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Tag: anti vax
Fox Anti-Vax Propagandists Declare War On New Covid-19 Shot

Fox Anti-Vax Propagandists Declare War On New Covid-19 Shot

Tucker Carlson may be gone from Fox News, but his former colleagues are still carrying on his war against the COVID-19 vaccines that have prevented millions of American deaths since they became widely available in 2021.

Fox’s propagandists responded to President Joe Biden’s Friday call for new funding for an updated vaccine booster that will be recommended for all Americans when it becomes available this fall by warning that COVID-19 vaccines are dangerous and ineffective. Some even directly exhorted their viewers — generally seniors who are most vulnerable from COVID-19 — not to take the new booster.

“There's another shot that he's going to recommend all Americans take?” Jesse Watters, Carlson’s 8 p.m. replacement, asked Monday on Fox’s panel show, The Five. “This is another huge scam and no one is going to go along with another shot, especially if it's mandated.”

Several pharmaceutical companies are currently developing updated COVID-19 vaccines that are expected to provide increased protection from Eris, the variant currently dominant in the United States.

With COVID-19 cases on the upswing, Biden said Friday that he plans to ask Congress “for additional funding for a new vaccine” he would “tentatively” recommend “that everybody get.” The updated vaccine is expected in mid-September, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said during her Monday briefing.

Fox hosts responded with ridicule and fury. Notably, several suggested that because the initial vaccines provided limited protection from infection from newer variants (even as they continued to provide strong protection from death or serious illness), people should be skeptical of the effectiveness of an updated shot specifically targeted to current strains. That’s a recipe for Fox’s viewers to once again put their health in danger by declining the shots.

Sean Hannity once garnered unearned credit from mainstream reporters over a tepid snippet about the vaccines. But since coming under fire from right-wing rivals and walking back even those remarks, he’s rarely missed an opportunity to demonstrate his vaccine skepticism.

“Straight ahead, COVID madness coming back,” he said, teasing a Monday night segment. “More draconian measures and a new vaccine that I'm sure they're going to tell you is absolutely safe. Like the last one? Straight ahead.”

After the break, he introduced Biden’s comments by saying, “Here we go again,” then asked Fox contributor Tomi Lahren, “Isn't this the same Joe Biden, same government that said that if you got the vaccine, that you'd never get COVID, you'd never transmit COVID and that were proven dead wrong? Isn't that the same government?”

Lahren replied that “if the Biden administration and leftists everywhere were that concerned about a new COVID strain, a new COVID variant, that southern border would be closed,” adding, “If the American people are ever dumb enough to fall for this again, we deserved to fail as a country. But I don't believe we are dumb enough to fall for it again. Not this time.”

Hannity went on to say that while he was not giving “medical advice,” he was “not listening to them” about the vaccines because “I don't believe a word they say. They've been proven wrong again and again and again.”

Likewise, while guest-hosting Fox’s prime-time “comedy” show Gutfeld!, Jimmy Faila argued that Biden’s call for a new shot was unnecessary because “unlike the Clintons, the virus wasn’t nearly as dangerous as we were told.”

“Now, I'll admit it's nice to see this White House making news for a drug besides cocaine,” Faila said. “But there's no need to discuss any drugs because the vaccines didn't stop transmission.”

Faila went on to express confusion about why politicians would say COVID-19 “would have been way worse” if they hadn’t been vaccinated, adding, “Like, you're saying it didn't work, OK? The government was wrong about every single thing they pushed on us during COVID, especially mask mandates, lockdowns, and vaccines.”

Fox could have responded to the deployment of COVID-19 vaccines, which were developed under then-President Donald Trump and are remarkably effective in preventing serious COVID-19 cases (with rare side effects), by urging viewers to get the shots. But the network instead ran a multiyear campaign against the vaccines while relentlessly hyping ineffective drugs popular among right-wing influencers. Any moral responsibility its hosts felt for their audience was apparently overrun by their reflexive opposition to Biden and their recognition that antivax commentary was “great for ratings.”

These attacks on the vaccination campaign had deadly consequences. Polls routinely show the network’s viewers were less likely to say they were, or planned to get, vaccinated than people who get their news from other sources. One recent study found that “excess mortality was significantly higher for Republican voters than Democratic voters after COVID-19 vaccines were available to all adults, but not before."

