The “Unscientific” Scientific American 

Richard Gale and Gary Null PhD
Progressive Radio Network, July 19, 2019


“A democracy depends on the individuals making an intelligent and rational choice in what he regards as enlightened self-interest in any given circumstance. But…  the purposes of selling goods and the dictatorial propaganda is to try to bypass the rational side of man and to appeal directly to the unconscious forces below the surface so that you are in a way making nonsense of the whole democratic procedure which is based on a conscious choice on rational grounds.”

– Aldous Huxley (Interviewed by Mike Wallace, 1958)


Many professionals and well-educated people read publications such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Forbes, Mother Jones, and leading newspapers such as the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, with the assumption that their chief editors hold a high standard of journalistic integrity and objectivity. We assume these publications are not compromised by conflicts of interest and institutional indoctrination. It was in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq that New York Times writer Judith Miller promoted the falsehood of Sadaam Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Readers believed that if such a story appeared in the Times, it must be credible. In effect, Miller became a principal opinion leader for the Washington establishment and the neocons to push forward with regime change. The media would play the role in convincing the public in the righteousness of this effort. Although the lie about Iraq’s WMDs was fabricated by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and other leading neocons behind closed doors and subsequently leaked to the Times, the Bush administration was able to viably state, “see, even the New York Times has reported on Hussein’s nuclear capabilities. Believe us, we are correct.”

But there were many credible and independent voices, such as former New York Times bureau chief in Cairo Chris Hedges, Robert Parry, Sy Hersh, Professors Michel Chossudovsky in Canada and Noam Chomsky, and many more who had conducted in depth and unbiased research to question the White House’s and Miller’s WMD claims. But their voices could never reach the mainstream media which was at least in principle “commissioned” to promulgate the government’s lies. 

This is how circular self-serving propaganda operates between official authorities and the media. Today we are witnessing this same strategy being used  on a national scale for the roll out of 5G wireless technology, genetically modified foods, and the push for national and state vaccination mandates.  In every case the message is highly biased, compromised by ulterior motives, and intentionally ignores volumes of sound scientific literature and analysis that undermine their falsehoods. With respect to advancing vaccination mandates, the mainstream magazines and newspapers use similar talking points to reinterpret and/or misrepresent facts to strengthen the agendas of private interests at the expense of bolstering public knowledge that might make society more immune to propaganda serving private commercial interests. Lie repeatedly enough to readers and you will win their allegiance. 

The circular reasoning of vaccination policy begins with the government health agencies announcing there is no connection whatsoever between vaccines and autism or other neurological disorders.  The science we are told is conclusive. All vaccines are thereby rubber stamped as safe and this is the fundamental message in the CDC’s educational campaign to journalists and health reporters.  Anyone who questions this commandment is mistaken; and anyone who actively disseminates information to the contrary is an enemy to public health.  Dutifully, the media chants the CDC’s screed.  Health officials and private vaccine makers’ public relations efforts then reference the media to further validate their disinformation campaign.   The CDC and FDA decide who are the acceptable spokespersons, such as Paul Offit and law professor Dorit Reiss, to be invited onto the mainstream media to warn the public about the dangers of vaccine opponents. There is no debate. Overarching ambiguous pronouncements are made about so-called “scientific consensus” about vaccine safety, and rarely is any substantial scientific research referenced.  We are not told that over $4 billion dollars have been awarded to victims of vaccine injuries and deaths, including neurological disorders such as autism. This reveals the influential power that the federal health agencies have in collusion with the pharmaceutical industry’s financial interests to silence opposition. 

This is the same strategy that got us into war with Iraq.

The most common repeated mantra is that vaccines are safe and do not cause harm.  In 2000, the CDC’s Verstraetan study concluded a relationship between the mercury preservative thimerosal used in most vaccines at the time with the onset of autistic disorders. CDC officials along with pharmaceutical executives and representatives from the World Health Organization and British health ministry secretly convened at the Simpsonwood retreat center near CDC headquarters in Atlanta to devise a scheme to respond to Verstraetan’s disturbing findings. It was only after civil rights attorney Robert Kennedy Jr made public the Simpsonwood transcripts after filing a Freedom of Information request that we can now acknowledge the CDC acted with criminal intent. 

