Although 2015 seemed to have a non-stop barrage of pro-vaccine propaganda, January 2016 brings with it the annual winter fear-fest regarding the lack of vaccination and the “anti-vaccine movement.” One such example is a small article in the KATV Little Rock, Arkansas ABC7 website.

The article is essentially an interview with Dr. Steve Thompson who told channel 7 that the “anti-vaccine movement” is a growing problem. Thompson states that the most difficult obstacle to vaccination is the parents’ fear and “claims made on the Internet” that are untrue.

“I’ve seen cases of whooping cough, I’ve seen cases that were so serious that we had to put the children in the hospital and it was very frightening, those parents were scared to death,” he says.

Thompson argues that between 1970 and 1985 the U.S. had an average of only 2,000 whooping cough cases while in 2014 he says there were nearly 33,000. It is noteworthy to point out that Thompson does not mention how many children he has seen die of whooping cough. Chances are, he hasn’t seen any. Why? Because those numbers are very low.

Of course, whooping cough is very dangerous and can indeed be a life-threatening illness, but what Thompson also fails to mention, is that vaccines are incredibly dangerous themselves and that the evidence that the pertussis vaccine would actually protect any of the children he encountered is scant at best.

It is noteworthy to point out that Thompson uses statistics of low numbers of whooping cough cases between 1970 and 1985 as if he were attempting to directly correlate the vaccine and low numbers of whooping cough. Of course, the vaccine had been introduced nearly 30 years prior to the earlier date he mentions so is Thompson arguing that 30 years of vaccination only produced a 15-year window in immunization? Or is he merely pulling out positive statistics and hoping no one will notice? Indeed, whenever one looks at the history of whooping cough vaccination in the United States, it is clear that the disease had already declined in a decisive fashion before the vaccine was ever introduced.

It is also telling that Thompson claims that the fear of vaccinations are the fault of Dr. Andrew Wakefield and that the anti-vax movement began in 1998. Yet, according to his own statistics, pertussis cases began increasing in 1985 so it couldn’t have been the fault of the anti-vaccination movement, which, according to Thompson, began 13 years later.

And he also added,

If your child wakes up with a 104 degree fever, you don’t get on the Internet and look up how to treat a child with 104 fever. What you do is you bring them to our office and rely on our training and expertise to help you diagnose that. It could be anywhere from a simple viral infection to pneumonia, so you rely on our expertise for that. Well it’s the same thing for vaccinations.

As one can see, Thompson wastes no opportunity to promote his ego and his expertise. He, Thompson implies, is the final authority when it comes to all things health-related. There are no flaws in Thompson’s system and anyone who thinks otherwise must simply be a dimwit who is spending too much time on the Internet. But, while medical doctors do have a respectable degree of knowledge on many issues, the Internet could have helped prevent Dr. Thompson from botching his own statistics on a media platform.

With that in mind, one other little tidbit that should be mentioned is that most of these whooping cough outbreaks tend to be centered in vaccinated populations.


Comment: A study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2013 showed that the whooping cough vaccines that have been in use since the 1990s – and not kids whose parents refuse the whooping cough vaccine – are actually behind the surge in whooping cough outbreaks across the U.S.

According to channel 7,

While some studies show possible seizures as a side-effect to vaccinations, or parents read stories of developmental problems, Dr. Thompson said those neurological issues were already part of your brain.

If Dr. Thompson is correct, these neurological issues are a relatively recent phenomenon. They are also a phenomenon that has a correlation to the increased number of vaccinations in small children. Apparently, the statistics in this regard are not important to Thompson, because his mind is already made up and the diagnosis has been made without ever having examined the patient.

In the end, Thompson’s spiel regarding vaccines and the anti-vaccine movement, is just one of many being repeated throughout mainstream media outlets. While it would be well enough for many of us to simply allow Thompson and those like him to complain about anti-vaxxers and promote vaccination, and simply agree to disagree, the pro-vaccination movement is not content to do the same. It seeks the force of law to ensure that no one is allowed to question or escape the hands of the pharmaceutical industry and forces injections virtually at gunpoint. We cannot allow Big Pharma financial interests, medical doctors, social policies, theories and opinions to eliminate one shred of our civil constitutional rights.

Brandon Turbeville is an author out of Florence, South Carolina.