I have come across what is perhaps one of the most jaw-dropping bits of news recently reported, and remember, given the current administration’s use of the signal app for sending war plans to random journalists, there is rather a lot of stiff competition running in the race to claim the “stupidity” crown.
The Texas parents of the child that died of very preventable measles have doubled down on on their decision to not use the vaccine and continue to recommend others copy them. They participated in a a bit of absurd anti-vaccine propaganda on camera – this is where they strongly recommended that others should also avoid having the vaccine in the middle of a measles outbreak that will kill more people…
Do you still feel the same way about the MMR vaccine versus measles and the proper treatment with Dr Ben Edwards?”
The mother did not hesitate. “Absolutely not take the MMR [vaccine],” she said. “The measles wasn’t that bad. [The other children] got over it pretty quickly. And Dr. Edwards was there for us.”
“wasn’t that bad” … FFS your six year old child died.
The degree of both denial and crass stupidity in play here is literally off the charts.
Now hit pause and take a second look at the phrasing of the question they were asked …”the MMR vaccine versus measles and the proper treatment with Dr Ben Edwards?“
MMR Vaccine, the stuff that actually works … vs … “proper” treatment?
WTF!
What exactly is this “proper” treatment and who the f*** framed and loaded an interview question like that?
What is going on here is all via the anti-vaccine advocacy group Children’s Health Defense (as reported by Kiera Butler writing in Mother Jones on March 20) …
Late last week, two Children’s Health Defense staffers, chief scientific officer Brian Hooker and Polly Tommey, the group’s director of programming for its video division, traveled to the west Texas region where the outbreak is most widespread. There, they filmed a conversation with the parents of the unvaccinated six-year-old child who had died of the highly contagious viral disease a few weeks earlier. The young couple, members of the Mennonite community, attributed their other four children’s mild cases of measles to treatments they received from Veritas Wellness.
This week, Children’s Health Defense aired the video of Hooker and Tommey’s conversation with the parents. The harrowing interview could reasonably be interpreted as a strong case in favor of measles vaccination—had she received the MMR immunization, the child would likely still be alive. But stunningly, the anti-vaccine activists see in the parents’ story a very different message: that shots are unnecessary as long as measles patients have access to untested treatments.
Not just “untested“, but totally bogus and utterly useless. A six year old child is dead because of this utterly absurd promotion of quackery.
It get’s worse …
During their interview, the couple repeated several other unfounded claims about measles. The father added through the translator [The parents are members of the Mennonite religious community and so they speak German] that he believed that measles strengthened the immune system overall, for instance, and that their children would then be protected from other diseases like cancer in the future.
Sadly these parents have gulped down the Children’s Health Defense poisoned cool-aid … literally.
This dad might indeed sincerely believe what is is saying, however, it is not in any way factual. The highly accurate technical term to describe this is of course the word “bullshit”. There is also well-established scientific evidence that confirms that even mild cases of measles will wipe your immune system of previously acquired immunity and leave you far more susceptible to many other infections for years to come. (I was writing about that last week here).
In a follow up video on March 19 we get a rather big dose of BS on steroids …
On Wednesday, Children’s Health Defense aired a follow-up video in which Hooker and Tommey claimed that they had obtained the deceased child’s hospital records and had come to the conclusion that she had not died of measles but rather as a result of the hospital using the wrong treatment protocol. The doctor who reviewed the medical records was Pierre Kory, a pulmonologist who gained notoriety during the Covid pandemic for his promotion of the antiparasitic drug ivermectin as a treatment for the disease, despite abundant evidence that it wasn’t effective. The American Board of Internal Medicine has since revoked Kory’s certification.
It’s quackery all the way down, and yet some are willing to buy into all this and so here we are now in the middle of a measles outbreak that should never have happened.
Who exactly are the Children’s Health Defense?
They are the primary source of vaccine disinformation in the US. Founded in as World Mercury Project in 2007 and also chaired by … yes of course … RFK Jnr from 2015 onwards until he dropped out to go into politics.
Via the Wikipedia article on this bunch of total quacks you get a good summary of what they are into …
The group alleges that a large proportion of American children have conditions as diverse as autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, food allergies, cancer, and autoimmune diseases due to exposure to a variety of chemicals and radiation.[16] The chemicals and radiation that the group has blamed and campaigned against include vaccines, pesticides, fluoridation of drinking water, paracetamol (acetaminophen), aluminum, wireless communications.[17][18]
Since this group is Kennedy’s baby, you can anticipate lots more of this is in the pipeline.
