by Arjun Walia, Collective Evolution
A documentary which explores the possible harmful health outcomes of vaccines titled Vaxxed: From Cover-up to Catastrophe was set to premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival later this month, but after receiving severe public backlash, was pulled from the festival.
One of the founders of this major film festival is Hollywood star Robert De Niro, who recently made an appearance on live television to comment on the move:
I think the movie is something that people should see. There was a backlash which I haven’t fully explored, and I will, but I didn’t want it to start affecting the festival in ways that I couldn’t see. But definitely there’s something to that movie and there’s another movie called Trace Amounts. There’s a lot of information about things that are happening with the CDC, the pharmaceutical companies, there’s a lot of things that are not said. I as a parent of a child who has autism, I’m concerned, and I want to know the truth, and I’m not anti-vaccine — I want safe vaccines. . . .
To shut [the film] down, there’s no reason to. If you’re scientists, let’s see, let’s hear, everybody doesn’t seem to wanna hear much about it, it’s shut down, and you [reporters] are the ones that should do the investigating.
“There’s a lot of information about things that are happening with the CDC, the pharmaceutical companies, there’s a lot of things that are not said.”
“The medical profession is being bought by the pharmaceutical industry, not only in terms of the practice of medicine, but also in terms of teaching and research. The academic institutions of this country are allowing themselves to be the paid agents of the pharmaceutical industry. I think it’s disgraceful.”
– Arnold Seymour Relman (1923-2014), Harvard Professor of Medicine and former Editor-in-Chief of The New England Medical Journal (source)(source)
It’s great to see someone like Robert De Niro speak up about a topic like this. We need to get this conversation started in the mainstream, and the more attention and open discussion we can generate, the better. Corporately owned media continues to completely ignore important findings in this field, which is very concerning.
So what exactly is De Nero referring to when he mentions the CDC? One example which comes to mind is the case of Dr. William Thompson, a longtime CDC scientist who has published some of the most commonly cited pro-vaccine studies — studies which purport to show absolutely no link between the MMR vaccine and autism.
Yet it wasn’t long ago that he made the following statement:
The CDC has put the research 10 years behind, because the CDC has not been transparent. We’ve missed 10 years of research because the CDC is so paralyzed right now by anything related to autism. Really what we need is for congress to come in and say, give us the data. (source)
He also pointed to a specific study that he co-authored in 2004 for the CDC which claimed that “the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine does not cause autism or any particular subtypes of autism spectrum disorder.” This study is often cited when the use of this vaccine is being justified.
It doesn’t stop there. He went on to say that “it’s the lowest point in my career that I went along with that paper and uh, I went along with this, we didn’t report significant findings. . . . I’m completely ashamed of what I did, I have great shame now that I was complicit and went along with this. I have been a part of the problem.” (source)
Sometime soon after the meeting, we decided to exclude reporting any race effects, the [CDC] co-authors scheduled a meeting to destroy documents related to the [MMR vaccine] study. The remaining four co-authors all met and brought a big garbage can into the meeting room and reviewed and went through all the hard copy documents that we had thought we should discard and put them in a huge garbage can. (source)
MorganVerkamp LLC, the lawyers that are currently representing Dr. Thompson, released this statement from him:
I regret that my coauthors and I omitted statistically significant information in our 2004 article published in the journal Pediatrics. The omitted data suggested that African American males who received the MMR vaccine before age 36 months were at increased risk for autism. Decisions were made regarding which findings to report after the data were collected, and I believe that the final study protocol was not followed.
I want to be absolutely clear that I believe vaccines have saved and continue to save countless lives. I would never suggest that any parent avoid vaccinating children of any race. Vaccines prevent serious diseases, and the risks associated with their administration are vastly outweighed by their individual and societal benefits. (source)
Pretty shocking, isn’t it? Again, you don’t have to be “anti-vax” to realize that there are still concerns worth discussing when it comes to vaccines.
A study with revised information and no data omission was published by Dr. Brian Hooker (a contact of Dr. Thompson) in the peer-reviewed journal Translational Neurodegeneration, and it found a 340 percent increased risk of autism in African American boys receiving the Measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine on time. The study has since been retracted during the same time of this controversy.
You can read the full study HERE.
Dr. Thompson’s story is featured in the two films mentioned by De Niro.
Should we really be shocked?
Should we really be shocked? You would think that a senior CDC scientist, and the co-author of several studies to show no link between the MMR vaccine and autism, would garner at least some attention from the mainstream media for these statements, but he didn’t. But then again, two former Merck scientists, who filed a whistleblower lawsuit accusing the drug maker of falsifying data about its mumps vaccine, say the company is refusing to answer a key question about the effectiveness of the product. These are just a few examples out of many that continue to pile up, but nobody is hearing these stories. As De Niro said, it’s our job to report on it.
The funny think is, people in a ‘position to know’ have been telling us this for years.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr, for example, explains the corruption inherent in the pharmaceutical industry and how this inevitably affects vaccine regulation:
Vaccines are big business. Pharma is a trillion-dollar industry with vaccines accounting for $25 billion in annual sales. CDC’s decision to add a vaccine to the schedule can guarantee its manufacturer millions of customers and billions in revenue with minimal advertising or marketing costs and complete immunity from lawsuits. High stakes and the seamless marriage between Big Pharma and government agencies have spawned an opaque and crooked regulatory system. . . .
Public health may not be the sole driver of CDC decisions to mandate new vaccines. Four scathing federal studies, including two by Congress, one by the US Senate, and one by the HHS Inspector General, paint CDC as a cesspool of corruption, mismanagement, and dysfunction with alarming conflicts of interest suborning its research, regulatory, and policymaking functions.
We even have documents that clearly show fraud. For example, Lucija Tomljenovic, who has a PhD in biochemistry and is a senior postdoctoral fellow in UBC’s Faculty of Medicine, is also a medical investigator. A few years ago she uncovered documents that reveal vaccine manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, and health authorities have known about multiple dangers associated with vaccines for some time but chose to withhold them from the public. (source)
There are good reasons why the most widely accessed article in the history of the Public Library of Science (PLoS) is titled “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.” Yet this was released more than 10 years ago, and things have only gotten worse since then.
A more recent example comes from Dr. Richard Horton, Editor-in-Chief of one of the largest, most credible medical journals in the world, the The Lancet. He has made the following claim:
The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness. (source)
Here is another eye-opening statement from someone of similar stature, Dr. Marcia Angell, a physician and longtime Editor-in-Chief of The New England Medical Journal (NEMJ):
It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine. (source)
The list goes on and on….
Clearly, as De Niro tells the world, there is something to talk about here and it’s time to have an open discussion, rather than listen to corporate media constantly ridiculing those who question vaccines.
De-Niro is not “anti-vax” and neither is Dr. William Thompson. As you can see above, they both support vaccinations, but that doesn’t negate the fact that there are problems which need to be addressed. The conversation is not closed, no matter what side of the debate you’re on.
The Science
To see some recent examples of peer-reviewed studies implicating vaccines in autism and more, please read this article. It’s heavily sourced and full of information that many people have not been made aware of:
Related: The Top 6 Reasons Why Parents Should Never Be Forced To Vaccinate Their Children
