"A statement of fact cannot be insolent." The miscellaneous ramblings of a surgeon/scientist on medicine, quackery, science, and pseudoscience (and anything else that interests him).
Antivax ideology: The main influencers are “controlled opposition” and “limited hangouts”
Antivax is more ideology and conspiracy than science. The recent accusation that antivax influencers are running “limited hangouts” as part of “controlled opposition helps illustrate this characteristic, in which the insufficiently radical are portrayed as useful idiots for the enemy or even heretics.
[Orac update: When I alluded to all the difficulties I was having in meatspace dealing with family health issues that, for the first time in nearly two decades, have drastically decreased my output here to close to zero, other than reposts of posts written elsewhere, I honestly thought there was a light at the end of the tunnel and that I’d be back to a normal posting schedule by now. That light wasn’t quite a train, but I underestimated how much time I would need. Now, I think it will probably not be until after I give my talk on cancer misinformation on Friday that I will be able to resume something resembling a normal posting schedule. In the meantime, here’s the controlled opposition running limited hangouts. At least that’s what antivaxxers are telling me…]
Ever since I started paying attention to the antivaccine movement around 25 years ago, one thing that immediately became apparent to me is how cult-like their beliefs are and how cult-like their behavior is. As a result, it’s not all that uncommon for kerfuffles and even outright feuds to break out between antivaxxers. When this happens, it’s nearly always an argument about who is “purest” in their beliefs, with one antivaxxer being attacked for being too accommodating to science, which sometimes just means being willing to accept that maybe—just maybe—not all vaccines are genocidal tools of depopulation. (Most of them are, but not all, but accepting that even just one vaccine might be safe and effective is too much for some antivaxxers.) Indeed, one of my favorite examples was when James Lyons-Weiler, founder of the antivax org Institute of Pure and Applied Knowledge (IPAK) and Leslie Manookian, the ex-homeopath turned filmmaker responsible for the 2011 antivax “documentary” The Greater Good, got into a fight over who was the most antivaccine, when Manookian attacked Lyons-Weiler for not being antivax enough, even falsely accusing him of being in favor of vaccine mandates and, indeed, a tool of the vaccine-industrial complex. Lyons-Weiler, of course, responded, and the fight was on. This brings me to a complaint by Michael Yeadon about how so many antivax influencers in fact run “limited hangouts.” That’s a criticism, as you’ll soon see
As amusing as they are to watch from the perspective of science-based medicine (SBM), such crank fights between antivaxxers can also be educational in that they demonstrate how the antivaccine movement is ideological, not scientific, and, more importantly, how there is a tendency within the movement towards greater and greater radicalism. That’s why I thought it informative to take a look at a couple of posts by antivaxxers at the new wretched hive of scum and quackery, Substack. In these posts, a “new school” antivaxxer named Michael Yeadon attacks many “old school” antivaxxers (e.g., Del Bigtree, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Vera Sharav) as being insufficiently antivax, their social media presences, podcasts, Substacks, and orgs being what he calls “limited hangouts” (which I’ll define later) for COVID-19 vaccines. However, he doesn’t just attack “old school” antivaxxers; he also includes in his sights antivaxxers who turned antivax and rose to prominence in the era of COVID-19 vaccines, such as Steve Kirsch, Alex Berenson, Dr. Peter McCullough, and others.
Michael Yeadon: Antivax activists run “limited hangouts”
I first noticed this attack in an Substack by Dr. Paul “We Want Them Infected” Alexander, who in his typically annoying way entitled his post Boom! Dr. James Hill, MD drops a MOAB, over target when he writes about his take on Dr. Mike Yeadon (hero of mine): Yeadon “discovers Del Bigtree and other prominent “vaccine skeptics” are limited…what? A blurb follows” …hangouts; stunning statement by Yeadon worth debating: “Del will “increase confidence in mandated vaccines,” and RFK Jr. and Dr. Robert Malone will tell you when some shots are safe to mandate”… You’ll excuse me here if, before I discuss the post and what Yeadon said that got Alexander so excited, I ask: WTF is it with the “BOOM!” that antivaxxers and right wingers love to preface the titles of their posts with? Also, when it comes to Alexander, WTF is it with the long rambling titles he chooses for his posts? (This one isn’t even the longest or most rambling.)
Seriously, there are dozens of posts in this search.
