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Vaccine advocate Blima Marcus learns the hard way just how low antivaxers will go

An advanced practice nurse gave an antivaccine rant posted to Facebook. Or did she? All is not as an antivaxer wants you to believe it is. At least so it appears.

Believe it or not, for once I had a really busy day in the operating room on Tuesday. (Given that I’m primarily academic and research, this doesn’t happen as often as it used to.) Because of that, I was pretty beat by the end of the day, too beat to put together anything that I considered of sufficient quality for the blog. It’s unfortunate, but it happens from time to time. This time it led to me falling asleep on the couch shortly after 9 PM, a situation that’s not conducive to producing the Insolence, either Respectful or not-so-Respectful, that you know and love. In any event, those of you who’ve been reading a long time know that one thing I really detest is an antivaccine physician like Dr. Jack Wolfson, but even more so an antivaccine pediatrician like Dr. Bob Sears, or Dr. Paul Thomas, the latter of whom is a “rising star” (if you can call it that) in the antivaccine movement. I also detest antivaccine nurses, and it’s that that brings me to my topic for today, an advanced practice nurse at NYU named Blima Marcus. Here’s how I first learned about her, from a video posted by antivaxer Hillary Simpson called The Marvelous Mrs. Marcus. It’s video of Blima Marcus speaking at a Vaccine Education Seminar in Lakewood, NJ on November 26:

And here’s the video on a page I had never heard of before, VaXism:

And here it is on YouTube.

Notice how the video is edited. That will become important as this discussion continues, because all might not be as it seems. On the other hand, some of what we see on the video does appear damning even without context. What’s really going on? Is Blima Marcus really antivaccine? On first glance, it looks bad. Let’s dig in and find out.

First, though, you might remember Hillary Simpson from a recent post I did about her. Basically, she founded the “Crazy Mothers” Facebook page, in which she cleverly appropriates the term sometimes used to disparage antivaccine moms and makes it her own. If you want to get an idea of what I’m talking about, check out a cringe- and vomit-inducing video that riffs on an old Apple Computer ad known as “Here’s to the Crazy Ones,” the ad that started launched Apple’s iconic “Think Different” ad campaign:

Of course, Simpson’s version of the ad substitutes antivaccine cranks for all the geniuses, artists, and rebels in the 20 year old Apple ad. So, instead of seeing Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King, Jr., Mahatma Ghandi, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Muhammed Ali, Alfred Hitchcock, Pablo Picasso, etc., we see…Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.? Suzanne Humphries? J.B. Handley? Andrew Wakefield? Del Bigtree? Rev. Tony Muhammad? Polly Tommy? Ack! I can’t take any more, but I’m still going to make you watch this video:

OK, I apologize. That really is cringe-inducing, isn’t it? I think it’s even more cringe-inducing than the video Simpson made of her freeform rap about vaccines and her child. (Let’s just say, Eminem, she ain’t.) I cringed so hard the first time I saw Simpson’s version of Apple’s Here’s to the Crazy Ones that people thought I had tetanus. Fortunately, I’m up to date on all my vaccinations.

It turns out that Blima Marcus, DNP ANP-BC RN OCN is an oncology nurse practitioner at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and an adjunct professor of nursing at Hunter College. If you watch that video of Blima Marcus above, you’ll see what at first glance looks like a litany of standard antivaccine tropes. In the very first shot, Marcus is shown saying that she knew nothing about vaccines until ten days ago, which seems very odd, and how she “gave herself a crash course on it with the help of a lot of my nurses,” which is even odder. If that were the case, why would she be speaking with parents at a vaccine education event? That doesn’t seem right. Why not, for instance, have a pediatric nurse practitioner, someone who’s knowledgeable about vaccines and even administeres them in her practice every day, address this group of mothers, instead of someone who had, if that snippet is to be believed, not known much about vaccines until ten days ago?

