A Health Debate: "disinformation", "anti-vaxxer", "conspiracy theorist"

Twelve years ago I wrote a series of 7 article that argued we needed a serious health debate. The problem in having such a debate, since then and before, has been that one side, the Pharmaceutical Medical Establishment (PME), has not wanted to take part in any such discussion. And since the so-called Covid-19 pandemic their refusal to engage has been considerably worse.

Instead the PME has done its best to close down all discussion on important health issues. One of its principle weapons to end debate has been the simple strategy of using certain dismissive words/phrases - such as "disinformation", "anti-vaxxer", "conspiracy theorist", et al.

All these terms are used to stand down discussion on the basis that the best form of defence is attack! The best way of avoiding discussion is to disparage and dismiss anyone, and everyone who disagrees with you.

Essentially, this position happens mainly when one side of an argument, usually the dominant side, but which, for whatever reason, is losing the argument. Why risk a discussion when it might risk undermining the power dynamic, the status quo? It happens regularly, for instance, when a politician, ahead in the polls, refuses to debate with an election rival. It happens when an employee asks an employer for a raise.

Yet it has become commonplace within the field of health, dominated by an immensely powerful pharmaceutical industry. Why should the medical establishment want to risk its dominance? Why should it waste time on anyone who has the audacity to suggest that their drugs and vaccines are neither "safe or effective"? Why should they engage with anyone who suggests that diet and exercise are more important than popping their pills? And there is certainly nothing to gain from speaking to anyone who believes in natural medical therapies, like homeopathy.

So shut down discussion by dismissing all such people who are spreading "disinformation", "anti-vaxxers", or "conspiracy theorists". End of argument, end of discussion.

One ongoing problems is that whilst these terms are used by an elite they are picked up by those who have a closed mind, or those who do not want to consider anything outside what they are being told. Conventional wisdom rules! Leave things as they are. We are busy people, we have other matters to deal with. Those in power must surely know best; they are the experts.

Perhaps the use of "conspiracy theory" is the worst of these repudiating terms. After all there are some very peculiar, even laughable conspiracy theories, ranging from the Flat Earth Society, to Holocaust denial, to fake moon landings, to the assassination of J.F. Kennedy, and the destruction of the twin towers in 9/11.

Yet if and when we come across any of these alleged conspiracy theories it is incumbent upon each of us to consider them, and make up our own minds about their validity. We should not dismiss any one of these, completely out of hand! We should examine the evidence, we should listen to both sides of the argument and reach our own conclusions. This is what intelligent, informed people do.

This is especially important when it comes to health issues. Whether the earth is flat, or the Holocaust did not happen, etc., etc., they are not relevant to our day-to-day lives. They may be interesting, but they are not of immediate concern to our future lives. Health is relevant to each one of us, right now, today, tomorrow - and the medical treatment that we are offered and accept can have a devastating affect on our future wellbeing.

The PME has been telling us for over 200 years that their drugs and vaccines are “safe and effective”, that they have overcome, even vanquished many former 'killer' diseases. Indeed, in the last 4-5 years we have been pummelled with these argument regarding the Covid-19 virus. It was a dangerous pandemic that would kill millions, only the vaccine could save us, and then only if we all took it. And no contrary view or argument being allowed to interfere with the pharmaceutical narrative.

So much of what most people believe and understand about health, and medical treatment, comes entirely from pharmaceutical promotion, and this system of medicine's very specific approach to health. Alternative views are not well known or understood, not least because neither government, conventional medicine, or the mainstream media, are prepared to discuss them with us.

For most people, the health debate is just not happening. The pharmaceutical message reigns supreme, largely unchallenged, dismissed as "misinformation". 

And this at a time when national health services, around the world, are being "broken" by unprecedented epidemics of chronic sickness and disease.

The result is that all our politicians can think of doing is to throw yet more money at the same, old, failed pharmaceutical medical treatment!

The Sad Lament of an Anti-Vaxxer

I read this on Facebook on 15 August 2023. The author, Richard Moskowitz, MD, has given me permission to republish it here. It provides a full explanation and justification for everyone who wishes to be an "anti-vaxxer, or as I prefer to say, to remain "vaccine free".

