Global PR Giant Launches Provocative HPV Vaccine Ads Targeting Gen Zers
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | December 7, 2023
A multinational public relations firm last week launched a provocative advertising campaign — under the slogan “HPV Fucks Everybody” — designed to persuade Gen Zers to get the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine.
The PR firm, Publicis Groupe, launched the campaign in collaboration with the nonprofit Fuck Cancer. The campaign doesn’t name a specific HPV vaccine brand name. However, Merck’s Gardasil vaccine is the only HPV vaccine brand distributed in the U.S., and Merck is a client of Publicis Groupe.
When asked if Merck was funding the campaign, a spokesperson for Fuck Cancer told The Defender, “This campaign has no connection with Merck and is a collaboration between Publicis Health Media and Fuck Cancer (a non profit). Please note that we are promoting a vaccine that is safe and saves lives.”
There are currently 80 cases pending in federal court against Merck alleging Gardasil caused injuries and the federal Vaccine Court has paid out more than $70 million to people making claims regarding Gardasil.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH), also a Publicis client, developed the HPV vaccine technology, which it licenses, in the U.S., exclusively to Merck.
In addition to Merck and the NIH, other Publicis Groupe clients include the World Economic Forum (WEF), pharmaceutical giants including Pfizer, GSK, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, Purdue Pharma and several pharmacy chains that administer the HPV vaccines, including Walmart, Rite Aid and CVS Health (owners of Target pharmacies and clinics).
Campaign ‘uses sex to sell its case’
The new campaign targets young adults directly through a series of ads featuring “diverse, sexy images” and edgy music, accompanying the message that it doesn’t matter who you are, you are at risk because “HPV Fucks Everybody.”
Photos of a black couple, a white couple and a furry couple kissing, and a multiracial group of young people partying are featured on the website and will be featured in the ads.
The images are accompanied by lines like, “Stop the spread. Get the shot. Keep doing you,” according to “Pharma & Health Insider” — a PR site that publishes promotional stories with a news-like appearance.
HPV transmission is likely to occur via sex, the PR story said, so the campaign “uses sex to sell its case.”
“Targeting all 18–26-year-olds who are sexually active (or who want to be), the campaign behaves just like its audience: honest, bold and unbounded by tradition,” said Alison McConnell, chief marketing officer at Publicis Health Media — one of Publicis’ “solution hubs.”
Michelle Stiles, author of “One Idea To Rule Them All: Reverse Engineering American Propaganda,” told The Defender that campaigns run by elite global PR firms may appear absurd to a skeptical observer, but they have tremendous power to shape global public health agendas.
She said:
“The trendy and provocative messaging targeting sexually active youth for yet another vaccination campaign should hopefully be met with ample amounts of skepticism or outright laughter for those who paid attention during the previous rollout of the COVID-19 shots.
“Unfortunately, these million-dollar campaigns are extremely dangerous because they are so effective.”
Ben Mallory, executive vice president/creative director for Digitas Health, another Publicis subsidiary collaborating on the campaign, said the campaign is designed to inform young people that they will be infected with HPV, that such infection will be risky and that vaccination is the answer.
“For a generation that doesn’t discriminate, it’s important they realize that HPV doesn’t either,” he said. “That’s what the campaign communications [sic]: It doesn’t matter who you are or what you’re into, if you’re not vaccinated, you’re at risk.”
Trying to reach ‘largest and most influential generation’
The campaign will air 30-second and one-minute ads on 150 college campuses and in 150 malls in major markets, and also post on lifestyle websites like Thrillist, PopSugar, the dating site Grindr.
An audio campaign will follow, along with advertising in “points-of-care,” which can include clinics or pharmacies.
On the campaign’s website, people can also sign up to “get the shot” at major retail pharmacies including Walgreens, CVS, Rite Aid, Walmart, Target and Kroger — companies Publicis Groupe also represents.
McConnell, Publicis’ marketing director for the campaign, said they are trying to reach Gen Z because it is “the largest and most influential generation.”
That makes this campaign different from most previous HPV vaccination PR campaigns that targeted parents.
This shift in focus reflects recent shifts in direct advertising by Gardasil maker Merck.
Merck’s early ads targeted parents of adolescents, but in 2022 they shifted gears and started targeting parents of young children with ads like this one, which appeals to parents of the older elementary school children.
These ads focused on marketing the vaccine as “cancer prevention” rather than as acting on a sexually transmitted disease, a strategy the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) promoted to encourage more young people to get vaccinated.
Last year, Merck expanded its advertising campaign to target adults through age 45, in commercials like this one, marketing the vaccine as protecting against a long list of cancers.
Merck has invested heavily in shaping the market since the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the drug in 2006. In October, it announced that its 2023 third-quarter Gardasil sales grew 13% to $2.6 billion.
Fact-checking the campaign’s claims
The campaign sample ad and its website, which provide no citations, make many misleading or erroneous claims.
The campaign’s approach appears to be rooted in the “fear-based” or “fear-appealing” messaging designed to “nudge” people into getting vaccinated, commonly utilized during the COVID-19 pandemic and in global public health more generally.
According to the CDC, HPV is the most common sexually transmitted infection in the U.S. and the majority of sexually active people will get it at some point in their lives, even if they have only one or very few sexual partners.
But the vast majority of HPV infections are cleared by the immune system and less than 10% of infections are linked to any clinical symptoms. Clinical symptoms can include a variety of warts and cervical dysplasia, which may be benign or precancerous.
Yet the campaign website claims, “HPV turns into cancer about 10% of the time,” a claim public health agencies don’t make.
There are over 200 strains of the HPV virus, a subset of which are deemed “high-risk.” HPV can cause genital warts and some strains have been associated with some types of cancer. However, HPV is not the sole risk factor for any cancer, and cancers associated with HPV can also sometimes develop without the presence of the virus.
Methods like regular pap screening are highly effective and have been found to reduce the incidence and mortality of cervical cancer among women by at least 80%.
But the sample ad on the site presents HPV as something always scary and dangerous.
It says:
“HPV Fucks Everybody. In fact, there are more than 14 million new HPV infections in the US each year, because HPV doesn’t discriminate. It doesn’t care who you are, what you look like who you love or what you’re into. HPV will infect more than 85% of sexually active people of all races, ethnicities and genders. It can lead to genital warts, or worse, over ten types of cancer. So it doesn’t matter if your status is single, committed, or complicated. It doesn’t even matter if you’re not currently sexually active.”
The website also claims the HPV vaccine can prevent a whopping 33,700 types of HPV-related cancers. Even Gardasil 9’s package insert and the CDC website only indicate the HPV vaccine for some cancers of the cervix, vagina, vulva, penis, anus and back of the throat with the HPV virus.
The campaign also repeats Merck’s claims that the vaccine is “safe and effective” and that the side effects are “mild.”
But a series of ongoing lawsuits against Merck allege the drugmaker fast-tracked Gardasil through the FDA’s approval process and deceptively conducted clinical trials to mask serious side effects and exaggerate the vaccine’s effectiveness.
Some of the signature impacts observed following HPV vaccination in thousands of adverse events reports worldwide include permanently disabling autoimmune and neurological conditions such as postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, fibromyalgia and myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome.
To date, there are no valid studies showing the HPV vaccine prevents cervical cancer. However, there are studies suggesting the vaccine could increase the risk of cancer.
Finally, the campaign promises that getting vaccinated can “put an end to HPV. For you, for us, for them. For everyone.”
However, the Gardasil 9 vaccine is designed only to suppress nine of the over 200 strains of HPV, and recent research has shown that when the HPV vaccine suppresses certain types of “high-risk” HPV strains, those strains are replaced with other strains associated with some cancers.
While the World Health Organization has launched a global campaign to eradicate cervical cancer as a public health threat, it has not indicated a similar project for HPV.
Publicis is part of ‘the propaganda arm of the global elite’
The campaign is spearheaded by Publicis Health Media and Digitas Health, which are both part of Publicis, along with Fuck Cancer.
According to the campaign publicity, Publicis Health Media is particularly concerned with HPV because the company CEO Arthur Sadoun was diagnosed and treated for HPV-associated cancer.
Last year, the company published a holiday video where board chair Maurice Lévy and Sadoun were joined by actor Michael Douglas, who was diagnosed and treated with throat cancer a decade ago, to promote the HPV vaccine and the Publicis Groupe.
As part of its cancer marketing focus, Publicis Groupe launched its Working with Cancer initiative, at the WEF. In partnership with 30 of the largest global companies, including Pfizer, Sanofi, PepsiCola, Meta and others, the campaign seeks to “abolish the stigma and insecurity that exist for people with cancer in the workplace,” according to the campaign website.
During Super Bowl LVII in February, it ran a commercial about the campaign that won a Gold Lion from the Health & Wellness jury at the 2023 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in June.
Publicis Groupe is an ad holding company, which recently rebranded “for the connected age” itself as a “platform,” according to its website.
As Stiles details in her book, just a few such companies — including Publicis, Omnicom, WPP and Interpublic Group — dominate the global media landscape.
Each ad-holding company has billions of dollars in revenue and serves thousands of corporate clients along with universities, nonprofits and governmental and nongovernmental organizations.
As public relations firms, they design ad campaigns and they develop and strategically place print and broadcast media content in mainstream news and PR publications for their clients. They also create public relations campaigns like those described here to develop, promote and defend the reputations of their clients.