Take for example that last bit … “wireless communications” … that they have campaigned against. Earlier this week we got the news that RFK Jnr wants to ban mobiles in schools because Kennedy claims …
“Cell phones also produce electromagnetic radiation, which has been shown to damage, to do neurological damage to kids when it’s around them all day, and to cause cellular damage and even cancer.”
Oh FFS, no, this is total BS.
I recently wrote an article about the claim the mobile phone EMF can supposedly harm you. The claim being made by RFK Jnr is totally bogus …
This has been extensively studied since the 1990s, the answer really is no. The watts your mobile emits is really really low, it will do you no harm.
Let’s get a tad technical for a second. The watts of EMF from a Mobile Phone is non-ionising.
Oh, what does that mean?
That basically means that it does not carry enough energy to ionize atoms or molecules. As a bit of a contrast, ionising radiation, such as X-Rays and Gamma-rays do, and so that has the potential to break chemical bonds and do damage.
Low wattage non-ionising radiation literally can’t harm you, there is not enough energy there.
“Yes but I’m still worried“
People have been concerned, so in 1996 the World Health Organization established the International EMF (Electric and Magnetic Fields) Project to extensively study this.
After over two decades of extensive research, and also literally billions of active users using it daily for over a quarter of a century now, they found nothing and concluded “no adverse health effects have been established as being caused by mobile phone use“
Side Note: Getting kids to not use mobiles in class in a good idea because they need to be paying attention to what is going on. Totally banning them for a completely whacky and totally bogus reason is nuts.
So anyway, as I said above, scratch and sniff the Children’s Health Defense and what you find is quackery all the way down …
Children’s Health Defense® is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. Our mission is ending childhood health epidemics
Well way to go guys, you now have a rising body count and a rampant measles outbreak to your credit.
What about the “proper” Treatments and Veritas Wellness?
So what exactly were those “proper treatments” they are endorsing from Dr. Ben Edwards and his clinic Veritas Wellness?
Well let’s start with this insight.
Here is a gem of a key quote that I have taken directly from the Veritas Wellness website …
Germs and Genes are not the cause of disease
Yes, sorry, I should have warned you that was coming up. Unfortunately you will now need to pause and clean all that coffee you just splattered all over your screen as you read and then digested that nonsense.
What is also inevitable is that like all these quacks, the Veritas Wellness website is a portal designed to sell you high-priced and utterly worthless supplements that will not in any way “cure” or treat anything … for example …
They also want you to join for $35 per month to get “online education and support platform designed to teach you about root causes of diseases“. Permit me to translate that for you. They want you to help enrich them and in exchange you will become a mark for them to sell you lots of snake oil.
As for treating measles, via Mother Jones on March 10, we learn that RFK Jnr has also been backing up the Veritas Wellness quackery as a cure for measles …
The same activist told Mother Jones that she had a phone call last week with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to understand the unique health challenges in the Mennonite community.
Siemens said she had been working with a clinic called Veritas Wellness in Lubbock, Texas, to distribute medications, including Vitamin C, cod liver oil, and the inhaled steroid budesonide.
Wait hang on a second, didn’t he endorse vaccines recently?
Yes he did … but …
On March 2, Kennedy penned an op-ed for Fox News in which he appeared to endorse the measles vaccines, writing that the shots “not only protect individual children from measles but also contribute to community immunity, protecting those who are unable to be vaccinated due to medical reasons.” Yet in an interview last week, Kennedy claimed, without citing research, that treating measles with steroids, antibiotics, and cod liver oil yielded “very, very good results.” Cod liver oil contains Vitamin A, which is often used in much higher concentrations to prevent complications from the disease, including blindness.
I really don’t need to say this, but for completeness – There is no evidence that Cod liver oil either prevents or treats measles – RFK Jnr is simply spouting BS, and yes, he really is revealing his anti-vax credentials there.
As for where Dr. Ben Edwards and his clinic Veritas Wellness is coming from, we also get this insight …
Veritas sells supplements and offers services including “peace consultations,” “movement consultations,” and a “menu” of medications and supplements it can deliver intravenously. According to the website, Dr. Edwards opened the clinic when “a divine appointment in 2011 opened his eyes to the fact that US medical schools only teach a very narrow way of disease and symptom management with pharmaceuticals instead of disease and symptom resolution by addressing root causes.”
