. It is like reading my fantasy comebacks to those nyt propaganda pieces. I just sent you 25$, gotta pay this thing forward. In your email you said you homeschool your son. My daughter is 3 but that is probably the way I will go. They are trying to make it so kids can say yes to vaccines without parents consent, among other reasons to not think your kids are safe there.
    So thanks again for being on the front lines. This issue is huge and I watch it as a litmus test of the consciousness of populations. Needless to say our country has some awakening to do. I read something about countries and their vaccine policy in regards to infant mortality. The more vaccines you have, the more babies die and on down the line to Japan, which does not mandate vaccines and has the best rates.

  • Rtp says:

    Such an amazing article except for this one line:

    “It’s obviously true that there are risks from viral or bacterial infections and the diseases they can cause.”

    There is no such thing as contagious disease. This seems preposterous for most people (even non-vaxers) such is the indoctrination but it is obviously true. If disease could be spread from one person to another then visiting (let alone becoming) a doctor would be instantly fatal.

    People will then retort with “but my classmates and I all came down with chickenpox at the same time – that can’t just be a coincidence”. It’s not a coincidence. The cause of disease can be shared but it cannot be transmitted.

    The cause of disease is either emotional trauma or poisoning. Classmates or siblings can easily share emotional traumas (although they often don’t) but doctors probably won’t share traumas with their patients. That is why being a doctor is a safe job but siblings can all come down with “gastro” at the same time.

    And it is easy to see that emotional trauma (the mind) is the cause of most disease by doing a google search for images of people with rashes (that doctors have blamed on viruses). Look at them all and note that most are focused (to varying degrees). Rashes are not typically spread evenly around our bodies. Some people get rashes on corresponding parts of our body! How could a virus do that?

    Well it can’t.

    Rashes (epidermis) occur due to a separation trauma – they present on the part of the body that the mind associates the separation. That explains why a child might have a rash on their hands and feet – or behind their knees and inside their elbows. They miss touching someone there.

    Dermis rashes (shingles) are even more remarkable because they somehow know right from left.

    Viruses don’t know right from left.

    Guess what does?

    Yes. Again. Your mind.

    Viruses don’t cause disease and nor could they. There are no negative feedbacks in a model of disease with a self-replicating pathogen (the posited immune system falls as the number of pathogens increases so it is a postive feedback). Therefore the germ theory is a mathematical impossibility. I can elaborate on this if you like.

    I can explain the supposed “efficacy” of antibiotics too by the way (hint: they never actually became “resistant”).

    Once you understand all this (German New Medicine) then you understand every aspect of the history of disease. You no longer are a slave to what some study does or doesn’t say. You understand from first principles how it all works.

    • There is no such thing as contagious disease. … If disease could be spread from one person to another then visiting (let alone becoming) a doctor would be instantly fatal.

      Your argument is a non sequitur.

      • Rtp says:

        How is it invalid?

        Being around sick people is either: a) dangerous; or b) not dangerous.

        If a) then doctor offices are the most dangerous places of all by far. If your health is in any way jeopardized by being around one sick person then you have no chance of surviving a doctor visit.

        If b) then I’m right and disease is not contagious.

        Whilst avoiding doctors is generally wise given they’re all abject fools most people survive doctor visits therefore b).

        At any rate I have another independent proof that the germ theory model is impossible. I am happy to elaborate as I said. There are no negative feedbacks in the germ theory/immune system model so recovery after any kind of infection is absolutely impossible. The more the pathogen increases the less our body’s ability to fight it off. Outside a discontinuity (a deus ex machina) there is no way of getting better. Therefore no organism could conceivably exist.

        Like I said, look at images of rashes. Rashes tend to be focused. That is a massive clue as to the cause of disease.

        Here is another.

        An opossum that goes into complete paralysis (that it has no conscious choice over) when trapped.

      • Rtp,

        How is it invalid?

        As I said, your argument is a non sequitur. It is invalid because the conclusion that disease can’t spread from one person to another does not follow from the fact that we don’t all die from visiting doctors.

        Being around sick people is either: a) dangerous; or b) not dangerous.

        Wrong. It depends on a lot of factors. It depends on the illness. It depends on the transmissibility of the virus or bacteria. It depends on the health and immune function of the host.

        I don’t have time for this silliness.

      • Rtp says:

        “It is invalid because the conclusion that disease can’t spread from one person to another does not follow from the fact that we don’t all die from visiting doctors.”