They design their strategies in part by collecting data “on virtually every U.S. consumer” and on journalists, politicians and scientists.
Other tactics include flooding the media landscape with spin, developing talking points for “experts” to use in public appearances and generally “using underhanded tactics to promote and defend their clients,” Ecowatch reported.
According to Stiles, an estimated two-thirds to 80% of the content broadcast and published by corporate media comes from public relations firms.
She said:
“There is no doubt that the top three PR holding firms WPP, Omnicom, and Publicis, whose collective revenue is over 44 billion, function and should be thought of as the propaganda arm of the global elite.
“The finely-tuned, targeted messages not only create revenue for the transnational capitalist class but just as importantly define the global problems to be solved and the way in which they should be solved, leaving very little room for other creative options.”
Each agency has smaller subsidiaries and PR affiliates under the same corporate ownership, creating the appearance that there are more players in the media field than there actually are. More recently, they have also begun to “gobble up” data companies.
For example, in this campaign, two of three collaborators are part of the Publicis Groupe.
The public relations site Pharma & Health, where one of the “stories” about the “HPV Fucks Everybody” campaign was posted by MediaPost Inc., a marketing company that posts up to 50 different industry blogs.
“Adding together the global revenue of the top 250 independent PR firms ($17 billion) with the PR holding companies ($44 billion) and we are literally swimming in marketing messages intended to consolidate capital for the mega-corporations,” Stiles said.
“The medical messaging repeatedly advises us to outsource health and wellness to drugs or vaccines, poor choices indeed,” she added.
A Defender investigation into Publicis’ clients last year, found it serves a wide range of corporate, governmental and supra-governmental agencies including the WEF and U.S. government agencies like the National Security Agency, tech giants like Google, Amazon, Disney, Microsoft and Meta, and corporate clients PepsiCo, Phillip Morris and Saudi Aramco.
Publicis Groupe was implicated in the “Monsanto File” scandal, where the company was found to be using Publicis Consultants and FleishmanHillard, an Omnicom subsidiary, to launch a PR offensive to rehabilitate the image of genetically modified organisms and pesticides.
Newsguard, a for-profit fact-checking organization backed by Big Pharma, Big Tech, the U.S. government and the American Federation of Teachers — a staunch advocate of mandatory COVID-19 vaccination and masks for schoolchildren — is also a client.
So is the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a politically driven service consistently attacking anyone who raises questions about vaccine efficacy or safety, and the organization responsible for creating the so-called “Disinformation Dozen” list.
In her book, Stiles also explains that asset management firms Vanguard and BlackRock are among the top 10 shareholders in the top four ad agency holding companies.
Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Taxpayer-Funded Initiative Urges Dentists to Push HPV Vaccines
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | November 2, 2023
The National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR) awarded over $685,000 to HealthPartners Institute to test strategies for getting dentists to recommend the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine to children and young adults ages 11-26, documents obtained by Children’s Health Defense (CHD) via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request revealed.
The NIDCR operates under the government’s taxpayer-funded National Institutes of Health (NIH).
The HealthPartners study is being conducted three years after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) added prevention of oropharyngeal cancer, a form of head and neck cancer, to a growing list of indications for the HPV vaccine — despite a lack of clinical evidence to support the claim.
Dentists remain generally reluctant to recommend or administer the vaccine to their patients, studies show.
The NIDCR funding covers the first two years of a six-year, $3.5 million proposal for the healthcare nonprofit to experiment with training dental providers to deliver scripted messages to their patients about why they should get the HPV vaccine.
HealthPartners will then run a clinical trial in 21 dental clinics to determine whether the training and messages lead more dental providers to recommend the vaccine, and more patients to take it.
The grant is one of nearly 50 identified by CHD in June — totaling more than $40 million — awarded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to universities, healthcare systems and public health departments to increase HPV vaccine uptake among adolescents.
The NIDCR is the latest of several HHS sub-agencies to fund behavior modification research aimed at providers and patients in order to increase vaccine uptake.
Why would dentists be charged with recommending the HPV vaccine?
Dentists are uniquely positioned to promote the HPV vaccine because they tend to have more regular contact with young patients than other healthcare providers, the HealthPartners proposal states.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the American Dental Association and the American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry all recommend that dental providers promote HPV vaccination — but most dental providers don’t see vaccine promotion as part of dentistry.
HPV is the most common sexually transmitted infection in the U.S. Most people will get the infection at some point in their lives, but more than 90% of infections clear on their own with no residual health consequences on clinical follow-up.
High-risk HPV types can cause cervical cell abnormalities that are precursors to cancer, however, HPV infection is not the sole risk factor for cervical cancer.
Regular pap screening has been found to reduce the incidence of and mortality from cervical cancer among women by at least 80%.
Merck’s Gardasil 9 — the only HPV vaccine marketed in the U.S. — is a widely used vaccine commonly administered to teens and young adults before they are sexually active to protect against nine of more than 200 strands of HPV that can be sexually transmitted later in life.
Despite Merck marketing Gardasil as a vaccine that protects against some forms of cancer, clinical trials for Gardasil did not test whether the vaccine protected against any cancer — only whether it had efficacy against the indicated strains of HPV.
Gardasil has been associated with a number of serious adverse events.
Some of the signature impacts observed following HPV vaccination include permanently disabling autoimmune and neurological conditions such as postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), fibromyalgia and myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome.
More than 80 lawsuits against Merck now pending in federal courts allege the drugmaker fast-tracked Gardasil through the FDA’s approval process and deceptively conducted clinical trials to mask serious side effects and exaggerate the vaccine’s effectiveness.
In June 2020, the FDA added the prevention of oropharyngeal and other head and neck cancers to the list of indications for the HPV vaccine under the “accelerated approval licensure pathway.”
That pathway allows treatments to be approved before clinical data demonstrating benefit exists, based on early clinical predictions that the treatment will likely produce a benefit.
Later, if a clinical benefit is never found, the FDA “can seek withdrawal” of the drug from the market.
According to the HealthPartners grant proposal, HPV is the leading cause of oropharyngeal cancers in the U.S., However, the references cited to support that claim are from 2014 — and they don’t appear to support the claim.
The CDC estimates 70% of oropharyngeal cancers in the U.S. are “thought to be” caused by HPV, and qualifies even that claim by adding, “It is unclear if having HPV alone is enough to cause oropharyngeal cancers.”
There is no evidence that the HPV vaccine prevents oropharyngeal cancers, but some trials have found that it does have efficacy against vaccine-type oral strains of HPV.
Top NIH-funded Merck consultants in the field, like Noel Brewer, Ph.D. — who developed and promotes the “announcement approach” to increasing vaccine uptake — have long looked to expand HPV vaccination into settings outside of primary care.
On that basis, the HealthPartners study aims to change dental providers’ behavior so they consistently recommend the HPV vaccine to their patients. Dr. Brad Rindal, a dentist, and Patricia Mabry, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist, are co-leading the study.
The proposal falls within HHS’ mission to understand the mechanisms of behavior change in order to develop methods of “experimental manipulation or intervention” with providers and patients that can help it meet its targets in various aspects of public health.
HHS, through the NIH, has been funding behavioral studies to assess and influence providers’ willingness to recommend and administer the HPV vaccine in order to increase rates of vaccine uptake since shortly after the vaccine was first licensed in 2006.
Study design explicitly waives informed consent for patients
In the study, a team of researchers from HealthPartners — which provides healthcare, coverage, research and education to 1.8 million plan members — will train providers, teaching them about the relationship between the HPV vaccine and the risk of oropharyngeal cancer.
Trained providers also will receive scripts for use in patient conversations tailored to “reduce fear” that such conversations will negatively impact provider-patient relationships. They also will learn how to refer their patients to a vaccine scheduler.
Researchers will then measure changes in provider behavior through direct provider reporting — they press a button in their office when they make a recommendation — and follow-up surveys.
Patients or patient parents or guardians will receive follow-up survey calls after the office visits to assess how effective the provider communication was.
Researchers will measure changes in patient behavior by assessing how many patients receive initial and follow-up doses of the HPV vaccine within 30 days of their office visit.
In the first two years of the study — funded by the initial grant — the team will develop and pilot test their training and scripts. Their control group will receive patient education brochures and untailored scripts and their intervention group will receive the training and the tailored scripts.
In the next phase, they will test the efficacy of these interventions in clinic-randomized trials, comparing the control and intervention groups. Twenty-one HealthPartners Dental Group clinics and their providers will participate.
Patients 11-26 years old who go to HealthPartners dental clinics and whose electronic health records indicate they have not initiated or completed the HPV vaccine series will be automatically enrolled in the study without their knowledge. HealthPartners estimates there will be approximately 8,000 qualifying visits with HPV unvaccinated patients.
Verbal informed consent will be obtained for participation in the post-intervention patient/parent phone survey.
The patients will not otherwise be informed of the study.
The study requests a waiver of informed consent for patients by arguing that the dental providers will only be making recommendations already endorsed by the CDC, the American Cancer Society and the National HPV Roundtable, which is a joint venture of the CDC and the American Cancer Society.
“Therefore,” they state, “the recommendations conform to current standards of care and don’t present a risk to patients that exceed the risks that patients assume when they seek care within any healthcare system focused on disease prevention through vaccination promotion.”
