The Guardian UK: Trump Appears to Have Abandonned Vaccine Safety Promise
Vaccine Dissidents: What Should Our Long Term Goals Be?

Law Professor Mary Holland Responds to Dr. Peter Hotez Calling Vaccine Safety Advocates "A Hate Group"

HotezFrom our friends at Health Choice:

On Tuesday, February 20th, the Duke Chronicle reported that vaccine researcher, Dr. Peter Hotez spoke at the Duke Global Health Institute in the first lecture of the Victor J. Dzau Global Health Lecture Fund Series, established by Dzau in 2017, as part of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Global Health Matching Grant.

Hotez reported remarks include the claim that, there is no link between autism and vaccines, and that vaccine safety and choice advocacy groups, including Texans for Vaccine Choice and NVIC, are “[Anti-vaccine organizations] camouflage themselves as a political group, but I call them for what they really are: a hate group,” Hotez said. “They are a hate group that hates their family and hates their children.”

Professor Mary Holland of NYU Law School has penned a letter to Dr. Hotez.  We join her in sentiments and demand an apology from Dr. Hotez for his smear of vaccine injury families and the organizations who represent them in their fight for full informed consent in vaccination.

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

Comments

Patrick M.

Just the sort of non-ethical, "Fachidiot" background that litters the American landscape nowadays and causes hurried vaccination (development) to become a problem in the first place.

no-vac

If somebody is taking blood money from pharmaceutical mafias to lie about safety of vaccines, he becomes their slave and must do what they order him.

Barry Stern

Some Duke professors are intellectually honest. This one seems to like jumping to conclusions as much of the faculty did when the university's lacrosse team was unjustifiably accused of malfeasance. Hotez's outlandish comments confirm that "medical science" is an oxymoron...like "government intelligence." Hopefully, our current leadership can drain the swamp and bring respectability back to such terms.

Jeannette Bishop

Query: I grew up hearing the question "What to do you want to be when you grow up?" so much. My answer probably should have been something like, "a good person," but it didn't take me too long to understand that I was supposed to answer with a job title, like my purpose in life, maybe even my identity, would become defined as a job I obtained or was aiming for, which at the time was being greatly expanded in possibilities each year through grade school, righting the clearly to be understood injustice of placing any limitation on what "job title" I could aim for as a woman--whatever the actual value, it was a programming that implied I was being denied a great personal value without a job title. That carried in some angst in a culture that still wanted to see moms stay at home and prioritize mom being there for her children to the greatest extent possible...it was almost like you were automatically less if you didn't have a job title to answer to the question "what do you do?" for part of the day, anyway, and brought out comebacks like pointing out how many "jobs" mothering might actually encompass, ironically including PR for motherhood, apparently...

Is this stemming from human nature? Or is this trying to glorify valuing the type of societal contribution that transfers resources rather easily (mainly via taxes, but I'm sure the labor production sometimes has some value for the tax garnerers too) into certain people's hands? It occurs to me also that getting the vast majority ultimately working (and really badly wanting to keep working or otherwise very limited in self-created entrepreneurial opportunities...maybe even fearful of having no clear "identity" that way) for a few at the top of a control-freakish system might be a profound control mechanism for their corrupt agendas, too...

Anyway...it almost seems to me like this innate tendency, or maybe well-programmed tendency, either has people putting the stability and perceived character of their own careers, maybe trying to protect their very identity over the very health and well-being of the next generation, even one's own in that generation (of course it helps if the whole system insists that your "job" is all about "protecting the well-being of children"). But many seem to by default take that job-protecting position on a concern that doesn't even really impact their own work, maybe out of solidarity "I'll watch out for your identity if you watch out for mine?"

...it's either believe something this visceral is going on, or I might have to resort to assuming too many in our race (at least in our rather polluted state of health) are all about comfort and the smallest of conveniences right down to what they will allows themselves to consider in their thoughts....(or I might have to undergo more expansion of ability to understand human nature than I may be currently capable of...)

Craig

When you believe you are morally superior, when you have dehumanized those you disagree with, then you can justify almost anything. That is what Hotez is doing here.

Hans Litten

https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2017/02/21/vaccines-linked-to-mental-disorders-by-yale-study/

Vaccines linked to mental disorders by Yale study

A recent Yale study has called into question the safety of vaccines and could lend fuel to anti-vaccine advocates like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has already written a piece covering the study on the news site EcoWatch.

The study, published last month in the journal Frontiers in Psychiatry, reports that patients diagnosed with neuropsychiatric disorders like obsessive-compulsive disorder and anorexia nervosa were more likely to have received vaccinations three months prior to their diagnoses. Though the collaboration between researchers at Pennsylvania State University and the Yale Child Study Center yielded results that seem to dispute the safety of vaccines, the authors asserted that the study needs replication on a larger scale and does not establish a causal relationship between vaccines and neuropsychiatric disorders.