        Well yeah it does actually. There are lots of sick people at doctor offices. You are vastly more likely to come into contact with a sick person at a doctor office than at any other place you might be inclined to go to.

        Being afraid of sick people germs but still visiting doctors makes as much sense as somebody from Dubai thinking that Vancouver would be too hot to visit in January.

        “I don’t have time for this silliness”.

        The very fact that most non-vaxers refuse to counter the fear of contagion is precisely why we never get anywhere.

        Most non-vaxers believe that if we could just make a few more people realize that vaccines are dangerous then we could shift public thinking on this but the fact is that we have already been completely successful in making lots of people believe they are dangerous. Over half of the population are willing to admit to pollsters that they believe vaccines are dangerous. And yet, well over half the population still believes in forced vaccination. Note that it is only because of us that half of the population are scared of vaccination. It certainly isn’t because of the media or doctors or governments telling them. Despite all the propaganda and the David vs Goliath mismatch, we are actually highly successful in selling our message.

        But our message is woefully incomplete. We have nuclear weapons but we prefer to use bow and arrows.

        Arguing over safety is fighting fear with fear. And historically, the one and only thing that governments and the medical industry have ever been good at is instilling fear. Why on earth would we want to fight governments and the medical industry on the one and only battleground that they have an advantage on?

        If we fought the government and medical industry on the battleground of logic they would fall apart within a matter of months. I doubt that the medical industry would survive a year of every non-vaxer pointing out that doctor offices are filled with the germs of sick people so visiting them (if you’re afraid of germs and support vaccination) is utter lunacy.

        Of course, it takes a little longer to gain traction on the invalidity of germ theory than to convince someone that vaccines are dangerous, but here;s the thing, most people who are convinced vaccines are dangerous will still vaccinate after the doctor has spent an hour or so bullying them. On the other hand, if you get someone to reject the germ theory they probably won’t even bother visiting doctors – let alone believing a word they say about vaccination.

      • The very fact that most non-vaxers refuse to counter the fear of contagion is precisely why we never get anywhere.

        I would counter that the reason we never get anywhere is because people go around saying crazy things like that diseases can’t be caused by viruses.

        Like I said, I don’t have time for this silliness. I have identified the fallacies in your arguments and there is nothing more to say.

  • Vive D says:

    I am not as scientifically adept as Rtp but I sort of agree with his/her conclusions. The disease model that is widely accepted is junk science. Viruses and bacteria do not in fact cause disease. The viruses and bacteria are always there, we must give them the environment to flourish. The presence of a multitude of pathogens is a symptom of the disease, not the cause. When we have a system that isn’t functioning well, we give the pathogens reason to multiply. It is like our immune system’s self destruct mechanism, they are there to clean up the mess, not the cause of the mess. This concept is quite revolutionary in a world where we were all indoctrinated to believe in the disease model and therefore always be afraid and unable to take control of our own health. For more on the subject check out Dr. Robert Morse, naturopath.

    • Viruses and bacteria do not in fact cause disease. The viruses and bacteria are always there, we must give them the environment to flourish. The presence of a multitude of pathogens is a symptom of the disease, not the cause. When we have a system that isn’t functioning well, we give the pathogens reason to multiply.

      So the pathogen isn’t the only cause of the disease. But it is still a cause of the disease.

      • Rtp says:

        It isn’t, and can’t be, even a cause of a disease. If it were, recovery would be impossible because the pathogen would increase in number even as our ability to fight it is reduced.

        Our bodies use germs as part of the disease process and the disease process is actually a self-directed healing mechanism. Emotional trauma causes changes in physiology. Most of the time these changes are actually unnoticed but once the trauma is resolved, the body is rebalanced and the physiology changes back. It is this rebalancing that is usually the unpleasant part.

        This actually makes sense. When the gazelle goes through the emotional trauma of being chased by a lion it certainly doesn’t feel lethargic and sore – it feels the exact opposite. Once the gazelle outruns the lion (assuming it does), that is when the unpleasant symptoms occur.

        When the healing process requires extra (or extra active) cells to be broken down, the body uses the bacteria that is all around us to break down these extra cells. Hence the proliferation of bacteria in diseased tissue. But obviously the bacteria can’t be the cause of the diseased tissue (because bacteria is ubiquitous) nor could it be making a bad situation worse (because then we couldn’t recover).