They also argue that the research “would not be feasible without such a waiver” because it would bias the provider involvement and patient response.
They add that patients sign a HIPAA authorization form that allows them to opt out of using health data for research purposes and that they will be certain to check that list.
Finally, they note that “patients can elect not to pursue vaccination despite the recommendation of the dental care provider” — even though the intervention is designed to change their behavior so they don’t make such an election.
Merck, federal public health agencies, and WHO looking to grow market for HPV shots
Merck’s Gardasil was first licensed in 2006 for use in girls and women ages 9-26 to prevent four high-risk strains of HPV.
The FDA in 2009 expanded the license for use in males ages 9-26 for the prevention of genital warts and in 2011, the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommended it for routine use in boys.
In 2014, the FDA approved Gardasil 9, designed to protect against 9 HPV strains, for use in the prevention of HPV-related cervical, vaginal and vulvar cancers in females and HPV-related anogenital lesions and anal cancers in males and females.
The FDA also expanded the age range of potential HPV vaccines to males and females between the ages of 9 and 45.
Early marketing strategies focused on promoting the drug as guarding against HPV, a sexually transmitted disease. But in 2016, as vaccination rates lagged, the CDC recommended that doctors stress the HPV vaccine’s cancer-prevention benefits, rather than talking about STDs as a way to get more parents to vaccinate younger kids.
And in 2020, it added oropharyngeal and other head and neck cancers to the list.
Over the last several years, HHS has invested tens of millions of dollars in research to get U.S. HPV vaccine uptake numbers to HHS’ “healthy people” target rates of 80% of children and teens vaccinated by 2030.
Meanwhile, Merck has expanded its ad campaigns beyond teenagers to target parents of young children and adults.
In 2020, the WHO set a goal of vaccinating 90% of teenage girls by 2030. Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, is currently launching a series of campaigns to vaccinate tens of millions of girls in Africa, following similar campaigns in India and Indonesia.
Last week Merck announced its third-quarter earnings from Gardasil were up 13% to $2.9 billion. Allied Market Research predicts the global HPV vaccine market — in which Merck is the primary player, although GSK also markets its Cervarix outside of the U.S. — will grow to $10.8 billion.
Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
‘So Many Pitfalls’: Feds Push School-Based Health Centers as Critics Sound Alarm Over Lack of Parental Consent
By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D. | The Defender | August 9, 2023
The recent push by the U.S. federal government to rapidly expand the use of school-based health centers (SBHCs) across the country has some critics concerned children will receive, or be pressured into receiving, unnecessary or unwanted medical interventions — including vaccines — without their parents’ knowledge or consent.
Georgia attorney Nicole Johnson, co-director of Georgia Coalition for Vaccine Choice and a consultant to the Children’s Health Defense’s (CHD) legal team, told The Defender :
“It’s scary because these health centers sound really good. In some of the rural and poor communities especially, this is going to seem like a really good way for children to get this care.
“And while there may be some conveniences, there are so many concerns with allowing medical exams and treatments at school. Parents need to be involved in all medical decisions and I fear they are being left out of the equation.”
SBHCs are intended to provide high-quality healthcare to kids by offering “primary care, mental health care, and other health services in schools,” particularly in underserved communities.
This includes services “to prevent disease, disability, and other health conditions or their progression” such as “immunizations” and “well-child care.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Community Preventive Services Task Force, SBHCs can improve educational and health outcomes.
The CDC also considers SBHCs as integral to its Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child model because they provide health services and mental health counseling.
But critics like Johnson worry that though there may be benefits to SBHCs, there are also downsides — including lack of regulation of the centers and the fact that parents may not be aware of the broad range of medical and behavioral services being provided in their children’s schools.
SBHCs have been linked to higher human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination rates, according to a 2022 report by Harvard University’s Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation and the University of California Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center.
The report — written expressly to “address vaccine hesitancy” — concluded: “These results suggest SBHCs create a considerable opportunity … to implement successful school based HPV vaccination programs.”
Merck, the maker of the Gardasil HPV vaccine, is one of the funders of the School-Based Health Alliance, a large networking organization that “works on policy, standards, data, and training issues” regarding SBHCs.
Federal, state authorities pour taxpayer money into school-based health centers
The idea of running full-service health centers in public schools has been around for more than two decades, but events in 2022 caused SBHCs to catch on like wildfire.
Congress and President Joe Biden in June 2022 passed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which allowed the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to award $50 million in grants to states “for the purpose of implementing, enhancing, or expanding the provision” of healthcare assistance through SBHCs using Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP).
The legislation charged the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) with expanding access to Medicaid healthcare services — including behavioral health services — in schools, and reducing the administrative burden for states and schools.
A CMS spokesperson told The Defender that Medicaid and CHIP now can provide reimbursement for services given in SBHCs for children and youth who are covered by those programs.
Additionally, in May 2022 HHS awarded $25 million in grants to 125 SBHCs “to improve and strengthen access to school-based health services in communities across the country.”
State public officials also are dedicating funds to expand SBHCs. For instance, the governor of Georgia in fall 2022 announced an investment of $125 million to expand school-based health services to rural communities in Georgia.
Pediatricians can ‘partner’ with schools
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) supports SBHCs and said in a policy statement that pediatricians may act as “sponsors” by partnering with a school to establish the SBHC as an extension of their practice or by supervising the care given at a SBHC.
“Sponsors also include local hospitals that can provide prearranged after-hours and school vacation coverage and financial support for SBHCs,” the AAP said.
The Defender reached out to the AAP statement’s lead authors for comments on how parental consent is handled in SBHCs, but they did not respond by our publication deadline.
SBHCs also have the support of the School-Based Health Alliance. In addition to funding from Merck, the alliance receives financial support from HHS’ Health Resources & Services Administration.
Documents obtained in June by CHD revealed that the HHS gave $4.7 million to research headed by a Merck consultant that focused on developing “The Announcement Approach Training,” where providers simply “announce” a child will be receiving the HPV vaccine as part of a routine office visit, instead of discussing it with the family first.
The government-funded research also is testing whether financial incentives and peer pressure can “nudge” doctors to change how they talk to their patients in order to increase HPV vaccine uptake among adolescents.
Meanwhile, a fierce battle is taking place in multiple states where some lawmakers are pushing legislation that would allow minors to receive treatments to prevent sexually transmitted diseases — including Merck’s HPV vaccine — without parental knowledge or consent.
‘So many pitfalls … so many ways for someone else to be making parental decisions’
Justine Tanguay, an attorney with nearly 20 years of experience advocating for children in various areas of the law, told The Defender :
“Don’t be fooled! This year many schools will be sending home blanket consent-to-treat forms for parents to sign.
“Parents need to be aware that these forms are not the traditional authorization requests for the school nurse to give first-aid or to treat minor illnesses.”
Tanguay, CHD’s director of campaign and research, explained that the forms may give those who run the SBHC the legal authorization to provide “comprehensive healthcare.”
This could include — but may not be limited to — “the ability to provide preventative treatment, behavioral and mental health services, reproductive counseling, lab and prescription services, various medical screenings, immunizations and disease management,” Tanguay said.
Moreover, SBHC staff will have “direct access” to a minor child, Tanguay said, “as well as the ability to encourage a minor child to make personal healthcare decisions without the need to consult with and seek approval from a parent.”
“The opportunity to circumvent both parental rights and informed consent is ripe for abuse,” Tanguay warned.
Johnson agreed, saying, “There are just so many pitfalls here, so many ways for someone else to be making parental decisions.”
Johnson shared with The Defender a consent form currently used in a school district north of Atlanta, Georgia.
The form says nothing about parents being notified before, during or after treatment. It reads:
“I hereby voluntarily give my consent for [my child] to receive health services with Georgia Highlands Medical Services at Cumming Elementary School.
“I further authorize any health care provider and professional staff working for the clinic to provide such medical tests, diagnoses, procedures, and treatments as are reasonably necessary or advisable for the medical evaluation and management of my child’s health care.”
The form does not clarify who determines what services are “reasonably necessary or advisable” and does not explain how parents will be involved in that process. It states:
“I understand that my signing this consent allows the health care provider and professional clinic staff of Georgia Highlands Medical Services at Cummings Elementary Schools to provide comprehensive health services which includes physical and behavioral health services.”
Again, the form does not clarify what specifically falls into the category of “physical and behavioral health services” or how parents will be involved in the determination for what services their child may need.
“I think about my own kids when they were in school,” Johnson said, “how easily they could have been swayed to get a vaccine or a medical treatment just because an adult told them that they should.”
“It’s really dangerous to have all of these things offered to them without the parents even being aware,” she said. “A lot of kids — most kids — are compliant. They want to do what the adults are telling them to do.”
According to the CDC, a key component of its Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child model, which includes SBHCs, is “family engagement.”
However, the agency’s 37-page document about family engagement mentions parental permission only once and does not discuss parental consent for medical treatment beyond the application of sunscreen during recess.
According to a CMS spokesperson, SBHCs “follow the same practices as any other medical center or Medicaid or Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) provider … including parental consent requirements.”
The spokesperson did not go into detail on whether consent would be requested generally or for each specific medical treatment.
Where’s the regulatory oversight?
Tanguay pointed out that SBHCs exist without proper regulatory oversight.
