Barbara Loe Fisher

Barbara Loe Fisher is the co-founder of the National Vaccine Information Center, and appeared regularly on the Alex Jones Show to spread anti-vaccination propaganda. She is not a doctor, but has a bachelor’s degree in English, and is not qualified to dispense medical advice.

Barbara And Vaccines

Pretty much all of the arguments that Barbara makes in her appearances on Alex’s show are the garden variety, thoroughly debunked “vaccines give kids autism” type of narratives. They are not very interesting, but when she appeared on the March 17, 2009 episode of Alex’s show, she said something that inspires zero confidence in her knowledge of the issues around vaccination:

If Barbara Loe Fisher does not understand why what she’s saying here makes no sense, then she doesn’t know the most basic reasons it is important to vaccinate everyone who can be vaccinated.

The argument that “if you’re vaccinated, you shouldn’t care if I vaccinate my kids or not because you can’t get sick” is very stupid. There are tons of people who cannot get vaccinated, and therefore, if more people who can get vaccinated choose not to, they raise the risk of those people who cannot get vaccinated getting sick. Localized studies have shown that where the number of vaccine exemptions in schools are higher, the incidence of vaccine-preventable are higher, and the two are correlated.

Pregnant women cannot get most vaccines. People who have allergies to any of the components in any vaccine cannot receive that vaccination. If you’ve ever had Guillain-Barré Syndrome, you probably can’t take the flu vaccine. You cannot get a Measles, Mumps, and Rubella vaccine if one of your immediate family members has a history of immune system problems. These are only some of the examples of this, there are plenty more.

People being vaccinated is a public health issue, not just a personal health issue, and the fact that Barbara Loe Fisher doesn’t recognize this leads me to believe that she is possibly not a serious thinker about the issues surrounding vaccination.

The National Vaccine Information Center

The NVIC masquerades as a serious research center, but it is little more than a gullible propaganda outlet, spreading misinformation about serious health issues.

In 2014, a satire site called the Wyoming Institute of Technology posted a fake article linking the flu vaccine to MRSA. The NVIC jumped all over this, and posted it as if it was good science, or even something they’d checked into at all. This is just a single example, but it should illustrate that this is an organization that is less interested in the truth, and more interested in putting forth anything that appears to prove the things they’ve already decided are true.

Amanda Z. Naprawa, JD and Dorit Rubinstein Reiss, Ph.D. posted a good rebuttal to a number of NVIC’s claims, from a legal and medical prospective, so check that out if you would like to know more about the things the NVIC is wrong about.

Suffice it to say that Barbara Loe Fisher and the NVIC are not a credible source for medical information, which explains why she appears on InfoWars.