By J.B.
Handley
Can a
website actually accumulate dust? If one could, I’d nominate VaccinateYourBaby.org as perhaps the web’s dustiest. Remember them?
Waaay on back in 2008, actress Amanda Peet called non-vaccinating parents
“parasites” and--in full retreat immediately after that PR disaster--did just
enough interviews to not look like she was sprinting for the hills…and then sprinted
for the hills! Nowadays, she does her work advocating with the United Nations
for third world vaccination awareness, perhaps reasoning that Masai tribesman
are less likely to send her nasty emails.
Peet’s
aging pro-vaccine website links you to the VaccinateYourBaby YouTube Channel, where the last video was posted
in 2011…and, as I’m writing this, has the following views for their 5 most
recently posted videos: 67 (posted in 2011), 168 (2011), 216 (2011), and 38
(2011). Back in 2008, when the Amanda Peet campaign was rolled-out, the flagship
video of Peet being interviewed has, today, 4 years later, a total of 11,965
views--not particularly robust when you consider that Jenny McCarthy, arguing
the other side of the vaccine-autism debate, routinely garners hundreds of
thousands of views for any number of interviews she gives (or, heck, 80,000 views
for me here yelling at The Doctors.)
Before
moving on to talk about the real topic of this post, I’d like to point out a
few delicious ironies about all of this:
-
The
Amanda Peet campaign was engineered by none other than the lord-vader-in-chief
himself, Paul “Pharma Pimp” Offit. Peet’s brother-in-law worked at CHOP where
Merck sponsors Offit’s activities, and Offit used his connection to Peet and
his medical degree to hatch a brilliantly disastrous marketing campaign that
nearly ruined Amanda Peet’s career. Good stuff!
-
Recently,
Amanda Peet has told the story in interviews that her daughter, in 2010 (2
years after the VYB campaign), contracted whooping cough AFTER being
vaccinated, and this series of events somehow made her even more pro-vaccine.
Now, I’m certainly not going to celebrate a 2 year-old child contracting a very
painful bacterial illness--I don’t wish that on anyone--but I will celebrate
the lunacy of becoming more pro-vaccine after the vaccine doesn’t work for your
own daughter!
Which
brings us to Every Child By Two, the pharma front group that bankrolled the
Vaccinate Your Baby campaign. If the VYB website looks dusty, Every Child By
Two’s website looks like it was designed by a 10 year-old in 1994. If
you click to the “news” section of the website, their last newsletter was issued in August, 2008,
more than four years ago.
By the
way, I wrote about Every Child By Two, waay back in
August of 2008, the very same month of the last newsletter they ever wrote. As
I clearly demonstrated back then, ECBT is really just a Wyeth vaccine division
marketing organization:
“First,
a little background. By nonprofit standards, ECBT is a rat-shit organization.
With a grand total of 3 employees, a tiny office suite in a crummy Washington
D.C. neighborhood, and an annual budget under $1 million, they are a blip on
the radar screen. As usual, the devil is in the details… And, how much did
Wyeth [the vaccine maker] give ECBT?
Wyeth gave $350,769. That's 68% of their
non-contract revenue and 48% of their total revenue. From one company. A
vaccine manufacturer named Wyeth. And Craig Engesser, a Wyeth spokesperson, has
been on the board of ECBT for as long as I can track it. He even served as the
organization's treasurer!”
* * *
What’s different about ECBT in 2012 versus 2008
is that four years ago ECBT actually appeared to be doing something. They had
Amanda Peet, they had a new marketing campaign, they had timely newsletters,
and they had Pharma funding. Today, nearly everything looks like it’s stopped,
like the money dried up, and everyone went home.
Unfortunately, 990 forms for non-profit
organizations have a time delay. At present, I can only find financial
information on ECBT through 2010, but I find their 990 forms for 2009 and 2010
raise all sorts of interesting and delicious questions. Consider:
-
The organization appears frozen in time after
about August of 2008, yet Amy Pisani, the Executive Director, was still making
$136,000 a year in 2010, two years later.
-
As of today, Amy Pisani no longer works out of Washington
DC where ECBT still maintains a small office next door to the Vietnamese
consulate office, but rather out of her house in Connecticut (which ECBT’s
voicemail calls the “Connecticut Office”)
-
Their sources of funding have become even more
clear and blatant. In 2010, they were: Wyeth vaccines ($307,000), Sanofi
Vaccines ($245,171), and Public Health Solutions, aka The NY Dept of Health
($182,136).