In 2017, in Scientific American magazine, Dr. Hotez called on the U.S. government and G20 nations to take steps to “snuff out” the “American anti-vaccine movement.” To “snuff out” means to “crush or kill.” Image Source.
Comments by Brian Shilhavy
Editor, Health Impact News
The vaccine civil war in America is heating up here in 2018. Thanks to the power of the alternative media, the true science, or lack thereof, surrounding vaccines and vaccine injuries is being published and read by millions of Americans, while the corporate-sponsored “mainstream” media continues to propagate the myth that all vaccines are safe and effective, and that “the science is settled.”
The claim that “the science is settled” is an intellectually and morally dishonest attempt to silence debate and discussion about the evidence and science, since vaccine products cannot exist in a free market, where lawsuits from those injured and killed by vaccines makes their manufacture and sales impossible without legal protection and government sponsorship. (The U.S. Government through the CDC and financed by American taxpayers is the largest purchaser of vaccines worldwide.)
The only reason the science is not debated today is because of a law passed in 1986 that gave pharmaceutical companies total legal immunity for any injuries or deaths caused by vaccines, and removed any shred of accountability for what has now become quite possibly the most dangerous, legal product in America: vaccines.
Since the data and the science does not support the claim that all vaccines are safe and effective for all people, the vaccine extremists resort to intimidation and threats, while controlling the corporate “mainstream” media and silencing any dissenters.
Debate and discussion of the data and science is not allowed.
What the vast majority of the American public still does not understand, is that the fact that vaccines kill and injure people is not even a fact that is in dispute.
The U.S. Vaccine Court has paid out billions of dollars in damages to American citizens who have suffered crippling injuries or death due to vaccines, and Health Impact News might be the only news source that publishes the Department of Justice (DOJ) reports submitted each quarter on vaccine injuries and deaths.
The Supreme Court of the United States has also ruled that vaccines are “unavoidably unsafe.”
The only thing that is in dispute is how many people are being injured and killed by vaccines. The vaccine extremists, who control Big Pharma and public health policy in U.S. health agencies such as the CDC, would claim that the rate is 1 in a million, without providing any reasonable data to support that claim, and stifling debate that would allow vaccines to come under scrutiny and potentially lead to safer vaccines in the marketplace.
Now, because the alternative media has done an excellent job in educating the public to the real science and data surrounding vaccines, the attacks against anyone who dares to question vaccine safety are becoming more vicious.
Dr. Peter Hotez of Baylor University has viciously attacked parents of vaccine damaged children, accusing them of “hating” their children, and calling on government leaders worldwide to silence their voices.
As editor of Health Impact News, I am presenting two dissenting responses by two extremely well-educated and informed women:
Barbara Loe Fisher, Co-Founder and President of the National Vaccine Information Center, and Mary Holland, law professor at New York University School of Law.
These two distinguished women represent the national cries for vaccine safety, and they represent the effort nationwide to support informed consent to medical procedures like vaccines, opposing the vaccine extremists agenda to mandate vaccines for ALL people in ALL situations ALL of the time, by force if necessary.
Ms. Fisher has been fighting this fight since the 1980s, and America can thank her and her national organization for the few remaining rights Americans have to refuse vaccines, or choose a vaccination schedule in consultation with their family physician that is tailored to the individual needs of their children.
Ms. Fisher opposed the 1986 law that gave legal immunity to Big Pharma, and was instrumental in establishing the National Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. The national organization that she leads, the National Vaccine Information Center, has successfully stood up for parental rights and patient rights for decades now, with representatives in all 50 states watching legislative actions that attempt to take away those rights.
She is obviously a threat to the agenda of the Vaccine Extremists.
Last year, Fisher wrote an incredible treatise titled “From Nuremberg to California: Why Informed Consent Matters in the 21st Century” that I characterized like this:
The controversial topic of vaccines in the U.S. today is primarily a topic about beliefs, and people’s trust in vaccines resembles a religious belief, not an informed opinion based on the facts.
I am not sure in all of my years in covering this very important and very controversial topic, that I have ever found a literary treatise on the subject as eloquent and comprehensive as this piece just put together by Barbara Loe Fisher, the founder of the National Vaccine Information Center.