According to Stand for Health Freedom, a nonprofit “dedicated to protecting informed consent in medical care,” SBHCs are “completely unregulated.”
For instance, it is presently unclear how HIPAA law (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996) and FERPA law (the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) will be applied to SBHCs and students’ health information.
Stand for Health Freedom also pointed out that although in-school clinics may relieve busy parents of the burden of taking their children to the doctor, “medical ethics do not allow physicians to treat minors without a parent or guardian present, which is why parents cannot simply drop their child off at the doctor’s office and come back later to collect them.”
Stand for Health Freedom said:
“Parents must engage politically and work with state health freedom leaders to ask lawmakers to either ban SBHCs in favor of the existing limited school-nurse model, or place guardrails on SBHCs to protect parental consent and involvement in their minor children’s medical care.”
Meanwhile, proponents of SBHCs, such as the School-Based Health Alliance, argue that SBHCs are a “powerful tool for achieving health equity among children and adolescents who unjustly experience disparities in outcomes simply because of their race, ethnicity, or family income.”
Johnson said she disliked being “so skeptical of something that may potentially benefit some people” but added, “as a parent, it is your job and your right to be a part of the decisions that affect the health and well-being of your child.”
Johnson said parents who experienced or witnessed vaccine injury would be particularly skeptical of putting medical decisions in the hands of government agencies, including schools.
“And the COVID response created even more skeptics,” she said, adding:
“It’s unfortunate that we have to approach this [SBHCs] with the thought, ‘How could this be abused?’ But that’s where we are.”
The Defender on Aug. 3 reached out to the School-Based Health Alliance to ask how parental consent in SBHCs is handled and what they’d like parents who may feel distrustful of the U.S. medical system to know about SBHCs. The alliance did not respond by our publication deadline.
Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., is a reporter and researcher for The Defender based in Fairfield, Iowa. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin (2021), and a master’s degree in communication and leadership from Gonzaga University (2015). Her scholarship has been published in Health Communication. She has taught at various academic institutions in the United States and is fluent in Spanish.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
What are the risks and benefits of each vaccine?
The COVID-19 vaccines have provided a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to answer this question
A Midwestern Doctor | The Forgotten Side of Medicine | April 5, 2023
A major problem I see throughout the scientific and political sphere is that people cannot maintain a perspective that allows them to see the whole picture; rather they tend to focus or fixate on things they have some type of emotional or subconscious priming to focus on (this has been an issue throughout history). This is why you can have someone be around an individual they like and they primarily register the one good thing the individual did (while ignoring all the bad things) and conversely why they will ignore all the good things another individual they don’t like is trying so hard to do and focus on the one bad thing that individual did.
This human tendency ends up becoming a huge problem because the media will emotionally condition the public to focus on the one side on an issue which favors its corporate sponsors. This in turn leads to these people getting up in arms about that one point when individuals who dissent against the corporate narrative try to highlight the issues that greatly outweigh any purported benefit of the narrative.
This is particularly common with complex issues (which are difficult to understand to begin with) and one of my longstanding frustrations has been that despite the harms of vaccines greatly outweighing their benefits, many of you can only register the danger of the (often insignificant disease) the vaccine allegedly protects against. In my eyes, one of the upsides about COVID-19 is that this selective reframing of reality and the media lies to maintain it went to such an extreme extent, much of the public became able to realize it was absurd and started taking the time to try and fully understand the subject.
One of the common questions I get from readers relates to another complex question—which vaccines are safe for their kids, and which ones are a bad idea? This is surprisingly difficult to answer because you must weigh the likelihood of an adverse event from a vaccination vs. the likelihood of suffering a complication from the disease that the vaccine would prevent you from getting and compute a figure that takes the weighted average of each into consideration.
In order make this determination, you need to consider all of the following:
Disease Risk
How likely is it for a person to get the disease?
Some diseases we vaccinate against are incredibly rare (e.g., tetanus).
How likely is the disease to cause a negligible, minor, moderate, severe, or fatal complication?
It is very important to distinguish between these categories because, for most infections, the risk of you catching it and then it becoming a severe condition is extremely low. For example, a Neisseria meningitidis infection (which can cause septic meningitis) is really bad and can progress very quickly, but also is very rare for people to develop (one in ten people are asymptomatic carriers whereas approximately one in a million get it a year).
How likely is it that the severity of the disease can be improved with an existing medical treatment?
Most of the infections we vaccinate against are very easy to treat. Unfortunately, the focus is always on vaccinating against the disease rather than providing treatment for it (especially if the treatment is something more unorthodox than an antibiotic). In the case of COVID-19, while severe complications represent the minority of cases, they (and the more minor ones) can in most cases easily be prevented by early outpatient treatment. Unfortunately, the Federal government has refused to disclose to the public what the effective treatments are for it (presumably because it would make it impossible to continue making money off COVID-19).
How likely is it that you will have access to the necessary treatment before you get seriously ill?
Although I dislike the vaccine approach, I have to acknowledge that this is one of the strongest arguments for it. For rapidly progressing diseases, for those in isolated areas, for those unable to recognize their need to seek medical care, and for those of limited economic means, they often cannot get the necessary treatment for the disease before it is too late to prevent a severe complication.
In general, it’s very rare that a vaccine-preventable disease has both a significant likelihood that you will get it and a significant likelihood that it will develop into a severe condition. Many of those believed to fall into this category are no longer an issue in the United States (e.g., polio or smallpox), regardless of whether or not you are vaccinated, but people who look at this question are often fixated on the past presentations of the disease when it was more pathogenic or when we did not have a way to treat it.
Vaccine Efficacy
How likely is the vaccine to be effective in preventing the disease, and do the presence of vaccine antibodies correlate with a decreased risk of the disease?
Many vaccines fail to do one or both of these. COVID-19 has provided the greatest red pill in history on this topic, especially since successive COVID-19 vaccines actually increase your risk of catching the disease.
How likely is the vaccine to be effective at preventing severe complications of the disease?
The human papillomavirus vaccine (which “prevents” cervical cancer) is an excellent example of a vaccine that does not live up to its promise to do so because it’s promise was based on a series of erroneous (and wishful) assumptions.
How long does the vaccine’s protection last following immunization?
Many vaccines suffer from the problem of declining immunity, hence needing repeated boosters to be given which re-expose the recipient to the risks of the vaccine. COVID-19 again has provided the greatest red pill in history on this topic, as the immunity from it wanes approximately 3 months after the most recent injection.
How likely will it be for the vaccine to prevent you from getting the disease when you need to be protected?
The hepatitis B vaccine is routinely given at birth, and then twice more very early in life. This is nonsensical for two reasons. First, at the time of birth, infants lack an immune system that can mount a proper antibody response to the vaccine. Second, hepatitis B is spread by blood-to-blood contact (e.g., sharing heroin needles or having unprotected sex), both things very unlikely to happen in childhood. This is important because the hepatitis B vaccine typically only lasts for around 6-7 years (estimates vary). The best explanation I have seen for why the vaccine is given immediately following birth (despite being completely unjustifiable) is that it habituates parents to come in for regular well child vaccination visits starting at two months.
How long does it take for the vaccine to create a selective pressure that causes the pathogen to no longer be covered by the vaccine?
This is a huge problem for any vaccine that “works”, because it rapidly creates selective pressure for variants not covered by the vaccine’s antigen. The only vaccines that do not suffer from this issue are the ones where the vaccine does not create selective pressures against the vaccine (e.g., the non-contagious tetanus bacteria toxin) and live attenuated vaccines since they contain so many different antigens [note: except for tuberculosis, all live attenuated vaccines are viruses]. Live attenuated vaccines, unfortunately, can cause infections of the vaccine strain in the immunocompromised host, and are frequently contaminated with other viruses that were present in the medium used to cultivate the virus.
Because this is a longstanding problem, many theorized that the COVID-19 vaccine (due to it only containing a single antigen in a rapidly mutating part of the spike protein) would rapidly trigger the production of more pathogenic variants. This is, of course, what happened soon after it hit the market.
Does the vaccine have other benefits besides preventing the disease?
Some live attenuated vaccines broadly stimulate the immune system. In third world countries with a high infectious disease burden, this actually saves lives (this has been shown with the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine [MMR] and the tuberculosis vaccine [BCG]) because the immune system is better able to fight off those otherwise fatal infections modern medical care is not available for.
Note: conversely, other vaccines like DPT, when studied were found to do the opposite and broadly increase the risk of death due to the immune suppression they create.
Population Immunity
Assuming that the vaccine “works”:
Does vaccination create a selective pressure for vaccine resistant variants to produce more or less dangerous variants?
With certain vaccines, the strains created by the selective pressure of the vaccine are more dangerous than those that preceded them, and they affect different age groups. This has primarily been shown with the childhood vaccines for bacterial infections.
Does developing a population-wide vaccine immunity to a disease improve or worsen the disease’s consequences?
Two of the best examples of this were the chickenpox vaccine and the measles vaccine (two relatively benign diseases in the era preceding vaccination due to a robust herd immunity).
If you get chickenpox as a child, it is benign, but if you get it as an adult, it can often give you a horrible (and sometimes recurrent) case of shingles. The CDC eagerly expected rolling out the chickenpox vaccine would decrease shingles, but the opposite instead happened (so they, of course, suppressed the data). The researcher who conducted those studies, with a good basis for doing so, theorized that this happened because the reduction of chickenpox in the population prevented people from having their immune response to it be periodically boosted by natural exposure.
