Why Have Vaccines Become a Religion?
As more and more people are awakening to the dangers of vaccines, they are gradually discovering a problem vaccine safety advocates have had to deal with for decades—talking to vaccine zealots is like speaking to a brick wall and regardless of the evidence you put forward, you can’t reach them (sometimes seeming as though you are speaking to a religious fanatic who is unwilling to even consider the “blasphemy you are spewing forth”).
For example, in 2009 after nephrologist Dr. Suzanne Humphries noticed patients (particularly hospitalized ones) kept on developing kidney failure after flu shots, she experienced significant pushback from trying to delay vaccinating until discharge:
In the past when I was consulted on kidney failure cases and said, “Oh that was the statin/antibiotic/diuretic that did that!” instantly the drug would be stopped—no questions asked. Now, however, a new standard was applied to vaccines. It didn’t matter that the internist’s notes in the charts said, “No obvious etiology of kidney failure found after thorough evaluation.”
The next time the medical chief of staff and I met in the corridor, an oncologist was present. At one point, I asked the chief, “Why doesn’t anyone else see the problem here? Why is it just me? How can you think all this is okay? Why is it now considered normal to vaccinate very sick people on their first hospital day?” The oncologist gave an answer that surprised me. She said, “Medical religion!” and turned and walked away.
Several months went by, and the medical executive committee met to discuss my concerns, without allowing me to be present at the meeting. I was informed in writing that the nursing staff were becoming confused by me discontinuing orders to vaccinate and that I should adhere to hospital policy. I thought this odd, given that nurses are not accustomed to giving the same treatment to every patient, and are fully capable of reading individualized orders.
As time went on, it was interesting seeing the divide in the hospital staff. Nurses would bail me up in quiet corners and tell me stories that completely backed up what I was seeing. They would guardedly support me, when their superiors were out of eye- or ear-shot.
I wrote all the cases out and put together a comprehensive brief for the hospital administration, but to no avail. Not even science could get through as the snake-oil salesmen continued to deny my findings.
I kept presenting the administration with facts they could not respond to, in the hope that they would get a blinding revelation of the obvious. Finally, they recruited the Northeast Healthcare Quality Foundation, the “quality improvement organization” for Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, to get me off their backs. Dr. Lawrence D. Ramunno sent a letter invoking the fallacy of authority, which adamantly informed me that hospital vaccination against influenza virus would become a global measure for all admissions in 2010 [due to Obamacare], and that my evidence of harm was not significant because 10 professional organizations endorse vaccination.
This condescending, vapid letter…illustrated callous disregard of clinicians at the highest level, and the willful blindness prepared to ignore clearly documented cases, and their own medical literature. Not satisfied with demanding that I practice automaton obedience to dictates from on high, they initiated a shadow observation, where everything I did and wrote in the hospital, from then on, was observed and scrutinized.
Note: prior to Obamacare effectively mandating flu shots for healthcare workers, many doctors I knew did not vaccinate as they felt there were negligible benefits to the shot and real potential risks and thought the new mandate didn’t make sense. I do not believe my sample was biased as other sources corroborated it (e.g., this 2009 CNN segment discussed New York healthcare workers protesting a state law requiring annual flu shots for them)—making it remarkable how quickly a simple mandate was able to shift critical thinking on this topic to an irrational embrace of vaccination (especially given how people I’ve met who got Guillain-Barré syndrome from a vaccine).
Worse still, decades of propaganda have enshrined a number of ridiculous standards and rationalizations to defend vaccines you are always expected to argue against if you so much as question them.
Note: propaganda is a tool that is used to convince the population that something which goes against their interests and cannot be logically justified is actually “good for them.” For this reason, propaganda is emotional rather than logical in nature, and frequently will use emotional arguments that on the surface appear logical but once you peer deeper are not.
Why Do People Believe in Vaccines?
Once people awaken to the vaccine issues, one of the most frequent questions which emerges is why the medical field has such a rigid ideological attachment to them. I would argue it is due to three interrelated reasons:
First, human society has always been defined by competing groups vying for status and wealth, and what many do not appreciate is that, historically, it is a very recent development that doctors attracted the prestige and salary the profession commands. This I would argue was ultimately a result of two things:
•Market monopolization (via the American Medical Association) and technological developments birthing an incredibly profitable medical industry, which generated the funding to market a newfound faith in it to the entire country and required doctors (and faith in doctors) to serve as the keystone for the industry.
•Medicine creating a mythology that it rescued us from the dark ages of disease, and hence deserves its supremacy in the current social hierarchy. As “vaccines ending infectious diseases” is a central part of that mythology, to maintain their existing prestige, those within the conventional medical system are essentially forced to double-down on the absolute supremacy of vaccines, regardless of the evidence against them, or the fact, as Secretary Kennedy brilliantly shows here, there is no actual evidence vaccines were responsible for the decline in infectious disease the medical industry falsely claimed credit for.
Note: when Dr. Humphries raised her concerns about influenza vaccines causing kidney failure, colleagues used the mythology of medicine’s most esteemed vaccines to dismiss her (e.g., “[the chief of internal medicine] went on to remind me that ‘smallpox was eradicated by vaccines, and polio was eradicated in the United States by vaccines.’”). This eventually motivated Humphries to scrutinize that mythology and create the pivotal book Dissolving Illusions that showed exactly why that mythology was a lie.
