I didn’t very much like Facebook prejudicing users against my journalism that way, especially since so much of my work has focused on exposing how the CDC deceives the public about the safety and effectiveness of vaccines to further its goal of increasing vaccination rates.
For example, I’ve written a multi-part exposé on the influenza vaccine, which the CDC recommends for everyone aged six months and up, including pregnant women. The impetus for that series was a New York Times article citing a 2010 systematic review and meta-analysis by the Cochrane Collaboration to support its claim that the science shows the vaccine confers a huge public health benefit. In fact, as I showed in part one, that review observed that the fundamental assumptions underlying the CDC’s flu shot recommendation are unsupported by scientific evidence and even went so far in its criticism as to accuse the CDC of deliberately misrepresenting the science to support its policy.
In part two, I cited a CDC presentation to the Institute of Medicine outlining a “recipe” to increase demand for influenza vaccines and commenting on the proliferation of online sources from which people can otherwise get their information by stating that “Health literacy is a growing problem”.
I also showed how the CDC had claimed that flu shots reduce mortality among the elderly to an unbelievable extent based on observational studies that other researchers have completely discredited by identifying a selection bias in those studies known as a “healthy user bias”. It wasn’t that elderly people who got the flu shot were less likely to die that flu season but that elderly people who were so sick and frail that they were likely to soon die were less likely to get a flu shot.
I also included a section explaining the CDC’s endemic corruption and conflicts of interest.
In part three, I showed how the key study relied upon by the CDC to support its claim that the aluminum in vaccines “is not readily absorbed by the body” amounts to nothing less than scientific fraud for the following reasons:
- The authors relied on a “minimum risk level” from a rodent study that had already been falsified and was more than seven times higher than quantities of aluminum other studies had shown to cause symptoms of toxicity.
- In the cited rodent study, mice were fed aluminum, whereas the FDA knows perfectly well that less than 1 percent of ingested aluminum is absorbed by the body whereas injecting it directly bypasses the innate immune system (i.e., the gut lining and skin), resulting in 100 percent of it being absorbed.
- The authors considered only the amount of aluminum in the blood and disregarded the quantity of aluminum remaining elsewhere in the body.
- The authors acknowledged that aluminum particles were taken up by macrophages and could be transported into the brain, where it accumulates, and that only a fraction of the aluminum injected is absorbed into the blood within 28 days of vaccination, yet their conclusion that aluminum-containing vaccines are “safe” rested on the false assumption that aluminum not absorbed into the blood does not contribute to the “body burden” of toxicity.
And in part four, I showed how the CDC implemented its flu shot recommendation for pregnant women despite the absence of randomized, placebo-controlled trials demonstrating that this practice was safe for both the mother and her child. I observed how the manufacturers themselves state in their package inserts that adequate studies have not been done to determine safety and effectiveness in pregnant women and how if they made the same claims that the CDC makes, they could be sued for fraud.
I detailed how none of the studies cited by the CDC on its website to support its claim that its safe for pregnant women to get the vaccine actually support that claim and how, indeed, their findings are rather alarming and directly contradict the CDC’s public message.
Similarly, I document how studies cited by the CDC to support its claim that the ethylmercury in flu shots is non-toxic and readily eliminated from the body actually acknowledged that it is a known neurotoxin that accumulates in the brain.
Likewise, on the CDC’s webpage declaring “Vaccines Do Not Cause Autism”, the CDC cites several observational studies and an Institute of Medicine review that acknowledged the possibility that they do by noting that observational studies are insufficient to falsify the hypothesis and, moreover, that none of the studies included in its review were designed to test the hypothesis that vaccines administered according to the CDC’s schedule can contribute to the development of autism in genetically susceptible children.
I’ve addressed the CDC’s deceitful public messaging about vaccines in numerous other articles, as well, but it would be superfluous to provide additional examples.
I had also documented numerous examples of how Facebook has acquiesced to the demand from Congressman Adam Schiff to censor what he called vaccine “misinformation”, which he used euphemistically to mean any information, no matter how factual, that might lead parents to conclude that strictly complying with the CDC’s routine childhood vaccine schedule might not be in their child’s best interest.
For example, one Facebook “Fact Check” lied that it was “False” that vaccines can cause encephalopathy, or brain damage, even though the vaccine manufacturer Merck states in its bestselling medical textbook The Merck Manual that it can occur as a result of vaccination, despite the US government listing it as an acknowledged adverse event under its Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, and despite the fact that under that program the government has acknowledged that vaccines can cause encephalopathy manifesting as symptoms of autism.
Another Facebook “Fact Check” lied that it was “False” that the chief scientist of the World Health Organization (WHO) had lied to the public about vaccine safety even though it was true that she had claimed in a WHO video published on YouTube that “robust vaccine safety systems” exist in countries around the globe that enable scientists working closely with the WHO to ensure that vaccines are administered “without risks”, and then she admitted a few days later to her colleagues in a WHO meeting that “we cannot overemphasize the fact that we really don’t have very good safety monitoring systems in many countries” and that the risk of serious adverse events being discovered only after a vaccine is on the market is “always there”.
You can imagine my ire at seeing Facebook’s prejudicial and deceitful warning implying that the information I was presenting to my page visitors was not to be trusted while absurdly holding up the CDC as though a practically infallible source for objective and truthful information despite its gross misrepresentation of the science.