In the case of measles, if there is no pre-existing immunity and poor living conditions (e.g., widespread vitamin A deficiency), the disease can be horrible (e.g. measles killed 10% of Native Americans it infected in one outbreak). In the past, infants received antibodies from their mother’s milk (the importance of breast feeding is discussed here), which provided them sufficient protection to build up permanent natural immunity once they were exposed to the virus. The population-wide herd immunity we used to have does not exist now, and periodic measles outbreaks still occur despite the majority of the population being vaccinated. Because we lack that immunity, many are vulnerable to measles, which is always addressed by vaccinating even more people for the disease.
Is there a benefit to developing the disease naturally that is prevented by vaccination?
One of the lesser known facts about diseases is that childhood infections are often critical for helping the immune system develop. A variety of diseases that are much more severe in adults than their corresponding “vaccine preventable” childhood infections are observed to result from not catching the disease in childhood. Some examples include:
-Not having a chickenpox infection increasing your risk of glioblastoma (a horrible brain cancer) later in life.
-Not having a mumps infection increasing your risk of ovarian cancer (one of the most deadly cancers for women).
Note: research substantiating these links and more can be found here.
Vaccinating While Infected
If you are already infected at the time you receive the vaccine, does this improve or worsen your response to the infection?
This was a major problem with the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, as it was shown in the study data that Merck submitted to the FDA that if you had a pre-existing HPV-16 or -18 infections, your risk of developing a cancerous lesion was increased by 44.6% following vaccination. I also have now seen many things which suggest that getting a vaccine while you are infected with COVID-19 significantly worsens the infection.
If an existing infection worsens following vaccination, how practical is it to test for the infection prior to vaccination, and vaccinate at a later time?
As far as I know, a pre-existing infection is never tested for before vaccination. I presume that this is because public health authorities never want to do anything which might encourage vaccine hesitancy. This is particularly absurd with COVID-19 because we are continually passing out free tests and encouraging people to test multiple times per week…except when they are going to be vaccinated.
Vaccine Side Effects
How likely is the vaccine to cause a minor, moderate, severe, or fatal side effect?
One of the important things to understand about toxins is that their side effects distribute on a bell curve, which means that their side effects become increasingly rarer as they increase in severity. Although the severe reactions are the most noticeable (e.g., the rapid progression to lifelong autism or sudden infant death syndrome), less severe chronic complications are much more common, and in my opinion, create the greatest burden to society (this is very well illustrated by Edward Dowd’s figures below).
An explosion of chronic illness (particularly of neurological and autoimmune nature) in our society has paralleled the mass vaccination of society. This has been most apparent at three times in history: the period of the smallpox vaccines, after 1986 when Fauci passed legislation to shield manufacturers from liability for producing dangerous vaccines (which led to a rapid increase in the number of childhood vaccinations and no motivation to ensure their safety), and following the COVID-19 vaccines. In each case, we’ve tragically become acclimated to an increase in baseline levels of chronic illness which never existed in the past, and we have simply assumed that the current disease burden is normal, when in reality it is not.
Similarly, although the sudden deaths from the COVID-19 vaccine are tragic, many less severe but debilitating or disabling reactions are much more common.
How easy is it to recognize that these effects occurred?
Given how difficult it is to get doctors to acknowledge the most extreme reactions to a childhood vaccine, it should come as no surprise that the more subtle issues go mostly unrecognized or are dismissed (to the point that members of the societal orthodoxy commonly produce memes making fun of anti-vaxxers who blame their various health issues on vaccines).
One of the struggles I have experienced throughout my career in medicine is the fact that I can notice right away that a vaccine injury has occurred while sadly, most of my peers cannot. Most of the signs that scream out to me are rarely detected by my colleagues, and the symptoms either don’t register or they give some type of innocuous explanation for them (e.g., it’s a behavioral thing that requires an SSRI to treat—something I do not support). Furthermore, if I try to point them out, all it accomplishes is undermining my credibility.
This has been particularly fascinating to watch with COVID-19, as countless patients are all developing the same symptoms after vaccination, and yet most doctors ardently insist they have nothing to do with the vaccines. Fortunately, this does appear to be beginning to change, as the medical field’s eyes are opening up to the issue (largely because many healthcare workers have also been injured).
How consistent and safe is the vaccine’s manufacturing process?
Because vaccine manufacturers are exempt from liability for unsafe products they produce, many corners often end up getting cut with the production process so more money can be made by the manufacturer (to this point America’s facilities that make our vaccines have been plagued with production concerns such as potential contamination) the FDA has done almost nothing to address. Additionally, since many vaccines are grown in cell cultures, contamination from things already present in the cells (e.g., retroviruses) is inevitable, and some believe this is a key issue with the vaccines.
With the COVID-19 vaccines, it has been demonstrated that much less due diligence was done with producing the vaccines (likely due to Operation Warp Speed enabling this malfeasance) and as a result, there is immense variation in what is present in each vaccine. Presently, this is the best explanation I have found for why people react so differently to the vaccines and why “hot lots” exist.
Does the vaccine priming your immune system to target one pathogen reduce its ability to respond to other pathogens or cancerous cells within the body?
This is a frequent but underappreciated consequence of vaccination. As far as I know, the worst offender in this regard has been the COVID-19 vaccines, which have been linked to both an explosion of cancers and unusual diseases typically only seen in immune-suppressed individuals.
Does the vaccine impair circulation and cause microstrokes in the body?
I believe that this is one of the primary mechanisms of harm done by vaccines, and frequently what must be focused on when treating these patients (e.g., we have seen miraculous results for individuals with COVID-19 vaccine injuries who we treated with simple methods for addressing their zeta potential). As this is a complex but critically important subject to understand, I put together an article explaining it here, and a series explaining how it affects the body and how to treat it here.
Does the vaccine cause the immune system to attack the body and give rise to chronic illnesses?
All vaccines work by provoking the immune system to go into overdrive to attack the vaccine antigen that is present. The downside to this is that it typically also causes the immune system to attack other proteins in the vicinity (e.g., a mice study showed that mice develop allergies to pollen that is in the air at the time of their vaccination). Autoimmunity is especially likely to happen if the vaccine shares antigen sequences with human tissue (homologies) and contains a very strong adjuvant (the vaccine component which stimulates the immune system). Before the COVID-19 vaccines (which have a remarkable number of homologies with human tissue), Gardasil (the HPV vaccine) was the greatest offender here as it had to use a very strong adjuvant and had homologies to human tissue.
If a vaccine causes negative reactions, does the risk increase if multiple vaccines are given concurrently?
Everything I have seen has shown that the more vaccines that are given (especially if they are received at the same time), the more likely people are to develop a severe reaction to the vaccine. This, for example, is why Sudden Infant Death Syndrome has been correlated to receiving multiple vaccines simultaneously, why many parents have observed their child developing autism after multiple vaccinations, and why some doctors advocate for not following the CDC schedule and spacing out the required vaccinations.
Similarly, if the same vaccine is provided multiple times (especially if it has tissue homology) each successive time it is given, it is more likely to create an autoimmune condition. Although I have seen this with other vaccines, this effect has been by far the most dramatic with the COVID-19 vaccines because their risk of a severe adverse event increases significantly with each successive vaccination.
Although increased autoimmune priming likely plays a role, the best model I have to explain the cumulative toxicity with vaccines is largely due to them successively impairing the zeta potential of the body, which creates catastrophic consequences once a critical threshold is passed. Analogously, I often see the worst responses to vaccines in individuals who already have an impaired zeta potential and cannot tolerate the additional reduction created by one more vaccine.
Unfortunately, since vaccines are considered “safe and effective” their potential harms are never considered. This is why individuals who try to propose very simple measures that could greatly mitigate the harm of the vaccination schedule (like spacing out vaccines) are relentlessly attacked under the justification that “they are not following CDC guidelines” and thus creating vaccine hesitancy.
At this point, we have never had a study performed on the cumulative effects of children receiving the entire vaccine schedule. Anyone who tries to do so is attacked for unethically experimenting on children, since the placebo group (who are not vaccinated) are placed at a “great and unjustified” risk because they are being denied life-saving vaccines (for diseases they will never get).
Since these studies have thus far never been completed, a variety of less controlled ones (e.g., comparing vaccinated and unvaccinated children in the same medical practice) are published. While these studies show a massive number of complications arise from vaccination, they are typically dismissed as not being valid since they weren’t a controlled study, and in many cases, the authors are attacked (e.g., consider what happened to Paul Thomas). Similarly, I and many colleagues can often immediately recognize children who were never vaccinated (as they are healthier in the body, mind and spirit), yet the changes vaccination create have become so normalized in our society, most doctors now lack the ability to recognize the currently accepted baseline is not normal.
If the vaccines cause negative reactions, who is the most susceptible to them?
There is a huge variation in responses to vaccines. Typically, individuals who have had a bad reaction to a vaccine are more likely to have bad reactions in the future, and there are a variety of other signs that predict the likelihood of a bad reaction to vaccines (e.g., previous adverse reactions, pre-existing autoimmune conditions, poor physiologic zeta potential, genetic metabolic defects, having previously had the infection the vaccine is for).