Revolutions that have changed the course of history have begun on lesser documents and exposés than what Barbara has written here, and I am not exaggerating.
You can read it here.
Mary Holland’s work to expose the legal ramifications of mandatory vaccines is also key in America today, as the U.S. Supreme Court has not ruled on the issue of forced vaccinations since the 1908 Jacobson v. Massachusetts case, and much has changed since 1908.
For example, in 1908 the courts in the U.S. generally believed in eugenics, and forced sterilizations of people deemed mentally incompetent.
Much of that changed after WWII when the world viewed first hand one outcome of the philosophy of eugenics in Nazi Germany, and the Nuremberg trials set forth legal precedence to protect patient rights and informed consent to medical treatments.
Both Barbara Loe Fisher and Mary Holland are past contributors at Health Impact News. You can read Professor Holland’s legal perspectives in this article:
Could Proposed Mandatory Vaccine Laws Survive Legal Challenges?
and watch her presentation to the United Nations on this issue in 2016:
N.Y. Law Professor Addresses U.N. on Government Vaccine Policies Violating the Nuremberg Code
Barbara Loe Fisher and Mary Holland have one more thing in common: they are both mothers of vaccine damaged children, the kind of mothers that Dr. Peter Hotez of Baylor University is now attacking and trying to silence.
Baylor’s Doc Hotez Bullies Parents of Vaccine Injured Children
by Barbara Loe Fisher, Co-Founder and President of NVIC
The Vaccine Reaction
Many years ago when I was having a conversation with a senior official at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) during a public engagement meeting, we explored the reasons for why public health officials and parents of vaccine-injured children were at such odds with each other.
I said it was because we disagreed about the science.
He said, no, it was a disagreement over values and beliefs.
This week a physician dean at Baylor University College of Medicine made it clear that it is a lot about doctors getting off on demonizing and bullying parents of vaccine injured children.
According to an article in the Duke Chronicle, Peter Hotez, MD, PhD gave a global health lecture at Duke University in which he called on medical scientists to “engage the public” to promote more financial investment into the development of more vaccines. [1]
Apparently, he also called on them to counter what he labeled as the “anti-vaccine movement,” which he believes has been “propelled” because “anti-vaccine websites exist with names such as the National Vaccine Information Center.”
The article reported that Dr. Hotez castigated politicians from the “peace, love, granola” political left, who believe that “we have to be careful what we put into our kid’s bodies,” and politicians from the political right, who tell doctors like him “you can’t tell us what to do with our kids.”
But Dr. Hotez 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 label “anti-vaccine” onto parents of vaccine injured children speaking about what happened to their children after vaccination.
Then, he went further and viciously accused those parents of hating their children:
[Anti-vaccine organizations] camouflage themselves as a political group, but I call them for what they really are: a hate group. They are a hate group that hates their family and hates their children. [2]
In an email, he expanded on his personal feelings about the non-profit charity, the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), founded by parents of DPT vaccine injured children, who have worked for 36 years to prevent vaccine injuries and deaths through public education and to secure informed consent protections in vaccine policies and laws. [3, 4]
He said:
The National Vaccine Information Center, is the National Vaccine Misinformation Center. It’s a phony website designed to intimidate and spread false and misleading information about vaccines. The NVIC is an important driver of the antivaxer movement and one that places children’s [sic] in harm’s way to perpetuate its twisted ideology.’
A vaccine developer, a former president of the Sabin Vaccine Institute and director of the Texas Children’s Center for Vaccine Development, Professor Hotez is a doctor with a lot of titles who brings a lot of prestige, power and money to any academic setting in which he works or appears. [5, 6, 7]
He is also the father of a daughter with autism, who he insists is not vaccine injured. [8]
Regardless of the cause of his daughter’s brain and immune system dysfunction, as the parent of a developmentally disabled child, Dr. Hotez should know better than to vent his anger and frustration by striking out at other parents with children requiring special education and lifelong care.
This is not the first time that Dr. Hotez has revealed his prejudice against parents, who disagree with him about the safety of vaccines and one-size-fits-all mandatory vaccination policies.