Back to Alexander’s post, however, which references a comment by Michael Yeadon on a post in another Substack, which he apparently discovered in the Substack of an antivaxxer named Dr. James Hill, whom I don’t recall ever having heard of before:
“The Pandemic no longer controls our lives. The Vaccines that saved us from COVID are now being used to help beat Cancer – Turning setback into comeback!” YOU’RE WELCOME, JOE, NINE MONTH APPROVAL TIME VS. 12 YEARS THAT IT WOULD HAVE TAKEN YOU!
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That moment when you realize:
Go back to the start of CHD and Highwire.
Bigtree around 2015-2016. Did Vaxxed with Wakefield.
CHD was also getting underway.
Founded by anti-vaccination activist Eric Gladen in 2007, the World Mercury Project was a relatively minor group until Kennedy joined its board in 2015. Its budget jumped to nearly half a million dollars and in 2018, changed its name to Children’s Health Defense.
They knew the pandemic was coming (Good Club, Operation Lockstep 2009-2010)
Do you see what happened?
Now look at them go. Look at them make the turn to The Father of the Vaccine and The King of Israel.
“I don’t think that we ought to be mandating medical interventions for UNWILLING Americans UNLESS we know precisely that that vaccine is going to end up helping people rather than hurting them.”
JUSTIFICATION: Adding this exemption will increase confidence in mandated vaccines.
If you have eyes to see and about eleven people seem to…you are getting an education in how “pragmatism” and legalese and ACTORS are used to prey on the gullible.
See what I mean? The idea is that Del Bigtree and all the other less radical people and groups are really acting to support vaccine manufacturers. If you just read the text of the link in the quote above, it’s easy to see how utterly ridiculous this characterization is. Bigtree and ICAN basically advertise that their proposed legislation is a Trojan Horse to eliminate vaccine mandates, after saying that ICAN opposes all vaccine mandates of any kind! For example:
This bill would create an automatic exemption for every vaccine because not a single existing vaccine can meet the four conditions listed in the bill (nor can any without resulting in the vaccine being pulled from the market due to financial losses from lawsuits). Also, the bill would add this automatic exemption without removing any existing exemptions (religious, medical, philosophical) and the exemption created by the bill is one that is based on “science,” not religion or philosophy, and hence will be significantly harder to repeal by those supportive of vaccines.
See? The idea is that there should be an automatic exemption for all vaccines that don’t meet ICAN’s deceptive standards:
B. Notwithstanding any other law, a person who is required to receive a vaccine for any purpose may claim an exemption from the vaccine requirement if there is not a vaccine approved by the FDA to fulfill the requirement that meets the following criteria:
1. The clinical trial the FDA relied upon to approve the vaccine evaluated its safety for at least one year after it was administered against a control group that only received either (a) a placebo or (b) another vaccine licensed as provided in this paragraph.
2. The department posts on its website the injuries or diseases caused by the vaccine and the rate at which the injury or disease occurs from the vaccine.
3. The risk of permanent disability or death from the vaccine has been proven to be less than that caused by the infection it is intended to prevent.
4. The vaccine’s manufacturer has liability for the deaths or serious injuries, if any, caused by the vaccine.
One can easily argue that all licensed vaccines meet standard #3, no matter how much the likes of Del Bigtree and Michael Yeadon might deceptively argue otherwise. I’ll give ICAN credit for cleverness regarding its first standard, however. They’ve clearly crafted it in response to the obvious scientific and ethical criticisms of their “no saline placebo” claim about how the vaccines in the childhood schedule are tested, specifically that it is unethical to test a new vaccine for a disease for which safe and effective vaccines already exist (e.g., measles). (The only ethical way to do a randomized controlled clinical trial of such a vaccine is to test it against existing vaccines to demonstrate at least noninferiority.) So what they do is to say that it’s OK to test a vaccine against an existing FDA-approved vaccines, but then crafted their criteria in a way that no FDA-approved vaccine is acceptable, either. Clever.
As for the liability claim, once again, the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 set up a compensation system supported by a tax on each dose of vaccine sold and mandated that vaccine injury claims have to go through a special court first, a court that basically bends over backwards to give injury claims every benefit of the doubt and even pays reasonable attorney’s fees and court costs if the complainant loses. For all its shortcomings, it’s a system designed to compensate people with legitimate vaccine injuries quickly (at least, compared to the regular federal legal system). Antivax lawyers have never liked the system however, because they don’t want nice, predictable hourly billing for their time and work. No, they’d rather roll the dice in the hopes that they can, science be damned, win a huge payout for their clients and, of course, a fat 30% (or more) commission on that payout. They also want the publicity.