Next up, we see Marcus saying that she thinks that physicians are “negating a lot of what women see in their children” and that the thinks that “physicians are trying to pretend that vaccines never cause harm.” She also states that “doctors will automatically tell the mothers that it’s not from the vaccine” and that she believes that there are genetic issues that can predispose to a vaccine doing “terrible damage.” She even repeats an antivaccine trope about how death rates from these “horrible diseases” were on the decline even before the vaccines were introduced, an antivaccine trope that I like to call the “vaccines didn’t save usgambit. On the other hand, she did correctly point out that the rates weren’t declining, but fewer were dying of the diseases because of better medicine; so she could very well have been countering the “vaccines didn’t save us gambit.”

Elsewhere, Marcus talks about shedding, but in a fairly straightforward manner, and it seems to me that this could have been an attempt to explain why vaccine shedding is not the horrific danger that antivaxers paint it as. At this point, I was starting to get a little suspicious that all was not as it seemed. Then Marcus started talking about toxins, relating how as a cancer survivor she didn’t want to take any more vaccines, wanted to be “natural,” and didn’t want to vaccinate her child and didn’t give her daughter the hepatitis B vaccine until she turned two. She even admitted that “vaccines terrified” her and how she delayed vaccination for her children. But then she also stated how, in retrospect, she thinks she just had postpartum anxiety.

Then I saw her bring up formaldehyde and how she had never known that vaccines had formaldehyde. Then there was a fast cut of her saying it “didn’t make sense” and talking about the flu shot and Guillain-Barré syndrome. At this point, I started to become really suspicious that there was some highly selective editing going on here. That suspicion deepened as I watched her talk about mercury poisoning as causing serious neurological symptoms without mentioning vaccines and then mentioning fetal cells without mentioning vaccines. Then the last segment shows her touting cannabis oil for…it’s not clear what.

So what’s going on here? Certainly there are some statements in that video that on the surface sound a bit damning, but then there are parts that look clumsily and selectively edited, such as the segue from Marcus talking about how she hadn’t know that there was formaldehyde in vaccines (without mentioning vaccines) to talking about the flu vaccines. (Formaldehyde, by the way, is present at such tiny quantities in vaccines that the formaldehyde produced by normal metabolism far outstrips the amount in any round of vaccines.)

Then I saw this:

So Blima Marcus is now publicly complaining that the video was deceptively edited to misrepresent her position. Given the fundamental dishonesty of many antivaxers, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if this were true. Still, I asked myself: Is there anywhere else we can look to see if she was truly misrepresented? It turned out that there is. Not long ago, Blima Marcus co-authored an article with another nurse, Sarah Levine, BSN, RN, for The Lakewood Scoop entitled The Uneducated Teaching the Unvaccinated. It is brutal, almost Orac-level brutal, in its condemnation of antivaxers. I like it:

The regional measles outbreak has sparked major controversy within the Jewish community. Heavily-populated Jewish communities are seeing dozens of cases of the measles, and it’s only getting worse. Confirmed cases in Chicago occurred after a family traveled to Lakewood with a newly vaccinated child who didn’t yet have time to develop immunity. This child contracted the measles in New Jersey, returned to Illinois, and exposed as many as 80 children in a daycare.

Some may point to a variety of reasons as to why the measles epidemic is so concentrated in Orthodox Jewish communities. This article will focus on the the biggest one: lack of education leaving people vulnerable to misinformed, devious, and outright propaganda efforts which attempt to paint vaccination as a dangerous and money-driven policy.

Anti-vaccination propaganda is led by uneducated and clearly biased Orthodox men and women in our communities.

If I were a Jew living in a Jewish community and writing about antivaxers, I couldn’t have put it better myself. I also learn from the article that apparently Marcus is a member of the Orthodox Jewish Nurses Association Vaccine Task Force:

The Orthodox Jewish Nurses Association, a national group of frum nurses, received many requests for information regarding vaccines and its safety. A group of 30 nurses, with varying professional degrees and credentials, formed a Vaccine Task Force. The goal of the task force is to examine where frum people were receiving their misguided vaccine information, what the content was, and to provide proper education and allow for question and answers on the topic of vaccines and its safety.