An Anti-Vaxxer’s Sad Lament

Those of you who know me or are familiar with my work know that I’ve been questioning the scientific basis of vaccinations for over forty years,(1), and that my concerns about them go beyond the side effects of this or that vaccine to the nature of the vaccination process per se. In short, I am that rare case of an honest-to-God “anti-vaxxer,” unlike the vast majority of those unjustly stigmatized with that label, such as the parents of vaccine-injured children, whose only mistake was to have done exactly what they were told, and suffered the devastating consequences of it: “ex-vaxxers” would be a more appropriate term for them.

While I’ve always felt for them and advocated for their cause, my problem with vaccines goes beyond the moral and political duty of redressing the harm that they suffered, to the issue of scientific truth, based on 50+ years of experience as a family doctor, and amply supported by articles in the medical literature, albeit largely unread and ignored. (2). 

I am far from claiming that what I’ve come to believe about them is the complete and final truth; but I do think such views deserve serious consideration, rather than the ridicule and censorship that they commonly receive. So I will begin by summarizing my findings here.

The idea of vaccinating sounds attractive, as a way of preventing large populations from coming down with and suffering from acute infectious diseases, especially the most serious ones like smallpox, diphtheria, and polio, which have killed or maimed so many people who came down with them.  

But vaccines are now so numerous and widely used, even for the common diseases of childhood, that we seldom remember or think to compare how they act with the natural process of coming down with and recovering from the natural diseases, which are acute phenomena of relatively short duration, involving fever and a collaborative effort of various immune mechanisms, and culminating in the expulsion of the offending foreign organism from the body.  This result cannot be achieved by any one of these mechanisms operating independently of the others. 

The natural immunity that results from it is specific, in the familiar sense of protecting the patient against future outbreaks of the same disease, just as vaccines claim to do.  Less obvious but even more important is its non-specific effect, priming the immune system to respond acutely, vigorously, and in concerted fashion to whatever other infections we are exposed to in the future.  

That wouldn’t seem like that big of a deal, except for research that few doctors or patients are aware of, showing that those who come down with and recover from measles, mumps, chickenpox, influenza, and other common acute diseases of childhood are much less likely to develop chronic, autoimmune diseases and cancer later in life than those who are merely vaccinated against them. (3) 

If true, that tells us that vaccinating is not the way to develop a healthy immune system; and we’re much better off learning how to get sick than vaccinating everybody against everything simply because we have the technical know-how to do so.

In contrast, whatever good vaccines may accomplish depends on one thing only, producing specific antibodies in significant quantities over long periods of time, bypassing if not dysregulating all the other collaborative mechanisms. It thus necessarily falls far short of duplicating the natural immunity that good health depends on.  

When a vaccine is injected intramuscularly, there is a brief inflammatory reaction at the injection site, but no local sensitization of the nasopharynx and its epithelium, no co-ordinated mobilization of phagocytes, cytokines, and serum complement, no overt illness, and thus, above all, no reliable mechanism or pathway for getting rid of it. After 14 days or so, yes, there are likely to be measurable titers of specific antibodies in the blood; and, yes, the recipients of many though not all vaccines will be somewhat less likely to come down with the corresponding acute disease, at least in the near future, than they were before.  

But without the acute illness, there is no concerted activation of the cellular system, no priming of the immune mechanism as a whole, no improvement in the general health, no encrypted memory of the infection, and again, no means of expelling the invading viruses, bacteria, or bioengineered fragments derived from them.

Where the vaccine actually goes, how it persuades the antibody-producing cells to continue doing their work over extended periods of time, as it was designed to do, and what price we have to pay for these antibodies and the partial, temporary semblance of immunity that they provide, are questions that it seems we're not supposed to ask, can expect haughty contempt or righteous indignation if we do, and haven't been convincingly answered in any way that helps the public to understand.

What continues to haunt me about the vaccination process is the obvious fact that, unlike the diseases it is supposed to prevent, vaccination is and must be a chronic phenomenon, in that its intended result of achieving continuous antibody synthesis for months and years afterward would seem to require that either the vaccine substance itself or at the information that it conveys remain active inside the body for at least that long.  

