The grande dame of the antivaccine movement, Barbara Loe Fisher, is ranting again. This time, she is peddling both misinformed consent about vaccines and likening her struggle to social justice movements of the past as she portrays well baby visits as “vaccine battlegrounds” instigated by the AAP.
Barbara Loe Fisher, Joe Mercola, and other antivaxers frequently deny that the flu is dangerous and that all the promotion of flu vaccines every year is a plot by big pharma to make money based on fear. The CDC argues otherwise, reporting that influenza mortality last season was higher than iit’s been in decades. Roughly 80,000 people are estimated to have died last season from influenza or complications from the flu.
Here we go again. Joe Mercola and Barbara Loe Fisher make up a fake “Vaccine Injury Awareness Week” as an excuse to fundraise and spread antivax pseudoscience hither, thither, and yon. Same as it ever was. At least this year, they avoided the gratuitous Nazi references. It must have taken enormous restraint on their parts.
Recently, Dr. Peter Hotez characterized antivaccine groups as “hate groups,” and antivaxer Barbara Loe Fisher took great umbrage, accusing Dr. Hotez and the public health community of “bullying” parents of “vaccine-injured” children. Did Dr. Hotez go too far? And what about Fisher’s hypocrisy, given that Dr. Hotez has received death threats credible enough to warrant police protection and Fisher herself has sued her critics, in effect trying to bully them into silence?
A story in The Washington Free Beacon claims that Tipper Gore will be appearing at a fundraiser for Kathleen Murphy, a Democratic member of the Virginia House of Delegates running for reelection to be held by Claire and Albert Dwoskin, two rich antivaxers and donors to the Democratic Party. If the story is true and not fake news that’s bad, but even if it turns out not to be true I just had to discuss the Dwoskins, who have been funding antivaccine “studies” for several years now.
