National Vaccine Information Center Calls Out AAP for Using Public Intimidation to Censor NVIC Flu Prevention Video Offered to Delta Travelers
WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The non-profit National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) is calling public pressure placed on Delta Air Lines by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) to censor an NVIC video about flu prevention an “act of intimidation” to block public access to full and accurate health information about influenza.
“The AAP’s leadership is clearly threatened by educated consumers, who have every right to engage in critical thinking when making choices about how to stay healthy”
NVIC was offered the opportunity to be a paid sponsor of a video about staying well during the flu season that would be included in Delta’s in-flight programming during November 2011. On Nov. 7, Forbes magazine published an article with a copy of a letter signed by the AAP President Robert Block, MD, accusing Delta of “putting children’s lives at risk” by showing travelers the NVIC sponsored video because it contains “harmful messages.”
In the AAP letter, the Pharma-funded medical trade association alleged that “The [NVIC] ad urges viewers to become informed about influenza and how to stay well during the flu season without resorting to the influenza vaccine.”
NVIC co-founder and president Barbara Loe Fisher responded, “Without cause, the AAP has used their considerable financial resources and political influence to intimidate Delta for simply showing a video that offers accurate information about ways to stay healthy during the flu season, including talking with doctors about getting a flu shot. Censorship and attacks on consumer advocacy groups working to institute informed consent protections in public health policies should not be tolerated in this or any society that cherishes free speech and the right to self determination.”
The AAP letter stated that “influenza vaccine continues to be the best way to protect against the disease,” without acknowledging that a recently published scientific study found that the flu vaccine is less than 70 percent effective in preventing influenza, which confirms previous studies questioning influenza vaccine efficacy and effectiveness. A top flu expert at the CDC has said that about 80 percent of flu-like illness reported in the U.S. every year is not influenza but is caused by other viruses and bacteria.
“The AAP’s leadership is clearly threatened by educated consumers, who have every right to engage in critical thinking when making choices about how to stay healthy,” said Fisher. “Why is the AAP so afraid to admit that washing our hands, covering our mouths when coughing, eating nutritious foods, getting enough sleep, exercising, and lowering stress are also important ways to stay well during the flu season and all year around?”
In the letter to Delta, the AAP alleged that NVIC “opposes the nation’s recommended childhood immunization schedule and promotes the unscientific practice of delaying or skipping vaccines altogether.” During NVIC’s three-decades of work to secure vaccine safety and informed consent protections in U.S. public health laws, NVIC has criticized one-size-fits-all vaccine mandates and advocated for more and better quality vaccine safety science but has not told individuals to use a particular vaccine schedule or told them not to get vaccinated.
“NVIC is a non-profit charity led by educated health care consumers. We are not doctors and do not tell people how or when to vaccinate or advise people not to vaccinate,” said NVIC’s Fisher. “We have a long public record of promoting well-informed, voluntary health care decision-making.”
This is the second time this year that the AAP has publicly attacked NVIC and taken action to censor information NVIC has made available to the public. In April, the AAP publicized a similar letter sent to CBS in an unsuccessful attempt to strong arm CBS into removing NVIC’s 15-second message shown on the Jumbotron in Times Square through the month of April.
Parent co-founders of NVIC worked with Congress on the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 and were responsible for securing historic informing, recording and reporting safety provisions in that law. The AAP and vaccine manufacturers lobbied Congress to secure a shield from civil liability for vaccine injuries and deaths in the 1986 law.
“Twenty five years ago, the AAP got liability protection for their pediatrician members, who are no longer accountable in a court of law when the liability-free vaccines they give ending up hurting a child,” said Fisher. “Almost immediately following the 1986 law’s passage, the AAP narrowed medical contraindications to vaccination so that, today, almost no child qualifies for a medical exemption to vaccination. Now, the powerful AAP is lobbying in states like California and Washington to strip parents of the legal right to exercise informed consent to medical risk taking for their children or file non-medical vaccine exemptions. This is becoming a civil and human rights issue involving censorship, inequality, discrimination and persecution of citizens by medical doctors wielding too much power.”
