To kick off National Infant Immunization Week, the U.S. Surgeon General teamed up with Sesame Street and Elmo for behavior placement directed at your children. Apparently, the campaign seeks to convince the real decision makers when it comes to childhood and infant vaccination; the children and infants. Having undertones of plain creepiness throughout the advertisement, the Surgeon General implies to your children and Elmo that their bodies can fight germs only with the help of vaccines.
Putting aside the “safe and effective” science, the reality of this campaign is that vaccines are a private company’s medical product. This is essentially a drug advertisement aimed directly at children and by doing so, violates the Federal Trade Commission’s Statutory Authority, the FDA Consumer-Directed Broadcasting Industry Guidelines, The Children’s Advertising Review Unit Guidelines, and plain moral and ethical integrity across the board. In the United Kingdom, Greece, Denmark, and Belgium, advertising to children is restricted. Your children are now considered “brand touch points” for pharmaceutical industry advertising. In Quebec, Sweden and Norway, advertising to children under the age of 12 is illegal. In addition Australia, Canada, and Sweden have already adopted regulations prohibiting advertising on programs targeting audiences of young children.
The pharmaceutical drug sector, driven by profit, has a rich history of damage to public health throughout the world. Recently, GlaxoSmithKline paid out $63 million to vaccine damaged children in the UK bringing their total legal payouts for damages and fraud to over $9 billion since 2003. Furthermore, the vaccines being fraudulently advertised by Elmo and the Surgeon General require the legally binding statements on their inserts and television campaigns to include: