There are many sources on the internet that come from an unflinching commitment to vaccines that I call “apologetic”; the holders of this position are “apologists”. How can you tell if an internet source is from an apologist?

(1) It calls vaccines “safe”.

(2) It denies the dangers of vaccines and only talks about the millions of lives that the apologists claim have been saved.

(3) It mischaracterizes those who have any questions about vaccines as liars or lunatics; and especially as “science deniers”.

(4) It will often insist that choice in vaccination should be taken away, in violation of multiple principles of bioethics (and principles of liberty and democracy for that matter).

(5) It supports the suppression and censorship of anti-vaccine sources.

(6) It denies any wrong doing by the pharmaceutical and vaccine companies who have profited billions from the proliferation of vaccines.

(7) It characterizes the unvaccinated as a major threat to society.

(8) It characterizes dangers of vaccines as conspiracy theories or myths.

There are good scientific and ethical reasons to question vaccines and whether they should be mandatory. And not all the questioners are anti-vaccines. There are different levels to this questioning.

But what we are finding is that if you do a Google search that these apologetic sources will appear first, and it may take some extra effort to find sources that ask the right questions. This is because the algorithms of Google seem to already be favoring a pro-Pharma position.

First published by Peter W. Dunn on Facebook, June 16, 2019