Bill Gates Attacks Andrew Wakefield and the Vaccine Safety Community

Updated 3/4/11: This just in, Gates Foundation invests $10 million in vaccine maker
Liquidia Technologies. And we have our profit motive. If all goes well for Bill the Benevolent, he should have his ten billion and more recouped by the end of the decade.

Updated: Just came across this:

Bill Gates: Register Every Birth by Cellphone To Ensure Vaccination, Control Population Growth

Ummm... hell no.

Is it just me, or does he sound like he is talking about forced vaccination? Putting together his comments from the two articles, "Over this decade, we believe unbelievable progress can be made, in both inventing new vaccines and making sure they get out to all the children who need them." (he seems to believe that every child needs them) and "If you could register every birth on a cell phone—get fingerprints, get a location—then you could [set up] systems to make sure the immunizations happen."

Apparently Gates feel that selling a bunch of buggy software with pushy business practices qualifies him as the king of the world.

Since posting this yesterday, many have commented that Gates seems a bit off his rocker in this interview. One commenter worried about neuro-degenerative disease. Maybe we should keep an eye on him to make sure he is not going the way of Howard Hughes.

Original Article:

Much discussion has taken place on the push back against the vaccine safety/vaccine injury community in the last month, beginning the first week of January. In the past media pushes against us have lasted a day or three in the media... but this one, centered on the strawman argument that Andrew Wakefield is at the heart of the current resistance to the aggressive vaccine schedule and that his guilt by accusation in the BMJ ends the debate, is apparently the new normal.

Apparently the attack on Andy was Phase 1 scheduled for January (Along with Offit and Mnookin's books) We now seem to be beginning Phase 2, Bill Gates coming out party and his Polio Vaccine drive.

Apparently, Gates has declared 2011 is "The Year of the Vaccines" and pledged ten billion dollars over the next ten years (Interestingly, this was a GSK tag line in their 2005 investors annual review).

Gates is interviewed by Sanjay Gupta on CNN today.

Gates: Well, Dr. Wakefield has been shown to have used absolutely fraudulent data. He had a financial interest in some lawsuits, he created a fake paper, the journal allowed it to run. All the other studies were done, showed no connection whatsoever again and again and again. So it's an absolute lie that has killed thousands of kids. Because the mothers who heard that lie, many of them didn't have their kids take either pertussis or measles vaccine, and their children are dead today. And so the people who go and engage in those anti-vaccine efforts -- you know, they, they kill children. It's a very sad thing, because these vaccines are important.

So considering Gates back to back Stewart/Colbert episodes with Offit last week, we can safely surmise that the attacks against our community and or doctors in the media is a Bill Gates Production. Ten billion dollars buys a lot of PR people and a lot journalists for hire.

And in my piece last week I asked the question... Who was talking people like Anderson Cooper and George Stephanolopous into going hard against Wakefield? Those interviews finally make sense to me. Bill Gates certainly has the clout to do so. Any journalist with the Gates Foundation feeding them information and giving them a push would feel pretty safe playing attack dog with Big Bill's Billions behind them. And watch Gates' tone in the interview. He is totally disgusted with us and AW. We are child killers. Easy to see the emotional transfer that took place from Gates Co to Talking Head Town.

So. How long will this push last... the one year? Or the ten years? Will more money, Big Bill sized money, do what all the other money couldn't do and get people to go back to sleep on vaccine safety? Is part of Bill's Billions going to push legislation on the Offit telegraphed idea in the Lancet a few months back that people should be coerced into vaccinating, with requirements for re-education camp before one would be "allowed" not to vaccinate?

I wonder if Gates money made its way into Brian Deer's pocket? He signed a paper for CNN saying he didn't take Pharma money for the last 3 years (note that he has been writing about Wakefield for 7 years), but he didn't sign anything saying that he didn't take Tech money for the last three years.

Bill Gates just called me a baby killer.  I thought that was a really bad thing to do.  Offit is horrified that parents would call him a baby killer.  'Scuse me... "Child Killer."  (Yes I know he said, "anti-vaccine" but that is what they consider us so....)

Also children who don't get the measles and pertussis vaccines are dead.  Apparently.

Wait a minute... Bill was born a decade before the measles vaccine was invented.  Why is he not dead?

Dear Bill Gates, 

You don't know what you are talking about.  You are making things worse with your monied arrogance.  Wanna help the poor?  We are right here.  We vaccinated our children like we were told.  Where is my check?  Got a vaccine to make my son healthy again?  Doesn't charity begin at home?

Sincerely,

Ginger Taylor, M.S.

Whose son has not had the measles vaccine and yet lives.

The man can't keep viruses out of his own computers, but he is gonna keep them out of your kids.

UPDATE:  Bill Gates.  The first name in honerable business practices.  Glass houses and all...

Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results

$28 billion health fund backed by Bill Gates and Bono is investigated for fraud
Microsoft founder's charity has donated over $100m

And those are just this week.

