A Pox on the Media
By Cathy Jameson
Chicken pox was in the news again. Quite a few children from a school in North Carolina have come down with it. Local media quickly picked up the story. National and international media outlets copy/pasted that story and turned it into a major headline. When my kids caught the chicken pox, it wasn’t front-page news. But that was way back then. Today, things are different. I noticed how different with each news story I read over the last two weeks.
It wasn’t so much that children caught a childhood illness that was being reported. More focus was on the parents of these children. Making sure to point out that the kids were at school with a religious vaccine exemption, as they have every right to be, the parents were made out to be irresponsible. What a world of difference life is for today’s parents whose children get sick with chicken pox compared to those depicted years ago. Name calling was non-existent. Judging a parent and their beliefs was unheard of. As was the case when my kids came down with it, chicken pox and the temporary inconvenience it’s known to bring, was simply part of life. I was reminded of that after seeing two television show reruns about two months ago that included characters coming down with chicken pox. After seeing those shows, which were quite popular when they originally aired, curiosity got the best of me. How many other shows used this illness in their stories? I had to find out.
The more titles I searched, the more shows I found that included chicken pox! What was interesting to note was the media never swooped in to badger any of these characters. Why would they? As Arthur’s father states matter-of-factly in the kid’s show Arthur, the media would never be involved in the storyline because, “It’s chicken pox. It’s just a normal childhood illness. I had it…your mom had it…” (Season 1, Episode 18; 1997) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__aSJkgOyrc No big whoop, right? Same goes for Caillou. He’s also told by his mother just the facts, “You won’t be sick very long. You’ll see.” And how right she was! He really would be outside playing in the garden soon enough. (Season 1, Episode 52; 1997)
Since it is a contagious disease, other shows were sure to feature multiple characters being sick. Several family members from Full House dealt with the disease together in A Pox in Our House (Season 1, Episode 15; 1988). I don’t usually read YouTube comments, but I started to while looking at this clip. If you read through them, you’ll see that most are positive and about the cuteness of the events in the episode. Seemingly out of the blue, one person chimed in stating that a chicken pox vaccine was not around when this show aired. While one was not licensed here in the States until 1995, a live attenuated virus vaccine had been in production in Japan as early as the 1970s. It wasn’t until 1988 that a chicken pox vaccine was released in Japan and also in Korea.
Vaccine availability or not, shows that aired beyond the year 1995 continued to include chicken pox-themed content. Writers of children’s and family shows, as well as prime time sitcoms, continued to add humor to these scenes as well. That was apparent when Chuckie, from Rugrats, was convinced by his pals that the chicken pox was going to turn him into a real chicken in the Chicken Pops story. (Season 4, Episode 4; 1997). That’s just a short clip. The full episode can be seen here but requires payment.
We head into early 2000s TV with continued talk of those pox. Older kids and adults are not spared the disease. I couldn’t find video, but Little Bill aired a show (Season 1, Episode 9; 2000) titled The Chicken Pox. As with the others from previous decades, no harm, no foul in this episode—just Little Bill missing out on a baseball game while he deals with those itchy, itchy chicken pox. Speaking of how itchy they can be, “Hardest part is not to scratch,” Dexter from Dexter’s Laboratory is told. He can’t help it though and just wants to scratch during the short video clip of this animated television show. (Season 4, Episode 34; 2002) We hear some common sense and that reassurance again – that the chicken pox is not serious, in That’s So Raven: “Don’t worry, guys. It’s no big deal.” (Season 2, Episode 3; 2003)
While not unusual, cases of chicken pox in adults are possible and can be as annoying as it is for young children. When Norm hears that Sam Malone from Cheers is home with it, he says, “…it can be pretty painful for an adult and highly contagious, too…” Even so, the opening scene ends showing Sam in bed and surrounded by a gaggle of lovely ladies. (Season 8, Episode 23; 1990)
Shows from the 1950s and through the 1990s didn’t mind adding a 7-10 day viral illnesses to their stories. Producers didn’t hide or demean anyone as they did so. As early as 1959, chicken pox was part of TV. Poor Beaver from the popular Leave it to Beaver TV show has to stay in bed after coming down with it. I couldn’t find any playable video, but the description sounded no alarms. (Episode 20, Season 2; 1959) Back then, and through to the early 2000s shows, chicken pox was nothing to fear. Adding it and calling it what it was, a typical childhood illness, made audiences laugh for decades. Friends, like other popular shows even include the name of the disease in episode titles: The One With Chicken Pox. (Season 2, Episode 26; 1996) How’s that for normalizing something people never used to fear?
