Dishonorable Doin's: The Devilish Details divulged by a Dirty Dozen Disinformationists
Dishonorable Doin's: The Devilish Details divulged by a Dirty Dozen Disinformationists. Click the link to reveal the profitable finances of the Anti-vax business. And that's what it is. Making money on mayhem. Crusading for cash.
Thomas,
According to a recent report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, 12 anti-vaxxers have been singled out as responsible for the majority of vaccine misinformation circulating online today. Quotes below are from the Center’s report:
“Throughout the Covid pandemic we have made sacrifices to protect ourselves, those we love, and our communities. And yet, as the world responded to this threat, a subversive, established industry of anti-vaxxers has seen an opportunity to enrich themselves at the expense of public health.
“This fifth column has operated in plain sight, publicly undermining our collective confidence in doctors, governments and medical science. Their confidence in openly promoting lies and false cures comes from years of impunity in which they were hosted on popular social media platforms, driving traffic and advertising dollars to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube, while benefiting from the enormous reach those platforms gladly afforded them. It’s a mutually profitable arrangement --our calculations value the audience of anti-vaxxers, now numbering above 62million followers, to be worth up to $1.1billion in annual revenue for Big Tech. The Anti-Vaxx Industry itself, as detailed in this report, boasts annual revenues of at least $35 million.”[1]
The twelve names are, according to the source above:
- Joseph Mercola “Joseph Mercola runs the world’s most popular alternative health news site, Mercola.com - #1 Natural Health Website, sometimes using health misinformation to promote the sale of supplements, books and food…Mercola uses some of his wealth to fund other anti-vaccine organisations, including the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC).”
- Andrew Wakefield “This industry stretches back to the time of Andrew Wakefield and his pseudo-medical campaigns against the MMR vaccine. Struck off the medical register for “serious and wide-ranging” errors, his views found safe-haven in Silicon Valley with its belief in profit and unfettered free speech and a hyper-capitalist mix of libertarianism and the prosperity gospel. His direct proteges and those he inspired now number in the dozens, with the most dangerous twelve -whom we dubbed the Disinformation Dozen in a previous report -creating two thirds of all misinformation shares on social media in this pandemic. … In 2016 Wakefield reinvented himself as an anti-vaccine filmmaker with Vaxxed, directed by Wakefield himself with fellow anti-vaxxer Del Bigtree serving as producer.71Vaxxeduses testimony from parents of autistic children to prop up Wakefield’s debunked claims about a link with vaccines, alleging “an alarming deception that has contributed to the skyrocketing increase of autism.”
- Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. “Kennedy was quick to post about popular conspiracies arising during the pandemic. Posts to his now removed Instagram account claimed that the “flu shot is 2.4x more deadly than Covid-19”, that “Bill Gates wants to chip us... for surveillance and transhumanism” and that 5G technology “causes catastrophic biological damage.” These claims are given extra weight by Kennedy’s reputation as the nephew of former president John F. Kennedy, and a decade of campaigning on environmental issues as founder of the Waterkeeper Alliance.86From this platform, Kennedy embarked on a new campaign questioning the use of mercury in vaccines, setting up the World Mercury Project, now operating under the name Children’s Health Defense with a broader mission of questioning the safety of vaccines.”
- Del Bigtree “Del Bigtree hosts The Highwire, a slick, magazine-style anti-vaccine show that was broadcast live to over 600,000 followers until it was deplatformed from Facebook and YouTube last year following reports he had advised viewers to intentionally contract Covid.105Bigtree and his campaign organisation, Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN), still reach 370,000 followers through their own accounts.A former producer on the TV health talk show The Doctors, Bigtree has no medical credentials but began his campaigning against vaccines as a producer for the film Vaxxed, which promoted director Andrew Wakefield’s debunked claims linking vaccines to autism.”
- Larry Cook “Larry Cook is a former alternative health entrepreneur who turned his stewardship of Facebook’s largest anti-vaccine Facebook Group into a career of full-time activism. Cook’s main Facebook Group, named “Stop Mandatory Vaccination”, already had close to 200,000 members at the outset of the pandemic. Health misinformation shared in the Group has had deadly consequences: one four-year-old is known to have died after his mother decided against using the prescription drug Tamiflu based on advice from its members.”
- Ty & Colleen Bollinger “Ty and Charlene Bollinger have made a career out of marketing paid-for documentaries spreading misinformation about cancer treatments and vaccines promoted to a social media audience of over 1.6 million followers at the height of the pandemic… In 2020, the Bollingers produced a new edition of TTAV, featuring leading anti-vaxxers including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Sherri Tenpenny, Mike Adams, Andrew Wakefield, Barbara Loe Fisher, Del Bigtree, Sayer Ji, Joseph Mercola, and Rashid Buttar. Materials created to promote this series include a “Coronavirus Field Guide,” which falsely links Covid-19 to 5G conspiracies and promotes “intravenous Vitamin C” as a way to combat the virus.”