Years later, a senior scientist at the CDC, Dr. William Thompson, admitted to an independent biology professor with a vaccine-injured son, Prof. Brian Hooker, that the federal agency had been engaging in an egregious cover-up of medical evidence that the measles-mumps-rubella or MMR vaccine contributed to a higher rate of autism in African American boys and that the thimerosal-laced flu vaccine was associated with a higher incidence in neurological tics, involuntary twitches and spasms that are a defining symptom in Tourette’s syndrome. Several published studies, including one authored by Dr. Thompson himself and published in a 2007 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine have shown this relationship. A subsequent 2012 study confirming the same was published in the journal Pediatric Psychology in 2012. 

Both of these revelations about the measles and flu vaccines were devastating enough to prompt CDC officials to gather all the scientific data for destruction. Dr. Thompson attempted to warn the CDC Director at the time, Dr. Julie Gerberding, regarding this relationship, prior to a February 2004 Institute of Medicine meeting on vaccines and autism. Rather than allowing Dr. Thompson to present the information at this meeting, Dr. Gerberding replaced him as a speaker with Dr. Frank DeStefano, current director of the CDC’s Immunization Safety Office, where he presented fraudulent results regarding the MMR vaccine and autism. Dr. Thompson was put on administrative leave and was threatened that he would be fired due to “insubordination.”


Dr. Thompson withheld copies of the incriminating documents, which were later provided to Prof. Hooker and Representative Bill Posey who has championed the cause of freedom for medical choice regarding vaccination. It is estimated that Thompson released 10,000 documents.  Despite efforts to have Dr. Thompson to testify before Congress, all attempts have been thwarted by the CDC.  The myth of vaccine safety today clearly trumps the health of the nation, and in the meantime serious childhood neurological disorders increase dramatically, and our federal officials scramble to find answers everywhere other than 50 vaccine doses children receive before the age of six. 


Certainly, all of these immunizations, which contain genetically altered live or inactivated bacteria and viruses, toxic chemicals such as formaldehyde, preservatives, heavy metals like aluminum, antibiotics and human, animal and insect DNA and RNA cannot be injected into a child without medical risks, either known and unknown. Frankly it is ethically irresponsible to blindly believe such a toxic stew is completely safe to inject into a young developing child. Our federal health agencies have yet to conduct or fund definitive studies with legitimate methodology to determine once and for all individual vaccine safety and whether or not vaccines as exogenous factors are contributing to the onslaught of illnesses ravishing the nation’s children. Worse, history of the pharmaceutical industry’s vaccine clinical trials is non-existent of viable gold-standard double-blind studies with a legitimate inert placebo. 

Yet this is exactly what a recent editorial in Scientific American’s June 24th issue wants readers to believe.  The article, “The US Needs to Tighten Vaccination Mandates,” states, “[T]here isn’t an iota of doubt that vaccines are a safe and effective way to prevent many diseases.”  No scientific evidence whatsoever to raise doubt? Despite a Supreme Court ruling that vaccines are “unavoidably unsafe?”  Perhaps more disconcerting is that the essay was written by the magazine’s “Editors,” meaning this is now Scientific American’s official policy statement regarding vaccination rather than being the opinion of a single author. In effect, the magazine is telling its readers that it stands firmly behind the CDC propaganda machine and we should never expect to see any scientific evidence that challenges the magazine’s vaccine dogma within its pages. This is one example for why on certain subjects Scientific American has become less scientific in recent years. 

The effort to silence all vaccine criticism, including attacking reputable scientists, physicians, and attorneys such as Kennedy who defend the rights of vaccine-injured children has been full throttle on Google, Facebook, Twitter and Wikipedia. 
 