Our findings are both astounding, yet unsurprising.

We learned that the Akeres Habayis hotline offers vaccine lectures delivered by ill-reputed anti-vaxx activists. One nurse called in and was appalled to hear vaccine information shared by a Binyomin Rothstein, a Maryland physician whose license was revoked after a decade of probation for practicing subpar medicine – including treating patients for illnesses such as pneumonia and heart attacks with injections of vitamins and injections of hydrogen peroxide. Toni Bark, another frequent lecturer on this hotline, is a holistic practitioner who sells beauty products online. Bark was discussing the (nonexistent) link between vaccines and infant mortality rates.

Of course, I’ve discussed Toni Bark before and her antivaccine pseudoscience and quackery, but I haven’t heard of Binyomin Rothstein before. He sounds like an “integrative medicine” physician.

The rest of the article is equally brutal against antivaxers. For instance:

The founders of Akeres Habayis also publish and distribute a propaganda pamphlet called the Vaccine Safety Handbook: P.E.A.C.H. Magazine – Parents Educated and Advocating for their Children’s Health. This comforting and benign sounding pamphlet is actually a collection of virulent propaganda against vaccines and the entire medical system. The Task Force received a copy and found it full of outright lies, misleading graphs, and inaccuracies. Quotes in this pamphlet are taken out of context, statistics are twisted and distorted, and most of the sources were found to be openly biased. Furthermore, some of the information in the pamphlet has been taken word-for-word from anti-vaccination websites, implying that the distributors of the pamphlet made no efforts to vet or substantiate the information they regurgitate.

It truly is the blind leading the blind.

And so it is. I might have to look into this “hotline” and the WhatsApp courses Akeres Habayis offers that the OJNA tried to infiltrate to see what sort of misinformation is being taught. I must admit that I had had doubts about Blima Marcus based on some of the things she was captured on video saying. Her article above, however, makes me very much more inclined to accept her explanation of what happened. She’s pro-vaccine and was trying to counter misinformation in the Orthodox Jewish community.

So here’s what I think happened. Blima Marcus agreed to appear at a vaccine education event in Lakewood after Thanksgiving. In trying to debunk common antivaccine tropes, she repeated some of them. To win the mothers’ trust and make a connection so that they would trust her, she related some of the events in her own life, including her previous fear of vaccines and how she had been a vaccine-hesitant mother. Normally, that’s an excellent strategy to win over a potentially hostile audience, but it does have a risk. We now see from the video Simpson shared what that risk was. There was someone there who was dishonest and recorded her on a cell phone camera. That same person selectively took bits of her talk and answers to questions and deceptively edited them together.

Now, here’s the thing. While Marcus is clearly the victim here and the antivaxer (whoever it was) who dishonestly edited snippets of her talk together to give the impression that she was antivaccine is a reprehensible piece of lying garbage, this incident is a cautionary tale that should be a lesson for vaccine advocates, particularly newbies. What do I mean? If there’s one thing I’ve learned dealing with antivaxers it’s that some of them are relentlessly dishonest to the level of spreading fake news to further their cause. This subset will not infrequently take what you say out of context to make it look as though you support their views. When going into any of these sorts of events, you have to be acutely aware of this risk and be very, very, very careful about what you say, including in small segments, to make sure that you don’t say anything that can easily be taken out of context. Now, in my case, no one—not even the most rabid antivaxer—is going to try (or be able) to convince people that I said something supporting antivaccine pseudoscience. That being said, I’m very aware that antivaxers would love to capture me saying something that paints me in a bad light, such as advocating something evil or saying something so wrong that it makes me look stupid or ignorant to have said it. Even experienced hands can be tripped up, such as when Dr. Paul Offit was unexpectedly confronted by an antivaxer in the cafeteria at NYU Langone Medical Center by an antivaxer and lost his cool.