        Like I said, we now know how to make sense of everything. We have a theory of disease that can literally explain every possible condition – from measles to cancer to strained hamstrings.

        All we have to do is start with the premise that God/nature/evolution/Intelligent Designer doesn’t make mistakes and therefore that disease is not something to be fought and is instead something to be worked with.

      • It isn’t, and can’t be, even a cause of a disease. If it were, recovery would be impossible because the pathogen would increase in number even as our ability to fight it is reduced.

        The human body is not incapable of recovering from a viral infection.

        Please stop wasting everyone’s time with this patent nonsense.

  • Venetia Buxton says:

    Excellent article!

  • Rtp says:

    By the way, I appreciate you giving me the chance to air my thoughts. I get they are controversial – even for non-vaxers.

  • vive d. says:

    I think you are being unfair to Rtp. You are sounding just like the mainstream media dismissing anti-vaxxer arguments. It would be better to do some research on the subject, the idea that “pathogens” do not cause disease is not silly or crazy. It is an opinion steeped in research and open-mindedness. Please look into Dr. Robert Morse and educate yourself on this. You are a great writer but you are blocking yourself, the search for truth must continue.

    • I think you are being unfair to Rtp. You are sounding just like the mainstream media dismissing anti-vaxxer arguments.

      It is you who is being unfair to me by comparing my replies to Rtp to the mainstream media’s replies to “anti-vaxxers”. So-called “anti-vaxxers” like myself present well reasoned arguments supported by facts and logic, while the mainstream media derisively dismisses reasoned arguments by spreading misinformation themselves. By contrast, Rtp is presenting literal nonsense that I have directly addressed by clearly identifying his blatant logical fallacies, which in turn clearly indicate a false pretense of knowledge. (You say his opinion is “steeped in research”, but I see precisely zero evidence of that, and, moreover, even if it were, his conclusions are still fallacious.)

      Furthermore, when people spread silliness like this, it makes it all the easier for the media to dismiss “anti-vaxxers” because it legitimates their accusation that “anti-vaxxers” are tinfoil hat wearing ignoramuses.

      I also take offense at the suggestion that I’m preventing myself from learning truth by not spending my time pondering literal nonsense. I know how to manage my time more efficiently than that. We have work to do. Let’s set aside this silliness and get it done.

      • Rtp says:

        No vive’s point is valid. Most of your responses are “that’s nonsense!”

        The closest you came to substantively answering me was this:

        “Wrong. It depends on a lot of factors. It depends on the illness. It depends on the transmissibility of the virus or bacteria. It depends on the health and immune function of the host.”

        But those points – true or not – don’t in any way negate my assertion. If you want to say “this particular germ is dangerous but another one is” that’s fine but you still need to explain why the germs that sick people have (ie those visiting doctor offices) are of the kind that aren’t dangerous/transmittable – even (especially) to other sick people. That is what you have to do but there is simply no way of doing this without a wholesale rejection of germ theory.

        So you didn’t do anything of value. You threw out points that in no way helped your position (if anything they reinforced mine) in the hope that nobody would bother to actually trace through the logic but instead would just make them feel better that some kind of a response was given.

        Pro vaxers do this.

        When I point out that doctors differentially diagnose using vaccine status and therefore the so-called VPDs have just been renamed not reduced pro-vaxers invariably respond with “but that can’t be true because laboratory testing!!!” But the use/requirement for lab testing today (but not before the vaccine) actually reinforces my point.

        They don’t care though. They said something.

      • Most of your responses are “that’s nonsense!”

        Right, because your arguments are literally nonsense, and I identified your fallacies at every step.

        If you want to say “this particular germ is dangerous but another one is” that’s fine but you still need to explain why the germs that sick people have (ie those visiting doctor offices) are of the kind that aren’t dangerous/transmittable – even (especially) to other sick people.

        This is incomprehensible gibberish.

      • TheAlmightyPill says:

        I too think you are being excessively dismissive of Rtp. His logical argument does have some holes, at least as stated and without further understanding of some issues. Yet, if contagion is true, then going to places where sick people congregate (hospitals, doctor offices) would be pretty stupid.

        The fundamental point is that the validity of vaccination rests entirely upon the validity of germ theory, which is far less scientific than you imagine. Calling it literal nonsense to dig deeper into the chain of evidence and ask more foundational questions is very reminiscent of how people are dismissed for questioning vaccines.