It’s worth asking how such long-term carrier states might be achieved, and what effect they might have on the health of vaccine recipients; but for now I’ll just add that it’s dangerously misleading, if not the exact opposite of the truth, to claim that vaccines render us immune to acute diseases, if in fact they merely drive the invading organisms or toxic derivatives of them deep into our vital organs and cause us to harbor them chronically if not permanently instead.

My reluctance to vaccinate originated with a gut feeling that I couldn’t explain, while the hypothesis formulated above was the logical conclusion of a sabbatical year of visiting the immunology that I was never taught in med school.  But it didn’t really come alive for me until I began seeing a lot of chronically sick children in my practice.4  

With so many vaccines being given, several of them even simultaneously at the same visit, it was practically impossible to identify a specific vaccine or component as the culprit, as doctors are trained to do; and it didn’t immediately occur to me to think about the vaccination process itself.  There are a lot of reasons why that link was difficult to see even when I looked for it.

What started me thinking about it was seeing so many kids given vaccines on the approved schedule who were reacting non-specifically to them, by developing a more intense or prolonged version of whatever chronic diseases they were already bothered by.  What still threw me off, even then, was that they all reacted in a characteristic manner that was peculiar to them, no matter which vaccine was given, which disease they had, or how severely they suffered from it.

Eventually I discovered that any vaccine would do, and that several different ones would have the same effect for that child, while the diseases involved ran the whole gamut of pediatric practice, might also attack the unvaccinated, and be brought on by environmental toxins and pollutants as well.
   
Another source of confusion was simply that chronic diseases tend to wax and wane idiosyncratically, not on any preformed or regular schedule.  The only way to see the causal role of vaccines was to treat the children with herbs, acupuncture, or homeopathy until they recovered and were essentially symptom-free for several months.

Then and only then, consistently enough to be the rule, their old disease pattern would recur promptly and dramatically after their next vaccination, whatever it was, such that its causal role became obvious to the parents and anyone else paying attention.  Suppressing the main symptoms with pharmaceutical drugs didn’t clean the slate sufficiently to achieve that clarity.

With the specific effects of each individual vaccine thus essentially hidden, and doctors distracted from considering the generic effect of the vaccination process, they readily fall into line with the industry’s agenda of piling on as many vaccines as we see fit.

Yet investigating the safety of vaccinating against everything, of the process itself, would require nothing more elaborate than comparing the all-cause morbidity and mortality, the overall rate of death and chronic disease, in vaccinated and unvaccinated populations.  The public surely deserves to be told, if only to discredit nay-sayers like me, why our nation, which yields to none in its professed commitment to science, has never seen fit to undertake such an obvious study, even though if not precisely because it could resolve the issue once and for all.  

To summarize, then, my clinical experience strongly suggests that all vaccines, whatever benefits may be ascribed to them, are regularly and significantly implicated in initiating, exacerbating, and reactivating the innumerable chronic diseases of our time. If that much is true, it follows as night from day that subjecting whole populations to repeated doses of more and more of them, with no end in sight, is adding continuously and exponentially to the crushing burden of chronic diseases that we already bear, not as rare coincidences, aberrations, or side effects, but as a built-in feature of their design.

Gripped by the urgency of that realization, and unnerved by our obstinate inability and unwillingness to recognize it, I began combing through the scientific literature, and uncovered a substantial body of reputable, published research along the same lines, (5), studies ignored by most practising physicians, because they directly contradict what we are authoritatively taught, fondly believe, and seldom bother to question.   

Since well before the COVID, thinking it a scientific and moral issue of vital importance, I began emailing leading progressive legislators, pointing out that simply ending the mandates would significantly improve the health of the nation; but not one ever acknowledged even receiving them.  During the 2016 Presidential election season, the drug companies launched a campaign to convince the blue states to eliminate their philosophical and personal-belief exemptions from the vaccines they were requiring, especially measles, because of a few modest outbreaks of the disease that belied the CDC’s claim to have eliminated it from the country.