Secondly, there is a well-known phenomenon in psychology known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, which states that the less competence or knowledge individuals have in an area, the more they will overestimate their competency and knowledge (e.g., as the DMSO series I’ve written has attracted more attention, an increasing number of DMSO hit pieces have been written and I’ve found that the more nonsensical, erroneous or misinformed the arguments presented are, the more confidently and aggressively their proponents espouse them and the more resistant they are to considering any conflicting data).
In medicine, there is a massive amount of information that needs to be learned, so in most cases doctors are forced to take short cuts throughout their training where again and again they assume if A is true then B is true without understanding exactly why A leads to B or how tentative the link can be and in which situations it does not apply. Likewise, when the public (especially members of the media) appraises medical information, rather than try to understand how A becomes B, they typically take the pronouncement of an expert (e.g., a doctor) that “A always leads to B” as all there is to say on the subject.
Since A often does not actually lead to B, and people do not like admitting they are wrong (especially if, like doctors, an incredible personal investment was required to attain the social status they hold), when confronted with inconsistencies in their beliefs, the typical response will be to double-down on their position rather than try to critically understand the additional data.
All of this, in short, encapsulates what I routinely observe when I see doctors or those aligned with “the science” defend (essentially-indefensible) aspects of vaccination.
Note: another common psychological mechanism at work, cognitive dissonance (not wanting to admit something you’ve invested yourself in was wrong), is particularly applicable to doctors, as it is a heavy burden to acknowledge you had harmed a significant number of people you willfully vaccinated.
Third, a strong argument can be made that societies cannot function without some type of unifying faith or spirituality (particularly since in the absence of one, people will frequently seek out one to adopt). In our culture, a rather peculiar situation emerged where religion was cast out by broad swaths of the society and replaced with science (under the belief it would create a fairer and more rational society) but the underlying need for a widespread faith was never addressed.
Because of this, much of science gradually morphed into the society’s religion, resulting in it claiming to be an objective arbiter of truth, but in reality, frequently being highly dogmatic and irrational as it seeks to establish its own monopoly over the truth (which has led to many labeling the current societal institution of science as “scientism”). As such, when science is discussed, religious terminology is often used by its proponents (e.g., “I believe in science,” “I believe in vaccines,” “anyone who denies climate change is reprehensible and must be silenced”).
The Religion of Medicine
Over the years, many have made the observation, medicine, by claiming dominion over life and death (and creating modern miracles like reviving the dead with cardiac resuscitation or awing the public with their ability to see through flesh with x-rays) has come to function as the foundation of the new religion of science.
Modern Medicine can’t survive without our faith, because Modern Medicine is neither an art nor a science. It’s a religion… The Church of Modern Medicine deals with the most puzzling phenomena: birth, death, and all the tricks our bodies play on us—Robert S. Mendelsohn
One of the first people who alerted me to this idea was Dr. Mendelsohn, who in his 1979 book, Confessions of a Medical Heretic argued that medicine was a dogmatic institution that prioritized authority, control, and ritualistic practices (which were treated as infallible doctrines requiring blind obedience from patients) over patient well-being, data transparency, and evidence-based care. There, he:
• Highlighted “unwritten rules” in medicine, such as doctors compulsively rushing to prescribe new drugs before their side effects are fully known, as examples of this rigid, faith-like adherence to protocol over science (particularly since debacles routinely followed this blind faith in new pharmaceutical drugs).
• Demonstrated how many routine practices and procedures caused significantly more harm than benefit (e.g., x-rays for tonsillitis later creating thyroid cancer) but could not be challenged due to the dogmatic nature of medicine, leading to similar debacles being repeated in each ensuing decade.
• Demonstrated that many illnesses that are routinely treated with (harmful) interventions would recover on their own, especially if augmented with simple natural healing practices.
• Argued that medicine’s tendency to withhold foundational medical information from the public (hence forcing them to trust the doctor’s opinion rather than their own judgement) was fundamentally unethical.
Note: this critique was raised in the pre-internet age where medical journal information was not widely available to the public. I believe this in part explains why journal articles published at this time (many of which I cite in this newsletter) were much more candid, whereas in later decades information which potentially incriminated the medical profession rarely made it to publication.
• Argued medicine’s compulsion to “do something” as a faith-based impulse rather than rational care, equating medical overreach with religious zeal that harms believers.
• Noted that in addition to patients being attacked for challenging the faith, doctors who did were treated as heretics and cast out (e.g., by being forced to resign from the hospitals they worked at).
Nowhere does the Church’s Inquisition emerge as clearly as it does through the drugging of children as a means of control… Modern Medicine sets up its Inquisition to define behavior which doesn’t conform as sick.
Mendelsohn’s work, in turn, was hugely impactful and played a huge role in shifting medicine away from the paternalistic model to one where patients began to be provided with data and allowed to play a role in deciding what care was optimal for them. For example, he made numerous highly impactful appearances on national television appearances such as this 1983 debate on the dangers of vaccines.
Note: over the last month, I compiled 54 other news segments that were aired on the dangers of vaccines that would never be aired now (and can be viewed here).
Nonetheless, many of the issues Mendelsohn highlighted persist to the present day. For example, doctors who tried to prevent COVID patients from dying by deviating from the ineffective remdesivir protocols were kicked out of their hospitals, the experimental mRNA vaccines were embraced with an unstoppable religious zeal by the medical community despite very little being known about them at the time and data on the safety or efficacy of the COVID vaccines was withheld from the public despite continual efforts and lawsuits to obtain them.