December 4, 2018
In less than fifteen minutes, you will address the Immunization Conference in Ottawa. A conference and a group that is mired in pride, prejudice and greed. Pride because many of them are genuinely convinced that they save lives and prevent sickness by providing ever more vaccines to children, and increasingly so to adults.
Prejudice because they think that vaccines are safe, safe enough, and effective. All of those vaccines, and ever more. Prejudice because they think they know best, they know better than the “lay person”. Prejudice because they think that all those people, all those parents, especially mothers out there, who warn that vaccines are not as safe as they are portrayed, and can seriously harm and kill adults and children alike, can be either dismissed or seen as irrelevant. People, parents are depicted as ignorant, or portrayed –even by you – as dangerous to society. Prejudice because in the field of vaccines a deeply entrenched misogynist behavior is roaming, because the group that warn, consist in a large part of mothers.
While the harm on a massive scale is continuing, you open a conference co-sponsored by the Big Vaccine Four: GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi-Pasteur, Merck and Pfizer together holding around 90 % of the global market. This is where greed comes in. Companies who will do everything to obscure the damaging effect of vaccines. It is tobacco science all over again.
Do you not see how deeply conflicted this conference is? How deeply conflicted the research about vaccines is? How can public tax money go to research about how to deal with vaccine hesitancy, but none of it goes to really researching the harm of vaccines? Are you not willing to see what is right in front of your eyes? Is your staff not informing you well? Are the funds from pharma that go to your party too attractive to even consider listening to Canadian families, who will tell you of the harm and pain that has been inflicted on their children, their families?
Your public health administration has become such a captive agency, that it is incapable of serving the real public good. It does not serve public health, but instead an industry that shows all the tendencies of criminal behavior. This industry is happily feeding the dogmatic belief in vaccines. A belief, a religion almost, that has very little to do with science anymore. This industry feeds the professional blindness of practitioners in the business of infectious diseases. And it willingly feeds their egos.
I invite you to seriously reflect on your role today, and in the near future as Minister of Health of ALL Canadians. Canadian families pay taxes and expect from you that you are an elected (public) representative to be trusted when it comes to their health, not to be caught by an industry transcending all borders and too big and powerful for you to comprehend its impact.
Thank you for your attention
Margreet van den Berg
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Sent to: Ginette.PetitpasTaylor@parl.gc.ca