Topic: WorldNetDaily
Dr. Lee Hieb does not feel particularly tethered to facts, as her history of writing for WorldNetDaily demonstrates. Hieb -- who is a past president of fringe-right, conspiracy-obsessed Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, goes full anti-vaxxer in a Feb. 4 WND column, in which she likens vaccination to euthanasia and the Tuskegee experiments:
1. The voices shrieking to forcibly vaccinate people are the same voices shrieking to support a woman’s right to choose abortion under Roe v. Wade. If a woman’s body is sacrosanct, if she has the right to choose to deliver a child or not, if she has total authority over her body, how can she not have the right to accept or refuse a vaccination?
2. Medical ethics are clear: No one should be forced to undergo a medical treatment without informed consent and without their agreement to the treatment. We condemn the forced sterilization of the ’20s and ’30s, the Tuskegee medical experiments infecting black inmates and the Nazi medicine that included involuntary “Euthanasia,” experimentation and sterilization. How can we force vaccination without consent? Vaccination is a medical treatment with risks including death. It is totally antithetical to all ethics in medicine to mandate that risk to others.
3. Science is never “concluded.” Mr. Obama and other ideologues may think the truth is finalized (“The science is indisputable”), but the reality is our understanding of disease and treatment are constantly being updated. Just like Newton’s mechanical paradigm of the universe was supplanted by Einsteinian physics, and physicists today modify that view, medical “truth” is not the truth for long. In an attempt to quantify change in medicine, years ago a cardiology journal discussed “The Half-life of Truth.” cardiologists looked back in their journal at 20-year-old articles to see how much of what was believed then was still believed to be true. The answer? 50 percent. So in cardiology, at least – and in all of medicine to greater or lesser degree – only half of what we believe now will still be true in 20 or so years. The last word on vaccination is not in. It hasn’t even begun to be written.
4. If you believe absolutely in the benefit and protective value of vaccination, why does it matter what others do? Or don’t do? If you believe you need vaccination to be healthy and protected, then by all means vaccinate your child and yourself. Why should you even be concerned what your neighbor chooses to do for his child – if vaccination works? The idea of herd immunity is still based on the idea that in individual cases vaccines actually are protective.
Yes, Hieb is such an anti-vaxxer she doesn't believe in the concept of herd immunity and that only "dictators and totalitarians" would promote its benefits:
So the next question is: Does vaccination work? Does it really protect you against disease? The answer is variable. Smallpox vaccine seems to be nearly universally protective against the very fatal disease of smallpox, and use of vaccine led to the eradication of the disease in the wild. But the dirty little secret in recent outbreaks of mumps, measles and pertussis is – they are occurring in vaccinated people in highly vaccinated populations!
[...]
The argument that I must vaccinate my children for the good of the community is not only scientifically questionable, it is an unethical precept. It is the argument all dictators and totalitarians have used. “Comrade, you must work tirelessly for the good of the collective. You must give up your money and property for the good of the collective, and now … you must allow us to inject your children with what we deem is good for the collective.” If American’s don’t stand up against this, then we are lost. Because we have lost ownership of ourselves. Our bodies are no longer solely ours – we and our children are able to be commandeered for the “greater good.”
Hieb is apparently unaware that for herd immunity to work, a sufficient number of a population must be immunized, and that threshold is higher for highly communicable diseases.
Hieb goes on to quote "Dr. Harold Buttram, M.D., FAACP" to further fearmonger about vaccines. Buttram has promoted the highly dubious concept (at AAPS, natch) that symptoms of shaken baby syndrome are actually caused by vaccines. As one blogger notes, "The myth that SBS is really “vaccine injury” is actually so detestable that even some of the most rabid antivaccine activists out there generally won’t touch it with the proverbial ten-foot cattle prod."
But Hieb thinks Buttram is credible enough to cite in her column. That says a lot about the credibilty of Hieb and her WND-published book fearmongering about Obamacare.