The National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC.org) is a 501C3 charity founded in 1982 by parents of vaccine injured children and is dedicated to preventing vaccine injuries and deaths through public education and protecting the informed consent ethic in medicine.
The AAP wants us to get our shots badly so badly that they'll thwart efforts to release basic information on how people can protect themselves from the flu. They've increase peer pressure to get shots via drug and "Get Your Flu Shot Today" signs at CVS and Walgreens. Something about this campaign smells fishy. Very fishy. I don't trust any group (AAP) who wants something this badly. In fact it makes me want to run for the hills.
Posted by: Sarah | November 17, 2011 at 12:21 PM
P.S Does sure makes Media Scholar's point don't it.
Could someone find that little snippet on You Tube and link it here?
I would like to see it again, because surely I misunderstood their medical advice and medical concerns??? They were talking about melonoma in kids?????
Is there a large or even a small., but significant number of kids getting skin cancer?
Posted by: Benedetta | November 17, 2011 at 09:32 AM
Media Scholar
Sunlight is dangerous according to two doctors on the Fox News this past Sunday!
Kids esp are vunerable!
They should wear sunscreen a lot, put it on as soon as they get back out of the water.
---And---- when they go off to school and spend those thirty minutes (as if schools give such a long time) of recess even if it is - in November!
Vitamin D?? Well take supplements instead and all the vitamin D you need you can make as you walk from the building to your car. I wonder how they knew that????
Posted by: Benedetta | November 17, 2011 at 09:24 AM
P.S.
"Perhaps the greatest evil of immunization lies in its diversion of public attention from true methods of disease prevention. It encourages public authorities to permit all kinds of sanitary defects and social problems to remain undressed, particularly in schools. It ignores the part played by food and sunlight and many other factors in the maintenance of health. It exaggerates the risk of [disease] and works upon the fear of parents. The more it is supported by public authorities, the more will its dangers and disadvantages be concealed or denied."---- M. Beddow Bayly, M.R.C.S., 1944
Posted by: Media Scholar | November 16, 2011 at 11:51 PM
The fact that Influenza vaccines don't work has nothing to do with injecting a worthless vaccine that doesn't work?
The wrong side of this issue is just bonkers. They haven't had a decent scamdemic payoff in at least two years and the "science" bloggers are having to move on to real jobs like Occupy Barbara Loe Fisher.
Posted by: Media Scholar | November 16, 2011 at 11:46 PM
National Vaccine Information Center
I approve of your message and will send out my donation tomorrow!
Posted by: Benedetta | November 16, 2011 at 10:25 PM
Haha, Jake, the Discover article is really rattling them, too! The great and powerful Oz seems to be unravelling a little as of late.
Posted by: Jen | November 16, 2011 at 09:18 PM
Matt Carey has also weighed in, with an answer that competes with Gorski's for its fact-free content:
"Left Brain/Right Brain is also a group of educated health care consumers. Educated enough to reject the NVIC’s message."
"a group of educated health care consumers" - That's funny, because that's not what LBRB is at all - that's not even what they've purported to be. It's the mainstay blog for neurodiverse ideologues to celebrate autism as natural human variation - not as a health care or public health problem to be addressed - and has attempted to justify this by wrapping itself in a veil of autism rights. But now, November 16, 2011, it has changed track to conveniently gain credibility to denounce NVIC's message - and that it's better at interpreting that message than NVIC itself.
And that message according to LBRB is an off-the-record metaphor allegedly made by one of its members and provided to us second-hand by the "master of ceremonies" and brother of a trustee for the "American Council on Science and Health" - denounced as a "front for industry" whose president is "the junk food queen" according to its former administrative director - and whose current medical/executive director previously lost his medical license for his involvement in a scheme to defraud Medicaid out of $6 million, for which the DHHS of all things dubbed him a "highly-untrustworthy individual," upheld in a court-of-law. That's right, he defrauded Medicaid, a government fund for the disabled, including those with autism.
