In the wake of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. telling reporters that President Trump asked him to chair a commission on vaccine safety and scientific integrity, the media is angling to shame and ridicule vaccine safety and informed consent proponents, be they physicians, scientists or parents with the ability to read and think for themselves.  

Although Kennedy's appointment has not been confirmed yet by the Trump administration, The Atlantic has gone so far as to suggest that a "shadow network of anti-vax doctors" is being emboldened by questions and concerns the new president has voiced about vaccine safety.¹

Like Kennedy and many other critics of vaccine science and policy, President Trump has been outspoken about his suspicions that vaccines and vaccine policies may not be nearly as safe as they're portrayed, and that the science is far from settled.

Meanwhile, Kennedy recently co-wrote an article in which he released documents revealing that officials at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) "knew that infant vaccines were exposing American children to mercury far in excess of all federal safety guidelines since 1999."²

Recent reports also reveal that medical treatment guidelines are frequently influenced by drug industry ties,³ and scientific "citation cartels" are gaming the system by repeatedly citing each other's work,⁴ thereby making their studies appear more noteworthy and establishing what amounts to a false base of research that becomes difficult to overturn by independent researchers.

In all, there can be little doubt that the drug industry is getting anxious and this is why the heat is being turned up against anyone daring to question the status quo on vaccines.

Clearly, having an open discussion about vaccine safety means opening the door to doubt, and this is something the drug industry simply cannot afford. Meanwhile, avoiding the discussion is something parents, and the health care system as a whole, can no longer afford.

Emboldening 'Anti-Vaccine Shadow Network?'

Not surprisingly, The Atlantic and other media outlets have published diatribes attacking President Trump and his staff for meeting with not only Kennedy, but also Andrew Wakefield, a British gastroenterologist.

In 1998 Wakefield and 12 colleagues published a case series paper in The Lancet, reporting that parents of 9 of 12 children they'd seen for chronic gastrointestinal symptoms told them that their children's symptoms had begun soon after getting the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine.

A case series paper is different from a control study in that it simply describes experiences of a single patient or group of patients with a similar diagnosis. As Wakefield points out in his book, "Callous Disregard," the purpose of a case series paper is to "generate new hypotheses."

It is not supposed to suggest or investigate possible causality — and Wakefield's paper did not make any causal claims. Rather, he and his colleagues concluded:⁵

"We have identified a chronic enterocolitis in children that may be related to neuropsychiatric dysfunction. In most cases, onset of symptoms was after measles, mumps, and rubella immun[iz]ation. Further investigations are needed to examine this syndrome and its possible relation to this vaccine."

The world didn't read it that way, however, and the paper was retracted after generating massive international controversy and denials by public health officials and doctors giving vaccines to children.

According to Science Magazine, Trump met with Wakefield and three other vaccine safety activists in August, 2016:⁶

"Trump chatted with a group of donors that included four antivaccine activists for 45 minutes, according to accounts of the meeting, and promised to watch "Vaxxed," an antivaccine documentary produced by Wakefield …

Trump also expressed an interest in holding future meetings with the activists, according to participants."

Such meetings and discussions are being widely criticized as completely unnecessary and evidence of ignorance and anti-science heresy by anyone involved, on par with believing that the Earth is flat. As noted by The Atlantic:⁷

"… [M]ost mainstream doctors say the vaccine question is beyond settled: Vaccines are some of the safest and most important preventive-health measures around. There is no evidence they cause autism or any other health problem …

What's more, unvaccinated people don't just threaten their own health. Outbreaks are more likely to occur during dips in the percentage of a population that's immune … A high vaccine uptake rate protects the vaccinated and unvaccinated alike."

There's No Such Thing as Vaccine-Induced Herd Immunity

The Atlantic goes on to discuss the importance of herd immunity, noting that "not one child under the age of 1 died from the chicken pox between 2004 and 2007, even though the chicken pox vaccine is not given to children that young. They simply benefited from the so-called "herd immunity" of older kids who were vaccinated."

What the writer, Olga Khazan, fails to address is the fact that herd immunity doesn't work the same way for immunizations as it does for naturally-acquired immunity resulting from exposure to, and recovery from, illness.

To understand the difference between natural immunity versus vaccine-induced immunity, please see the video below.

Khazan also makes no effort to explain how the majority of outbreaks occur in areas that are thought to HAVE herd immunity status already, i.e., where the majority of people are fully vaccinated and "should" therefore protect the entire community from infection and transmission of infection.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFWBelim1Hw