Cherry picking again!

This is ridiculous!

If there’s one thing that is common amongst the anti vaxxers it’s lifting quotes out of context and putting them as stand alone comments to try and make the speaker look bad. That’s what Taylor did in her latest entry trying to attack Paul Offit.

Unlike her – I actually listened to the question and the whole comment. Here is the full transcript of the question and the answer with Taylor’s extraction underlined.

Q: Doctor Offit, on a slightly different topic, some people feel that the vaccine discussion is really a discussion – a surrogate discussion for other issues. The role of big government, the role of the law in a complex society, the difficulty some people have adjusting to a very complex society. If they are surrogate issues, how can one approach that if one truly believes in the usefulness of vaccines.

A: It’s a great question, and I think as physicians we always ask that question when parents come in for example and complain about or are upset about a certain set of symptoms which when you hear it are actually fairly benign, you always ask the question “What are you worried about?”. And then you suddenly hear this story that they’re worried about leukemia for example, it is – you know – it is far greater than what the symptoms would clue you into. And so I think that’s what we have to do as physicians or scientists and just try and understand actually what is the real concern here. I mean, Vaccinations aren’t easy. This isn’t an easy thing to do. We ask a lot of our citizens. To get as many as 26 inoculations in the first few years of life, and five shots at one time. It’s hard to do that, especially given that vaccination is a violent act, you pin the child down, you give them this biological agent against their will. The biological agent generally isn’t understood well by the parent, and to some extent not understood all that well by the physician. I’m not sure we do a great job at educating physicians about exactly what vaccines are and how they work, and you don’t see these diseases and we get you know vaccines against 14 different diseases in the first few years of life with a lot of inoculations. I think that’s a lot to ask so it’s understandable I think that people could push back, but you need to understand as you’re saying – what is it that they’re scared of? What is it that frightens them?

This is what Taylor is intentionally hiding. Paul is talking about the natural fears of something new from a very basic level and noting this as the true core of the opposition to vaccines – and he is saying that this is wrong and needs to be overcome. He’s not admitting anything like Taylor thinks he is. He’s applying context that Taylor is ignoring. What is there to worry about? The answer is nothing. Paul makes a good point about education of doctors in particular because if they knew as much as the scientists knew they could allay these fears more confidently.

Taylor’s fear is without foundation. She is not thinking clearly and is desperate to grab anything and never mind the context. It’s deluded people like that which Paul Offit ignores – and he is right to do so. He knows very well as I do that these fools are indeed making a Deadly Choice (as in the title of his book) and that choice isn’t deadly because of the vaccine itself. It’s deadly because not doing it places lives at risk. And Paul said 10,000 vaccines, not 100,000. Adding zeroes for effect is false narrative to the point of blatant fabrication. The person who needs to “get the (beep!) out of here” is you, Taylor. YOU are the threat to us all – you and your fellow anti vax lunatics!