Looks like LBRB should work on actually accomplishing its originally stated premise before all of a sudden changing focus by calling itself "a group of educated health care consumers" in order to make judgments about the motives of a real group of educated health care consumers. Moreover, it's hardly accurate to call LBRB a "group." Even its owner is out of the picture, rarely breaking his indefinite hiatus to make some snide remark about somebody.
LBRB is basically just Matt Carey, and Carey is LBRB - that's where he can pollute the blogosphere with his emotionally-driven denial to misinterpret every fact to feed his preconceived view that his son's autism was entirely inevitable and could not possibly have been influenced by anything else, at least not anything as direct and immediate as a vaccine. And for him, that requires believing the same about every other person with autism in the whole world.
Posted by: Jake Crosby | November 16, 2011 at 07:40 PM
Pharma's online mouthpiece has weighed in, justifying the front group's censorship campaign by throwing his own little pity party:
"As far as "intimidation" goes, it's the anti-vaccine movement that has that down. I ought to know. I've experienced it myself first hand, as a bunch of Age of Autism readers, spurred on by Jake Crosby, tried to get me fired from my job."
Aside from the fact that this happened over a year ago, I was not trying to get him fired from his job and for that matter I don't think any of the readers were either.
Rather, what they were trying to do was inform his workplace that his activities and relationship with the pharmaceutical industry through their institution conflicts with his regular routine writing as a "science"blogger:
http://www.ageofautism.com/2010/06/david-gorskis-financial-pharma-ties-what-he-didnt-tell-you.html
-A perfectly reasonable approach to a problem he had previously kept undisclosed before I hauled it out for the whole internet to see just how "independent" this guy is as he has been claiming for the previous five years. It's no wonder he'd be overly paranoid, for fear of people finding out about and disseminating news of his deceptive antics, which feeds into the just of his argument, which he always tries to keep buried in a screed of typically 1000-2000 words (on his conservative days):
"This is about as blatant an attempt to wrap anti-vaccine views in the mantle of "vaccine safety" and, of course, "health freedom.""
This is beyond the usual Ad Hom approach - He throws up a conspiracy theory, the very thing he accuses all of us of doing, to discredit this ad. Indeed, it's not any of the information in the ad that is incorrect, but the group behind it, and the group behind it according to him is just dedicated to destroying vaccines - why? He doesn't say, he can't even provide a motive, yet the reason why he says this should be obvious to anyone who looks closely enough.
He alleges that we are part of a conspiracy because he is - he knows as well as any of us what the AAP has been up to publishing tobacco science defending mercury in vaccines knowing that its fraud, and supporting - early on - the initiation of these "studies" in the first place as early as Simpsonwood, if not earlier.
He knows he can't defend what was said in these meetings, in these emails, so he does what he's supposed to do - justifying them just like he's justifying the campaign against NVIC's PSA now, and that Delta should only run the pharma front group's, Every Child by Two's ad, instead by throwing up smokescreens about any presumably bad thing any designated "anti-vaccinationist" did or might have done, in reality or dreamed up in his own mind.
Look how he defended the Simpsonwood meeting, even disputing that the Simsponwood retreat is "isolated." He goes to such lengths, he even linked to a google satellite image of the place:
http://www.google.com/maps?q=simpsonwood+loc:+Norcross,+GA&num=10&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
Notice "A" - the actual area where the people met - it's pretty much the one place on the map not surrounded by any other buildings, and if you were to look at an aerial photo of the area, you'd see it was surrounded by trees.
Now look at how he tries to use weasel words to explain the conference wasn't meant to be secret:
"Of course, the real reason Simpsonwood was chosen was not to "ensure complete secrecy," but rather because a huge computer conference was in Atlanta at the same time, and Simpsonwood was the only facility that had space on such short notice."
The huge computer conference in Atlanta forced them to go to Simpsonwood because it would mean ensuring complete secrecy of such a meeting held in Atlanta would be impossible, not because Simpsonwood was the only facility that had space on such short notice. That was only speculative afterthought - not the real reason why they chose Simpsonwood - along with the claim that they "benefited" from the spirit of its closeted location, which Gorski censored out of his blog.