- Sherry Tenpenny “Sherri Tenpenny is a practising osteopathic physician and alternative health entrepreneur who offers paid-for “boot camps” on anti-vaccine activism. The self-proclaimed “doctor, speaker, educator, consultant” promotes her services through a network of social media accounts with 260,000 followers.164During the pandemic, Tenpenny held a training session that discussed how to target vaccine hesitant people and spread doubt about information from public health agencies. According to the journalists, Tenpenny told participants “my job is to teach the 400 of you in the class... so each one of you go out and teach 1,000”, adding “we're going to build an entire army”. With tickets reported to cost over $500, Tenpenny and her associates could have made over $200,000 in total from the event. According to reporters at CBC, this course was the eighth of its kind since 2017, with previous courses focusing on anti-vaccination information while the most recent session was Covid specific.”
- Mike Adams “Mike Adams is the founder of Natural News and Brighteon where he peddles conspiracies about attacks on public health and liberty while plugging survivalist products… Brighteon frequently advertises Adams’ products and services. One video where Adams claims “they are out to kill us with weaponized vaccines” advertises iodine tablets and non-GMO vitamin C, available to buy on a Brighteon-branded store… Adams’ network of websites has amplified right-wing conspiracy theories191about US election fraud, The Great Reset and the QAnon-related blood-harvesting theory. He has guest-hosted conspiracist Alex Jones’s Infowars show and in April 2021, spoke at the Tulsa Health & Freedom Conference with anti-vaxxers the Bollingers and Andrew Wakefield and conspiracists General Michael Flynn, Lin Wood and Sidney Powell.
- Rashid Buttar “Rashid Buttar is a osteopathic physician and anti-vaxx entrepreneur… He has been cited by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for mismarketing supplements and formally reprimanded by the North Carolina Medical Board which alleged he had given cancer patients treatments “so unproven the only possible benefit would be to give false hope”. Buttar has claimed on social media that Covid is a bioweapon with links to 5G, the vaccine could cause infertility and the flu vaccine could cause Covid. He has also promoted unproven Covid remedies and amplified discredited public health officials… Buttar recently shared a livestream video to Twitter in which he referred to the pandemic as "plandemic.”
- Barbara Loe Fisher “Barbara Loe Fisher is co-founder and president of the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC). Founded in 1982, it is one of the most influential anti-vaxx organizations, hosting conferences, lobbying against vaccine mandates, and spreading misinformation about vaccines, specifically targeting parents.”
- Sayer Ji “Sayer Ji founded Greenmedinfo, a website aggregating alternative health articles.232Contributors include Ji, the “GreenMedInfo Research Group” and occasionally anti-vaxxers such as Joseph Mercola and Children’s Health Defense… Ji describes the Covid vaccine and potential vaccine passports as “the new medical apartheid, this is the new bio-segregation, and this is what they want to roll out throughout the world” and tells supporters “we have the right to deny an experimental vaccine”. [Ji] has drawn comparisons between the Holocaust and vaccine development, claiming that the vaccine rollout had a “resemblance to previous phases of human history marred by genocide” accompanied by an illustration of a yellow star reading “No Vax”.”
- Kelly Brogan “Kelly Brogan is an alternative health entrepreneur and holistic psychiatrist who recommends patients turn to “radical self-healing” instead of conventional medical treatments.248Brogan deploys pseudo-scientific language alongside aphorisms like “you have the power to heal,” as she aims to discredit the “medical tyranny” of mainstream medicine while encouragingfollowers “to live “without victimhood,” that is, without dependence on the medical establishment… Brogan spreads conspiracy theories about Covid insisting “we’re not experiencing a real medical pandemic,” and that “fear has been used to manipulate the public into accepting an experimental vaccine.” She claims that The Gates Foundation is pursuing an agenda of “depopulation, transhumanism, and eugenics” that she resists.”
My highlights in the report’s text focus attention on lies that have been repeated many times by anti-vaxxers here on the Quora platform, in “questions” or answers or comments on answers.
Prior to reading this list of merchants of death, it was somewhat of a mystery to me where folks were getting such nonsense, much less that they were being indoctrinated as part of a deliberate campaign by an organized conspiracy of profiteers.
So there you have it. “The American media voices most guilty of having created the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” are those 12 individuals who, together with their profit-making organizations and associates, have made millions by misleading thousands into thinking they should preserve their health by getting sick with Covid-19. That sounds like a very questionable line of thinking to me!
-Jeff
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