“Divine appointment” …??? … to basically abandon real medicine and instead sell useless supplements and quackery.
What is inevitable is that with RFK Jnr in a position to dictate national policy, we are going to be seeing a lot more quackery and a slow decline of real medicine.
Never before in living memory (or even in the history of the US) have we had someone so detached from science and reality at the helm of our federal health agencies
Dr David Gorski
Vaccinated people do not die of measles, do not get immune reset, and do not get sicker than shit. Unvaccinated do. Vitamin A at best, in the vitamin A deficient, decreases mortality by 39%, not the 100% decrease from vaccination.
Dr Mark Crislip
But wait, why did the parents double down when faced with reality?
This itself is a fascinating area of psychological study.
Back in the early 1950s psychologist Leon Festinger along with his students were very interested in this question. They rather famously spotted a story in a local newspaper headlined “Prophecy from Planet. Clarion Call to City: Flee That Flood. It’ll Swamp us on Dec. 21“, and so they decided to infiltrate this group of UFO believers and observe how they responded to the failure of this very specific dated prophecy.
On the date, all the believers sold all they had, and then gathered ready for the UFO to come pick them up. Absolutely nothing happened. So how did they cope with this encounter with the brick wall of reality?
While some did indeed leave the group, those with the highest commitment simply rationalised the failure away and then doubled down on the belief itself. Interestingly enough, this is what the researchers had thought would happen when faced with such a very stark disconfirmation.
The term they coined to describe what happened is cognitive dissonance. It describes the gap that had opened up between the beliefs and reality.
when an action or idea is psychologically inconsistent with the other, people automatically try to resolve the conflict, usually by reframing a side to make the combination congruent. Discomfort is triggered by beliefs clashing with new information or by having to conceptually resolve an issue that involves conflicting sides, whereby the individual tries to find a way to reconcile contradictions to reduce their discomfort
The researchers studying the UFO cult published all the details within what is now a rather famous work of social psychology titled When Prophecy Fails
When a deeply held belief fails, be that political or religious, then often the disconnect between the belief and reality is resolved, not by a rejection of the belief, but rather by increasing a commitment to the belief. This also often motivates believers to strive to recruit others into that same belief.
Huh?
Basically this – believers who find it difficult to abandon their beliefs in the face of disconfirmation, use their available social support to maintain their beliefs, and so they try to increase consonance by recruitment through proselyting, on the grounds that “If more and more people can be persuaded that the system of belief is correct, then clearly it must after all be correct.”
For this to happen specific conditions are needed …
- The belief must be held with a deep conviction, one that motivates them to act on that believe in a big way
- They must also expose themselves to failure in the real world
- The disconfirmation of the belief must be undeniable
- They must also be embedded in a micro-culture that supports the belief (this is where isolated individuals would abandon the belief, but those with social pressure to maintain the belief will instead resolve the dissonance by doubling down on the belief and rationalizating away the failure).
From QAnon to anti-vax, and also all the failed “prophets” that are a dime a dozen these days, Cognitive Dissonance explains so much.
Why does understanding this matter?
Basically because once you begin to understand what is really going on then you have a better shot at a meaningful intervention.
When tackling people ensnared like this then the outcome of the more traditional approaches are all doomed to fail
“Tell them you disagree and they turn away. Show them facts or figures and they question your sources. Appeal to logic and they fail to see your point.“
So what can you do?
- Create a safe space for them, a place where they are more open to self-reflection, a place where they feel respected and not judged. Where they feel empathy, and so you really do need to avoid confrontation or criticism because that will fail.
- Ask open questions that enable them to explore their thinking. By doing this you can help the to resolve the conflict between a belief and reality without pressure.
- Use active listening. “Gosh it must be tough because of the X you explained to me“
- Focus on shared goals or values
- Be patient, it is a slow process. People do need both time and space to resolve such conflicts
Further Reading
- CNN: (March 21): Tracking measles cases in the United States
- CNN: (March 24): ‘Measles is only a plane flight away’: As outbreak surges, experts warn against global health funding cuts
- Science Based Medicine (March 3): Measles is back, and so are all the old antivax tropes about it
- Science Based Medicine (March 18): Vitamin A, Infections and Measles
- Wikipedia: Cognitive dissonance
- Wikipedia: When Prophecy Fails