Keeping scenes accurate – the onset of fever, the fatigue, the intense desire to itch as well as the gradual and inevitable recovery from the illness, allowed viewers to feel sympathetic to their favorite on-screen actors, even if they’d just made a horrible choice in a previous episode like Bailey did in Party of Five. (Season 3, Episode 8; 1996)
I haven’t looked for any feature films that may include chicken pox yet, but just a few years ago, one of the largest film studios, Universal Pictures, shared a message. Now viewed over 12 million times and from one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, we learned that Angelina Jolie wouldn’t get to partake in the premier of her latest film. Why? Well, she came down with the chicken pox. (14 December 2014) I was happy to learn that she wasn’t out of commission for too long. By January 2nd, she’d bounced back and was in studios doing interviews again.
Fast forward to this year. A newly televised show based on a UK book series from the 1960s, called Topsy and Tim, posted this video in the middle of 2018. Here’s the story being read aloud: What’s notable in the story is that there’s no doom and no real gloom beyond the typical symptoms one would expect. As with every other show: Child feels ill. Fever sets in. Pox appear. Parent helps to manage and treat the symptoms. Child returns to regular activities. Family life returns to normal.
You get the picture.
Speaking of pictures, this one spoke volumes to me. It showed up on Facebook feed making the rounds on several friends’ and on some advocacy group pages after hundreds of news outlets posted about the chicken pox in North Carolina:
With how many other known contagious diseases out there, why is it that the media laser focuses on only the ones that are associated with a vaccine? Long gone are humorous television episodes that casually talked about what used to be called a common disease. Long gone is the thought that sickness sometimes happens. Long gone is the chance for us to trust our instinct. Long gone is logic. None of that happened overnight, but it’s become a lot more apparent the louder the media has become regarding certain topics.
TV parents have had to handle “plain ol’ mundane chicken pox” for decades. So have their friends and neighbors. Early in its 7-year run, Mary pitches in to help Phyllis on the Mary Tyler Moore Show when Phyllis’ husband, Lars, thinks he’s caught the pox. (Season 1, Episode 3; 1990). It turned out that Lars did not “contract a case of varicella”. But the producers still gave us ample opportunity to enjoy a show that portrayed what so many families knew to be true—that the disease was common, that it was itchy and inconvenient, and that it would soon be over.
Too bad the media doesn’t let us see chicken pox the same way today. They’ve traded facts for fear. They’ve told the public what they need to think and what they need to believe. Those who bother to speak out are ridiculed instead of lauded, like those parents in North Carolina have been. If I could offer some advice to those parents it’s to stand tall. Don’t listen to the negativity. You know your child best and you always have. Some of the physical scarring from a case of the chicken pox may fade over time, but emotional scarring from incidents like you’ve just experienced can linger longer than you might expect. You’ll be stronger for it though. I promise.
Cathy Jameson is a Contributing Editor for Age of Autism.
I had the chicken pox as a child in the 1960s and sure I felt awful, but after about a week the illness ended and I was fine. Everyone I knew had the chicken pox with the same results of sickness for about a week and then over and done. No one became seriously afflicted and no one DIED! It was just considered one of the childhood illnesses that everyone caught and eventually recovered from. Life went on and we all grew up fine and healthy. Now all of a sudden chicken pox is a DEADLY and DAMAGING disease that is falsely being portrayed that way by the CDC, NIH, and BIG PHARMA strictly for PROFIT. The result is that now we have 1 in 35 children who have a disease called autism that was so rare that no one ever heard of it. The numbers back then when I was a child were 1 in 10,000! Now instead of having children getting an illness that runs its course and damages no one we have vaccines that cause life long damage to a whole generation of children. There is something very wrong with this picture and we, the families are paying the price of having to care for our children for the rest of their lives! We need RESEARCH that I believe the right people can accomplish to REVERSE the damage done to our children's immune system. We have the technology and the people to do the research so let's get going and CURE our children and adults NOW!