In 2017, in Scientific American magazine, Dr. Hotez called on the U.S. government and G20 nations to take steps to “snuff out” the “American anti-vaccine movement.” [9]
To “snuff out” means to “crush or kill.” [10]
In his interview for the Duke newspaper, Dr. Hotez chose to use the word “hate” four times in two sentences when he defamed the National Vaccine Information Center by calling it a “hate group.”
Branding an organization a “hate group” is not an inconsequential action, morally or legally.
In the 21st 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. [11]
In a July 2017 commentary, Class and Race Profiling in the Vaccine Culture War, I described how some physicians and lawyers in academia have been systematically fomenting fear, hatred and prejudice against any parent or physician who talks about the reality of vaccine injuries and deaths and defends the informed consent principle, which has been the ethical standard for the ethical practice of medicine since World War II. [12]
A child health advocacy group that points out vaccine science research gaps, criticizes paternalism in medical practice, and challenges the use of utilitarianism as the moral foundation for public health policy does not qualify as a “hate group.” [13, 14]
Prestigious universities like Baylor and Duke, which receive substantial funding from government health agencies to develop and test new vaccines, should have a minimum standard of conduct for professors, whether they are employed to teach students or perform research. [15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22]
Engaging in defamatory speech and using violent imagery to call on governments to “snuff out” people for exercising freedom of thought, speech, conscience and religious belief does not meet even a minimum standard for civil conduct.
Regardless of what vaccine developers and forced vaccination proponents like Dr. Hotez choose to do, the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) will continue to publish well referenced information on NVIC.org anchored with links to the CDC, FDA, NIH, National Academy of Sciences, vaccine manufacturer package inserts, articles published in the medical literature, state vaccine laws and other information resources to assist those making educated decisions about vaccination for themselves and their minor children.
We will continue to provide a forum for Americans to testify about their personal experiences with vaccination, [23, 24] we will continue to defend the legal right to exercise freedom of thought, speech, conscience, religious belief and informed consent, all of which have been recognized internationally as human rights. [25, 26]
In a Valentine’s Day 2018 vaccine education awareness campaign, supporters of the National Vaccine Information Center communicated the following two messages to their friends and families:
“I love my children and protecting all children” and “Let all that you do be done in love.”
Those are messages that Dr. Hotez and other doctors, who bully parents because they are upset with a challenge to their wisdom and authority on the subject of health and vaccination, do not understand. [27, 28]
The doctors operating the mandatory vaccination system with an iron fist, who refuse to acknowledge or address the suffering of people for whom the risks of vaccination turned out to be 100 percent, would do well to reflect upon the primary role they have played in the crisis of public trust in the safety of vaccines and doctors forcing everyone to use them.
Read the full article at TVR.org.
NYU Law Professor Mary Holland’s Response
Mary S. Holland
22 Washington Square North,
B-16 New York, NY 10011
(212) 998-6212
February 20, 2018
Dr. Peter Hotez, M.D.
Dean, National School of Tropical Medicine
Baylor College of Medicine
Houston, TX
Dear Dr. Hotez:
It is with sadness and distress that I read of your inaugural Victor J. Dzau Global Health Lecture Series at Duke University.
Based on reporting in the February 20, 2018 Duke Chronicle, I understand that you accused those whom you brand “anti-vaccine” as “a hate group that hates their family and hates their children.”
Let me explain why I find your remarks both offensive and off-the-mark.
Like you, I am the parent of a young adult with autism. Unlike you, I believe that vaccine injury is by far the most plausible explanation for my son’s onset of autism in his second year of life.
Through extensive education and work with groups that you dub “anti-vaccine,” I came to understand that vaccine-induced encephalopathy, which can manifest with “features of autism,” is a well-known phenomenon.
Indeed, colleagues and I revealed that the federal Vaccine Injury Compensation Program has been compensating such cases of brain injury, with concomitant autism, since the program’s inception in 1988.
My mother, the late Dr. Jimmie C. Holland, a psychiatrist, was an early female graduate of Baylor College of Medicine in 1952; she was one of three women in her class.
In 1992, the College honored her with its Distinguished Alumni Award.