Assuming I’m correct, Blima Marcus should be applauded for counteracting antivaccine pseudoscience in the Orthodox Jewish community. I hope that she learns from this incident. It’s a not uncommon rookie misstep. If she learns to be a bit more careful about what she says and always aware of how it can be twisted and taken out of context, then she’ll be an even more effective pro-vaccine spokesperson, and that will be good for the health of the children of New Jersey.

ADDENDUM:

Here is some original video showing two hours of Marcus’ talk in context:

By Orac

Orac is the nom de blog of a humble surgeon/scientist who has an ego just big enough to delude himself that someone, somewhere might actually give a rodent's posterior about his copious verbal meanderings, but just barely small enough to admit to himself that few probably will. That surgeon is otherwise known as David Gorski.

That this particular surgeon has chosen his nom de blog based on a rather cranky and arrogant computer shaped like a clear box of blinking lights that he originally encountered when he became a fan of a 35 year old British SF television show whose special effects were renowned for their BBC/Doctor Who-style low budget look, but whose stories nonetheless resulted in some of the best, most innovative science fiction ever televised, should tell you nearly all that you need to know about Orac. (That, and the length of the preceding sentence.)

DISCLAIMER:: The various written meanderings here are the opinions of Orac and Orac alone, written on his own time. They should never be construed as representing the opinions of any other person or entity, especially Orac's cancer center, department of surgery, medical school, or university. Also note that Orac is nonpartisan; he is more than willing to criticize the statements of anyone, regardless of of political leanings, if that anyone advocates pseudoscience or quackery. Finally, medical commentary is not to be construed in any way as medical advice.

To contact Orac: [email protected]

39 replies on “Vaccine advocate Blima Marcus learns the hard way just how low antivaxers will go”

I understand your caution, but honestly, it is may very well be a lesson that most people have to learn the hard way. Many nurses and doctors likely go into these situations trustingly, and I blame the misusers of the statements, not the fact that the practitioner went in with trust.

I have to agree with you – while it’s important to ‘know your enemy’ – being naïve is not a crime, wilfully misrepresenting someone’s sincerely expressed views is. Victim blaming and all that.

I agree Carl: being naive is not a crime.

Let me just add, wilful misrepresentation of what Ms. Marcus said is not what these aholes did. They created a whole new conversation out of whole cloth that never happened.

VaXism’s video isn’t misrepresentation. It’s fiction.

Maybe many of us do have to learn this lesson the hard way, but I was hoping, through my post, to show just how low antivaxers will go and thereby warn others who haven’t had this happen to them yet that it could.

Orac: And I appreciate you doing it. You may save someone else having to learn it the hard way. I just wanted to put a caveat to the suggestion she’s to blame.

Chris: I’m not sure. Misrepresentation is a tort, but showing harm might be tricky here. Just editing a video is not illegal.

Yep.
.
Lessee – We just had the “One Conversation” which was a sleazy anti-vaccine death cult set-up and now this.
The anti-vaxxers just get sleazier and sleazier.
Morality isn’t their strong suit and seems anathema to advocates of the anti-vax death cult.
.
Keep warning the unwary, Orac.

Well yes, most people do learn the hard way. I know from sad experience. Although this one was a particularly low blow. Having said that, if you assume you will always be ambushed, then you end up not talking to groups that you should talk to.

Orac suggests being more aware of what you say and that can help, but having looked at the video it is always going to be possible to selectively edit what you say to make it look like you support their position if there is enough material to use. The best way to counter this is to point out extremely vocally that what is being shown is an edited version of what you said deliberately done to take your comments out of context and that it in no way represents your views.

