The government doesn’t have a monopoly on reality

One of the cries that I keep hearing from conspiracy nuts is that “The Government” did this and that, or that it’s hiding this or that. Just the other day, I was listening to a podcast by Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist. He was answering questions from his audience when someone asked who is to say that the government is not hiding an asteroid on its way to destroy the planet. He answered the question very simply by saying that an asteroid would be visible to everyone on the planet. A person in their backyard would be able to see such an asteroid. A scientist in any of the many observatories around the world, including Neil, would see it coming. In essence, the government can’t keep a secret that big.

The same thing applies to conspiracies about cover-ups of vaccine damage. If you read some of the materials put out by anti-vaccine organizations, you’d think that vaccines were maiming and/or killing people by the millions. They say that there is an “epidemic” of autism. They have a “wall of remembrance” of children who, according to them, have been killed by vaccines. Even when you confront them with the fact that the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) doesn’t have thousands of deaths by vaccines — and that many of them can be properly explained (e.g. a car accident) — anti-vaccine activists will say that it’s all a cover-up. Either “Big Pharma” is covering up the deaths from vaccines, so they can make the millions they don’t, or the government is covering it all up so it can control us or depopulate the Earth or whatever.

But neither the government nor Big Pharma, nor the reptilians, own reality. First, there are the epidemiologists, like myself, who look at the data and evaluate it. Then there are the higher-level people within local and state governments who also look at the data. There are also healthcare providers and insurance companies. (Do you think insurance companies would pay for vaccines if the vaccines were to cause a lifetime of payouts from a lifetime of illness?) Then there are the people in academia who research vaccines and are constantly trying to make better ones. You think they wouldn’t research their competition and blow the whistle if there was a problem? For example, Andy Jeremy Wakefield had a single measles vaccine in mind when he decided to go against his competition, the MMR vaccine. Thing is, he did it fraudulently, and we figured him out. (Well, Brian Deer figured him out, but the truth would come out.)

Using the analogy of the asteroid, there are thousands and thousands of scientists all over the world (in their respective “observatories”) and with all sorts of professional and personal associations, and they are yet to find a causal relationship between vaccines and all the evil things anti-vaccine groups claim happen when you take a vaccine. Do you think they’ve been paid-off as well? Or that one of them wouldn’t spill the beans on the conspiracy, offering up evidence, if one of their loved ones was hurt by vaccines?

Of course you do. You’re a rational person, and that’s why you’re reading this. Or you’re not rational and you really do think that all of us are in on it and meet in secret to, I don’t know, sacrifice a virgin or something.