Medical Journals Help Promote the War on “Vaccine Hesitant” People

Written by Barbara Loe Fisher on October 30, 2024. Posted in Current News

Public opinion surveys and polls all say the same thing.

More Americans are doubtful that getting vaccinated over and over and over again is a reliable way to stay healthy. Especially since the extreme response by governments to the World Health Organization’s coronavirus pandemic declaration in 2020.

More adults have lost trust in doctors and public health officials. Some have either personally experienced a COVID-19 shot reaction or know someone who has died suddenly or is suffering with chronic poor health problems after getting the shot.

¹ Others can’t forget being fired from their job or being denied medical care or a school education for refusing to get a COVID shot, while others are still unable to access social media accounts that were suspended for simply talking about COVID shot reactions.

^2 3 And now, just about everybody knows that mRNA COVID shots don’t prevent infection and transmission of the disease. ^4 5

These negative experiences have prompted a growing number of Americans to question whether they or their children really need to get a flu shot every year or need many other government-recommended vaccines.^{6 7 8 9 10}

Doctors call it “vaccine hesitancy,” and almost always blame doubts about vaccination on what they call “misinformation” published online.

¹¹ In January 2019, World Health Organization (WHO) officials at the United Nations declared that “vaccine hesitancy” is among the top 10 threats to global public health. They defined vaccine hesitancy as “the reluctance or refusal to vaccinate despite the availability of vaccines.” ¹²

That 2019 WHO declaration triggered a global culture war targeting vaccine hesitant adults and their children, who are labeled “anti-vaxxers” for propaganda purposes.

What followed was an orchestrated assault on freedom of thought and speech led by doctors working for industry, medical trade and government, who collaborated with media outlets to demonize and punish people who disagree with them about vaccination. ¹³

Medical Journals Help Escalate the War on “Vaccine Hesitant” People

The war on vaccine hesitant people is escalating. And demagogues like pediatrician Peter Hotez, MD, PhD that uber vaccine salesman from Baylor College of Medicine, ¹⁴ are ramping up persecution of people who refuse to worship vaccine pushing scientists like him.

Professor Hotez sure does know how to get attention, and he doesn’t care if it is positive or negative attention because he has the backing of the most powerful medical and scientific journals, academic institutions, government agencies, and media corporations in the world.

For a long time, he has been stalking parents of vaccine injured children and enlightened doctors who criticize vaccine safety and advocate for voluntary vaccination.

He labels them “anti-vaccine” and “anti-science” and part of a “killer movement” that is “a lethal societal force of enormous magnitude.” ¹⁵ Now, Dr. Hotez is demanding that the police forces of the world join together to neutralize the vaccine hesitant people he hates and fears so much.

It gives a whole new meaning to the battle cry of globalists: ONE WORLD, ONE HEALTH!  ^{16 17 18 19}

Every human being capable of rational thinking should be aware that Dr. Hotez and a growing number of doctors and scientists like him are lobbying lawmakers to criminalize dissent so we can be forced to salute smartly and accept every cell disrupter biological product Big Pharma manufactures and sells – no matter how sick we get.^{20 21 22 23}

Describing himself as a “vaccine scientist” while others describe him as a “misinformation machine,” ²⁴ this year Peter Hotez was listed by Time magazine in the top “100 Most Influential People in Health in 2024.”

²⁵ But this summer, when he called the vaccine hesitant a “lethal force” and an international “security problem” and then wildly suggested during an international medical symposium that the US Department of Homeland Security, U.S.

Department of Justice, US Department of Commerce, and the United Nations, including the World Health Organization, plus the largest intergovernmental military alliance in the world – the North Atlantic Treaty Organization – take action to eradicate “anti-vaccine aggression [and] anti-science aggression,”.

I thought it was time to take a closer look at this white coat with his hair on fire demanding that NATO go nuclear on people who know and tell the truth about vaccines.²⁶

It is not the first time Peter Hotez has hoisted the science flag and praised the infallibility of vaccines and the scientists who create them, while personally attacking anyone who disagrees.

Over the past decade, prestigious science publications and mainstream media outlets have put this master propagandist on a pedestal so he can spew hate-filled rants against those who criticize dodgy vaccine science and cruel one-size-fits-all vaccination laws that violate the informed consent ethic and either deny the existence of or dismiss vaccine injured persons as expendable for “the greater good.” 

In 2017, the prestigious Scientific American magazine, which is owned by a German-British academic publishing company, gave Peter Hotez permission to use violent imagery to incite hatred of those who disagree with him. Professor Hotez called on the U.S. government and G20 nations to take steps to “snuff out” the American anti-vaccine movement.