Unfortunately, since vaccines are considered 100% safe, virtually nothing qualifies as an exemption to them (which California has used as a justification to revoke the licenses of anyone who writes exemptions, hence leading to it now being almost impossible to get vaccine exemptions there). To highlight the absurdity of it, I had a friend who had a documented anaphylactic reaction to the Moderna vaccine they had to go to ER for, and was simply told that they needed to get a different COVID vaccine. I have also heard of a case where someone hospitalized in a California ICU for a vaccine reactions and could not find a doctor in the state who was willing to write a medical exemption for their employer.
The Public Health Perspective
One of the largest issues with public health is that it does not see people as individuals, and instead uses theoretical constructs (that are often wrong) and applies them to the entire population. I believe that this is done because it is the most practical way for a centralized bureaucracy to affect the health of a large swath of people with whom it has no direct contact with.
This approach is a huge problem because many individuals behave differently from others (e.g., some derive no benefit from the intervention and some react poorly to the interventions). Unfortunately, for the centralized public health approach to work, the public’s diversity must be ignored, and dissent must be forcefully suppressed when members of the public complain.
Many issues in life I believe ultimately come down to people being lazy and taking the easy way out when addressing a complex problem. For example, in the recent series on SSRI antidepressants (this article and this article), one way the entire debacle could be summarized is that patients with mental health issues require a therapeutic relationship with a counselor who can help them navigate their issues, but this is far too time consuming for most doctors in practice.
Psychiatric medications offer an easy way out; you can just give the drug for the symptom, feel like you solved it, and not have to deal with the patient. Unfortunately, this often doesn’t work, and the medications make the patients worse. At this point, the choice to do one’s job properly or default to a lazy approach again comes up. The doctor can actively monitor the patient for adverse reactions to their drug and intervene before those effects are catastrophic, or gaslight the patient, tell the patient the drug works and just give them more of it or another drug. Most of the catastrophic events I’ve heard about from SSRI-injured patients happened because the doctors took the lazy approach to handle their issues.
Similarly with public health, if a contagious disease is present that the system believes needs to be addressed, there are two options:
• Adopt comprehensive public health measures that contain and mitigate the spread of the disease and encourage practices that increase the natural immunity of the population.
• Add a vaccine for it to the vaccine schedule and mandate it so everyone takes it.
Since the second approach takes much less work, it’s a foregone conclusion that it will happen. Similarly, since the approach will inevitably fail to prevent many people from catching the disease, excuses will be made for why this happens that ultimately boils down to “not enough vaccines were given.”
Likewise, it’s inevitable that injuries will occur from these campaigns (which often outweigh any benefit achieved by the vaccines). When this happens, those injuries are written off by the centralized public health administrators as “necessary collateral damage” for the greater good that the vaccine creates and system-wide policies will be adopted to conceal those injuries and gaslight the injured.
Typically, once it becomes clear that the vaccine is not completely “safe and effective” the justification provided to the public is that the vaccines create “herd immunity” to the disease, and that this benefit outweighs the negative consequences of the vaccine. Unfortunately, in most cases (for many of the reasons listed above) the vaccines do not create herd immunity and instead become a product the population needs to take indefinitely while the disease continues to persist.
Note: for those interested in this subject, I discussed how vaccines consistently fail to prevent disease transmission here, and how we watched this unfold with the COVID-19 vaccines here.
Which Vaccines Should Be Avoided?
For each vaccine, as we consider the risk of its disease, the efficacy of the vaccine, the effects of developing vaccine immunity within a population, the issues with vaccinating while infected, and vaccine side effects, it should become clear that this is an immensely complex question to answer. There are so many potential risks and benefits of different magnitudes that combining them into a weighted average borders on the impossible.
This helps to illustrate some of the major issues that arise when you provide an intervention with known harms as a preventative for a potential risk that may or may not happen (note: the same can also be said for statins). My own belief is that if a therapy has known harm, the benefit for it needs to be concrete (e.g., all antibiotics are to some extent toxic, but most would agree that toxicity is outweighed if someone has a dangerous infection the antibiotic will treat). In the case of vaccination, there are a few vaccines that can be given therapeutically (BcG, rabies, and ones made from the patient’s own serum) so that a clear discussion can be made about the relative risks and benefits of each, but that is not the case for virtually every other vaccine on the market.
Typically speaking, to analyze complex questions like this, we depend on large clinical trials. The problem with such trials is that since they are industry-funded, they always omit most of the adverse events that arise (e.g., they reclassify a severe event as something nebulous, they use a toxic placebo to mask the increase in adverse events seen amongst the vaccinated, or they only monitor subjects for a brief period of time, which is not long enough for most of the vaccine side effects to appear). Generally speaking, the only way to get around this issue is to assess the total number of people who die in each group (as there is no way to reclassify death), and when this metric is looked at in the trials for the worst vaccines (e.g., Gardasil or Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine) the total death rate is shown to be increased by vaccination.
The other option is to look at population statistics. Sadly, while these consistently show vaccines cause significant harm, public health officials tend to ignore this data.
When I approach this question I use the following algorithm, where each item takes precedence over the ones after it.
1. Does the vaccine have an unusually high degree of toxicity?
2. Does the vaccine potentially provide an important benefit?
3. Does the vaccine have other reasons to make me concerned about its potential side effects?
4. Does the vaccine actually work?
5. Does the vaccine still work?
I will now briefly discuss some of the vaccines on the current CDC schedule that I feel are the worst offenders.
First, let’s consider the HPV vaccine and the benefits it created by “preventing cervical cancer.”
While I have seen datasets (when stratified by age) showing Gardasil (and other HPV vaccines) actually increased the cervical cancer death rate in those vaccinated, I will give it the benefit of the doubt here. As the graph shows, cervical cancer rates were already approaching 0 before Gardasil, so it is difficult to say if any of the lives saved were due to it (at this point I believe the cancer prevention attributed to Gardasil is false).
Note: many other diseases whose decline was attributed to vaccination also actually had most of their decline occur prior to a vaccine being available.
However, assuming all lives were saved by Gardisil, in England, each year it has saved 6 lives per 100,000 (0.0006%) people, and in the United States, 2 lives per 100,000 (0.0002%) people. Conversely in the clinical trials, 133 per 100,000 (0.13%) participants died (in comparison, the average death rate at the time for those the same age as the trial participants was 43.7 per 100,000). This means, in the best case scenario for the vaccine, for 100,000 people you traded killing 89.3 of vaccine recipients in return for saving 2.
Even though this is terrible, the greater issue is that in the original HPV clinical trial, between 2.3% to 49% of the individuals who received Gardasil developed a new autoimmune condition. We do not know exactly where in that range the total number of new autoimmune disorders was, as Merck classified many autoimmune disorders simply as “new medical conditions” (industry trials always reclassify something they don’t want to show up in the final trial with vague labels like this), but other investigations have concluded the 2.3% figure significantly underestimated the rate of new autoimmune conditions.
So, in return for saving 2 lives per 100,000 people while killing 89.3, you are also giving 2300 (and likely many more) a new life-altering autoimmune condition. All in all, I would not say this represents the best risk-to-benefit ratio. Unfortunately, because Gardasil is so profitable, nothing has been done about this despite numerous red flags being set off and many petitions being made to the FDA to address it.
Diphtheria, Pertussis and Tetanus (DPT)
I am not a fan of the DPT vaccine for the following reasons:
• It is the vaccine most clearly linked to infant deaths (I summarized the extensive degree of evidence substantiating the link that has accumulated over the last century here).
• The vaccine frequently causes permanent brain damage (especially the older version of it). In addition to hearing this from many parents, this happened to two members of my extended family who received the slightly older and more toxic version of it.
• I believe it is one of the primary causes of childhood ear infections (one of the most common complaints parents see their pediatricians for). Many doctors have observed this link, and the best example I heard of came from a doctor and medical missionary who decided to vaccinate an ashram (Indian temple) he was staying in. Before the vaccines, ear infections were non-existent, immediately afterward a large number of children came down with them.
Conversely, I believe the benefit is minimal because:
• The vaccine does not prevent the colonization of any of these bacteria. This is why pertussis outbreaks occur in fully vaccinated populations.
• Diphtheria is now non-existent in the United States, so there is no reason to vaccinate against it (additionally it can be treated with modern antibiotics).
• Tetanus is now very rare (there are approximately 30 cases a year) and it’s actually difficult to say how much the vaccine antibodies protect a person from tetanus (studies have shown that the vaccine produced antitoxin does not prevent tetanus).
Note: it is impossible to get a vaccine that is only for tetanus. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. For example, I’ve had multiple family members who went to the ER for a laceration, were told they needed to get a tetanus vaccine, agreed to on the condition it only had tetanus, but not diphtheria or pertussis, and when I reviewed their medical records, they had received the DPT vaccine.
Hepatitis B
As stated above, I do not believe childhood hepatitis B vaccines can be justified. Additionally, the vaccine does create complications and has been repeatedly associated with neuromuscular autoimmune conditions. I believe that this is most likely due to the fact that the antigen used shares a homology with myelin (the coating of nerves), but it may be for other reasons as well.