I reached out to Bernie Sanders, because he’d been railing against the greed and corruption of the drug industry for decades; but his office never wrote back, and in one campaign speech after another he echoed the official CDC line, blaming the unvaccinated for spreading the disease, and thus putting their fellow-citizens at risk. (6)   Similar attempts to inform Liz Warren, AOC, and a few others also failed, leaving me to own up to the fact that vaccination had become essentially a sacred cow, beyond question or doubt, for the public at large.  Nor could I blame them entirely, since their only mistake was having trusted the medical profession and the CDC to tell us the truth about matters of health that they presumably understand better than anyone.   

By 2019, as the outbreaks continued, editorials in the New York Times and other mainstream media were openly castigating “anti-vaxxers,” (7) with Congressman Adam Schiff, an avowed champion of civil rights, explicitly ordering Facebook and Google to suppress all content questioning the vaccine mandates as “disinformation,” and thus violating the First Amendment in the name of a public health emergency that he was doing his level best to create, with every righteous intention, to be sure. (8)

With the COVID pandemic in 2020, the censorship looked to become permanent, as the economy and almost all daily activities were locked down, against the advice of leading epidemiologists. (9)  In 2021, when the vaccines finally became available, the whole population was threatened with loss of jobs and forbidden to travel for refusing them, as the unvaccinated were blamed once again for spreading the virus, even though the vaccine was later admitted to be ineffective in preventing it. (10). Meanwhile, Biden had become President, and the Democrats, abandoning their concern for civil rights in the teeth of the emergency, enforced the mandate more strictly than the Republicans, and did everything possible to discredit the “anti-vaxxers” who resisted or even doubted the need for it, and to silence or punish those who dared to question its safety or tried to publicize its adverse effects.   

In addition to the growing number of doctors who began speaking out against these policies, a number of actors, writers, and politicians, mostly conservative Republicans and libertarians who detested the Biden Administration and government interventions of any kind, were raising their voices as well.

One of the leading dissidents was Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who carries on the name and legacy of his still prominent family, especially his uncle, a beloved former President, and his father, who was also assassinated while running for President himself.  

A successful environmental lawyer who won major judgments against polluters and the government agencies colluding with them, this younger Kennedy also created and led a nonprofit public-interest group, Children’s Health Defense, which publicizes current health issues, including how the drug industry deceives the public about vaccines, and ends up controlling the government agencies meant to regulate them.11  In short, he sounded like a classic New Deal Democrat, championing many of the same values that led me to study and write about this issue in the first place.

For all of these reasons, he became a hero to me and so many others, for taking on these powerful interests and exposing them with passion and eloquence, not least for doing so as a Democrat, at a time when most mainstream Democrats and party leaders were either clueless about the dangers of vaccines, reluctant to speak out against them, or committed to the pro-vaccine agenda now prevailing because their GOP opponents had begun to attack it, largely on libertarian grounds.  

In the run-up to the 2024 Presidential election, when he announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination, RFK Jr. soon attracted a huge following from among the growing multitudes harmed by vaccines, or disenchanted with the censorship and emergency measures imposed under the pandemic. In particular, for the minority of liberal and progressive Democrats like myself who felt the same way, he seemed like our only hope of bringing the vaccine issue into the mainstream of political discourse, as the signature and indeed winning issue for the left that I’ve always thought it was, and now more than ever.  
 
But even at this early stage in the campaign, with the Democratic Convention still a year away, it is already clear that he cannot possibly win the nomination, because the party leadership and their activists at the state and district level are firmly committed to defeating him by any means necessary, so that there is no realistic possibility that he will succeed in bringing the vaccine issue front and center before the electorate and the general public at this time. If that is true, then the only possible result of his candidacy going forward will be to dissuade the 20% of normally Democratic voters who now support him from voting for Biden, the presumptive nominee, and thus quite possibly help to re-elect Trump, who has explicitly and for once truthfully pledged to end our already frail democratic experiment once and for all.  

Preventing that result, at once too horrible to contemplate yet suddenly within reach, must take precedence over the vanishingly unlikely prospect that Kennedy will be allowed to represent the party, when it refuses even to give him the same Secret Service protection it has always allowed its sworn enemies.  It saddens me to have to say this, since it will also mean weakening and burying yet again the cause that I’ve spent the last forty years trying to publicize.   

