thanks to the reader who sent the link to this item from natural news.com: swine flu vaccine victims encouraged to post reports of side effects on swinefluvaccinereport.com by mike adams the health ranger. it gives me a chance to explain why i'm such an old crab about these guys....
as the swine flu vaccination campaigns begin sweeping across america, naturalnews has created a new website where victims of swine flu vaccine side effects can post their true stories about what happened to them or their children.
"victims of swine flu side effects" and "post their true stories" are great examples of begging the question: assuming the truth of something still under debate.
the website is http://www.swinefluvaccinereport.com and it was created by naturalnews editor mike adams for the simple purpose of "shedding light" on the potential side effects of the swine flu vaccine.
"potential side effects" is meaningless. a potential side effect of shaving is cutting your own throat. so what?
anyone can post on the site. all posts are moderated, so it takes some time for new posts to be approved. any posts that appear to be fictitious will be deleted.
well, i delete some posts too, but not because they're fictitious. they're wrong and therefore just a waste of time.
"this website gives swine flu vaccine sufferers an opportunity to share their true stories with the world," said mike adams, also the writer of the popular hip-hop song 'don't inject me.'
"swine flu vaccine sufferers" = more begging the question. then a brilliant example of the appeal to authority: he's not only the editor of the site, he's a ... hip-hop writer. of a popular song.
"while vaccine manufacturers are trying to censor the truth about the dangers of their vaccines, we are working to serve the public interest by openly revealing the truth about how these vaccines are impacting real people."
more loaded language: "censor the truth," "dangers of their vaccines," "serve the public interest." how can we not trust this guy? adams is on the record saying that the swine flu vaccines are likely more dangerous than the swine flu itself.
so what? does this mean if you survive a vaccination he'll give you your money back?
the extremely mild nature of h1n1 influenza, combined with the increasing reports of seizures and deaths from cervical cancer vaccines, leads many people to be openly concerned about the risk / reward ratio of swine flu vaccination.
close to an outright lie from this promoter of truth. "increasing reports" = one case of a poor girl who died of a malignant tumor in her chest shortly after receiving an hpv vaccination she would never need. "many people" is just another example of the bandwagon propaganda device: if many people believe something, there must be something to it.
"there is no medically justifiable reason to be vaccinated against such a mild flu," says adams. "this vaccine is clearly being pushed solely as a revenue generator for the pharmaceutical companies, not as a serious effort to protect public health."
if i refused a vaccination, caught h1n1, and passed it along to a pregnant woman or an asthmatic child, i would have a hell of a lot on my conscience.
the vaccination isn't all about me, or about those wikkid big pharma corporations--it's about building a barrier to protect the people who really do get terribly sick from this "mild flu."
maybe mr. adams the hip-hop star ought to spend some time in icus, seeing what this mild virus can do.
and he then might try making his case in the unemotional, rational language of the medical profession, instead of resorting to semantic gimmicks and logical fallacies that aristotle would have laughed at.
i'm sorry if i've upset some of my regular visitors with this rant. i realize some people have genuine reasons for refusing a vaccination. but as the pandemic has gone on, the anti-vaxers have grown increasingly smug in their rejection of the medical science that has repeatedly saved their ignorant asses from death before the age of 5.
sixty-one years ago next month, i caught polio for the lack of a vaccine. i could have ended up in an iron lung, or lurching around with crutches and braces on my legs, like one of my classmates (who caught polio twice).
when the polio vaccine came along, you'd better believe i took it--and so did my father and brother, both of whom probably had undiagnosed polio about the time i did. so did millions of others, and now polio has effectively vanished from the civilized world, like smallpox.
regular readers of this blog know that i know how minor this pandemic is compared to the ongoing disasters of hiv/aids, tb, malaria, and a host of other diseases.
it's no credit to us that we ignore those deaths. if americans, for example, reported their own gunshot deaths (30,000 a year) as breathlessly as they're reporting their few deaths from swine flu, they might even be moved to do something about that particular public-health catastrophe.
if canadians had really cared about the dismal living conditions (and mortality rates) on our first nations reserves, we'd have forestalled last spring's outbreaks in manitoba.
but our culture shrugs off some deaths and pays attention to others. at the moment, h1n1 deaths are getting attention. most of those deaths are preventable, if we deal seriously with them, and in the process we might learn something that will save lives at risk from worse diseases.
and one thing that will save far, far more lives than it will cost is vaccination.