Posted by: Gayle | November 26, 2018 at 02:35 PM
Del Bigtree covers the "omg / chicken pox" / run for your lives / rather well here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ml9m8-aIrQo
Posted by: go Trump | November 25, 2018 at 07:57 PM
To add to your compilation, they did the 'chickenpox is no big deal' thing in an episode of that newer series This Is Us, flashing back to the 1970s. Again, itching itching itching and no big freakin' deal!
I remember in the early 70s, my sister caught chickenpox and my mom was encouraged by our family doctor to just get it over with with all of us, so she kept us home from school for over a week and confined us to the living room to all play in close contact.
Four girls, each about a year apart, home for a week, Barbie dolls everywhere....drove my mom insane. But we all got it over with - and (gasp) survived! Nowadays, moms are encouraged to get their kids every vaccine on the planet and instead of staying home and going crazy for a week with sick kids, we get to stay home and go crazy for 20, 30, 40, 50 years taking care of our sick, brain damaged kids. Gotta love medical progress.
Posted by: Donna L. | November 25, 2018 at 06:34 PM
John, skin conditions of the epidermis (all forms of pox, measles, rosola, hand foot and mouth etc) are caused by separation traumas. The rash always occurs in the healing phase (the previous, trauma phase is a roughening and desensitisation of the skin) and, along with absent-mindedness, allow the separated organism to cope with that situation as best as possible.
Polio and other paralysis diseases are caused by a feeling of being trapped aka "playing possum" (although it isn't playing). For a predator such as a human, this feeling is far more likely to occur in a child than in an adult as an adult predator is more likely to fight or flight than to pretend to be dead - which is an action of last resort.
Posted by: rtp | November 25, 2018 at 04:48 PM
Some children are experiencing recurring shingles from receiving this vaccine, too. I don't see how the NCVIA removes liability for this type of recommendation, particularly the continuation of a bad recommendation, where the "benefits," whatever they can theoretically be trumped up to be, clearly are less than the societal costs.
Posted by: Jeannette Bishop | November 25, 2018 at 03:48 PM
In the 1960s, the childhood diseases that I experienced came and went without much local or national fanfare - though the shadow of paralytic polio still loomed. School personnel watched students for symptoms and alerted parents - but didn’t play judge like nowadays.
The arbitrary selectiveness of public health priorities and their inadequate reminders about hand washing point to their misplaced priorities to increase industry profit and social control. Mass media’s inept fear-mongering coverage has been a profound disappointment for consumers, but a boon to public-private vaccine partners.
Vaccine PR encourages participants to feel smug about their health care “choice,” then pressure others to cooperate. How handy for those who profit from vaccine sales - making nags and snitches out of their product’s buyers.
Posted by: nhokkanen | November 25, 2018 at 01:54 PM
The most obvious done for the money vaccine
Contagious?