Update: In this interview, he comments that the roll out of the Rotavirus vaccine has gone slower than he had anticipated. Interesting that he singles Offit's vaccine among all of them.

He also talks about adding five or six new vaccines to the ones already in use.

During one part of the discussion, he addresses meeting with world leaders to influence them to get behind his vaccine program. Note that he says, "Vaccination systems can be run even when there is no governmnet. NGo's are in places like Somalia and actually making that work."

So where are the boundaries? There is a fine line between offering a vaccine and coercing someone to vaccinate. Which is he doing? Many governments feel perfectly fine to round up their citizens at guy point to make them do what the government wants them to do. What is in place to prevent that kind of a thing from happening here?

An Invitation to Julie Gerberding to Help Her Find the Missing Information on Autism

Yesterday CNN posted an interview with Julie Gerberding, head of the CDC, whom many parents of autistic children, myself included, want removed from her post for her… well… I will be generous and call it “mismanagement” of the autism epidemic.

Dr. Gupta, who has seemed to actually want to investigate this since the Poling Case was brought to our attention, did the interview, and unfortunately, could not have made it easier on her. He lobbed softballs and challenged nothing that she said. But he did say he would “stay on this”, so I am not giving up hope on him.

Of course she stuck to the same talking points, ‘CDC cares about autism’, ‘CDC are parents too’, ‘autism rates the same, just better recognition’, ‘more needs to be done’, but failed to mention that she has been saying those same things since she took the job six years ago, but has not actually done one single thing for our kids.

I would just like to call attention to a couple of her bullshit (*) remarks:

“There have been at least 15 very good scientific studies and the Institute of Medicine that has searched this out. And they have concluded that there really is no association between vaccines and autism”

The IOM report and two of those “very good” studies are the thing that got me into this debate in the first place. (David Kirby wrote a very fat book about them, which CDC still has not responded to.) The IOM decision was a horrible one. It was not based on the research presented at the meetings, the findings contradicted themselves and we have the transcripts of one of the first meetings in which they say no matter what information comes to light, they were going to give CDC what they asked for, which was that vaccines would not be indicted.

When asked about the transcripts, Dr. Harvey Fineberg, head of the IOM, states that this is an incorrect interpretation of the comments, but will not offer any alternate interpretation of what else they could mean. (I wrote to him personally, but got no response.)

Additionally… well… if you read my blog you already know how I feel about those “very good” studies.

“33,000 children a year are saved from death associated with vaccines because of our immunization program”

There is absolutely no way for her to know this. As far as I know there is no door way into an alternate universe where everything is the same except that vaccination does not exist so that she can count how many kids there die and come back and make the report to us.

“One of the things that concerns me, while the attention is focused on vaccines, in a sense, it means that people are not looking for other causes."

Nice misdirection, but you forgot to misdirect us to something. What are these other causes that we might be examining? It can’t be genetics because pretty much ALL of the government research dollars have been going into them for decades. What is it that we have become distracted from?

And now for the biggest bullshit statement of the day:

“And we have got to keep reminding ourselves that the vaccine story is one that has been debated for many, many years now. We keep looking and looking and looking and really cannot turn up any information”.

Oh. My. God.

Really? Seriously? (Where are Amy and Seth when you need them).

Because I can. Random mom in a little town in Maine with internet access and the ability to read is finding more information than you can with your thousands of scientists and billions of dollars?

Come on Julie. (Can I call you Julie? I feel like I know you personally since your actions have had such a directly destructive impact on my son and the course of the lives of each of the members of our family) Let's set the bullshit aside. I know that you know that information too, because CDC visits this blog every day, Monday through Friday. (Half the time it is to read about what we are all saying about you personally).

Tell you what. I will give you the benefit of the doubt on this one. Perhaps all this information on causes and treatments has escaped your attention. But you are in luck!

The spring DAN! Conference is next week in Cherry Hill, NJ and they have LOADS of this missing information that you cannot seem to find. So I want to offer you a personal invitation to attend the conference with me.

I will pay all your expenses. And by that I mean I will make JB Handley pay all your expenses because I am broke from treating Chandler for his ‘autistic symptoms’. (update: JB confirmed, he's got you covered.)

Just let me know where and what time to pick you up on the evening of Wednesday, April 2. World Autism Day.


* My apologies for using this crass term for those who may not believe that it is appropriate, but after four years of hearing this junk, I have come to the conclusion that it is really the only accurate term to describe these statements any more. I will be using it from now on as a technical term to describe the form of speech described by Princeton Professor Harvey G. Frankfurt in his 2005 ethics book, “On Bullshit”.

UPDATE: Apparently I am a plagiarist. Mark Blaxill gave a talk at the 2006 Autism One conference where he invokes Frankfurt's ideas in reference to Harvey Feinberg's epidemic denial comments. It is a great talk and appropriate to the absurdity of the statements coming out of the CDC and their fellow travelers these days so I will post it. I had heard the speech from the podcast a few years ago and forgot about it. I thought John Stewart had introduced me to Frankfurt, but apparently I misremembered. ;)
HT: Carrie Elsass