In fact, if we look through all the screeds he wrote at that time in 2005 against RFK's piece only one paragraph of his entire blog actually deals with what was said in the meeting. In an act of sheer desperation, Gorski took a whole, verbose two-paragraph passage from where Kennedy quoted the the troubling lines of the WHO vaccine adviser, John Clements, talking about stifling research that would yield troubling results and about hiding those existing results, reposted it on his blog, hoping to drown out the underlying message to his readers, and then say:
"It sure sounds a whole lot less conspiratorial in context, doesn't it? Dr. Clements was just expressing a quite reasonable fear that lawyers will use very preliminary and unconfirmed studies for their own ends, which is what they do indeed routinely do. Such a concern was not at all unreasonable and is still not unreasonable. In fact, RFK Jr.'s highly selective quoting of Dr. Clements' words is a perfect example of what Dr. Clements was clearly afraid of!"
http://oracknows.blogspot.com/2005/06/saloncom-flushes-its-credibility-down.html
"In context" or translated from Gorskspeak: drowned in two paragraphs worth of text that could not possibly have fit into Kennedy's article, which is why he condensed them to make them more concise to his readers and to conserve page space so it could run in The Rolling Stone.
Yet this is what Gorski calls "RFK Jr.'s highly-selective quoting." But for what "ends?" Gorski doesn't say, for he's talking about a man who has dedicated his life to taking polluters to court as chief prosecuting attorney for a non-profit environmental protection group - he has no vested motive, but the logical insight that injecting mercury into infants is no better than dumping it in the Hudson River. The vested motive, of course, lies with Gorski, which would best explain his insinuation of one about Kennedy.
This is what corporate shills like Gorski do: driven by their own paranoia about the discovery or dissemination of discovery about their reprehensible behavior, they manufacture F.U.D. against those uncovering troubling information about them or their handlers by making up conspiracy theories about the dreamed-up motivations and activities of their critics.
More often than not, it takes a conspirator to concoct a conspiracy theory.
Posted by: Jake Crosby | November 16, 2011 at 07:04 PM
Something here is a tad suspicious:
Just over a month ago, the Whittemore Peterson Institute for Neuro-Immune Disease (WPI) fired its former research director, Judy Mikovits, who led the study that identified a link between a mouse retrovirus to chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), which has since been widely discredited. Now, the non-profit institute has filed a lawsuit against Mikovits, ScienceInsider reported, claiming that she took lab notebooks and documents from her computer that she had no right to take and that could hinder the institute’s research efforts.
http://the-scientist.com/2011/11/15/chronic-fatigued-researcher-sued/
Posted by: GH | November 16, 2011 at 12:25 PM
We need to remember the CBS story from 2008, How Independent Are Vaccine Defenders?, where Sharyl Attkisson reported on the ties between the vaccine makers and the AAP.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/07/25/cbsnews_investigates/main4296175.shtml
The vaccine industry gives millions to the Academy of Pediatrics for conferences, grants, medical education classes and even helped build their headquarters. The totals are kept secret, but public documents reveal bits and pieces.
A $342,000 payment from Wyeth, maker of the pneumococcal vaccine - which makes $2 billion a year in sales.
A $433,000 contribution from Merck, the same year the academy endorsed Merck's HPV vaccine - which made $1.5 billion a year in sales.
Another top donor: Sanofi Aventis, maker of 17 vaccines and a new five-in-one combo shot just added to the childhood vaccine schedule last month.
Anne Dachel, Media
Posted by: Anne McElroy Dachel | November 16, 2011 at 10:14 AM
The AAP is well known for it's dangerous advice.
Here are the final two sentences of a letter that Mike Wagnitz ( Senior Chemist) wrote some time ago:
"...You can then go to the medical search engine "Pubmed" and type in thimerosal. You will get references to 1087 published papers. Except for the papers published in pediatrics, all the other papers focus on the extreme toxicity of thimerosal."
Pediatrics is owned by the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Posted by: Barry | November 16, 2011 at 07:16 AM