Perhaps the best way to deal with antivaxx dishonesty and “editing” like this is for provaxxers to bring along someone to film them, so that if “splicing” occurs, there is a hard record of what was actually said.

Second that. Fight fire with fire. Or in this case, fight malicious lies with the truth.

I’m sorry these people put you through this. I can only imagine how angry you must be.

Absolutely agree Julian Frost. It would be a great tool to demonstrate what liars anti-vaxxers are and the depths they go to validate themselves. Ms. Marcus and other vaccine advocates can use that in presentations to show vaccine-hesitant parents the level of deception anti-vaxxers use to convert scared parents.

I’ve downloaded the video and would be happy to provide a copy to anyone who wants to use it to demonstrate how mendacious antivaxers can be.

How can whoever did this live with him/herself? I hope Ms Marcus posts her real video far and wide to expose this creep. I hope media picks it up and gives it wide coverage. On top of the daily headlines that are so discouraging, this is just about more than I can take in.

Is there anywhere to donate to help fight this–and all the rest of–kind of garbage?

That’s terrible: Ms Marcus speaks sincerely and provides sound medical education and someone edits what she said, misrepresenting her views and then broadcasts it. She is quite a strong vaccine advocate, if you read her article. She wants to protect kids.

Orac encouraged me to think about how we, if speaking publicly, can avoid being similarly abused. There has to be a way to signal what we actually believe ( SBM) vs what others believe ( antivax myths). At first, I thought about using verbs or sentence structure ( differentiating I vs they) which can be hard – or perhaps saying ” I used to believe” or ” antivaccine advocates believe” each time. BUT maybe the easiest is having some sort of bulletin board or blackboard behind you with two sets of beliefs and stand directly in front of it so videographers can’t avoid it.

Vaccine sceptics – not the diehards but worried parents- might be able to note how choppy the presentation is: it’s obviously messed with.

-btw- I like how she described Toni Bark as a “holistic practitioner” who sells beauty products on the internet. Bark is associated with many of the anti-vax proselytisers and woo-meisters I follow, appearing in quite a few “docu-dramas” from PRN.

That won’t work when people just quote your words. Some of it isn’t even malignant, such as when someone twisted my nurse explanation of how doctors detect hepatitis infection as proof of why hepatitis vaccines don’t work…

Considering the disease promotors are also harrassing the parents of dead children, I don’t think there is anything they wouldn’t do to promote their agenda. Manipulating a video is just one of their instruments.

I remember awhile back Orac mentioning that an antivaxer-sponsored conference that had invited him (along with a few other pro-immunization advocates, who backed out after realizing they were being used to give the event respectability) promised to supply an unedited tape of the event.

As the current example shows, it’s no protection against being selectively edited by others and having a deceptive version splashed over antivax websites.

I’m reminded of sleazy tactics used in movie ads to make it seem like critics loved the film. Case in point:

“The TV spot for Gone Girl included a quote from Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers, who called it “the date-night movie of the decade”. It failed to include the second half of his actual quote which finished with “… for couples who dream of destroying one another”.”

https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2015/sep/09/legend-review-movie-marketing-false-advertising

I thought the pro disease people could do very little to surprise me, but this did. Not the dishonesty, but posting something that could so easily be refuted with the real thing.

“Vaccines are great…” said Hilary,
“…awesome…grand…and…quality…”
__”I’ve been misquoted!” she screams,
__”pro-vax in your dreams!”
But I just edited for…clarity.

I’ve now posted an addendum with a link to the FB Live video that was taken by Ms. Marcus’ friend. It’s less than two hours, but should be enough to reveal the dishonesty clearly.

An English chemist has a YouTube channel where he debunks a lot of internet conspiracies. He has quite a few segments where he pulls apart the AIDS denialist movie House of Cards. In one segment he shows how footage of respectable scientists discussing the issue was edited to make it look like they questioned the existence of AIDS when in fact they did just the opposite. I recommend this for anyone who is thinking of of talking to such groups.