Which he said may have “sufficient strength and momentum to affect vaccine coverage globally,” while reluctantly noting that vaccine hesitancy was linked to smart people with “high educational attainment and socioeconomic status.”

²⁷ To “snuff out” means to “crush” or “kill” ²⁸ and the extremist language he used in that once respectable scientific forum set the stage for what was to come.

In 2018, I wrote about how Peter Hotez demonized parents of vaccine injured children during a global health lecture he gave at Duke University.

²⁹ In that lecture publicized by Duke’s student newspaper, he complained that “anti-vaccine websites exist with names such as the National Vaccine Information Center.”

He pointed fingers at scientists for failing to “engage the public,” which he alleged has led to organizations “exporting this anti-vax garbage” to communities around the world. ³⁰

In the lecture, Dr. Hotez castigated U.S. lawmakers on Capitol Hill from what he described as the “peace, love, granola” political left who believe that “we have to be careful what we put into our kid’s bodies,” and those from the political right, who tell doctors like him “you can’t tell us what to do with our kids.”

But he reserved the bulk of his venom for parents of vaccine injured children. Like a schoolyard bully who engages in name calling when he can’t come up with anything intelligent to say.

He slapped the “anti-vaccine” label on parents of vaccine injured children who describe how their children’s health deteriorated after vaccination and express doubts about the safety of vaccines.

Then, he went further and viciously accused those parents of hating their own children.  In a dark statement that reveals the depth of his uncontrolled rage, he said: ³¹

  “Anti-vaccine organizations camouflage themselves as a political group, but I call them for what they really are: a hate group,” Dr. Hotez snarled. “They are a hate group that hates their family and hates their children.” 

³² Later he apparently instructed the reporter to alter that last sentence to read “They are a hate group that hates [our] family and hates [our] children,” which is just as ugly and ludicrous as his original statement. 

Branding an organization a “hate group” is not inconsequential. In the 21^st century, the term “hate group” is most frequently used to describe groups of individuals associated with “hate crimes,” which are defined by state laws and include threats, harassment or physical harm.

Hate crimes are motivated by prejudice against someone’s race, color, religion, national origin, ethnicity, sexual orientation or physical or mental disability.³³

A child health advocacy charity like the National Vaccine Information Center that highlights vaccine science research gaps, criticizes paternalism in medical practice, and challenges the use of utilitarianism as the moral foundation for public health policy and law does not qualify as a “hate group,” although Dr. Hotez has done his best to make that defamatory slur stick.

Now Being ”Vaccine Hesitant” Is Being “Anti-science”

In June 2019, in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Peter Hotez wrapped himself in the martyred science crusader cape and wrote about heroically “combating antiscience” that he believes has caused a “deplorable situation,” because the mainstreaming of “antivaccine sentiments” has led to more parents requesting “conscientious exemption affidavits” for their children to attend school without being vaccinated.

³⁴ He alleged that “the antivax and other anti-science movements have conquered the Internet and disseminate misinformation on a scale that far exceeds accurate messaging from scientists,” while complaining that “the vast majority of Americans cannot name a living scientist,” and have no conception of how hard he and his fellow scientists have it as they “struggle over NIH grant applications and wring our hands at weekly lab meetings.”

Oh, Peter. It must be so hard to figure out how to spend the millions of dollars in taxpayer money that your buddies at NIH give to you. Your suffering is so much greater than that of vaccine injured adults and parents struggling to raise vaccine injured children, who can’t afford to pay the crushing medical bills that pile up after vaccines destroy the lives of those for whom the risks of vaccination turn out to be 100 percent. ^{35 36 37 38 39}

Over and over again, this Baylor doc cooking up new biological products, which he wants you to be required to put in your body and the bodies of your children, categorically denies that vaccines cause autism. Hotez argues that “as a parent of an adult daughter with autism,” he absolutely knows there is “no link between any vaccine and autism.” ⁴⁰

Members of Congress Investigating Origins of SARS-CoV-2 Accused of Being “Anti-science”

Beginning in 2020 with the declaration of a coronavirus pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO), Dr. Hotez began ramping up his vendetta against the vaccine hesitant and encouraged scientists, medical doctors and lawmakers to join him in viewing parents of vaccine injured children and anyone who points out the risks and failures of COVID shots as enemies of the state.

In the science journal Microbes and Infection, in May 2020 he accused an “accelerated antivaccine movement” of causing a return of measles to the U.S. and speculated that the “antivaccine movement has grown stronger from the COVID19 pandemic, fueled with fresh conspiracies and new alliances.”