The article repeats many of the CDC’s lead talking points to promote a medical regime that will eventually enforce mandatory vaccination upon the nation, thereby making state laws ineffective.  The magazine editors’ key points are:

• Unvaccinated children and their parents are to be blamed for recent infectious disease epidemics, notably the 2019 measles outbreaks;
• Unvaccinated persons and those who oppose vaccine mandates are a national threat to public health;
• The nation must achieve herd immunity in order to once and for all eradicate infectious diseases;
• Herd immunity can only be reached by full compliance to the CDC’s vaccination schedule and religious and philosophical exemptions are an obstacle for reaching this goal;
• The internet is the main source for the proliferation of information that questions vaccine efficacy and safety;
• Dr. Andrew Wakefield, a former gastroenterological researcher at the Royal Hospital in London, is largely to be blamed for the increase in vaccine hesitancy.

Behind these messages, the Scientific American is softly advocating widespread censorship of information that questions vaccine safety. This would have to include numerous peer-reviewed  studies and analyses that show vaccines in fact cause a large variety of mental and physical adverse effects, and the biological pathways behind the cause of these injuries are known. If vaccine opponents can be silenced or blacklisted from search engines and social media, then the public would never know about the scientific literature that exposes vaccines’ flaws and a mythic herd immunity can be reached unimpeded. The medical and immunological research that uncovers vaccine injury causation would be buried in obscurity because no pro-vaccine advocate who agrees with the Scientific American’s official policy would ever reference them.  It is therefore inconceivable that the Scientific American and numerous other popular publications and the major media networks that are fully beholden to the CDC and the drug industry would print new research challenging politically correct claims about vaccine safety. This is one reason why the anti-vaccination community is so essential at this time to keep the public debate on vaccine efficacy and safety alive and to prevent a national vaccination mandate being implemented and based upon biased and unsound scientific findings. It has only been through the diligent motivations of vaccine truth seekers, who perform exhaustive research in the scientific literature, that an alternative vaccine story reaches public light.  

Readers are encouraged to visit any of the leading anti-vaccine websites and read the articles in the archives that consistently analyze, and reference very specific peer-reviewed studies buried in the esoteric world of medical literature that raises serious concerns about the medical establishment’s vaccination rhetoric. You will never learn about these studies by reading mainstream journals, such as Scientific American, and major news sources. 

The editorial revisits the old yarn to condemn Dr. Andrew Wakefield in the typical fashion of misrepresenting the facts of both the court case and his research in the medical journal The Lancet. On no occasion during the lead up to his being discredited by the British court did Dr. Wakefield make the claim that the measles vaccine caused autism in any of the children enrolled in his research. His Lancet paper focused on gastrointestinal inflammation that is not an uncommon condition in autistic children. Wakefield’s study reported on the presence of MMR’s viral component embedded in the children’s gut. His conclusion was that this may be the causal factor for the GI disorders in certain children on the autism spectrum scale.  However, today, with the US’ latest autism rate at roughly 1 in 40 children (the state of New Jersey having the high of 1 in 34), parents of vaccine injured children are increasing dramatically. And they will seek out answers to understand why their children are damaged. This is a crisis our federal health agencies are criminally ignoring. However, any qualified reporter or journal editor could have determined that Dr. Wakefield was only one among a team of scientists, and none had stated the MMR caused autism but recommended further research be performed. Collectively, Lancet paper’s authors had published numerous papers earlier and were all vaccine advocates. 

The paper was retracted and the two lead authors, Dr. Wakefield and his superior Dr. John Walker Smith, were subsequently charged with scientific fraud and had their medical licenses revoked. Dr. Walker-Smith appealed, and the highest British court exonerated him and stated its disapproval the British medical board’s behavior and the court ruling. The court’s ruling in effect said that the entire case against Wakefield was unfounded. And yet today, Scientific American clearly did not get the message. 

