Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/12/06/anti-vaxxer-invited-by-senate-republicans-to-testify-before-homeland-security-committee-on-tuesday.html
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Whoa, a doctor who is executive director of…
a group that opposes government involvement in medicine and views federal vaccine mandates as a violation of human rights.
Isn’t government involved in medical licensing? If Dr. Orient is so opposed, maybe the state should just take that back, so there’s no conflict with her beliefs.
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wow. I mean no one who has a compromised immune system should be forced into getting a potentially dangerous vaccine. However for that reason it’s imperative that healthy people do get the vaccine to protect those people.
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while there are people with compromised immune systems, there’s a large set of woofolk who say the same thing. if somebody isn’t able to say why they have the condition – ex. “i am undergoing chemotherapy” – then they probably don’t.
i wouldn’t place bets on this person having one. it’s just an excuse for being anti-vax
the main candidates in the us aren’t based on a live virus, and as far as i know, nobody’s identified any serious side effects.
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Let’s see what the ol’ Google machine has to say about the good Doctor, shall we?
Here’s a fun one:
Documents released as a result of the tobacco litigation the 1990s and early 2000s show that Philip Morris officials worked with AAPS executive director Jane Orient to help the company’s “junk science” campaign that attacked indoor smoking bans.
My, this AAPS group of hers sounds interesting right? Let’s delve a little deeper:
In 2008, an article on AAPS’s website suggested that President Barack Obama was covertly hypnotizing people with his speeches, and that this might explain why Jews voted for him.
Yeah that seems about par for the course.
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This is fucking ridiculous MOD-Squad shit.
fake-balance is ruining america. Giving people who have no expertise or evidence a “fair hearing” is not “being fair”, it’s discounting the value of actual experts.
Having an open mind is great, but dumping shit into your head opening is not smart.
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I’m getting seriously concerned that not enough Americans will get the vaccine to actually give us (real) herd immunity. Things like this aren’t helping (either with my concerns, or the situation in general). To make matters worse, there are still so many unknowns, both with the virus and the vaccine - we don’t know how long getting the virus itself provides immunity (possibly as little as six months), which raises questions about how long the vaccine protects, there’s questions about whether people might be able to get - and shed - the virus even with the vaccine, etc. Then there’s also the possibility of the virus mutating, the longer it’s allowed to circulate in the population. All of which suggests that to be assured that we have herd immunity, the vaccine needs to be given to perhaps 80% of the population within a fairly limited timeframe.
All of which makes me fear that the Republicans are basically engineering, even if unintentionally, a situation where covid will permanently be with us, seasonally tearing through the population each year, killing off 2% (or more) of the infected, having to wear masks in public for the rest of our lives…
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Republicans made shittons of money due to COVID. The richest 400 billionaires in the world have gained over 1 trillion dollars since February.
I think the republicans love COVID. It makes them money and gives them a ready-made excuse to fuck off and not do their actual jobs.
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I will not be surprised to learn that a few prominent Dems have made bank as well.
The ruling class are not gonna rich themselves.
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Goddam plague rats
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Since this is a rather obvious argument, I’m sure there is a number of respectable scientists available who could represent this position in front of the committee in a more nuanced way. So why do they have to resort to a this quack?
But obviously Republicans also got wise in the meantime: the world-class hypnotism expert and stable genius Scott Adams discovered that a certain D. Turmp also used hypnotism to influence people. This time, it appears, it was not used on jews, but on gullible idiots. That is much more sinister, as it is really hard to prove.
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But I thought Scott Adams himself became a rabid Trump supp—ohhh I gotcha.
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There is only one valid reason I can think of to invite some fool like this, and that would be to openly debunk on record. Alas, as we all know, this will never be the case with Republicans. Critical Thinking is something only heretics do, and a sign that one is not a true believer worthy of Grace.
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“But how much of a threat is required to justify forcing people to accept government-imposed risks?”
This much. This virus, right here.
vaccine mandates [are] “a serious intrusion into individual liberty, autonomy and parental decisions.”
You don’t know what any of those things mean. What else ya got?
“It seems to me reckless to be pushing people to take risks when you don’t know what the risks are”
We do know what the risks are, the other side gave us these reports right here.
“People’s rights should be respected. Where is ‘my body, my choice’ when it comes to this?”
Again, you don’t know what any of that means.
OK, is that all? Great, let’s get on with the vaccinations.
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You know, if Americans take the COVID-19 vaccine in large numbers, then large numbers of American lives could be saved! But we all know how Putin… er… I mean the Republicans would feel about that.
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This. Live vaccines are a no-go for the immunosuppressed. But the currently proposed Covid vaccines are not live.
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Worth pinning this down, since it’s the same “I got your nose!”-grade sleight of hand that underpins all anti-vax horseshit:
Health authorities “don’t know” what the risks are in the trivial, dumb sense that if there is some bizarre unforeseen risk, it has not been foreseen. Perhaps the vaccine somehow causes spontaneous brain detonation after 13 months. Perhaps a sound effect in the next Star Wars movie will open a portal to the realm of the Elder Gods and destroy us all. We just don’t know.
However, if we’re talking about risks that have ever actually been detected in reality, health authorities do know what the risks are, because that is precisely the point of the exhaustive testing which anti-vaxxers also oppose.
This line of argument boils down to “if you don’t understand something, how do you know anyone else understands it?”. Which, OK, champ. Feel free to go live in the woods if you find that preferable to believing that the rest of human civilisation has anything to contribute to your no doubt really cool existence.
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Possible, but far more likely that her “condition” is the same as those people who have one of those anti-mask cards for “reasons”.
Rand Paul was a member until became an embarrassment.
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Yeah. Basically started as the medical wing(nut) of the John Birch Society.
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It’s fan service for the death cult.
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