⁴¹  He said that “the antivax lobby falsely claims the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of the US National Institutes of Health, headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci, is behind COVID19, and funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology to perform gain-of-function research to transform an innocuous coronavirus into the lethal and transmissible SARS-CoV-2 virus.”

A year later, in May 2021, US Senator Ron Johnson requested information on why the US State Department halted the government’s only investigation into the origins of the mutated virus.

⁴² At the same time, Hotez told US News & World Report that the mystery of the origins of COVID-19 should be solved by scientists, specifically Chinese scientists. He said, “we need to have the world’s best Chinese and global scientists leading the effort” to “investigate the true origins of COVID-19.” ⁴³

However, the very next month the scientific journal PLoS Biology gave Peter Hotez permission to publish a vitriolic political attack on members of Congress holding an independent congressional investigation into risky NIH-funded gain-of-function research potentially linked to the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

⁴⁴ Unhappy that Congress was not confining its investigation to the WHO narrative alleging that a coronavirus virus jumped out a bat or another animal into a human and spontaneously created a mutant virus that immediately began killing lots of people.

Hotez charged duly elected members of Congress with creating “an unprecedented culture of anti-science intimidation,” and accused “conservative news outlets” of “repeatedly and purposefully promoting disinformation designed to portray key American scientists as enemies.” ⁴⁵

What was really unprecedented about that attack on Congress was that a scientific journal known for scientific rigor gave its stamp of approval to an NIH funded doctor to use the journal as a bully pulpit to compare a former President of the United States and U.S. lawmakers from one political party to Hitler, Mussolini, Marx and Lenin.
Intent on creating a link between what he terms “antiscience aggression” and those who do not agree with him politically, Professor Hotez said:

   “The rise of antiscience in an authoritarian America is notable for its intellectual cover. Experts affiliated with far right-leaning think tanks have adopted positions on herd immunity, vaccinations and other COVID-19 prevention approaches that fit the America First narrative.”

In a sinister aside, he whispered “In some cases, these views are reinforced by intellectuals on the dark web,” an innuendo which invoked disturbing images in the reader’s mind of pornographic and other illicit content. Blaming conservative members of Congress and “conservative news outlets” for “anti-science intimidation” and “aggression against science and scientists in America,”.

Which he said promotes “illness and causes loss of life,” Hotez then delivered the punch line: he called on Congress to protect US government scientists from what he called “political interference” and “extend federal hate crime protections” to scientists like him employed by private universities and research institutes.

Presumably this would include categorizing all public criticism of vaccine science, policy and law and risky scientific research that scientists conduct as “hate speech” to legally silence critics.

Doctors and scientists would be free to use violent rhetoric and engage in anti-social behavior to punish the vaccine hesitant, while cavalierly promoting medical misinformation and disinformation.

The Hotez diatribe in PLoS Biology was a low point in the history of scientific journal publishing, but more was to come.

A Call for Using Coercion to Force Americans to Get COVID Shots

In August 2022, at the height of the Orwellian COVID pandemic response policies featuring lockdowns, electronic surveillance and testing, masking and vaccine mandates imposed on millions of Americans by lawmakers being told by public health officials to do it.

⁴⁶ Peter Hotez joined with 19 other professors, doctors, scientists, attorneys, and journalists from Stanford University, Texas A&M, Yale, Emory, Johns Hopkins, Columbia, Rice, University of Washington and the Universities of California, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, New York and the Clinton Foundation and published in The Lancet a full-throated endorsement of the use of coercion to force children and adults in the U.S. to get a COVID shot in order to hold a job or attend school. ⁴⁷

It was a page right out of Hotez’s old playbook.

One brave dissenting public health physician commented in an independent online forum that The Lancet was promoting “medical fascism.” Pointing out that the article lacked foundational scientific evidence about the safety of COVID-19 shots.

The dissenting physician rightly pointed out that it is unethical and a human rights violation to use coercion to force use of a pharmaceutical product that can cause injury and death by threatening job security and the right to an education. ⁴⁸

Critic of Gain-of-Function Research Investigation Cited for Conflicts of Interest

On Aug. 2, 2022, Dr. Hotez tweeted that congressional hearings  ^49 50 investigating the origins of SARS-CoV-2 and its association with gain-of function research was “a big threat to American biomedical science.”

⁵¹ Like others still insisting that the sudden emergence of a mutated coronavirus in 2019 was a freakish act of nature, ⁵² he branded the lab-leak hypothesis a “conspiracy” theory.

