Zoey O’Toole of Children’s Health Defense on “Turtles All the Way Down”

Zoey O’Toole, editor of the anonymously-authored new book Turtles All the Way Down: Vaccine Science and Myth, demystifies a complex topic.

Q: Why are “anti-vaxxers” so relentlessly smeared in mainstream media? A: Because ad hominems are the best way to distract people from  scientific facts when those facts prove inconvenient to the powerful financial interests pushing pro-vaccine mythology. (That’s why the author of Turtles has chosen to remain anonymous, forcing critics to engage with the message rather than kill the messenger.)

Almost three decades ago, before the emergence of the internet as we know it today, I used a university library’s research tools to try to get up to speed on the debate about vaccine safety and efficacy. After a long, painful slog, I concluded the medical and scientific establishments, almost entirely owned by big government and big pharma, had systematically exaggerated the benefits and covered up the ill effects of the ever-burgeoning mass vaccination program.

I wish Turtles All the Way Down, or something like it, had been available then. It would have saved me a lot of time, and given me a superb, thoroughly-documented yet user-friendly one-volume reference to share with people new to the subject (as well as “experts” who have been programmed to see only one side of the debate).

Turtles All the Way Down cuts to the heart of the vaccine question and shows that vaccine critics are the ones arguing from scientific facts, while the pro-vaccine establishment’s position is grounded in emotion-based myth. Crucially, it highlights two simple questions that vaccine enthusiasts can’t answer: Why haven’t any of the common vaccines in use been tested, in their manufacturers’ safety trials, against harmless, neutral placebos such as saline solution? And why won’t anyone do a bona fide large-scale study comparing health outcomes in general, and frequency of chronic diseases in particular, for vaccinated versus unvaccinated people? The conspicuous absence of genuine placebo safety trials and VU (vaxxed-unvaxxed) studies has only one plausible explanation: The vaccine lobby, and the medical and scientific establishment it owns, knows (by virtue of its own secret informal studies) that the results would be highly unfavorable for vaccines at best, and at worst could lead to mass prosecutions for scientific fraud and crimes against humanity.