So this is my plea to RFK Jr., which I can only hope he’ll take to heart:

* Please arrange a private meeting with Joe Biden and other Democratic leaders, and announce your intention to suspend your candidacy for the sake of party unity against Trump.
* Please ask them to give serious attention to your work at Children’s Health Defense, exposing the malfeasance of the vaccine manufacturers in corrupting the CDC and other government agencies that were created to regulate and restrain them.
* Please promise to be a loyal Democrat, to work hard to help re-elect Biden or the party nominee, whoever it turns out to be.
* And this is my plea to President Biden and the Democratic Party leaders, which I hope they will heed as well:
* Please listen carefully to what RFK Jr. and various doctors and scientists have to say about the dangers of vaccines and the successful tactics of the CDC and other agencies to keep them hidden from the public.
* Please appoint him to the Platform Committee, to make use of his research and expertise about vaccines and public health to help formulate party policy about these important issues.

Thank you.
 Respectfully submitted,
 Richard Moskowitz, M. D.

1. Moskowitz, R., “The Case against Immunizations,” Journal of the American Institute of Homeopathy 76:7, March 1983.
2. Moskowitz, Vaccines: a Reappraisal, Skyhorse, New York, 2017, Chapters 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, passim.
3. Cf., for example, Albonico, H., et al., “Febrile Infectious Childhood Diseases in the History of Cancer Patients and Matched Controls,” Medical Hypotheses 51:315, 1998.
4. Moskowitz, 2017, op. cit., Chapter 4, pp. 57-69.
5. Vide supra, note 1.
6. Pollack, H., “All Our Politicians Should Join to End the Dangerous Anti-Vaccination Madness,” Washington Post, February 4, 2015.
7.  “How to Inoculate against Anti-Vaxxers,” Editorial, New York Times,   January 20, 2019.
8. Rodrigo, C., “Schiff Calls out Facebook, Google over Anti-Vaccination Information,” The Hill, February 14, 2019.
9. Cf., for example, “Perspectives on the Pandemic: a Conversation with Dr. Knut Wittkowski,” The Press and the Public Project, thepressandthepublic.com, April 2, 2020; Prof. David Katz, “Is Our Fight against Coronavirus Worse than the Disease?,” New York Times, March 20, 2020; and Michael Osterholm, M.D., “Facing COVID-19 Reality: a National Lockdown Is No Cure,” Washington Post, March 21, 2020.
10.  Cf. President Biden, the White House, September 9, 2021: “This is a pandemic of the unvaccinated . . . ,” vs. Rochelle Walensky, M.D., CNN Interview with Wolf Blitzer, You Tube, August 8, 2021.
11.  Cf., for example, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., “Gates’ Globalist Vaccine Agenda: a Win-Win for Big Pharma and Mandatory Vaccination,” childrenshealthdefense.org, April 9, 2020.

WHO AM I? I am a Pro-Choice Well-Being Advocate

If, like me, you are fed up with being abused by government, the mainstream media (MSM), and conventional medicine about pharmaceutical vaccines, let's make a stand!

• I am not going to have the Covid-19 vaccine, no matter what these 3 pillars of our society say.
• I am fed up with being called an 'anti-vaxxer', or 'vaccine hesitant' - this does not explain my position.
• I am fed up with being told that only vaccines will save the world, return social life to normal, and rescue the economy.
  
• I am fed up with being ignored, never given the chance to explain my position on MSM, and never being given a right to reply to abuse (much of it by journalists).
• I am fed up with insistent reminders from the NHS that I should get vaccinated.

So, the first issue. How should I describe my personal stance? I have been discussing this with several colleagues, and I have decided that this is how I would like to be described.

I AM A PRO-CHOICE, WELL-BEING ADVOCATE

I believe in patient choice, and more widely, in health freedom. This means, in negative terms, that I refuse to be forced into accepting pharmaceutical medication. I believe I have good evidence and information on which to base my stance, both negative and positive. First, the negative reasons.

1. The treatments offered by the conventional medical establishment (CHE) are not effective. Most of them do not work, and the efficacy of all pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines are grossly exaggerated by CHE and the mainstream media (MSM).
2. CHE drug treatments are all dangerous, with adverse drug/vaccine reactions ensuring that their disadvantages far outweigh any benefits.