Morag

Sounds like a conceited way to see which way the wind blows -Vane?
The self serving "Selfies" working within the health and social care landscape ,with clear limits and boundaries, have inentified severe training deficiencies. Some Doctors obviously urgently need remedial re-training in the absolute basics of professional acceptible behaviour and conduct,as stethescopes and microscopes giving the professional conduct a"big stiffie "in public ,definately is "Not the done thing" and "Certainly "Not a good look either" in danger of knocking it's own lip salve, for six sideways.
Wily old rascalls from Lochinver taught us well that. "Lackeys of lackeys always have been, and always will be, a hundred times worse than the servant of a servant."

Jeannette Bishop

Completely off-topic, reporter Ben Swann is continuing his Reality Check & Truth In Media reporting:

http://truthinmedia.com/

Autism Investigated

"the female-dominated vaccine choice and vaccine safety movement"

Um, pretty sure that's an incorrect statement - the key people with a relevant science background seem to be mostly men.

Jake Crosby, MPH

The Original Someone #1

I really cannot fathom the level of "hatred" a person must possess in order to think that killing or maiming a previously healthy child is justifiable for --- well--- any reason at all(!)-- up to and including the mythical concept of "herd immunity". These people are sick and full of hatred for anyone who has a child that cannot withstand the insane barrage of vaccines that profit an industry enormously, yet do little else besides harm babies, children, and adults with never ending, completely unscientific, entirely irrational, pharma stakeholder endorsed vaccine "schedules".

Margaret Jaeger

Reason has also departed from the worshippers of the rhetoric of medical science..groups..... and many of the workers who we so desperately need in this world. Just the mention of vaccine damage brings out hate speech with name calling, and no facts to support their ...worship. In their schooling and training, they must be being taught that any one calling for vaccine reform are haters of vaccine science, totally untrue,,but many seem to accept that as the holy truth and a reason to hate and speak hate themselves, which they don't even seem to notice what they're doing is hate. Then to have some bigwig spread the hate across a broad audience will guarantee harm will come to those who advocate for clean vaccines and a revamp of recommended scheduling. The hate war goes on......they are asleep at the wheel.

no-vac

Of course, the parents who want to protect children from being poisoned, maimed or murdered with toxic vaccines must hate their own and other children. You can't be more moronic and hypocritical than this pharma-globalist puppet dr. Hotez.

Jeannette Bishop

...I guess this isn't exactly atypical of others associated with the Gates Foundation...

If he agrees to debates with Professor Holland, that would be pretty atypical. I hope he does and appreciate greatly Mary Holland's response and willing invitation!

annie

Soooo we're a "hate group" that hates ourselves?! That is as absurd as referring to someone who vaccinated her child or who fights for a safer vaccine program as "anti-vaccine".

Bill

The comments by (alleged) "Dr." Hotez were at best very inappropriate.
Yes, they DO themselves constitute "hate speech".
My use here of (alleged), and "Dr." in reference to Mr. Hotez, is to indicate that
I DO NOT consider him a healer.
He *might* have an MD degree, but that doesn't make him a healer.
Given his pro-vax stance, he seems to me like just another PhRMA shill....
Even PhRMA shills have autistic children....

Patricia pratt

I honestly believe this man is now so fearful that he has been terribly wrong about the issue of vaccine injury, in particular encephalopathy, that he has resorted to 'hate ' speech. His world is collapsing around him and he knows it. He is hitting out at the most vulnerable in society. This is not the behavior of a rational and balanced physician.

Carol

Hotez should get his tin-earitis treated.

Greg

A few threads down Michael wrote...

Peter Hotez is angry just like so many parents who have learned the hard way that vaccines do carry the risk of the kind of damage he see's in his daughter Rachel. His anger is misdirected. He needs to direct his anger and energy at those institutions who have betrayed the public's trust. He has turned his back on his vaccine-damaged daughter and thousands of other children to continue down the only road he knows.

Indeed Michael, I have also witnessed similar 'displaced' anger from autistic parents who also vehemently deny the link. Should we then see Hotez's insult as more of a projection, how he is really thinking about himself? Not so much that he hates his daugter, but by denying the truth, and, much worse, joining the coverup, he is quite aware that his betrayal is not consistent with being a loving parent.

Angus Files

Hoetz needs more than a pair of Harry Potter,`I am clever specs on`, to make any of his hurtful nonsense seem credible,we all don`t speak and live Pharma Parseltongue.


Pharma For Prison

MMR RIP

bob moffit

'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."

Unfortunately .. while common sense dictates .. "national public health deserves serious discussion among all stakeholders" .. those "stakeholders" .. who "advocate for vaccines " .. much prefer to demonize those who "oppose them" .. such as .. calling them a "hate group that hates their family and their children" .. rather than actually "embracing this conversation".

There is an old trial lawyers' saying “When the facts are on your side, pound the facts. When the law is on your side, pound the law. When neither is on you side, pound the table"

Who can blame someone like Dr Hotez for resorting to such hateful rhetoric .. after all ... he of all people knows he has neither the facts or law on his side ..

John Stone

By branding opponents as “a hate group” Dr Hotez is indulging in hate rhetoric - reason has deserted him.

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