It turns out Dr. Hotez had every reason to try to discredit the congressional investigation into coronavirus gain-of-function research.

Because a week later on Aug. 9, 2022, the U.S. Right to Know organization published an article exposing Peter Hotez for having used a $6.1 million dollar NIH grant spanning 2012 to 2017 to fund development of a SARS vaccine that would respond to a possible zoonotic spillover or “any accidental release from a laboratory.”

⁵³ According to documents and published studies identified by U.S. Right to Know, ⁵⁴ that NIH research grant in part funded gain-of-function research involving a lab-generated chimeric SARS-related coronavirus that was linked to Dr. Shi, also known as “the Bat Lady,” at the Wuhan Institute of Virology ⁵⁵ being investigated by Congress as a potential source of an accidental release of the mutated coronavirus implicated in the COVID pandemic.

One of the oldest and respected scientific journals, the Lancet is owned by the publishing conglomerate Elsevier and wields global influence on the scientific community. Hotez was appointed in 2020 to The Lancet COVID-19 Commission, which had as one its goals an investigation into the origins of the mutated coronavirus.

Even though Hotez had been involved in sponsoring gain-of-function research on the coronavirus for years, he apparently did not inform the head of The Lancet COVID-19 Commission of his glaring conflict of interest.

When the chair of the Commission Jeffrey Sachs, PhD eventually learned about the gain of function research Hotez had conducted, he was quoted by U.S. Right to Know as stating: ⁵⁶

   “Whenever I discussed the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 was a laboratory release, Hotez strongly rejected that possibility, but never explained to me or to the Lancet Commission that he actually had a grant that was based on that very kind of risk.

He should certainly have been clear on that….“I asked all of the Commissioners repeatedly to be transparent about any possible conflicts of interest,” said Sachs.

The Lancet Commission Attacks Natural Rights Guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution

Two months later, on Oct. 8, 2022, The Lancet, published the controversial report entitled The Lancet Commission on lessons for the future from the COVID-19 pandemic. ⁵⁷ Dr. Hotez was listed as a co-author, along with a long list of university professors, doctors, scientists, economists, as well as officials at the United Nations.

In a blatant swipe at civil liberties and natural rights guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution, Hotez and the cadre of elitists at the helm of the global Public Health Empire used the Lancet Commission report to blame the “anti-vaccine movement” in the United States for their own pandemic response failures.

Pledging “solidarity” with the United Nations, of course, they called on America to abandon individual freedoms that limit the power of the state and “reorient” toward a collectivist society, which would require disempowering local and state governments so that only the federal government has the authority to make public health laws and tell citizens what to think about, believe, and do with their bodies and the bodies of their children.

Accompanying the Lancet Commission report was a Lancet editorial entitled “COVID-19: the case for prosociality.” And if you do a Google search using the words “prosociality and communism,” what you find at the top is an article published in Frontiers in Psychology in September 2022 entitled, “How prosocial behaviors are maintained in China: The relationship between communist authority and prosociality.” ⁵⁸

Comparing the “Anti-Vaxxers” to “Global Terrorism”

Frustrated and angry that the “Great Reset” embraced by the World Economic Forum (WEF) ⁵⁹ and United Nations ⁶⁰ in 2020 was met with widespread pushback against COVID shot mandates, in an article published in 2023 in Scientific American, Hotez broadened his attack on the “anti-vaxxers” who he said have created a “killer movement…a major societal lethal force” that is “undermining our national security.”

⁶¹ Linking up “anti-vaxxers” with “the far right” and “anti-science” and “anti-semitism” he accused the unbelievers of operating in a “well-oiled, well-financed antiscience ecosystem.”

Alleging that “This is part of how authoritarian regimes operate: you denigrate science and scientists,” Hotez then proclaimed:⁶²

“We’re going to need help, both from the White House and the United Nations because this is now a politically motivated assault. So we need the White House, for instance, to treat this like any politically motivated attack on the country, whether it’s a cyberattack or global terrorism or nuclear proliferation.”

“The first step is bringing in people from the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Justice and the Department of State… we need an interagency task force [in the U.S.] and the same at the U.N. I don’t think the World Health Organization can solve this problem.

 I think this needs to go to the attention of the U.N. General Assembly and maybe the Security Council and NATO, perhaps, because it is a security threat, and it undermines democracies and the security of countries.”