Basically, the entire bill is, as admitted by ICAN, constructed as an antivax “educational tool.” What they don’t say is that, of their four criteria, existing vaccines easily meet at least one without modification and that the others are deceptively constructed to sound reasonable if you don’t know science and clinical trials. Also, the scientific literature is full of publications on the rates of disease versus the rates of adverse events from vaccines.
According to Victor Marchetti, a former special assistant to the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), a limited hangout is “spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting—sometimes even volunteering—some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further.”[1][2] While used by the CIA and other intelligence organizations, the tactic has become popularized in the corporate and political spheres.[3]
So you can see how the conspiracy theory is developing here. According to people like Yeadon, if you are an influencer not utterly and irrevocably opposed to the very concept of vaccination and don’t view all vaccines—not even just most vaccines, but all vaccines—as utter poison, tools of death, destruction, depopulation, and authoritarian control, then you must be part of the “controlled opposition” used by The Enemy (e.g., pharmaceutical companies) in order to bamboozle the public with less awful sounding claims about vaccines that keep them from investigating The Truth. These “limited hangouts” are thus tools of keeping the public from realizing the whole “truth”—believed by people like Yeadon—that vaccines are tools of genocide.
How can we recognize these “limited hangouts”? Hill is only too happy to describe how:
As controlled opposition, limited hangouts for Covid shots reveal injection harms — a valuable service — but provide misdirection and gatekeeping to veer you from seeing real intent, goals, and perpetrators.
What they tell you:
Damage is all unintentional and accidental (like the “lab leak” and “experimental shots” psyops).
No matter how harmful, the injections are well intended.
It’s just big pharma trying to profit.
Politicians pushing the shots just want power and money and to control you.
Those behind the plan are “nazis.”
Let’s forgive, move on, “let the healing begin,” and not lay blame.
What they don’t tell you:
One goal is slow- and fast-kill weapons to disable, kill, and sterilize.
The spike protein was designed with different binding affinities for some genetic variants of ACE2 and TMPRSS2 receptors. (This implies intended effect trends across populations, not that all in any ethnic group are affected or spared.)
[Redacted] military intelligence runs things and both attacks Covid shot critics and funds “vaccine opposition,” say researchers.
See what I mean? (I also can’t help but note that it’s not true that RFK Jr, for instance, hasn’t bought into the conspiracy theory that SARS-CoV-2 was an ethnically targeted bioweapon designed to wipe out white people and spare Jews and the Chinese. But who, in Hill’s opinion, represents “controlled opposition” running “limited hangouts”? Well, it’s almost every major antivax influencer other than Yeadon:
I included the links that Hill used, just so that you can be as amused as I am. In particular, I am highly amused to see some of the names included. I wonder how Drs. Marty Makary, Drew Pinsky, Jay Bhattacharya, and—especially—Vinay Prasad would think about being lumped in with the likes of Naomi Wolf, Steve Kirsch, and RFK Jr. Dr. Prasad, after all, does every contortion that he can to present himself as The One True Voice of Evidence-Based Medicine with respect to COVID-19 and, well, everything else. As much as he tries to portray himself that way, hardcore antivaxxers see him for who he really is: As a fellow traveler, as antivax-adjacent if not outright antivax, just not as radical as they are—and not radical enough for them. I also agree. It is entirely appropriate to lump Drs. Makary, Bhattacharya, and Prasad in with the likes of these people.
I would also note that Hill is not correct in his characterization. For instance, he approvingly cites an antivax influencer named Peggy Hall (on Substack, natch!), who is very unhappy that RFK once said in 2019, “I don’t think we should be mandating medical interventions for unwilling Americans unless we know precisely that that vaccine is going to end up helping them rather than hurting them.” Her mistake, of course, is not to realize that RFK Jr. has a long history of intentionally constructing his criteria for what constitutes a vaccine that ends up “helping them rather than hurting them” such that his standards for meeting that standard are impossible to attain in the real world. In a way, this is illuminating. RFK Jr. is quite antivaccine; he’s just political about it. He knew (then, at least) that saying he was against all vaccines would discredit him. To some extent, he even realizes that now.
