JC

Yesterday, Politico wrung its hands into splinters in an angst-laden article headlined, “The anti-vaccine movement is on the rise. The White House is at a loss over what to do about it.” The sub-headlined promised, “This is the first story of a five-part series diving into the rise of the anti-vaccine political movement.”

image 2.png
Early this morning, right on schedule, Politico published its second installment, this one alarmingly headlined, “‘We’re going to lose lives’: Health experts decry rise of vaccine skepticism.”

Hey, look on the bright side. Maybe we’ll lose expert lives.

Haha, just kidding. The article’s emotional sub-headline fretted, “Some worry that only a national tragedy will turn the current trend around.” They’re fretting about you. And — according to Politico — you have gone mainstream, baby:

The mainstreaming of a once-fringe movement has horrified federal health officials, who blame it for seeding dangerous conspiracy theories and bolstering a Covid-era backlash to the nation’s broader public health practices.
The article begins by insinuating that gullible fools like yourselves were deluded, but not by monstrous government overreach and an especially nasty form of mass hallucination that its psy-experts intentionally discharged under cover of so-called “public health programming.” No, Politico says you’ve been deluded by Robert Kennedy, Jr., and by dark GOP forces who slipped off the leash when the judge in Missouri v. Biden shut down the federal government’s censorship machine.

But Politico’s bad news, delivered using as somber and ominous of a tone as that silly rag can muster, is our good news. What Politico sees as ‘horrifying’ trends, we count as accomplishments. In Politico’s words (lightly edited for clarity):

For decades, being openly skeptical of vaccines made one a pariah in all but the smallest of political circles. To cast doubt on them placed you on the fringe. But public health officials fear those days are increasingly numbered.
As another Covid vaccination campaign gets underway, fewer Americans than ever have kept up to date on their shots. Just 20 percent of adults got last year’s (booster) shot, according to CDC data, down sharply from the 79 percent who received their initial series of vaccinations in 2021. Child vaccination rates against the flu are measurably lower than before the pandemic… vaccination rates for kindergarteners dropped for the second consecutive year.
The anti-vaccine movement has historically found a home among both libertarians and the far-left. (But) recent polling shows Republicans are now more than twice as likely to believe the shots should be optional than they did in 2019. Democrats… overwhelmingly favor childhood vaccine requirements.

The paranoid hypochondriacs, I mean public health experts, are pulling what’s left of their hair out. First covid, now this. Politico quoted lockdown-worshipping maskaholic Dr. Lawrence Gostin, a Georgetown University public health professor who advises the White House, who tearfully but angrily warned, “Diseases that we once thought had ended will roar back and kids will get sick and die from 100 percent preventable conditions.”

You’ll be sorry if you don’t listen to us.


Snake Oil Salesman

Permanently-disheveled bowtie advocate and pharma shill “doctor” Peter Hotez, somehow still employed as a virologist at Baylor’s College of Medicine, took a short break from counting his covid money and sighed that questioning vaccines has “now become a politically motivated movement.” In his multiple books about the so-called anti-vaccine movement, Hotez argued that vaccine skepticism has become part of conservatives’ political worldview. But for some reason, despite that Hotez says he’s tried to cure conservatives of their delusions, nobody will listen to him: “I can’t get any engagement out of anybody.”

Dr. Umair Shah, Washington state’s secretary of health, was yet more blunt and apocalyptical. She sees vaccine hesitancy leading to the End of Days. “This is the beginning of a really rough and tough time,” Shah told Politico. “People are going to get sick. We’re going to lose lives.”

The long-form article made one main point: the White House needs to do something. But Politico glided right over two gigantic flaws in its argument: first, why is it the White House’s job to sell pharma’s products? And two, Politico’s articles never discussed the two categories of lived experiences actually fueling people’s so-called skepticism: covid shot side effects and jab mandates. If it’s not that, then Politico should explain how conservatives became vaccine skeptical, when it was a massively-popular Republican President who was originally responsible for the shots?

In more good news, sort of, Politico admitted that at least some public health experts realize that a lot of people hate them now. Dr. Dean Sidelinger, Oregon’s state health officer, told Politico, “I may be a trusted messenger for, hopefully, a large segment of the population, but I am not the trusted messenger for everyone.”

No doubt.

Here’s some news you can use. Since nobody is listening to the public health “officials” anymore, whoever is paying these so-called scientists (we could guess) has shifted tactics and is now sneakily going after pastors and social media influencers:

In lieu of being out front on the issue, public health officials have been turning to the community leaders who helped them spread the word about the Covid-19 vaccine. That includes leaning on respected conservative officials and pastors to be their ambassadors. They’re looking to expand peer-based education, such as training parents and teachers to spread the word on public health.

Re-building trust using sneaky, manipulative tactics seems oxymoronic, but what do I know? I’m just a lawyer.

The two articles, yesterday’s and today’s, were so similar that it was like Politico ran the same story twice. They’re going to do it three more times. Is it wrong of me to speculate about who’s paying Politico to write all these anti-anti-vaccine articles and give all these well-known pharma henchmen even more airtime?

I’m sure it has nothing to do with this article Politico published on Saturday:

Follow the science and you will find the money, or vice-versa