After Dr. Hotez in 2023 branded people, who talk about how they suffered chronic health problems after vaccination and want to be free to make voluntary vaccination decisions, as anti-science, anti-semitic global terrorists attacking America,⁶³ in August 2024 he had a full blown hissy fit at an international pediatric conference in Columbia.

⁶⁴ He claimed that “Two hundred thousand Americans died because of anti-vaccine aggression [and] anti-science aggression.” He said he had met with the Director of the World Health Organization ⁶⁵ and, once again, upped the ante by calling for the enlistment of intergovernmental security forces like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to intervene because, he emphasized, “this is a security problem.”

Investigating SARS-CoV-2 Lab Origins Is “Anti-Science”

Hotez’s most recent battle cry for a beatdown of the unbelievers coincided perfectly with a paper published in the September Journal of Virology in which 41 immunologists, microbiologists, pediatricians, oncologists, pathologists, and public health doctors from more than two dozen universities attacked U.S.

Lawmakers, scientists and journalists for criticizing Dr. Anthony Fauci and examining evidence that SARS-COV-2 is likely a manmade virus that leaked out of a lab in China. ⁶⁶  Characterizing discussion of the lab leak hypothesis as an attack on science and scientists, they insisted that the origins of SARS-CoV-2 “may never be full resolved” but that “available scientific evidence supports a zoonotic origin.”

They demanded that people stop talking about the “lab leak narrative” because it “fuels mistrust in science and public health infrastructures.”

They complained about what they described as “contentious, disrespectful and unfounded calls for Dr. Fauci to be ‘prosecuted’ and imprisoned for ‘crimes against humanity.”

They complained about proposed restrictions on gain-of-function virology research. Then they declared that “major scientific organizations must unite in developing programs to counter anti-science movements.”

There was no humility or self-reflection about why the people may have legitimate reasons for losing faith in the advice of doctors and scientists.

There was no compassion for those who may have been harmed by biohazard lab safety violations or risky scientific research and oppressive public health policies gone wrong. Instead, they chose to blame the people for no longer trusting them.

It is pretty amazing that what began In the late 20^th century as a simple request by mothers and fathers of DPT vaccine injured children for government to license a less toxic pertussis vaccine, has triggered an all-out war in the 21^st century waged by doctors and scientists on anyone who criticizes science, public health policy or law.

What began as an effort to protect the ethical principle of informed consent to medical risk taking has been turned into a culture war waged by propagandists and profiteers, who are politicizing science so they can use hate speech to eliminate freedom of speech ⁶⁷ and call for use military force to compel people to give up fundamental natural rights.

We do not trust scientists and doctors who shame, threaten, coerce and sanction us for thinking rationally and for exercising freedom of thought, speech and conscience.

The blame for the rise in vaccine hesitancy lies squarely at the feet of doctors and scientists in academia, industry and government who refuse to conduct the good science that will yield knowledge to give people confidence in the safety and effectiveness of public health policies and, instead, behave like thugs whenever they are called out for failing to do their jobs.

The outcome of the vaccine culture war, which is being played out right now in living rooms, schools, doctors ‘offices, government agencies, Congress and state legislatures, legacy and social media and in the board rooms of corporations and politically powerful institutions, will determine whether Americans will live free or be put in chemical chains for the rest of this century.

You can help make your family, your friends and your community aware of the danger of governments failing to resist the siren call for a militarized solution to the rise of vaccine hesitancy. You can defend your right to know and freedom to choose how you and your children stay healthy by educating and working on the ground in your own backyard.

The eight billion people on this planet, including the 340 million people in the United States, can stop the exploitation and the tyranny that threatens to overtake us if we don’t expect someone else to fight the good fight.

No one individual or political party or organization, no one court or one book or movie will save us. Each one of us must arm ourselves with information and courage so we can stand up and save ourselves.

Join with NVIC, the oldest and largest consumer-led non-profit in America, a classic 501C3 charity, working to prevent vaccine injuries and deaths through public education and to defend your right to make voluntary vaccine decisions without being punished for the decision you make.

Get information you can trust about vaccine science, policy and law at NVIC.org. Sign up for our free weekly journal newspaper The Vaccine Reaction at TheVaccineReation.org and register to use the free NVIC Advocacy portal at NVICAdvocacy.org so you can fight the good fight for vaccine freedom of choice in your state.

At NVIC, we believe in the power of one, ⁶⁸ the power of each individual to make a difference.  With strength and commitment, with faith and good will, each one of us can do something every single day to defend truth and freedom.

It’s your health, your family, your choice. And our mission continues:

No forced vaccination. Not in America.

See more here Nvic.org

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