Topic: WorldNetDaily
As if responding to our post pointing her fearmongering about disease-ridden immigrants, dubous right-wing doctor Jane Orient doubled down in her Dec. 10 WorldNetDaily column, in which she actually suggests that migrants are spreading disease deliberately:
Epidemics can happen naturally or through neglect — or they could be caused deliberately. Biological warfare is probably the very worst weapon of mass destruction.
One scenario is to embed a suicide agent incubating a deadly disease in a mass of migrants. There are doubtlessly innocent persons infected with deadly diseases to which Americans have no immunity among thousands of migrants overwhelming our border – from Central America and many other places.
Orient accused doctors and others who call out her fearmongering of being in "denial," then rants about the migrant caravan approaching the U.S. from Central America:
Is concern about the caravan just “fearmongering”?
We don’t hear that term applied to those who say we must treat a child missing some mandated vaccines as a “Typhoid Mary” and bar him from schools or doctor’s offices – even though nobody ever caught a disease from a child that wasn’t infected with it. Rather, that’s the word for those who warn about tropical diseases, even if they are much more common and deadly than indigenous measles – or for those concerned about tattooed MS-13 gang members, rapists, jihadists, human traffickers and other criminals intent on harming Americans. Such people also infect, molest, assault, or murder people in their own countries and in the caravan.
Our nation faces real threats that produce genuine body counts from violence and disease. Instead of addressing those threats, we are supposed to worry about carbon dioxide, invisible dust particles and imperceptible phobias and isms. And not just worry, but shut down industries and shut out dissenters from public discourse.
A wall is indeed proposed – to confine the half of America that votes the “wrong” way and wants to protect American lives, liberties and property.
What we need is an outbreak of common sense.
Or, you know, a little less fearmongering from people who don't assumse that all foreigners are "tattooed MS-13 gang members, rapists, jihadists, human traffickers and other criminals intent on harming Americans."
(Also, the entire point of vaccinating children is to build up enough herd immunity to contain or even stop spread of a disease. But Orient and the fringe-right organization she runs, the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, generally opposes mandatory vaccination efforts.)
Not to be outdone in the fearmongering-about-filthy-foreigners department, Ilana Mercer used her Dec. 12 WND column to complain that nobody appears to be interested in finding a"Patient Zero" in the current outbreak of acute flaccid myelitis. She added her own attack on the caravan: "In any event, along for the ride with the thousands of migrants poised to pour into the U.S. from Central America is a healthy array of microbes: measles, Chagas disease, hepatitis and much more. Diversity, baby."
Mercer then wrote:
First in the liberty community to decry the health hazards from the unfettered flow of migrants across the 1,940-mile-long border with Mexico was dazzling Randian scholar and patriot, Madeleine Pelner Cosman, Ph.D., Esq.Coupled with her health-care policy expertise, Dr. Cosman was an avid outdoorsman and marksman who regularly volunteered to patrol the border with the San Diego County Sheriff’s agents.
In a 2005, Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons paper, “Illegal Aliens and American Medicine,” Cosman addressed the effects on the U.S. health system of the bleeding Southwestern border.
Yes, Mercer is referencing the very same paper -- published, as it so happens, under the journal editorship of one Jane Orient -- that has been discredited for falsely asserting that cases of leprosy in the U.S. have exploded because of immigration. As far as we know, Orient and the JAPS have yet to issue a correction despite the claim being debunked years ago, and the PDF of the paper to which Mercer links is similarly uncorrected.
Compounding fearmongering with bad research does not help the whole earmongering-about-filthy-foreigners thing.