I do not care if you agree, or disagree with this stance! That is entirely your prerogative. I can defend my position with good quality information, much of it coming from the literature of the CHE itself. I have written a book, freely available on the internet, called "The Failure of Conventional Medicine" and in this I fully explain my position. You may disagree, although you cannot disagree without first knowing what my position is. I am not an 'anti-vaxxer', or 'vaccine hesitant' - without very good reason.

All I ask is that you first seek to understand my position. Do not dismiss me without first knowing what this is.

I am fully aware of the position of CME on vaccination. Everyone does! We have heard nothing else from government, health authorities, and the MSM for over a year now. And these sources of information have been most careful to ensure that my position, as a pro-choice well-being advocate, has never ever been presented or explained.

So what is a 'Pro-Choice Well-Being Advocate'?

First, we are people who believe that personal freedom and liberty is important; and that there is no freedom more important than the freedom to choose our medical treatment when we are ill. We believe that it is unacceptable for government, or one particular medical system, or the corporate-dominated and controlled MSM, to encourage/oblige/force anyone to take pharmaceutical medication. 

And we demand full information, from all side of the health debate. Moreover we want this information to be freely and transparently available to everyone - so that we are all able to make an informed choice. An informed choice is not necessarily a 'correct' choice, or a 'sensible' choice, or even a 'wise' choice; but it is a choice that should not forced on anyone by the 'experts' of one particular medical system.

Second, pro-choice well-being advocates believe in something that is vitally important. Our belief is no longer accepted by the CME but this does not make the CME right. Our reasons for not getting vaccinated are for good positive reasons:

• they are reasons connected with the immune system, supporting and strengthening natural immunity to infection and illness, through diet, nutrition, exercise, life-style choices. And (for me) with homeopathic prophylaxis; and ultimately (should I fall ill) having homeopathy at my side for treatment.

It does not matter to me if you believe this is inadequate, that you think this will not protect me from Covid (or anything else), and that I should still have the vaccine. That is YOUR assessment of what heath is all about. It is most definitely NOT mine! It is not about well-being!

Third, well-being is an importantly different concept to today's normal definition of 'health' - which is why I prefer the term. We believe that everyone is equipped by nature to stay well. Certainly, we can compromise our well-being by poor life-style choices, bad diet, or indeed through the harmful side effects of conventional medical treatment. But this does not make germs (bacteria or viruses) an enemy. They become an enemy when we undermine our personal protection against them. We recognise that we live with germs every second of every day, and that the secret of well-being is to live with them, alongside them, in harmony.

So, our response to Covid-19 is much the same as it is for measles, pertussis, HPV, influenza, et al; plus every other disease for which conventional medicine wants to force drugs/vaccines on us. We support well-being every day by maintaining our immune system, by strengthening our natural immunity. And, importantly, we get on with life without the panic and fear we have been witnessing over Covid-19.

We are not selling drugs or vaccines? We are not promoting anything. We are not profiting from what we do. We believe we keep well, and protect ourselves from illness, by looking after ourselves.

Fourth, we recognise that we are all responsible for our own well-being. Health does not come from a bottle of pills, or even an injection. It comes from within ourselves. What this means is that I cannot be responsible for your health, and that I cannot expect you to be responsible for my health. Well-being is about the decisions we each make about our lifestyle. This is not a selfish position. It is not a decision at all. It is the reality. Our health is in our own hands; it is our responsibility; we make ourself well, or susceptible to sickness, by our own decisions. 

When we get ill natural medical therapies are there to help us support and strengthen our immune systems; but part of that consultation will almost inevitably involve a discussion about the lifestyle choices we have made, and what we can do to enhance our well-being.

Fifth, we recognise that one of the main side effects of pharmaceutical medicines is to compromise our natural immunity, to make the patient more rather than less susceptible to illness. So we avoid them. Pro-choice well-being advocates do not recommend chasing germs, and killing them, as the CHE does. We take this position because we believe, ultimately, they are counter-productive to our well-being.

So advocates of pro-choice well-being cannot agree to vaccination. It is not because we are 'anti-vaccine', or 'vaccine hesitancy'. It is because, for us, health comes from within. We do not believe that conventional medicine is helpful, that it does not understand health, and that ultimately it is contrary to our wellness and well-being.