Submitted to The Science Post by: Anonymous
It all started with a scientific paper. That’s right, a simple, scientific paper. It was entitled “Economic Evaluation of the Routine Childhood Immunization Program in the United States, 2009” and was published in the journal Pediatrics. It sounds pretty dull, but to my supervisors at Merck, it set off alarm bells like you wouldn’t believe.
I had been working there in the marketing department there for only 2 months when our boss called an urgent meeting to discuss the findings of this paper, specifically its finding that “analysis showed that routine childhood immunization among members of the 2009 US birth cohort will […] net savings of $13.5 billion in direct costs and $68.8 billion in total societal costs, respectively.” I have never seen a man so angry and concerned as he explained to us how much vaccines had cost Merck and Big Pharma as a whole. 13.5 billion dollars per year is a lot of money, even for Big Pharma.
We knew that we had to do everything we could to stoke fears about vaccines. Andrew Wakefield’s paper had been retracted and he had been barred from practicing medicine in England. The link between autism and vaccines had no scientific credibility. Even Jenny McCarthy was saying that she was merely for “safer vaccines.” It was not a good time for us.
It was at that moment that the plan was hatched. We would bombard social media with anti-vaccine comments. Any time an article appeared anywhere in the news on vaccines, we were there in the comments. We were all over Facebook. And we were getting paid. For every comment that I made, I received between $1-$15 depending on how many people “liked” or shared the comment; and there were thousands of people like me: paid to leave anti-vaccine comments anywhere we could.
At first, the comments were benign. We expressed concerns that vaccines caused autism and that there were toxic ingredients in vaccines. As things progressed, we grew bolder. We said that disease like polio and smallpox never really disappeared. We said that vaccines caused SIDs. We would say Bill Gates was trying to depopulate the world through vaccines.
We thought for sure no one would believe the claims we were making- but they did. No one questioned us. No claim was too outrageous. We could literally say anything about vaccines and people would believe us.
