These are your “vaccine experts”: Christina England

Now that I’m done wading into the cesspool of “vaccine experts” found within Facebook, I’ve come to realize that most of them never got any kind of formal training on the science of vaccines. This is no surprise by itself, but it is kind of scary when you realize the number of people who listen to them and take their word as gospel. Even those among them who self-identify as journalists don’t do much journalism, per se. Their brand of journalism is filled with personal opinions and misinterpretation of scientific evidence. Hell, they don’t even consult with anyone who has any kind of scientific training to see if the evidence they have in hand stands up to scrutiny.

For example, take a look at Christina England. She writes a lot about vaccines and what she perceives to be their dangers. She even seems to think that babies who die at the hands of their parents, with broken skulls and brain damage, actually died from a vaccine reaction and not from Shaken Baby Syndrome (SBS):

“Amanda died from multiple skull fractures and the triad of injuries associated with Shaken Baby Syndrome (SBS) which are Retinal haemorrhages (bleeding into the linings of the eyes); subdural haemorrhages (bleeding beneath the dural membrane); Encephalopathy (damage to the brain affecting function).
The question is did Elwood Sadowsky deliberately kill his daughter or was her death the result of a series of tragic circumstances?”

She goes on to quote a paper on ergonomics, and then adds this:

“An encephalalitic reaction after the Hepatitis B vaccine is well documented and is a reaction discussed in many papers. Professionals often refer to high pitched screaming or seizures shortly after this vaccination, indicating a problem. Neil Z Miller an American medical research journalist, anti-vaccine and natural health advocate wrote the following in the Vaccine Safety Manual.
“Many of the mothers noticed that their children had a high-pitched cry soon after their vaccination or vaccinations. This is called the encephalitic cry, meaning that it is caused by an inflamed, swollen brain. It also explains the difficulty many mothers have in waking their children, the vomiting, passing out and irritability following vaccinations. These are all signs of an inflamed brain.”
Did Amanda suffer from this reaction and was this the reason that baby Amanda was so distressed? If so the injuries found just weeks later may have been caused by the Hepatitis B vaccine, however, this possibility this was never investigated.”

If you’re shocked that someone would defend the murder of a child by trying to tie it to vaccines, you shouldn’t. This is a common thing that anti-vaccine people are doing the world over. Ms. England also takes blog posts from known anti-vaccine sites, misreads and misinterprets the “evidence” presented in those blog posts, and writes her own blog post about how there is “evidence” that non-vaccinated children are healthier than vaccinated children. All the studies quoted are from surveys. All the papers written clearly state that there were surveys and that actual case-control or cohort studies should be done.

If you look at her bio page on Whale.to (a known cesspool of conspiracy theories in its own right) you’ll see that Ms. England never had any formal training in epidemiology, yet she continuously criticizes epidemiological studies. This would be funny if it wasn’t so goddamned serious. She adds “HND” to her name, meaning that she obtained a “Higher National Diploma“, something that is equivalent to about two years of a bachelor’s degree (or an Associate’s Degree here in the United States). That HND is in journalism. She also claims to have taken “A Level in Psychology” (a vocational certificate) and have a BTEC certificate (also a vocational certificate) in learning disabilities.

Yes, there are plenty of people who are experts in things without having professional degrees. But you don’t find these people in the biological sciences stating opinions without facts, or publishing quality papers on biological sciences. Or, if they weigh in on scientific issues, they consult with actual experts (and not just quacks who think vaccines are the enemies of God). They also don’t exaggerate the dangers of vaccines to the point of writing that SBS, in which a baby’s skull is broken and their brain separated from their spinal cord, is actually caused by vaccines.

I recently told you that anti-vaccine people are their own worst enemies, and I still stand by it. They genuinely think that people like Christina England know more and are more of an expert than someone who did the work of getting an undergraduate, graduate, and even a doctoral degree. They believe that babies shaken to death and killed in a manner most horrible is not the result of an adult doing it to them but the result of vaccination. So, if these are your “experts,” you have a lot to worry about.