So, on November 8, I posted the following (typos corrected in this version):
Dear Facebook,
If my readers want truthful and scientifically accurate information about vaccines, they can stay on my Facebook page and click through to read my articles meticulously documenting how the CDC blatantly lies to the public about the science, including by grossly misrepresenting its own cited sources from the medical literature.
Please stop insulting our intelligence. We do not appreciate you condescending to us by telling us what information we should or should not take into consideration.
We also do not appreciate you actively censoring information on behalf of the government, which euphemistically defines “misinformation” about vaccines as any information, no matter how well supported by scientific research, that would not be pursuant to the CDC’s goal of sustaining or increasing vaccination rates.
And, Mr. Zuckerberg, we saw you embarrass yourself before the Congress and the world recently by clearly elucidating how, when you manipulate your algorithms to prevent people from seeing information that your algorithms say they want to know, you are doing so on the basis of having adopted the government’s (e.g., Congressman Adam Schiff’s) euphemistic and dangerous definition of “misinformation” (e.g., you acknowledged that you manipulate your algorithms to reduce the chances of people seeing information contrary to the opinion that “people should get their shots”).
You should be ashamed, and not for the reason most of those clueless Congressmen want you to be ashamed for. You have no need to be ashamed for providing the public with a tool by which they can circumvent the propaganda filters of the corporate media and judge for themselves what information they think others should be made aware of. What you truly should be ashamed of is cowardly bowing to the government’s demand that you act contrary to the interests of us, your users, by manipulating your algorithms to prevent Facebook users from seeing information your algorithms otherwise would say Facebook users want to see.
Incidentally, Mr. Zuckerberg, Adam Schiff blatantly lied to you in his letter to you dated February 14, 2019. Contrary to his false claims, the fact that vaccines can cause permanent harm and even death isn’t even the least bit controversial. We notice that Schiff omitted from his letter the fact that the government has granted legal immunity to vaccine manufacturers against injury lawsuits and instead administers the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program to shift the financial burden for vaccine injuries away from the pharmaceutical industry and onto the taxpaying consumers.
Mr. Zuckerberg, you could redeem yourself easily in our eyes by simply standing up and telling those ignorant and autocratic bureaucrats where they can stick their demands that you actively censor information that they don’t want us to know.
Or you can go down on the wrong side of history. The choice, of course, is yours. We would prefer that Facebook be a tool for the betterment of society rather than yet another means for the government to indoctrinate the public with propaganda. We’d prefer to get the truth out with Facebook, but if you persist down the wrong path, we will still get the truth out without you.
Sincerely,
Jeremy R. Hammond
P.S. — Dear reader, if you want to help push back against Facebook’s manipulation of their algorithms, give this post tons of engagement by loving, commenting, and sharing it!
We’re not going down without a fight. We didn’t start this information war, but we will finish it. 😀
That post rapidly became the most viral I’d ever shared. As I’m writing this, it has reached 50,562 people and had 9,801 engagements, including over 1,300 likes, 238 comments, and 569 shares. I guess my postscript worked!
Soon thereafter, Facebook’s prejudicial warning also disappeared from my page. I thought it might have just been for me that it was not appearing, so I asked others whether they were seeing it and they confirmed to me that it was no longer there. This was not because Facebook discontinued the practice. The warning continue to appear on numerous other pages posting about vaccines. It don’t know that it’s because of my viral post that it was removed, but I also can’t think of any other reason my page has been excluded from the warning despite my continuous posting of information about vaccines.
There is an information war happening right now. Truthful information is dubbed “false” and censored while demonstrably false information deemed “fact” by the gatekeepers and thought-controllers is widely propagated. But while they may have the financial resources and the power, we will win this war because their deceptions can only fool so many people for so long, and a growing number of people are waking up to how they are being lied to.
In my previous article, “Yes, Fauci and Gates Do Have Ties to COVID-19 Vaccine Maker“, I listed four things we can all do to help fight this war:
- Don’t spread misinformation on social media. Think critically, question your own assumptions, and check your confirmation bias. Take the time to try to verify information to make sure it checks out. (Go to the original source, if possible. You’d be surprised how frequently sources are cited that either don’t support or contradict the claim being made. I encounter this continuously. Also seek corroboration from other sources.) We do not want to be legitimizing accusations of spreading misinformation because it plays right into the hands of those who wish to censor our voices.
- Second, do keep spreading truthful information that the establishment wants to keep from the public. Social media is a very useful tool for circumventing the gatekeepers and challenging mainstream propaganda narratives. That’s precisely why people like Congressman Adam Schiff want social media platforms like Facebook to censor information on behalf of the government. When you read quality articles containing important and verifiable information that mainstream media consumers just aren’t otherwise getting, be sure to share it.
- Third, when you encounter media content that is misinforming the public, make an effort to hold them accountable. Write to the authors and editors to respectfully request corrections to false information, providing them with any documentation necessary to prove that their claims are untrue. (I thank my own readers for identifying errors in my own writings on occasion, which I correct with published acknowledgments.)
- Fourth, when you encounter mainstream misinformation, hold it up as an example to educate others about how they are being deceived and how the media tend to serve the function of manufacturing consent for harmful government policies. Share the information and explain to your friends, family, and followers on social media why the claim or narrative is false and what the truth is.
Keep up the good fight.