In adults who are at risk of a hepatitis B infection (e.g., healthcare workers who can accidentally get poked with infected needles), there is a stronger justification for this practice. I do not know how reliable my approach to this problem has been, but each time I have been exposed to potentially infected fluids (including from a hepatitis patient), I avoided the medications and vaccinations offered to me and instead immediately got an ozone or ultraviolet blood irradiation treatment. I am not sure if that was necessary, but I have never developed one of those infections.
In the most memorable instance, my team worked with a patient who exposed many of us to his fluids, and after a preliminary HIV test came back positive, everyone was given antiretroviral medications. I declined them (which everyone made fun of me for) since I knew they were dangerous and I thought it was extremely unlikely he had infected any of us. Later, a few of the healthcare workers told me they had experienced significant complications from the antiretrovirals, which they thought might have been the early stages of HIV, and later still we were told that the test the patient had gave a false positive and he did not, in fact, have HIV.
Measles, Mumps, Rubella (MMR)
As discussed above, it is a bit of a debate if the MMR vaccine decreases measles rates, since while regular vaccination does reduce measles rates, permanent immunity to it disappears within the population, and outbreaks will still occur within the vaccinated population. Sadder still, deaths from measles had almost completely disappeared at the time the vaccine for it was introduced (so there was essentially no justification for introducing it), and in effect by creating the vaccine we turned a non-existent problem into a permanent one by doing so. From my perspective, the greatest problem with the MMR vaccine is its frequent association with autism, something I believe is much worse than developing measles and something you are at a much higher risk for than the infection itself.
Polio
Two types of polio vaccines exist. The inactivated polio vaccine (currently used in the USA) and the live attenuated one (frequently used in poorer nations). The inactivated one does not prevent you from catching polio, but does to some extent (I don’t know how to calculate the exact figure) prevent a polio infection from causing polio-like paralysis. Since it does not prevent infection, it has no effect on transmission. The live polio vaccine does prevent you from becoming infected with polio, but has the unfortunate side effect of sometimes causing polio in the recipient and spreading the weakened polio virus into the environment.
At this point, the polio virus is mostly extinct, and from 2017 onwards, more cases of polio have resulted from the vaccine than polio itself (note: one of my friend’s relatives developed polio from the vaccine). One of the most tragic examples occurred in India where Bill Gates diverted their health budget to aggressively vaccinating against polio, which resulted in 491,000 children developing a “polio-like” illness.
Given that there is no reason to vaccinate against polio, there is no benefit to outweigh the vaccine’s risks. The risk from this vaccine is harder to quantify as I have met many people who have had bad reactions to it, but they did not have a consistent pattern to the injuries (which I often see with other vaccines).
Influenza
There is presently no evidence that the (often mandated) influenza vaccine prevents an individual from getting the flu (which, in most cases, is a relatively benign infection) or transmitting it to others. Additionally, there is evidence that the vaccine increases your likelihood of developing a severe case of influenza and developing influenza in the subsequent year. Furthermore, many individuals have developed injuries from the influenza vaccine.
Meningococcal
Initially, due to the severity of a Neisseria meningitidis infection, I initially thought the meningococcal vaccine would probably be a vaccine you could make a strong case for. Unfortunately, there are multiple dangerous strains of this bacteria, and one of those strains (strain B) is very difficult to make a vaccine for, since it has homology with tissue of the human body.
Not surprisingly, this has created a selective pressure on the bacteria and now the majority of infections are caused by strain B, which until recently, the scheduled vaccine did not cover (and at this point I am unsure how effective this newer vaccine is). Furthermore, as discussed above, many people carry this bacteria and are asymptomatic—the infection is very rare and the primary group at risk are those with pre-existing susceptibilities, not the general population.
Conversely, the vaccine has a variety of potential autoimmune complications. By far the most common one I encounter is that it causes Crohn’s disease (typically a few months after vaccination), and I think this side effect alone outweighs any potential benefits from the vaccine.
For those wishing to learn more about this subject, I would suggest reading this article on why vaccines consistently fail to create herd immunity, Miller’s Review of Critical Vaccine Studies (especially in regard to the HiB and Pneumococcal vaccines), and the textbook Vaccines and Autoimmunity. Peter Gøtzsche (one of my heroes) has also written a good review of the evidence surrounding the vaccines, Vaccines: Truth, Lies, and Controversy, which highlights many issues with them but also has the typical pro-vaccine bias and contains certain conclusions I do not agree with (but makes it an excellent book for opening the eyes of more conventional physicians). Finally, Turtles All The Way Down also does a deeper dive on many of these vaccines.
Pneumococcal and Haemophilus influenzae type B (HiB)
These two are probably the most difficult routine vaccines to have a clear-cut position on. This is because:
• These two infections, especially HiB are the vaccine-preventable illnesses that are the most likely to cause severe complications in children. For example, when the HiB vaccine came out, pediatricians around the country noticed a significant decline in the rates of infants with meningitis, which is a big deal. Similarly, in modern-day pediatrics, many of the most common concerning infections doctors encounter are pneumococcal.
• Although these vaccines have adverse effects, they are not as dangerous as those of many other vaccines.
• Because these vaccines work but target an easily mutable part of the bacteria, their adoption triggers their target bacteria to mutate, become resistant to the vaccines, and, in some cases, affect different populations. For example, the pneumococcal vaccine is continually being updated and re-released, with additional strains being covered in each successive version (and I’ve seen multiple vaccinated children with potentially life-threatening pneumococcal infections who had been vaccinated). In the case of the HiB vaccine, it selected for the A strain (HiA), which in some areas was more deadly than HiB, and also selected for strains that affected adults (typically HiB only affects children), leading to severe HiB infections becoming a disease of adults and the elderly.
Note: studies supporting the contentions in this section can be found within this excellent book.
The Risks and Benefits of the COVID Vaccines
Although many tragic things have happened with the COVID-19 vaccines, the circumstances around them have also made it possible to shed light on the actual risks and benefits of a vaccine, a topic that is typically far too obfuscated for anyone to make sense of. The clarity this time around is primarily because:
• The novel vaccines were rapidly rolled out onto the entire population at the start of 2021. This makes it possible to compare numerous existing yearly trends to before and after the deployment of the COVID vaccines.
• A lot of people strongly objected to how the vaccines were pushed onto the population, and did a lot of work to prove that the risks from these vaccines greatly outweighed their benefits in almost every aspect that was examined.
For example, many people are aware of this dataset:
Recently two things became available, which I believe help to clearly illustrate the poor risk-to-benefit ratio of the COVID-19 vaccines.
Rasmussen Reports
The first was a recent poll from Rasmussen Reports. Before discussing it, I would like to share the results from two of their prior polls on this issue:
Both of these reports serve to highlight that the damage from the COVID vaccines is on a scale that the general public is fully aware of, despite the massive amounts of propaganda telling them otherwise. Let’s now look at Rasmussen’s recent results:
There are a few important takeaways from these polls:
• Although Democrats tend to believe that the COVID virus is dangerous and that vaccines are safe relative to Republicans, they have now seen so much evidence to the contrary that the gap between them is much smaller. This is especially true for the vaccine deaths, which will likely have immense political repercussions for the party that forced them on America.[
• In the public’s perception, the same number of people have died from COVID-19 as from the vaccines. Given that many of the COVID-19 deaths occurred before the vaccines, many of those deaths were not actually due to COVID-19, and that the vaccines do not offer complete protection against COVID-19, this is a strong argument that the benefits of the vaccines do not outweigh their risks, especially when you factor in their much more common complications which disable but do not kill the recipient.
• Many respondents likely did not understand what “household” meant (and likely instead interpreted it to just mean someone they knew). This is because nowhere near 11% of US households have had a COVID-19 or vaccine death in them.
Note: Many people disparage Rasmussen and claim they have a right-wing bias. I, however, consider them to be one of the most accurate political polling firms in the country.
Edward Dowd has taken an innovative approach to red-pilling the public—showing the financial costs of the vaccine program for the country and making people feel like chumps for investing in fields that are being adversely affected by those costs. Since everyone can relate to money, this makes the concept much easier for individuals to grasp, and more importantly, since money is the most important thing to the upper class, they are likely to be motivated to act against the vaccination program in order to protect their assets.
Dowd has assembled a team of experienced analysts that has done a lot of work to calculate the costs of the vaccine program. Recently they released a report which speaks for itself:
When I reviewed Dowd’s report, I realized that there were a lot of issues that I know have human and economic costs that it was not counting, presumably since they are impossible to calculate. This means he had to underestimate the harms that have been caused by the vaccine program.
Because things like this are so difficult to estimate, you have to err on the conservative side and avoid claiming things you cannot quantify or are unsure of. Similarly, I have the same experience each time I write an article here, and do not mention a lot of things I am passionate about after I realize I can’t actually back them up.
These recent publications (and the datasets that Dowd’s estimate is based upon) show clearly and unambiguously that the risks of the COVID vaccines greatly outweigh any possible benefit they might have. Given that much of the country is beginning to see this now, it will be very interesting to see how this issue unfolds in the coming years as our institutions struggle to rebuild the trust they spent decades creating in America. My hope is that this process will allow us to also critically examine the entire vaccine program, which has by and large enjoyed complete immunity to scrutiny, due to both the difficulty in comprehensively assessing it and our institutions’s adamant protection of them.
One of the themes of my articles here has been to discuss the progressively evolving pleas for COVID amnesty, which in the space of slightly under a year have gone from “the experts were wrong, but you should still trust them rather than your gut” to “America’s COVID-19 response was based on lies.” Recently, the author of one plea (I did not completely agree with) posted something I felt made an excellent conclusion to this article.
