In a move sure to have far reaching implications, leading anti-vaxxers announced that they are merging their organizations with the Flat Earth Society.
Spokesperson Gull E. Bull explained that this exciting merger grew out of a chance encounter that occurred in the lobby of Trump Tower.
[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]The merger grew out of a chance encounter in the lobby of Trump Tower.[/pullquote]
Andrew Fakefield, a leading anti-vax researcher, was awaiting his interview with President-Elect Donald Trump for a senior position at the FDA, while Flat Earth Society executive Steven Frawde was about to be vetted for leadership of NASA.
Fakefield and Frawde got to talking and realized that they had a startling amount in common above and beyond their personal friendship with Mr. Trump.
As Fakefield pointed out, both movements are made up of people who are “educated” and have done their own “research.”
Frawde concurred:
The members of the Flat Earth Society are not sheeple like most of the benighted folks who have accepted the assertion that the world is round. They know that astrophysicists are hiding the truth. Anti-vaxxers have equally incisive intelligence. The idea that injecting pieces of dead viruses into the human body to prevent infection with lives viruses makes as much sense as the absurd claim that the flat ground we walk upon is actually curved.
But the similarities don’t end there.
1. The glaring absence of RCTs
Fakefield notes that just as there has never been a randomized controlled double blind trial (RCT) to prove that vaccines are effective, there has never been a randomized controlled double blind to prove that the earth, or any other planet, is round. Considering that RCTs are widely recognized as the gold standard of research, the omission is particularly glaring.
2. Correlation is not causation
Sure, various vaccine preventable diseases began to disappear after the introduction of the relevant vaccines, but that was almost certainly due to improved sanitation and clean water. Sure, satellite and GPS technology rest on the assumption that the earth is round, but it could equally be explained by invoking anti-gravity ray guns that precisely position satellites above a flat earth.
3. Massive, corrupt government efforts to fool the populace
The unholy cabal of Big Medicine, Big Pharma and Big Government is widely recognized as responsible for the vaccine industry. As Fakefield points out, vaccines are a money making venture and manufacturers are greedy. That’s why they keep introducing more vaccines and insisting on boosters for diseases like tetanus.
Space missions involve even more money. Defense contractors, engineers and astrophysicists make billions while the American public is fleeced to support them. Just consider the massive expense required to stage the fake moon landings or to create the photographs supposedly sent back from deep space probes.
4. Poisons
Frawde notes that it’s tough to determine which is more dangerous: vaccine ingredients or the massive chemtrails created by space missions.
We’ve heard a lot about vaccine injuries, but I think going forward we are going to learn that chemtrail injuries are a greater problem. After all, vaccine injuries affect only those who were injected whereas chemtrails poison everyone.
According to Fakefield, there is some disagreement on this point.
The latest research from my esteemed colleague Dr. Bob Snears shows that vaccine shedding is a large and growing problem and may ultimately affect more people than chemtrails.
What will the new organization be named?
Frawde explained that their initial choice was Flax, a combination of Flat earth and anti-vax, but that was eventually dropped due to concerns that the name might be thought to promote Big Linen.
Fakefield told us that they ultimately settled on Morons United.
While it doesn’t directly reference either vaccines or earth, we think it captures the essence of what we have in common.
Flat earth “theory” the world’s finest comedy show
How DARE Dr. Amy write such an offensively insulting article! How DARE she compare anti-vaxxers to Flat-Earthers! They ought to sue her for libel; the Flat Earth Society would NEVER stoop so low as to associate themselves with anti-vaxxers.
Sarcasm? Sincerity?
I CAN’T TELL!
These are odd times in which we live, are they not?
Just my attempt at humour using the ‘Insult to Rocks’ trope.
For what it’s worth, I found spending a bit of time on the Flat Earth Society’s online forum to be surprisingly educational. It’s an interesting intellectual exercise to take a belief so widely-held as “The Earth is round” and ask “But how do I REALLY know that?” Whichever side one takes in the ‘debate’, questioning and/or defending the Round Earth Theory is good for sharpening one’s skills as a skeptic. I saw it as practice for debunking genuinely false beliefs; if you can cast aspersions on the sources a Round-Earther relies on then you’ll have no trouble exposing an anti-vaxxer’s citations for being as reliable as homeopathic birth control.
I hereby dub him President Donald Chump. Not the most original name, I know, but a convenient one nonetheless.
I like Drumpf, too, since that was his family’s real surname.
“They know that astrophysicists are hiding the truth.”
This and the last few posts have reminded me very much of the analysis slacktivist did on the “Left Behind” series of books and movies.
Time and time again the authors of the book series betray the (sincere?) belief that EVERYONE is aware that God is real, and will unleash Armageddon on all of us, and that “Christians” are right about everything, but that we refuse to acknowledge the truth out of pure perversion.
It feels that antivaxxers, flat earthers, NCBers, cancer quacks, naturopaths, in fact ALL woosters subscribe to this paranoid delusion. They can’t conceive of anyone not believing what they believe. In fact, the only reason they can think of is that non-believers are purposely being perverse and evil. That way, they never even have to really try to “save” anyone or win them over with arguments, since they primarily believe we’re all arguing in bad faith in the first place. They can instead indulge in their second-favorite activity, hoping for disaster to smite their enemies.
But if everything they believe isn’t real, then, then…then they will have wasted their lives worrying about things that don’t really matter. Their whole lives.
Much easier to keep on believing they alone know the truth and everyone else on earth is just being perverse.
I don’t have much of a problem with people who believe that they are right and everyone else is wrong; that’s just standard religious belief. Hell, we all have beliefs that we believe are right (we wouldn’t hold them if we didn’t) and, by definition, believe that contradicting beliefs others may hold must be wrong. As long as we understand that not everyone believes the same things we do, then we can all ultimately just agree to disagree and be respectful of each other’s beliefs.
The people I have an issue with are those who believe that everyone else believes the same things they do but pretend they don’t just to be perverse; the religious who think all non-believers just want an excuse to sin, the conservative who thinks all liberals know that free-market capitalism creates prosperity for all and just want to destroy society by giving hardworking taxpayers’ money to the wantonly idle, the liberal who thinks all conservatives know that not everyone can pull themselves up by their bootstraps and just want to oppress minorities and/or the working-class. If I were to flip the attitude of the former back around on them, I would say “I know you know there isn’t really a God; you just say you think there is because you need an excuse to tell other people how to live their lives and it gives you something vaguely comforting to say in the face of a tragedy (You’ll see her in heaven/It’s all part of God’s mysterious plan/A little discomfort cleanses the soul etc).”
I’ve encountered many a Fundie who is under the impression that everyone KNOWS that their particular brand of faith is the right one. They think non-believers consider their faith’s rules to be an inconvenience so use disbelief as an excuse to not follow them.
I cut such accusations off at the pass by referring to myself as a Satanist rather than an Atheist when dealing with such people. It makes the ensuing debate much funnier.