I regret that she died at the end of 2017, but until that time, she loved her grandson with autism with all her heart. She actively supported my advocacy to look more deeply into questions of vaccine-induced autism, making invaluable contributions to the Elizabeth Birt Center for Autism Law and Advocacy, the Autism Action Network, the Center for Personal Rights, and Health Choice, all organizations focused on the links between the autism epidemic and the sharp rise in infant vaccines since the late 1980’s.
Was my mother, a distinguished alumna of Baylor College of Medicine an “anti-vaxxer who hated her family”? Really?
The powerful #MeToo movement has made the country understand that for too long, girls’ and womens’ assertions of sexual violence and abuse have been marginalized, disparaged and rejected.
Doctors, like Dr. Larry Nasser, and prestigious universities, like Michigan State University, have played shameful roles in these crimes against children and women.
The parallel to the female-dominated vaccine choice and vaccine safety movement is all too obvious. Ad hominem (or more accurately ad hominae) arguments, like labeling those who disagree with you as “hate groups,” does your viewpoint no favors.
The appropriate role for vaccines in national public health deserves serious discussion among all stakeholders, including those who advocate for vaccines, those who oppose them, and every stripe in between.
This is a serious, contentious debate, implicating fundamental questions of prior, free and informed consent; the medical principle of ‘first do no harm;’ public health; science; and even the role of government itself.
Academic institutions and leaders should be embracing this conversation, not seeking to squelch it.
I would welcome the opportunity to debate these questions with you in an open, respectful, academic setting. I would be pleased to invite you to come to the NYU School of Law, where I am on the faculty, or I would be pleased to come to Baylor or Duke or any place else to engage in such discourse.
I believe we would make far more progress in this thorny area by openly discussing the issues together than by making inflammatory, hurtful and simply false attributions to those with whom we disagree.
Sincerely yours,
Mary S. Holland, Esq.
Cc: Dr. Linda A. Livingstone, President, Baylor University
Take Action! Demand Dr. Hotez’s Immediate Termination!
Baylor University, where Dr. Peter Hotez serves as Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine, presents themselves as a “A Private Christian University and a Nationally Ranked Research Institution.”
Their About Us page states that this is their “Values and Vision” statement:
Baylor’s mission is to educate students for worldwide leadership and service by integrating academic excellence and Christian commitment in a caring community.
Do Dr. Hotez’s attacks against parents of vaccine-injured children fit in with Baylor’s supposedly Christian philosophy?
Linda A. Livingstone is the current president of Baylor University. The phone number to her office is published here. (254-710-3555)
The American Civil War regarding vaccines and the attempt to make vaccines mandatory for ALL Americans is not a fair fight.
On the one side is the massive pharmaceutical industry that is well-funded, and backed by the U.S. government supported by American tax dollars, which also controls the U.S. corporate media.
On the other side are leaders like Barbara Loe Fisher with her poorly funded non-profit organization staffed mainly by volunteers, and Mary Holland, who do not have the resources to really challenge these attacks against them.
They must rely on the Constitutional First Amendment of Freedom of the Press to present the other side of the conflict. They are dependent on YOU, the public, to supply grassroots efforts to fight this battle.
And we can start by demanding that Dr. Hotez be reprimanded and removed from Baylor University.
Comment on this article at VaccineImpact.com.
References
1 Chen Y. ‘Part of this is our fault’: Global Health expert talks anti-vaccine movement, preventable diseases. Duke Chronicle Feb. 20, 2018.
2 Ibid.
3 NVIC.org. NVIC’s History. February 2018.
4 Fisher BL. The Moral Right to Conscientious, Philosophical and Personal Belief Exemption to Vaccination. National Vaccine Advisory Committee May 2, 1997.
5 Hotez P. Curriculum Vitae & Biography July 2017.
6 Nace M. 2nd Annual Vaccine Biotechnology Conference at Texas Medical Center Highlights Need for Further Commercial Participation. Bionews Texas Oct. 17, 2013.
7 Hotez P. In New Book: Dr. Peter J. Hotez Argues Most Neglected Tropic Diseases Can Be Found in World’s Wealthiest Countries. TMC News Sept. 6, 2016.