The irony is that Dr. Wakefield’s research is rarely mentioned or referenced any longer within the anti-vaccination community. That was an earlier generation. Yet the corporate friendly media continues to highlight it repeatedly as central to its arsenal of propagandist fodder. The new generation of parents with vaccine-injured children is far savvier and more educated; they mine the body of scientific literature incessantly. They know far more about vaccine ingredients and their toxicological properties than their pediatricians and primary doctors. If an honest public debate on vaccine safety were to be held, many of these parents would turn the Scientific American’s pro-vaccine editors into biased amateurs. They have independent science, uncontaminated with conflicts of interest, on their side.  If the CDC and other federal agencies want to know why anti-vaccine sentiments continue to grow and are unswerving, here is the answer. There is a large body of science that validates their early experiences and suspicions after their healthy child changed for the worse after receiving a vaccine or multiple vaccines.  This is a reason why you will rarely, if ever, see or hear a leading pro-vaccine advocate such as Dr Paul Offit at Children’s’ Hospital of Philadelphia participate in an honest public debate about the pros and cons found in the scientific literature. Pro-vaccine advocates are strongest and most effective while tucked away in their institutional and media citadels that remove them from the pubic commons.  Their primary strategy is denialism. In short, pro-vaccine advocacy is a culture of unscientific cowardice and breeds the same. And Scientific American’s editors should be shamed for its irrational treatment of the subject.

It  may also be noted that the Scientific American’s Chief Editor Mariette DiChristina has some relationships that raise serious questions about her scientific objectivity. She has been lauded praise by the small medical cult of radicalized, militant Skeptics in the Science Based Medicine group for promptly taking charge to discredit a story in the magazine’s Brazilian issue that was favorable towards agricultural homeopathy.  As the magazine’s Chief Editor, she is on record for stating that homeopathy is a “pseudoscience”, a common term used by followers of Skeptical medical materialism to denounce non-conventional medical theories and therapeutic practices. She is also favorable towards the Gates Foundation, the world’s wealthiest and most aggressive philanthropic funder of vaccine research and development and for founding vaccination programs in developing countries. This year DiChristina attended the World Economic Forum in Davos and interviewed the Foundation’s president of global health, Trevor Mundel, about the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), the largest international endeavor of its kind to create vaccine platforms for rapid responses to infectious disease outbreaks.  Another managing editor for the magazine, Curtis Brainard, has written articles to demonize Dr. Wakefield for spearheading anti-MMR frenzy. 

If we were to peak into the minds of Scientific American’s editors, we might discover a dangerous world view that embraces scientific materialism, and the ideology that humans are nothing but machines. Human society is no different than a corral of cattle, all undergoing the same medication regime before going to slaughter. The editors write, “we need to consider the needs of the herd over the individual.” We believe this statement would find a home in fascism, and it hearkens to Nobel Prize winner Bertrand Russell’s warnings about scientific materialism’s threats to civilization and democracy. 
 
By suppressing the scientific data that warns us about vaccine risks, the magazine’s editors are either intentionally or unknowingly supporting the creation a doctrinal medical regime that will deprive citizens of any right to medical interventions of their choice.  Later, if and when such a regime is nationally operative and enforced, it is predicable that the journal’s editors may also advocate for fines for liability damages during infection outbreaks and even imprisonment. Similar recommendations have already been made by the pro-vaccine advocate Arthur Caplan, a professor of Medical Ethics at New York University’s School of Medicine and an adviser to the US Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency on synthetic biology. In a worse scenario, we could witness Gestapo-like forced vaccination of children at their homes or schools against their parents’ will. Would the editors of Scientific American stand by and support such draconian measures? This is not a scientific question; it is a deeply moral one, especially when there are other viable preventative means to protect oneself from infectious diseases that do not require a vaccine. But for those who have buried their heads in the black hole of medical materialism they are unable to recognize nor evaluate the alternatives.