previously published on the National Health Federation UK website
This is included in much more detail in the Second Edition of my book, Holistic Well-being: A Paradigm Shift
Please feel free to comment with your own thoughts or experiences below.
To Immunise or Not To Immunise – THAT is the Question! It certainly is a question that only YOU can answer whether it is immunising your baby or having the flu vaccine.
I am hoping that this analysis of and insight into the propaganda surrounding the vaccine and immunisation drives by local health authorities will help you to see how your logical thoughts are manipulated to make you afraid NOT TO vaccinate. This is mainly achieved by the use of fallacies which are tricks that can stop you thinking logically, and can therefore alter your decisions and even beliefs!
Vaccine season is certainly now upon us. We have seen many distasteful “advert” banners outside doctor’s surgeries stating “ROLL UP ROLL UP FOR YOUR FLU JAB”– like it’s some sort of circus! What a clever way to try to make the vaccine seem that it is not a serious issue – no big deal! But then maybe this should also tell us that we shouldn’t be taking the advertising and scare mongering seriously!
Sadly, though it really IS a serious issue, especially to those who have been harmed by the vaccine, or the family members of those who have died soon after having the vaccine.
The chant “Roll Up Roll Up” also puts me in mind of a snake oil salesman – is this REALLY what our doctors are becoming? If I were a doctor I would be insulted by this approach to advertising one of my services and I think it is appalling that the government feel they can treat our health so trivially and non-seriously! They think it’s a circus? And what are we? The monkeys? Yes – that would be test monkeys held in our cages of fear!
The vaccination campaigns are almost all based upon a fallacy that appeals to our emotions and the emotion they use is fear. When we are afraid, especially for our health and the health of our children, we will do anything to help ourselves, but in truth this is just making us more vulnerable to misinformation.
They also encourage us to make an assumption. The assumption that if something is believed to do something good then it isn’t bad (or at least can’t be THAT bad).
You can see by the NHS poster opposite how much they use fear to promote the jabs. Fear is induced not only by the exaggerated and inaccurate imagery, but also stating that we do not know all the facts about flu, making us think there is a lot more to it and scaring us into the jab. But what they don’t do is state the fact that we do not know all the facts about the jab EITHER!
It also states the the flu virus is clever as it “continually evolves and mutates”. This makes us think of something alien or disgusting, further adding to fear. But if you read between the lines, what this ALSO states is that the vaccines cannot possibly help! The vaccine you have in your arm was developed (at least) months previously – so this means that the virus the vaccine protects against has now surely mutated and evolved into a different strain!
They also state “if you suffer from certain chronic illness or are 65 or over you are especially at risk” – yet this is also true of negative side effects from having the jab (but they hide this information from you).
This advert is clearly trying to belittle the HPV vaccine, trying to demonstrate that it is a matter-of-fact everyday thing. Also in this way putting the message across that it is not serious.
But the truth is that it IS serious and the decision to have a vaccine that contains an ingredient that made EVERY rat tested on STERILE should not be taken lightly at all!
Here is a list of fallacies that I have found in this very short advert (after only a short while, I could maybe write a lot more if I had a lot more time!)
Fallacy 1: Appeal to Common Practice – if everyone does it then it is OK for me to do. This is shown by all the pupils going about their day and having the vaccine.
Fallacy 2: Appeal to Popularity – most people approve of this so it must be OK.
Fallacy 3: Bandwagon – everyone else does it so I will too or otherwise I may not be accepted. This is shown by linking arms with her friend, both getting the vaccine together.
Fallacy 4: Questionable cause – HPV and cervical cancer sometimes occur together so HPV must cause cervical cancer (this has been proved NOT to be the case by the FDA without the presence of an infection). In the words of the FDA: “Based on new scientific information published in the past 15 years, it is now generally agreed that identifying and typing HPV infection does not bear a direct relationship to stratification of the risk for cervical cancer. Most acute infections caused by HPV are self-limiting [1, 4-7]. …Repeated sequential transient HPV infections, even when caused by ‘high-risk’ HPVs, are characteristically not associated with high risk of developing squamous intraepithelial lesions, a precursor of cervical cancer.”
“A woman found to be positive for the same strain (genotype) of HPV on repeated testing is highly likely suffering from a persistent HPV infection and is considered to be at high risk of developing precancerous intraepithelial lesions in the cervix .It is the persistent infection, not the virus, that determines the cancer risk.” (ref:redpillreich.blogspot.com)
Fallacy 5: Appeal to Authority – the NHS are passing on information given to them by pharmaceutical salesmen, but making us think they are the experts in this, and so we trust them.
Fallacy 6 (double): Appeal to Emotion (fear) & Slippery Slope – HPV MAY occur and if it does Cervical Cancer WILL be inevitable (this is how it makes us think – not the truth!!) and this invokes our fear to be scared into having the vaccine.
And finally…calling the vaccine the “Cervical Cancer Vaccine” is extremely misleading as it does NOT protect from cancer at all. There are still many strains of HPV not covered by the vaccine and as we have just read from the FDA’s own words, it is the infection NOT the virus that can lead to cancer. But calling it this lures people into a false sense of security and gives them false information just from the name.
What makes things worse about obtaining information about vaccines is that we trust what our GPs tell us, and they generally tell us there is nothing to worry about and the vaccines ‘save lives’, but the fact is they are given increasingly large bonuses for the number of patients they vaccinate. As many surgeries/doctors come to rely on these bonuses their advice inevitably may become more profit-related than health-related.
Here is an excellent article entitled “Seasonal Flu Vaccines, Are They Safe or Necessary?”