Connecting the dots when you can’t connect two brain cells

Let me connect some dots for you. Merck makes one of the anti-HPV vaccines. Merck gave money to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine to endow a chair. In the minds of the anti-vaccine crowd, anyone in that chair (figuratively and literally) might as well be Satan’s spawn. After all, who but Satan’s child would take a position paid for by Big Pharma? No one in their right mind would work for Big Pharma.

Furthermore, no one would ever want to study and become an expert on vaccines through education and hard work because that means you’re a shill. No, you must gain all your knowledge of vaccines and their side-effects from anti-vaccine websites, celebrities, and chiropractors. Sure, there are some honest-to-goodness physicians sprinkled among the nutjobs, but you know what they say about the company you keep. (Anti-vaxxers are not science-based if they have a few scientists and physicians in their ranks. It makes the very few scientists and physicians anti-vaxxers.)

If you, say, study law and become good at defending the legal framework that supports compulsory, mandatory, or required immunization, then you’re a shill. You can’t be anything else. That’s the way things are if you can’t connect two brain cells together then go about trying to connect the dots of the conspiracy theory in your head. Allow me to elaborate.

A woman by the name of Cindy Killeen Waeltermann wrote this blog post at “Thinking Mom’s Revolution”. Go ahead and click on it. Clicking on it will not increase its page rank. In that blog post, Cindy Killeen Waeltermann went off on Dorit Reiss like only that other weirdo can. (More on that later, actually.) In that happy little rant, CKW is convinced that Dorit is taking money from “Big Pharma” in order to reach the conclusions on matters of law that she does. Why else would she advocate for vaccines if not for the money? I mean, it’s not like vaccines work or anything. <Insert sarcasm here, Cindy.>

CKW writes:

“Just who is this woman who, on the surface, appears to be a busy professional?  She is listed as teaching nine classes at the U. C. Hastings Law School, so why and how is she posting on every vaccine story on the internet, sometimes hundreds of times? (I’m NOT being facetious either!)”

If she’s teaching so much, when does she have time? We’ve asked similar questions of CKW and other “warrior mommies”. If they are so busy with “vaccine damaged” and “soulless” children, when do they have time to write against proven medical interventions and comment on Facebook postings? When do I have the time? It’s not about time. It really doesn’t take long to type if you’ve been at it for a long time.

“As Waldman points out, Reiss’s employer recently collaborated in a joint endeavor of Kaiser Permanente, U. C.  San Francisco and U. C. Hastings College of Law, which was funded by The National Human Genome Research Institute – a GOVERNMENT ORGANZATION – which provided $778,000.  The new endeavor benefits Reiss’s employer as it provides a new student study center… I’d say that’s benefiting from a government grant, indirectly if not directly ‐‐ it’s hard to say without taking a look at U. C. Hastings’ payroll for Ms. Reiss.”

Objection! Poisoning the well!

I’ll allow it. I want to see where this is going.

“Reiss is on the “Parent Advisory Board” for Voices for Vaccines  (“VFV”) which states on its website “Independence.  To allay concerns about conflicts of interest, we will accept no funding from companies that manufacture or distribute vaccines, nor from any government.”  It may be strictly true that the organization does not take money from vaccine manufacturers or governments, but does that mean the organization is independent?   I found otherwise.  Let’s see, how to explain?  Hrm.  Think classic Mafia money-laundering  operation and you will have the picture:  a many-layered network of intertwined organizations seemingly designed to deceive and obfuscate where the money is coming from.  They are braided into parent organizations with multiple subsidiaries and multiple methods of cloaking sources of revenue.”

Again, you MUST be in the mafia, or the child of Satan, or something very evil to advocate for vaccines.

The rest of the miserable attempt at a Crosby’s Labyrinth kind of post. It’s the usual mental defecation that we’ve come to expect from the anti-vaccine people. There’s no substance. There’s no clear evidence that vaccines cause all the injuries (in number, proportion, and severity) that the anti-vaccine types claim they cause. It’s all about how Paul Offit must be the devil because he once worked with Merck, a vaccine manufacturer, on (surprise!) manufacturing a vaccine! And virtually everything that is said about that relationship is skewed and told out of context.

Listen, anti-vaccine loons, if I wanted to build a safe and reliable car, I wouldn’t do it on my own. I would work with Ford, Chrysler, or Honda. (But not BMW, because they’re German.) If I wanted better batteries, I would work with Duracell or Ray-o-vac. People like CKW (and Cynthia Parker in the comments, that’s for a post of its own) can’t imagine a world where experts in the field work with proven and reliable companies to deliver a product to the public. It must be scary cold and dark in those brains, especially when you’re trying to connect all those dots without being able to connect two brain cells together.

Now, about the weirdo and CKW. It seems that CKW wanted the daily online newspaper of the monsters under the bed (aka “Age of Autism”) to run the blog post above. So she contacted the weirdo John Stone. What did the weirdo do? He plagiarized it. He published it on AoA without her consent and without crediting her for it. Of course, since she complained and complained loudly, it’s been taken down. But here is what she had to say on her Facebook page:

“I showed the excerpts from my article to several people — including David Kirby (for his opinion), Erik Nansteil, Jami King Gladfelter and a few others and John Stone, contributing editor from Age of Autism, Kim Stagliano from Age of Autism, and several other autism parents who will be happy to tell you that they read my work… John Stone clearly said, “Great stuff.  This can go out on AoA any time, let me know when you are ready.” So imagine my surprise this morning when I woke up and found that John Stone had taken my research to use it for his own, and also unfriended me before I found out what he had done.  Coward. So, I want to show you the document that I was in the middle of writing.  The one that was pretty much stolen from me so that one man can continue to stroke his ego… Age of Autism should be ashamed of itself.  Given that it is run by writers with supposed professional ethics, I have to say that in my opinion you are a disgrace.”

Insert laugh track here. If they misrepresent actual scientific facts, did it surprise you that they plagiarized your work? You are appalled that they would stab you in the back when they don’t think twice about posting anti-Semitic imagery about vaccine supporters?

You all truly do deserve each other. Weirdos.

(And Cynthia Parker [aka “Cia Parker”, aka “C Parker”]? She shows up in the comments of the blog post above and names Dorit’s child by name:

“She has a cute three-year old son, (redacted), who’s on Youtube in many videos, in preschool now, obviously.”

What the hell that has to do with vaccines is beyond me. It’s more of a call to arms to anti-vaccine loons to seek out the child and… And I don’t know. I don’t want to think about it. This isn’t the first time she’s done it, though. I’ve seen her other comments at Dorit. Remember, nothing is off limits for anti-vaccine weirdos.)

UPDATE: Here’s Orac’s take on CKW’s post.