8 Hotez P. Fathering Autism. Washington Post July 1, 2008.
9 Hotez PJ. Will An American Led Anti-Vaccine Movement Subvert Global Health? Scientific American Mar. 3, 2016.
10 Dictionary.com. Definition of snuff out.
11 US Legal. Hate Crime Law and Legal Definition.
12 Fisher BL. Class and Race Profiling in the Vaccine Culture War. National Vaccine Information Center July 17, 2018.
13 Fisher BL. The Need for Better Quality Vaccine Safety Science. Presentation to the Institute of Medicine Committee on the Assessment of Studies of Health Outcomes Related to the Recommended Childhood Immunization Schedule. Feb. 9, 2012.
14 Fisher BL. Forced Vaccination: The Tragic Legacy of Jacobson v. Massachusetts. National Vaccine Information Center Nov. 2, 2016.
15 Baylor College of Medicine. Vaccine Research Grants.
16 Baylor College of Medicine. National Institutes of Health Funding.
17 Baylor College of Medicine. Vaccine Clinical Trials.
18 Baylor College of Medicine. Vaccine Clinical Trials.
19 Duke University School of Medicine. Duke Human Vaccine Institute.
20 Duke University. Department of Medicine Grants and Funding and Research Funding.
21 Idrus AA. Duke University scores $20M from NIH to develop HIV vaccine. Fierce Pharma Apr. 9, 2015.
22 Duke Health. Vaccine Clinical Trials.
23 National Vaccine Information Center. International Memorial for Vaccine Victims.
24 National Vaccine Information Center. Cry for Vaccine Freedom Wall.
25 Fisher BL. From Nuremberg to California: Why Informed Consent Matters in the 21st Century. National Vaccine Information Center Oct. 24, 2017.
26 National Vaccine Information Center. NVIC Advocacy Portal.
27 Fagone J. Will this Doctor Hurt Your Baby? Philadelphia Magazine June 2009.
28 Hotez P. Peter Hotez vs. Measles and the Anti-Vaccine Movement. Texas Monthly December 2017.
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Leaving a lucrative career as a nephrologist (kidney doctor), Dr. Suzanne Humphries is now free to actually help cure people.
In this autobiography she explains why good doctors are constrained within the current corrupt medical system from practicing real, ethical medicine.
One of the sane voices when it comes to examining the science behind modern-day vaccines, no pro-vaccine extremist doctors have ever dared to debate her in public.
Medical Doctors Opposed to Forced Vaccinations – Should Their Views be Silenced?
One of the biggest myths being propagated in the compliant mainstream media today is that doctors are either pro-vaccine or anti-vaccine, and that the anti-vaccine doctors are all “quacks.”
However, nothing could be further from the truth in the vaccine debate. Doctors are not unified at all on their positions regarding “the science” of vaccines, nor are they unified in the position of removing informed consent to a medical procedure like vaccines.
The two most extreme positions are those doctors who are 100% against vaccines and do not administer them at all, and those doctors that believe that ALL vaccines are safe and effective for ALL people, ALL the time, by force if necessary.
Very few doctors fall into either of these two extremist positions, and yet it is the extreme pro-vaccine position that is presented by the U.S. Government and mainstream media as being the dominant position of the medical field.
In between these two extreme views, however, is where the vast majority of doctors practicing today would probably categorize their position. Many doctors who consider themselves “pro-vaccine,” for example, do not believe that every single vaccine is appropriate for every single individual.
Many doctors recommend a “delayed” vaccine schedule for some patients, and not always the recommended one-size-fits-all CDC childhood schedule. Other doctors choose to recommend vaccines based on the actual science and merit of each vaccine, recommending some, while determining that others are not worth the risk for children, such as the suspect seasonal flu shot.
These doctors who do not hold extreme positions would be opposed to government-mandated vaccinations and the removal of all parental exemptions.
In this article, I am going to summarize the many doctors today who do not take the most extremist pro-vaccine position, which is probably not held by very many doctors at all, in spite of what the pharmaceutical industry, the federal government, and the mainstream media would like the public to believe.
