One of the easiest ways to get labeled as a crazy conspiracy theorist is to be an anti-vaxxer. Opposition to vaccinations is on the same scale as claiming the earth is flat or the real Paul McCartney died in 1966. Few conspiracy theories have received such a universal bashing as vaccine opponents with attacks coming from Washington DC, medical organizations, and mainstream media.
Celebrities have been ridiculed. Anti-vaccination doctors have been taken to court or blacklisted. But the debate still rages and it’s a valid one, particularly when it comes to the buried connections between vaccinations and autism.
Journalist Sharyl Attkisson brought the issue to the forefront again with an enlightening report that exposed revelations from people who have been used to promote vaccinations in the past. Most notably, she refers to an affidavit by Dr. Andrew Zimmerman, a a world-renowned pediatric neurologist and former Department of Justice expert who claims he warned the DOJ in 2007 about clear connections between vaccinations and autism caused in certain classifications of children.
“He claims that during the vaccine hearings all those years ago, he privately told government lawyers that vaccines can, and did cause autism in some children,” Attkisson said. “That turnabout from the government’s own chief medical expert stood to change everything about the vaccine-autism debate. If the public were to find out.”
But, as with anything negative pertaining to vaccines, the public did not find out. His claims were buried and his services were no longer sought by the DOJ. Then, the debunking machine started to work on Dr. Zimmerman’s claims. It worked, and once again nobody is talking about the dangers of vaccinations for fear that they’ll be labeled crazy conspiracy theorists.
The source of the problem may be the pharmaceutical industry itself, which contributes to the campaigns of nearly every person on Capitol Hill. They have extremely lucrative incentives to keep vaccinations looking rosy in the eyes of the public and have been willing to share that lucrative take with lawmakers.
Representative Bill Posey (R-FL) said of Big Pharma, “I don’t have to tell you that the industry is a very, very powerful industry. As a matter of fact I don’t know of anyone more powerful than that industry.”
Watch this video. It’s not an unhinged, baseless attack on vaccines like so many anti-vaxxer videos. Sharyl Attkisson’s investigation is lucid, factual, and as alarming as it needs to be without going over the top. Spot on.