At this point, I believe that all vaccines can cause harm frequently enough that the harm must always be considered when evaluating the vaccine. For this reason, I always feel very torn on what to do when people ask me to provide them with a way to protect themselves from the harms of a vaccine they have to get (note: the two best approaches I know of are taking a lot of vitamin C beforehand, and doing whatever you can to strengthen your zeta potential).
This is because regardless of what you do, you will still always have patients who are harmed by taking the vaccine, and I hate being complicit in what happens. To this point, I have had times where I repeatedly warned a patient against vaccinating where I felt they were at risk of an adverse reaction, and they had one anyway, and then they suffered a permanent complication and I was left having to try to help them get better.
I also believe that natural immunity is always superior to vaccine immunity. For this reason, I believe that the correct approach to handling almost all diseases you can vaccinate against is to accept the inherent risk of getting it as an unvaccinated individual and be familiar with what treatment protocol you need to implement if you got the infection so that you can clear the infection and develop natural immunity. Just imagine how different the world would be now if we had followed that approach instead of suppressing every single treatment for COVID-19 and mandating a deadly and ineffective vaccination on the population.
Utah Woman Is First to Sue Merck Alleging Gardasil HPV Vaccine Caused Cervical Cancer
The Defender | April 26, 2023
A lawsuit filed Tuesday in federal court alleges Merck’s Gardasil human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine caused a young Utah woman to develop cervical cancer and other injuries.
The lawsuit, filed on behalf of Caroline Cantera, 25, by Wisner Baum (formerly Baum Hedlund Aristei & Goldman), is the first lawsuit to allege Gardasil can cause cervical cancer — the very cancer Merck asserts Gardasil prevents.
Cantera alleges New Jersey-based Merck & Co., Inc., and subsidiary Merck Sharp & Dohme oversold Gardasil as a “cervical cancer vaccine” and downplayed known health risks to enhance sales.
Cantera’s attorneys filed the complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina as part of the Gardasil multidistrict litigation (MDL). Dozens of federal Gardasil injury cases filed throughout the country have been consolidated in North Carolina.
According to the complaint, Merck never studied whether Gardasil prevents cervical cancer. Instead, the drugmaker tested Gardasil to determine if it could prevent the development of certain lesions, some of which are considered related to cancer — even though a majority of such lesions, even the most serious, regress on their own.
Public health officials have long recommended the Pap test as the most effective frontline public health response to prevent cervical cancer. Long before Gardasil was introduced to the market in 2006, cervical cancer rates had been plummeting by up to 80% with the implementation of routine Pap testing.
For those who are diagnosed with precancerous lesions or worse, cervical cancer is largely treatable if caught early.
Nonetheless, Merck sought “Fast Track” U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval of Gardasil. Once approved, Merck engaged in a relentless marketing campaign falsely proclaiming that Gardasil was a “cervical cancer vaccine” and that any young girl vaccinated with Gardasil would become “one less” woman with cervical cancer, the lawsuit claims.
Cantera alleges Gardasil can actually increase the risk of cervical cancer. The Gardasil vaccine label specifically states, “Gardasil has not been evaluated for potential to cause carcinogenicity or genotoxicity.”
Studies from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suggest the suppression of the HPV strains targeted by Gardasil (there are more than 200 HPV strains and Gardasil targets between four and nine strains) may actually open an ecological niche for replacement by more virulent strains, thus increasing the risk of cervical cancer.
Merck’s own studies show that for those previously exposed to HPV (a huge percentage of the population) when vaccinated, there is an up to 44.6% increased risk of developing advanced abnormal pre-cancer cells or worse.
The complaint also cites rapidly climbing cervical cancer rates among young women in countries where Gardasil has seen a high uptake. Studies also show young women who received the Gardasil vaccine are foregoing routine Pap screening due to a false sense of security that the HPV vaccine will protect them from cervical cancer.
Bijan Esfandiari, co-lead counsel for plaintiffs in the Gardasil MDL, said:
“Merck has heavily promoted Gardasil as a cancer prevention vaccine even though the studies weren’t designed to answer that question, and its marketing has effectively resulted in young women foregoing Pap screening, the most reliable and proven method of preventing cervical cancer.
“Merck also hasn’t studied whether Gardasil can cause cancer, but we now have evidence it can increase the risk of cancer. Given Merck makes over $6 billion a year on Gardasil, it has little incentive to stop the deception.
“Through our litigation, we hope to expose the truth and hold Merck accountable for the harm it has done to Caroline and others.”
Cantera ‘had to face the painful fact that I will never be able to have children of my own’
Cantera was 19 years old when she received her first of three Gardasil shots. She said she agreed to receive Gardasil after being convinced by Merck’s prolific marketing that the vaccine is very safe and prevents cervical cancer.
Before receiving the HPV vaccine, Cantera was healthy and never had to go to the doctor for anything other than regular checkups and physical exams for sports. She received routine Pap tests, all of which were negative prior to Gardasil.
In high school, she played tennis, regularly went backpacking and loved spending time outdoors. She lived a happy, carefree life filled with friends and activities.
After her Gardasil injections, Cantera experienced unexpected fatigue, intense stomach aches and overall weakness throughout her body. The fatigue and occasional abdominal pain continued until she noticed that her period had lasted over four weeks.
After what she thought was an initial visit to a gynecologist, her life suddenly took a drastic and unexpected turn.
Cantera was diagnosed with stage four cervical cancer. She received multiple biopsies, CT scans and MRIs, had six rounds of chemotherapy, 30 radiation treatments, three brachytherapy treatments and saw countless doctors.
She was unable to go back to university for her final semester and struggled to finish the classwork necessary to receive her undergraduate degree.
Because most of her treatment was directed at her cervix, her ovaries were also affected, putting her into menopause in her 20s. She will never be able to have children of her own because her eggs are no longer viable due to the cancer treatment.
Cantera said:
“Every day since my diagnosis has been a battle. My body is still recovering from the toll of such intense treatments to fight cancer, and I live in constant fear that my cancer could come back at any time.
“On top of all that, I also had to face the painful fact that I will never be able to have children of my own. If Merck knew this vaccine can cause so much harm, why didn’t they warn people?”
In September 2022, Wisner Baum and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., chairman on leave from Children’s Health Defense, filed their first wrongful death suit against Merck, alleging the drugmaker’s Gardasil HPV vaccine caused the death of 13-year-old Noah Tate Foley.
Wisner Baum and Kennedy have filed numerous lawsuits against Merck alleging the company knowingly conceals the adverse events associated with its Gardasil vaccine. These include:
- Victoria Trevisan (California)
- Merrick Brunker (California)
- Emma Sullivan (New Jersey)
- Ashley Dalton (Michigan)
- Abigail Stratton (South Carolina)
- Savannah Flores (Nevada)
- Korrine Herlth (Connecticut)
- Kayla Carrillo (California)
- Michael Colbath (California)
- Sahara Walker (Wisconsin)
- Zachariah Otto (California)
- Julia Balasco (Rhode Island)
While each case is unique, all of the plaintiffs agree that if Merck had told the truth about the known dangers associated with Gardasil, they never would have consented to the HPV vaccine.
If you or your child suffered harm after receiving the Gardasil HPV vaccine, you may have a legal claim. Visit Wisner Baum for a free case evaluation or call 855-948-5098.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
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‘The Franco-British Plot to dismember Russia’
By Kit Klarenberg | Al Mayadeen | June 25, 2024
June marks a number of anniversaries, almost completely unknown in the West today, of significant events in the Allied invasion of the Soviet Union. Namely, when the entire wretched project began to spectacularly unravel. The loss of the Allied Powers’ Tsarist ally to the November 1917 revolution, and the embattled Bolsheviks subsequently granting Germany political and economic hegemony over Central and Eastern Europe via the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, led to wide-ranging imperial intervention in the Russian civil war, starting from May 1918.
The effort was led by Britain and France. Soldiers drawn from the pair’s respective empires, and Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Greece, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Poland, Romania, Serbia, and the US, were deployed in vast numbers, fighting alongside local “White” anti-Communist forces. Initially prosecuted largely in secret, by June 1919, things were going so badly for the invaders that London formally dispatched a 3,500-strong “North Russian Relief Force” to the Soviet Union. Their ostensible mission was to defend threatened British positions in the country.
Almost immediately though, the “defensive” unit was deployed on offensive missions, to seize key Soviet territory, repel the Red Army, and link up with White Russian forces. This thrust was comprehensively beaten back, however. From that point on, Allied fortunes rapidly worsened. White Russian soldiers violently mutinied against their “allies” and defected to the Bolsheviks, while invading foreign troops simply refused to fight due to horrendous battlefield conditions. All-out Western withdrawal commenced before the month was over.
In failing to crush the Russian revolution, Britain and France lost a historic opportunity to “strangle Bolshevism in its cradle,”, in Winston Churchill’s pestilential phrase. The pair had agreed to carve up the Soviet Union’s vast resources while neutralising any prospect of Moscow emerging as a major international anti-capitalist agitator. The failure of invading powers to learn lessons from the debacle, and Russia’s visceral memories of the mass invasion, in no small part account for where we are today. … continue
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