In my 9th grade computer class we learned how to manipulate both images (Photoshop) and sound clips (don’t remember the software). The assignment was to have a teacher say something innocuous and then turn it into something silly. My group did something about advertising bottled water that was from the cooling pools at a nuclear power plant, using a Fleetwood Mac song and asking a teacher about “The Simpsons”.

This was way way back before 2000.

So while I’m always disappointed that people get dishonestly edited to sounds like they’re saying the opposite of what they said, I can’t say that any of us should be surprised by it. Like, hello reality TV.

In my 9th grade computer class we learned how to manipulate both images (Photoshop) and sound clips (don’t remember the software).

A missed opportunity to learn steganography?

IANAL, but I think Blima should contact a defamation attorney about the potential for a lawsuit. I’m generally on the side of ‘free speech’ in this area, but these postings are really, really bad. I looked up the key principles for libel in NY state, and they’re actual malice and actual damage to the plantiff, typically some financial loss. EXCEPT, there are 4 defined categories of Defamation Pro Se, which don’t require proof of loss – the act itself is enough. One of these is “Stating false facts that tend to injure a plaintiff in his or her business trade or profession.” Well, in the context of the copy Simpson provided with the video,it sure seems to me the posting presents falsehoods damaging to Blima’s profession as an advanced practice nurse.

Miss Marcus wrote a SCATHING article about the “Anti-Vaccine” propaganda she has encountered, which I will post in the comments so you can see why I was so delighted to receive this video. ? She clearly states in the beginning, “I KNEW NOTHING ABOUT VACCINES UNTIL 10 DAYS AGO…” Well, Miss Marcus, it’s apparent that after your “Crash Course” you learned a lot of what us, CrazyMothers know – Vaccines are not safe, nor are they effective.

Those words frame the video as a truthful representation of Blima’s current views on vaccines, and argue that she has recanted the position she took in The Lakewood Scoop. What may be especially damning is that bit of all caps shouting, representing Blima as being ignorant on a subject clearly important to her profession.

My guess is that Simpson phrased her copy in awareness of defamation law, in an attempt to dodge any legal complaints. Notes how she wrote she was “delighted to receive this video”, implying she was not involved in any way in creating it and was ignorant of it’s provenance. Thus, I think she thinks, she can just say, ‘Well, it sure looked to me like Ms Marcus had become woke to vaccine danger! I just found the video in my inbox. How was I to know it was bogus? I only said ‘it’s APPARENT she learned vaccines are not safe’, and that’s how it does appear in the video I had.’

Actually, even if the court bought that line, it wouldn’t totally get Simpson off the hook in NY,

It is easier to win defamation cases when intentionally false statements are made, as opposed to just negligent statements. Winning a defamation case on the basis of a negligent statement about a public figure is not typically possible because actual malice is required. However, private individuals could still successfully prevail in defamation lawsuits based on statements that were published or spoken by a speaker who was negligent in determining the truth of the statements.

But I’m also not sure that if Simpson did make the defense I imagine, that would necessarily pass muster as factual. The Crazy Ones take-off Orac mentioned shows Simpson is prone to using video editing in propagandistic ways. Perhaps her internet pages would show she has a history of misrepresenting other people’s views… If it could be established that Simpson either created the edited video herself, or knew that it had been edited, I think the consciousness of guilt shown by the weasel-lingo would double the level of actual malice.

Anyway, these are some of the reasons and things I’d want to talk to a lawyer about, if anyone did that kind of thing to me…

IANAL (though my family tree is full of them) so I’m curious what outcome is possible from a defamation lawsuit. Taking down the video? Public apology? Money? And in your opinion, what would be the most useful?

From the law firm site where I got the quotes above:

If the defamation has occurred in the past, we can seek compensatory relief in the form of monetary damages. If the defamation is currently happening, we can seek injunctive relief to force an end to the defamatory statements. An injunction is essentially a court order mandating that the defamer stop publishing or speaking the negative information about you.