Smallpox isn’t contagious nor polio
"Dr. Ogle, the chief in the Registrar-General’s Department, told the Royal Commission as a witness before it, that he had never known chicken-pox kill a child in his life."--Dr Hadwen (1896)
"Varicella always runs a favourable course. It has no sequelae.....PROGNOSIS.—This is always favourable." --Dictionary of Medicine (1894)
As a rule, it is a very insignificant disease. By that I mean that it is not of sufficient importance to worry about.--John Tilden MD (1851-1940)
http://www.whale.to/vaccines/varicella4.html
Disease hyping is http://www.whale.to/v/ploy.html over 300 years old when they suppressed the cure of smallpox http://www.whale.to/v/smallpox2.html using real medicine and instead poisoned their patients with pseudo medicine like mercury http://www.whale.to/a/allopathy4.html
Essential killing 18% of their patients for 300 years
They also suppressed the fact it was a sanitary disease and not contagious http://www.whale.to/vaccines/infectiousness_smallpox_q.html
Like they do to this day eg with chemo murdering 98% of their patients http://www.whale.to/cancer/chemo.html instead of curing 100% with the over 100 years old cancer cures http://www.whale.to/a/cancer_c.html
Like dr Hamer’s 90% cure over 20 years ago http://www.whale.to/cancer/hamer.html
They also had to vanish toxicology and nutritional knowledge and invented the false disease theory using Pasteur http://www.whale.to/c/disease_theory_summary.html
Useful when they invented the polio virus to hide ddt poisoning or drug poisoning http://www.whale.to/v/polio2.htm
Like they invented hiv out of thin air purely to murder people with azt etc http://www.whale.to/aids.html
Fear of viruses http://www.whale.to/a/infectious_scares.html is the fuel for vaccination which was only attempted murder as Shaw said in 1911, and maiming kids for profit http://www.whale.to/vaccines/diseases.html
Re mercury as medicine they only put in dpt to cause disease which they called autism http://www.whale.to/vaccine/vaccine_autism_proven.html
The vax racket is a 200 year pox on the human race by a race of satanic psychopaths and is an easy racket to destroy
http://www.whale.to/c/vaccination_racket_summary.html
Vax advocates are sociopaths or useful idiots and the only thing keeping it afloat is Stockholm syndrome as the whole truth is too shocking to swallow
It would help them if they could isolate said viruses http://www.whale.to/c/virology_banners.html
And the main nail in orthodox virology the Devil’s science called Scientism is the fact they have suppressed the vit c cure for all viral disease for 80 murdering years http://www.whale.to/a/vitamin_c_banners.html
In a nutshell
''Vaccination is not disease prevention - it's a particularly nasty form of organised crime in that it manipulates parents' protective instincts to get them to submit their child into getting poisoned for profit under the guise of disease prevention.'' ~ Erwin Alber.
Posted by: John Scudamore | November 25, 2018 at 01:04 PM
I have my own early humorous memory of chicken pox. I was in grade school and a lot of schoolmates were coming down with chicken pox. One day, a girl in my class, whose name was Carol Leaf, had to go home during class on account of it. It just so happens that we were studying plurals at that time. One of the examples that came up was leaf ==> leaves. After going over it, my teacher commented that this is just what happened! There was certainly no hysteria about it back then.
Posted by: David Weiner | November 25, 2018 at 10:01 AM
Cathy
Just to mention that we still don’t do chicken pox vaccination in the U.K. The advice has long been that it caused more problems than it solved: more shingles, early onset shingles etc. But I am sure some are itching to get it added. The basic point however is that we over here still currently in this case recognise the reality that it is safer to get the disease.
Posted by: John Stone | November 25, 2018 at 08:17 AM
Cathy, Your recounting of so many TV shows is amazing!
Just three days ago I was driving from Virginia to Florida, through North Carolina, listening to a local radio station that said the "victims" of the chicken pox were all recovering. Calling these children "victims" is a perfect example of fear-mongering orchestrated by Pharma & the CDC.
Your brief mention of "scarring" unfortunately implies it may be common; however, permanent pockmarks were very, very rare, being no justification for the toxic vaccine bringing lifelong damage. Thanks(!) for all your do.
Posted by: David m burd | November 25, 2018 at 07:27 AM
Thank you Cathy .. it is good to remind ourselves how much things have changed since our childhood .. such as .. the chickenpox being a "normal" childhood disease that was NEVER portrayed as a potential deadly disease to all in the family and community around.
Unfortunately .. on many issues beyond chickenpox .."normalizing" what was once universally considered "abnormal" .. has become common.
For example .. it is now considered "normal' that 1 in 35 children are diagnosed autistic .. or .. 1 in 6 suffer all kinds chronic autoimmune disorders .. such as .. juvenile type 1 diabetes … that would have been recognized immediately as ABNORMAL in all previous generations.
Today .. the only thing that has changed is that … inexplicable, dramatic increases in both autism and juvenile type 1 diabetes in children .. is no longer considered "abnormal".
Posted by: bob moffit | November 25, 2018 at 07:01 AM