I’m not saying this, but I might be thinking it

I really don’t want to be a “conspiracy theorist,” but sometimes you just gotta wonder, says I. Yesterday, while searching for something else she wrote, I found a 2019 article by Bretigne Shaffer called “Is Vaccine Safety Too Dangerous for Us to Discuss?”

It begins with a description of how HuffPost had deleted a 2013 article about “a case in which the U.S. government’s Court of Federal Claims conceded that routine vaccination had aggravated a child’s underlying condition and led to that child developing ‘features of autism spectrum disorder.’” The website even deleted a link to the actual court decision.

This retraction did not occur in a vacuum. The first half of 2019 has seen a coordinated effort to scrub the Internet of any information that is critical of the claim that “vaccines are safe and effective.” The push began last fall, but gained momentum in January when the World Health Organization declared “vaccine hesitancy” to be a “global health threat,” placing it alongside Ebola, cancer, war zones, and drug-resistant pathogens.

On March 1, U.S. Congressman Adam Schiff wrote to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and, after stating that “there is no evidence to suggest that vaccines cause life-threatening or disabling diseases,” expressed his concern that Amazon might be allowing content with “medically inaccurate information.” He asked what action Amazon was taking to address “misinformation about vaccines.”

The thing that raised my tinfoil-hat hackles is that all this scrubbing was taking place in 2019. The article appeared Sept. 3, 2019, a couple months before news started creeping out of Wuhan, China, about a new novel coronavirus, and the rest is history.

I knew the censorship of vaccine questions was real because I have a family member whose otherwise normal child ended up on the autism spectrum not long after receiving a routine vaccination years ago. The “canceling” of my once-outspoken family member was a harsh reality long before “cancelation” was in vogue.

But I didn’t realize the crackdown had ramped up significantly the year before government took unprecedented actions to break the world economy in the name of public health, which led to the effort to shame and segregate people who hesitate to take an experimental medication that has been described as a vaccine. Even the way I phrased that description is subject to “fact-checker” smackdown.

Why was it so important that Schiff asked Amazon to self-censor its inventory and purge anything that may lead people to question whether the giant corporations that manufacture vaccines have their best interests in mind? Shaffer reports Schiff sent similar letters to Facebook and Google, and all sorts of big platforms had begun pruning vaccine “misinformation” from their sites.

When did asking questions about medical procedures and medicine become taboo? What more basic right do we have than the right to have all available information about something that’s going into our bodies, even information that self-serving manufacturers deny is true?

Apparently, it began a year or so before Big Pharma and government began putting pressure on us to get jabbed for our own good and our neighbors’ good.

Ronald Reagan once said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’” Like I said, sometimes you just gotta wonder.