To someone like Peggy Hall, however, antivax “strategery” is treason:
Ah, yes those pesky qualifiers. The word “unless” negates everything before it. These top-tier bamboozlers sure have a knack for sprinkling extra fluff, pretending to champion freedom when it’s really just conditional freedom. Could they be reeling in people like you with truth, to capitalize on blind trust in the future when “trust and confidence is restored” in our regulatory agencies and the junior jabs are rolled out?
Discussing safety testing is a distraction and sends the wrong message. The focus should be on 1) Individual right of no consent 2) repealing the 1986 Act and the legal framework that shields these habitual criminals from liability, and 3) eliminating government funding for vaccines
Whether it’s RFK, Big Tree, Kirsch, Malone, McCullough, or others, they all seem fixated on the ingredients. Personally, I couldn’t care less if the jab contains Hershey’s chocolate syrup; I’m not going to take it!
See what I mean? Hall is also ignorant. RFK Jr. has attacked the NCVIA of 1986 many times going back 20 years. It was trivial to find, for instance, a 2016 press release announcing RFK Jr.’s World Mercury Project (which ultimately evolved to become Children’s Health Defense) stating:
WMP joins these organizations calling for the repeal or radical reform of NCVIA. “This act provided vaccine manufacturers blanket immunity for any harm caused by injuries from vaccines, no matter how wanton, reckless or negligent the manufacturing, how anemic the testing or how grievous the injury,” Kennedy said. “That act and the mountains of pharma cash going to politicians, regulators and the press have helped obliterate all the checks and balances that normally stand between a rapacious industry and vulnerable children in a free and Democratic society. The complete vacuum of accountability caused by the NCVIA has emboldened the worst kind of behavior by vaccine makers including the continued use of mercury in vaccines.”
“We want robust and transparent science, independent and honest regulators, safe vaccines and healthy children,” Kennedy added. “Although Congress intended this law to make children healthier and safer, it has paradoxically made them less healthy and less safe, allowing them to receive mercury-contaminated vaccines that other countries have long outlawed.”
Seriously, this is the press release announcing the formation of World Mercury Project, and the org states explicitly that it is calling for the repeal or radical “reform” of the NCVIA. These “new school” antivaxxers should learn some history. Also, RFK Jr. appeared in a the 2020 antivax documentary 1986: The Act, which is all about deceptively portraying the NCVIA of 1986 as a horror that has harmed children, enriched pharmaceutical companies, and therefore must be repealed.
It’s also incorrect that RFK Jr. hasn’t stated that there should be no vaccine mandates. He’s been opposed to vaccine mandates since he first “came out” as an antivaxxer in 2005. He’s even said publicly, “I would be against mandates at all, for any vaccines, for any vaccine.”
Similar attacks have been made against Dr. Robert Malone, who has become an antivax conspiracy theorist claiming to be the “father of mRNA vaccines,” a claim that has put him in the crosshairs of antivaxxers like Yeadon and Alexander as having contributed to what they see as the “horrors” of COVID-19 vaccines.
I also reference more recent claims of antivaxxers, such as “purebloods,” in which those who are vaccinated are no longer pure blood. For these and many other reasons, I’ve discussed in depth a number of times how antivax is basically a purity cult.
Another key component of the ideological, cult-like nature of antivaxxers is that they engage in projection. Because they are motivated not by science or medicine but rather by an ideology that demonizes vaccines as “contamination” of their “purity of essence,” they assume that vaccine advocates base their belief systems in religion too, as Toby Rogers did recently in a post entitled Vaccines are an ideology. The projection is thick, too:
THE IDEA OF VACCINES is that we are in control, that we know what we are doing, that we have conquered nature, that we can stop all disease, and ultimately that we can live forever. The idea of vaccines is that we are God — omniscient, benevolent, infallible, timeless.
For the last two thousands years, most people in the west believed that we were expelled from paradise because of our sinful nature but that we can live forever through our faith in Jesus Christ. Now the vaccine religion would have us believe that the sole cause of death is viruses and our own defective genes but that we can live forever through our faith in The Science.™
Vaccines are a cult in a vial, an idea that has supplanted religion and yet claims to be secular. The idea of vaccines hits about as hard as high-grade heroin and is just as addictive. Because vaccines are in fact toxic trash the idea of vaccines causes people to lose their minds and their lives. The idea of vaccines is destroying our society and all of western civilization.