But Fox is undeterred by the destructive impact of its vaccine coverage. The network is doing its best to inflame viewers as its extremist competitors baselessly fearmonger over the prospect of “new lockdowns” ahead of the 2024 election. And that means more of them are going to die.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Sherri Tenpenny

Medical Board Suspends License Of Notorious Anti-Vax Doctor

A doctor whose false claims that COVID-19 vaccines could magnetize you (and that this was also somehow connected to 5G cell towers) has lost her medical license. The State Medical Board of Ohio decided that Dr. Sherri Tenpenny’s license should be suspended indefinitely due to her refusal to cooperate with its investigation into more than 350 complaints against her.

Tenpenny’s July 2021 testimony in front of Ohio legislators made headlines because of how bananas in the belfry her claims were, including her statements that videos of people claiming to be magnetized by vaccines were real evidence. "You can put a key on their forehead, it sticks,” she said with a straight face. “You can put spoons and forks all over and they can stick because now we think there is a metal piece to that.”

And while the board’s indefinite suspension of Tenpenny’s license was not directly tied to her erroneous claims, the report released with the decision includes a lot of unanswered questions regarding proclamations Tenpenny has made in her capacity as a medical professional over the years.

Some of the questions still lingering in the wake of Tenpenny’s investigation include:

“The Interrogatories asked for information regarding Dr. Tenpenny’s practice in general as well as asking specifically about her practice regarding recommendations concerning, and administration of, vaccines and whether any of her patients subsequently contracted certain illnesses. The Interrogatories also specifically ask how many doses of COVID-19 vaccines she had provided and whether she had personally received a COVID-19 vaccine. ”

And:

“The Interrogatories also asked Dr. Tenpenny what scientific evidence she had, and specifically asked that she cite her sources for this evidence, regarding COVID-19 vaccines causing people to become magnetized or creating an interface with 5G towers; regarding the COVID-19 vaccine not injecting a real virus but strips of genetic material and patients suffering complications such as abnormal bleedings, myocarditis, strokes, and neurological complications; and regarding some major metropolitan areas liquifying dead bodies and pouring them into the water supply.”

One of the board members, Dr. Amol Soin, explained the decision in language even a person with a spoon stuck to their forehead can understand.

“The license to practice medicine is not a right. It’s a privilege,” Soin said. “A privilege that is earned, and a privilege that you have to uphold. And as you get that license, and as you obtain that privilege, you consent to certain reasonable things. And a reasonable thing you consent to... is to cooperate when someone complains about you. In this case, 350 complaints. It is a very reasonable thing to cooperate in that scenario.”

The Trump administration’s botching of our public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic will go down in history as an epic failure. After spending a year trying to figure out how to blame the pandemic on everybody and everything and even helping to promote the idea that it wasn’t that bad in the first place, Trump realized that the only success his administration might be able to hang its hat on was getting an effective and safe vaccine to Americans in under a year.

Unfortunately for Trump and the Republican Party, the toxic cauldron of anti-science rhetoric and bad public health proposals meant they had trained the most vociferous members of their voting base to be anti-vaccine. In the months after the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were rolled out, anti-vaxxers made all kinds of unsubstantiated claims, and Tenpenny’s wild accusations were just one of the more headline-grabbing instances.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

RFK Jr.

Deadly Outbreak: When RFK Jr's Vaccine Lies Killed Samoan Kids (VIDEO)

Hours after anti-vax Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. testified before the United States House of Representatives Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government on Thursday afternoon, one of the nation's foremost experts on vaccinations reminded PBS News Hour's audience that Kennedy was at least partially responsible for a 2018 measles outbreak in American Samoa that left two infants dead.

Host Geoff Bennet kicked off the segment by introducing his guest — Dr. Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and a member of the Food and Drug Administration's Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee — and giving a brief synopsis of Kennedy's fringe beliefs.

"So RFK Jr. is widely known as an anti-vaccine activist. He has a much larger platform now as he runs for president, he says that many of his views are misunderstood; they're taken out of context. Help us understand what he's been promoting and what the science tells us about it," Bennet began.

Offit elaborated on why Kennedy's contrarianism is so dangerous.

"Well, he's been promoting false information about vaccines," Offit replied. "He's been promoting the notion that vaccines cause autism, which is clearly not true, or cause a variety of other chronic diseases like diabetes or multiple sclerosis, or attention deficit disorder, and that's all not true. So what he does is by putting misinformation out there, he causes people to make bad decisions that put themselves and their their family at risk."

Bennet asked, "You also point to one episode where he spoke out against the measles vaccine. What was the impact of that?"