        Take measles. Do you know the evidence that the measles virus causes the disease called “measles,” or do you take it on faith? Is it anything more than correlation?

        Since measles diagnosis requires lab confirmation, is this apparent correlation anything other than definitional tautology? What then does one call a disease that is clinically indistinguishable from measles but without lab confirmation? What would they have called this disease before lab confirmation existed, when “measles” was far more prevalent and deadly?

        Going a bit deeper, what is the evidence that the measles virus even exists? Consider this interesting event from Germany: https://www.sott.net/article/340948-Biologist-wins-Supreme-Court-case-proving-that-the-measles-virus-does-not-exist

        The reason that he won the court case is because all of the studies presented as proof relied upon the first “isolation” of measles by Enders (https://archive.org/details/EndersPeebles1954). Yet this first isolation consisted merely of treating and sterilizing a cell culture and adding a sample of purportedly infected blood. When the stressed cells died they attributed it to infection with the purported virus and called the resulting cellular stew an “isolation.”

        Notice there is no control experiment involved: they did not rule out that their stressing of the cell line was the cause of cellular changes. Notice also that they did not perform the standard density gradient centrifugation necessary to truly isolate viral particles for proper biochemical characterization: their “virus” is nothing more than cellular debris.

        If that is the foundation of all evidence for the virus existing, how can it possibly be said to cause anything?

      • Yet, if contagion is true, then going to places where sick people congregate (hospitals, doctor offices) would be pretty stupid.

        If you wish to call it stupid because going to the hospital entails the risk of coming away with a viral or bacterial infection, that is your prerogative.

        The fundamental point is that the validity of vaccination rests entirely upon the validity of germ theory, which is far less scientific than you imagine.

        This is incorrect. The fact that certain viruses and bacteria can infect a human host and cause disease does not validate vaccination at all.

        Calling it literal nonsense to dig deeper into the chain of evidence and ask more foundational questions is very reminiscent of how people are dismissed for questioning vaccines.

        But, of course, I did not call it nonsense to dig deeper and ask questions. I highly encourage those two behaviors. What I called literal nonsense were statements that were logical fallacies. I identified the fallacies, but instead of addressing my point, you’ve engaged in this strawman argumentation.

        Do you know the evidence that the measles virus causes the disease called “measles,” or do you take it on faith?

        Infection with the measles virus is a necessary condition for the development of measles disease. Your suggestion that this is not so is crazy.

        Please note this reply to Rtp. The same applies to you.

        https://www.jeremyrhammond.com/2019/06/03/injecting-people-isnt-a-religious-right/#comment-247809

    • Anne J DeRocher says:

      I agree with you vive d and rtp. I’m glad there are people that understand the falseness of the germ theory. Thank you for your comments. And I appreciate Dr Robert Morse also. Highly recommend him as well.

  • Rtp says:

    “because it legitimates their accusation that “anti-vaxxers” are tinfoil hat wearing ignoramuses.”

    They’ll call you a conspiracy theorist no matter how moderate you are in your criticism of vaccination. Vaccines are a cult and absolutely no questioning is allowed.

    You don’t deprogram members of a cult by pretending that most of what they believe in is true – let alone that their leaders have some kind of legitimate authority. Rather you take whatever they say and turn it against their beliefs and against the legitimacy of their leaders. You can be sympathetic to their welfare but you should never acknowledge that any of their beliefs are coherent. Luckily for us, every pro-vaccine belief is an impossible lie from start to finish. And this is why the doctor office argument is so brilliant from start to finish. Pro-vaxers fear germs. You take that fear and point out that that means they shouldn’t go within a million miles of their precious doctors.

    • They’ll call you a conspiracy theorist no matter how moderate you are in your criticism of vaccination.

      That is true, but when you present sound arguments and they do so, they are the ones being unreasonable, whereas, again, when you present literal nonsense, you legitimate their accusation that “anti-vaxxers” are tinfoil hat wearing ignoramuses.

      I’m ending this discussion now. You are welcome to discuss the topic of the article, but you are no longer welcome to pursue this distraction here. If you persist in doing so, your commenting privileges will be revoked.

      This is a place for serious, reasoned discussion, not for spreading harmful nonsense.

  • jt says:

    Jeremy thank you for this great article. I’m amazed at and appreciative of the dignity you’ve shown in the comments.

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