So any or all of money apology, monetary damages. In general, civil litigation is only an option for regular folks if there’s enough potential for damages that an attorney will take the case on contingency. In this case, whether Blima could get representation might depend on what sort of damages courts tend to award in cases like this, and whether Simpson and/or VaXism have pockets deep enough to bother. It would be nice if some well-resourced organization would be worried enough to take the case on pro bono to establish precedent, put some fear into those who would do this kind of thing. But I don’t know of any groups on the pro-vax side of things, or even the more general medical professional protection side who I’d expect to have both the juice and the interest.

Back to the legal principle as opposed to the pragmatics of “justice”: I should note that as dorit said above: “Just editing a video is not illegal.” What matters here, IMHO, is that Blima is not a public figure, the video is verbally represented as a valid account of reality, and it’s potentially harmful viz the Pro Se standard because someone coming upon the FB posts are likely to believe them. In contrast, say someone did a similar edit with clips of Paul Offit, making him sound like an anti-vaxer, and posted it with a comment like “Last night i had a dream… :-)” Or even posted an edit w/o comment where the cuts were so obvious to the point of wincing. Then that’s satire, which is criticism, protected speech, because Paul IS a public figure as far as vaccine politics is concerned. If anyone takes the video ‘straight’ that’s their problem, since Paul’s actual views are well publicized.

Now, again there’s a difference between principle and practical reality. Let’s say I did exactly the same thing I just described with Andy Wakefield (which, btw I have the skills to do fwiw) made a vid where he appears to renounce anti-vax, and posted if with “Last night i had a dream… :-)”. Andy could still sue me for defamation. All he’d have to do is get one of his wealthy pals to cover the up-front lawyers’s fees. There’s little or no chance he could prevail in court, my satire/commentary/protected speech argument is too strong. But that probably wouldn’t matter. I’m poor. Andy wouldn’t want the money I don’t have, he’d just want to shut me up and make an example of me. But since I’m poor, I can’t hire attorneys to do all the stuff necessary to getting the case to a verdict. Even if I get some pro bono help, the fight would take over my life, and I don’t have the strength for that. So basically I’d get bullied into settling…

EXCEPT, there are 4 defined categories of Defamation Pro Se

That’s “per se.” Not worth the effort, in any event.

Sadmar’s law firm site quote ,

“If the defamation is currently happening, we can seek injunctive relief to force an end to the defamatory statements.”

MJD says,

In malice, some individual(s) have harmed MJD by calling him an anti-vaxxer and part of the moronic anti-vaxx movement.

http://americanloons.blogspot.com/2013/07/628-michael-j-dochniak-denise-h-dunn.html

To my recollection, Narad has never called MJD an antivaxxer. Thanks Narad!

@MJD:

In malice, some individual(s) have harmed MJD by calling him an anti-vaxxer and part of the moronic anti-vaxx movement.

1) You have repeatedly “hypothesised” that vaccines cause autism through latex contamination, despite the fact that vaccines have never been shown, even in huge meta-analyses, to cause autism. Distorting and lying about the harms of vaccination ipso facto makes you an antivaxxer.
2) Truth is a defence against a charge of libel, as David Irving learnt the hard way. There is no malice in calling you an antivaxxer because you ARE an antivaxxer.
3) The anti-vaxx movement IS moronic, and you, by claiming that vaccines can cause autism through latex contamination, are part of that movement.
If you don’t want to be called out for being an antivaxxer, stop reciting antivaxx claims.

What harm have you or might you suffer from being called an antivax moron in the comments section of a (relatively) minor blog in terms of reach, and in which you voluntarily post despite knowing your comments have always been ill-received by the blogger and other commenters?
The defense moves for summary dismissal.

As the Bible says: “There is no God” (Psalm 14:1). This is at the same level.

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