Offit recalled, "In Samoa, there were two children that died immediately following receipt of a measles vaccine. And the way it works in Samoa is they have an MMR vaccine in powdered form. It needs to be diluted in water. Two nurses made a mistake instead of diluting it in water, they diluted it in a muscle relaxant. Those children stopped breathing and died immediately. Now, very quickly, within two weeks, it was realized what that mistake was."

Offit then highlighted how Kennedy's conspiracy theories led to a precipitous plummet in the percentage of the Samoan population receiving inoculations to the highly contagious virus.

"It was a nursing error, but nonetheless, RFK Jr. seized on that. He flooded Facebook with the information that the measles vaccine is killing children in Samoa. He went to Samoa. He met with anti-vaccine activists. He met with senior officials in Samoa and kept the drumbeat alive that the measles vaccine was killing children in Samoa as a consequence," Offit continued. "Vaccination rates fell from 70 percent to 30 percent, and between September and December of 2019, there was a massive measles epidemic in this island nation of 200,000 people. There were 57,000 cases of measles and 83 deaths. Most of those deaths were in children less than four years of age. And Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had everything to do with that. And that shows you how disinformation can kill."

Kennedy's connection to the Samoan measles crisis was previously chronicled in 2019 by The Washington Post:

[Kennedy] visited the country in June, appearing next to officials at Samoan independence celebrations. His visit was 'for a program that is not government-related,' an official in the prime minister’s department told Samoan news media at the time.

Kennedy has asserted that vaccines cause autism, a claim disproved by extensive research. Members of the Kennedy family have publicly criticized him for helping 'spread dangerous misinformation.'

The World Health Organization estimated that in 2018, only 31 percent of infants in Samoa received the measles vaccine, a drop from 60 to 70 percent in previous years. The WHO attributed the extremely low rate in part to a public health scandal: Last year, two infants in Samoa died within hours of receiving the MMR vaccine. The country temporarily halted its vaccine program, but the vaccine did not cause the deaths. Two nurses improperly mixed the vaccines with a liquid muscle relaxant instead of water. The pair were sentenced to five years in prison for manslaughter.

What happened in Samoa was not a unique occurrence, either. A measles outbreak there in April 2023 forced Governor Lemanu PS Maug to issue an emergency declaration that lasted through the end of May of that year.

ABC News reported at the time that more than 32 people had been infected. The outlet referenced the events of 2019, when "in American Samoa, there were 12 measles cases and no deaths reported. However, in the nation of Samoa, there were more than 5,700 cases and 83 deaths reported, most occurring in children under five years old."

MSNBC's Mehdi Hasan also dedicated a segment of one of his shows in June to this very topic.

Watch Offit's remarks below via Decoding Fox News or at this link.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

New Polls Shows Growing Voter Distrust Of 'Nutjob' Robert F. Kennedy Jr

Robert F. Kennedy Jr's 2024 White House bid was always a long shot. But the more voters get to know the anti-vax conspiracy theorist, the less they like him, The Washington Post's Aaron Blake reports.

The Kennedy conundrum came to a head on Thursday when, despite warnings that it would backfire, the sixty-nine-year-old environmental lawyer accepted Republicans' invitation to testify before the United States House of Representatives Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.

The spectacle, Blake notes, was "impossible to separate from conservative media's own effort to play up Kennedy's campaign. Fox News has devoted extensive attention to Kennedy on the air and its website, publishing more than 80 articles and videos about him since his campaign launch in April."

The impacts of Kennedy's fringe platform, explains Blake, are evident in the latest rounds of polling, including those that were conducted prior to Kennedy's congressional appearance.

"Quinnipiac University released a poll Wednesday showing Republicans continue to like Kennedy — by more than a 2-to-1 margin, in fact. But among Democrats, Kennedy's image was more than 2-to-1 negative. While 21 percent had a favorable opinion, 47 percent had an unfavorable one. That’s 26 points 'underwater,' up from 15 points underwater a month ago," Blake writes.

"A new poll out of New Hampshire is even worse for Kennedy," Blake continues. "The University of New Hampshire Survey Center in April showed him 22 points underwater among likely Democratic primary voters; its latest poll now shows him 60 points underwater." UNH found that "just 9 percent had a favorable opinion of Kennedy, compared with 69 percent who had an unfavorable one. The survey also asked people to use one word to describe Kennedy, and the most popular words were 'crazy,' 'dangerous,' 'insane,' 'nutjob,' 'conspiracy,' and 'crackpot.'"

Blake concludes that "these are not the numbers of someone who is seriously competing for the nomination."

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.