Of course, I like to point out that one of the main ideas behind antivax, that infectious diseases don’t affect those who are healthy because they live a “healthy” lifestyle, consume a “healthy” diet, use the “correct”—and, of course, “natural” supplements—and do “healthy” things like engaging in adequate exercise, all of which, in their belief system, renders vaccines unnecessary, is exactly what Rogers accuse vaccine advocates of holding: A belief system claiming that we have total control over biology, that we can stop all disease, and ultimately live forever. It’s just that what antivaxxers put their faith in to accomplish this total control of human biology is very different than what they accuse vaccine advocates of putting their faith in. Because antivaxxers believe that this “healthy lifestyle”—a marker, of course, of not just health but moral righteousness—protects them from nearly all disease, they assume that vaccine advocates, scientists, and physicians view vaccines as the same sort of panacea and marker of righteousness.
We can see just how ideological, even religious and cult-like, antivaxxers are by examining the conflicts that break out among them. Frequently, as in religion, ideology, and politics, these fights involve those who are more radical attacking those whom they perceive as insufficiently dedicated to the belief system as heretics, traitors, or even tools of the opposing ideology serving as controlled opposition or useful idiots hosting “limited hangouts” in order to undermine the purity of the movement. This is, of course, a conspiracy theory layered on top of all the other conspiracy theories of the antivax movement, in particular what I like to call the “Central Conspiracy Theory of the Antivax Movement,” the claim that “They” know that vaccines are not safe and do not work but are keeping The Truth hidden from you. I’ve been seeing this phenomenon play out in different contexts going back at least 20 years. Once you start looking for it, you’ll easily see many examples.
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.
2 replies on “Antivax ideology: The main influencers are “controlled opposition” and “limited hangouts””
I wish you good luck with everything, your family and your lecture.
Those anti-vaxxers should finally decide who is who. Anti-vaxxers that are not radical enough are controlled opposition and anti-vaxxers who are to radical are also a form of controlled opposition, to make anti-vaxers look bad.
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Although I do see purity-of-message chic amongst the usual suspects ( NN, PRN, AoA, Wolf, Bigtree, RFK Jr, CHD, Kirsch, Covid contrarian doctors, Substackers- my list intersects with Orac’s greatly) more recently there are:
—really increased religiosity e.g. Adams’ daily sermons, “church” and eschatology, Wolf discussing her encounters with Jesus, ghosts and dark malevolent forces, Null carrying on about the value of spirit over materialism, AoA showing hopes and prayers AND
—an extreme shift towards conservative politics and Trump support- even from those who are self-described liberals, progressives and feminists- although they do vary from being unquestioning FOX-like broadcasts** to seeing Trump being superior to Harris PLUS he has Bobby!
If the country is truly so divided over candidates why do these people all fall on the same side?
Alt med/ anti-vax purity now comes with a heaping side of right wing talking points.
Orac might have to become a political analyst as well as an SBM educator ( although he already sort of is one)
** repeating misinformation about migrants, crime, trans people, Ukraine, the evils of government, FEMA, the Fed etc
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2 replies on “Antivax ideology: The main influencers are “controlled opposition” and “limited hangouts””
I wish you good luck with everything, your family and your lecture.
Those anti-vaxxers should finally decide who is who. Anti-vaxxers that are not radical enough are controlled opposition and anti-vaxxers who are to radical are also a form of controlled opposition, to make anti-vaxers look bad.
Although I do see purity-of-message chic amongst the usual suspects ( NN, PRN, AoA, Wolf, Bigtree, RFK Jr, CHD, Kirsch, Covid contrarian doctors, Substackers- my list intersects with Orac’s greatly) more recently there are:
—really increased religiosity e.g. Adams’ daily sermons, “church” and eschatology, Wolf discussing her encounters with Jesus, ghosts and dark malevolent forces, Null carrying on about the value of spirit over materialism, AoA showing hopes and prayers AND
—an extreme shift towards conservative politics and Trump support- even from those who are self-described liberals, progressives and feminists- although they do vary from being unquestioning FOX-like broadcasts** to seeing Trump being superior to Harris PLUS he has Bobby!
If the country is truly so divided over candidates why do these people all fall on the same side?
Alt med/ anti-vax purity now comes with a heaping side of right wing talking points.
Orac might have to become a political analyst as well as an SBM educator ( although he already sort of is one)
** repeating misinformation about migrants, crime, trans people, Ukraine, the evils of government, FEMA, the Fed etc