From Reader Nimueh:

America’s patrons of the theatric and visual arts, the lovers of film, dance and music, are among the nation’s most diehard advocates for liberty, self-expression, and art’s civil rights to challenge the failures and wrongs in the social and political status quo. During every decade, during every generation, many of our most memorable artistic achievements and performances are recognized as such because they raise relevant and timely insights that stir controversy. Projected on the screen, films can magically crack the veil of our collective illusion, the mythic, wonderland fantasy of self-deception and ignorance perpetuated by governmental and corporate powers to manipulate a mentally compromised mainstream media. By their very nature, documentary films offer an alternative story to the scripted propaganda streaming across our TV screens and monitors. Frequently they adventure into a deeper reality that so often underlies the mere posturing and veneer of half truths and lies that take hold of society and masquerade as fact. For this reason, artistic truth and censorship are a horrible marriage and have never been suitable bedfellows.

The recent controversy over the acceptance and rapid withdrawal of the documentary film, Vaxxed: From Coverup to Catastrophe, at Manhattan’s Tribeca Film Festival, is an alarming case of censorship to protect the guilty and demonize a messenger of warning, the film’s director Dr. Andrew Wakefield.[1] Popular scientific consensus has yet to tackle the huge uncertainty gap to identify the most probable causes of autism. Legitimate medical protocol and integrity demands honest debate of all the scientific evidence, regardless of its undesirable conclusions. Yet the CDC and Big Pharma adamantly refuse to engage in such a debate and review. Therefore the expurgation of Wakefield’s film is a dangerous step closer to widespread medical McCarthyism.

What is equally disturbing is the mass media’s outcry to denounce a film before its release. In unison, a barrage of press simultaneously condemned the festival’s co-founder, actor Robert De Niro, for his decision to screen Vaxxed at Tribeca. Within a 72 hour period we witnessed ABC, CNN and MSNBC, the UK’s Guardian, Time Magazine, the Washington Post and the LA Times, the New York Times, Forbes, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Rolling Stone, Variety and many others ridiculing De Niro’s original decision then celebrating its withdrawal two days later. From pariah to messiah, De Niro caved into powerful private interests. It should be comforting to know that all of these publications and news bureaus are on the ready to report simultaneously en masse as this story develops.

What we do know is that De Niro experienced formidable opposition to screening Wakefield’s film. In a private email sent to many of us who oppose the CDC’s vaccination schedule and who recognize the serious scientific shortcomings in the body of studies the CDC relies upon to make its unsound claims concerning vaccine safety and efficacy, Robert Kennedy Jr wrote that De Niro informed him that he was “under huge pressure to not show the film.” No mention is provided about the source of this pressure. However, knowing a little bit about the film’s real story will bring the culprits to light.

A thorough review of the mainstream media’s news bits reveals a remarkably similar editorial script. The media’s central message frames Dr. Wakefield as a “discredited” British gastroenterologist who fabricated research in order to mislead the world that the MMR vaccine causes autism. For this reason, we are persuaded to blindly accept that Vaxxed is simply another example of misinformed anti-vaccine lunacy that will endanger the lives of children across America. Therefore, we should ignore the film and save our money, because our shining experts sitting in the high towers at the CDC have already concluded that vaccines do not cause autism. It is better to go back to sleep and not worry about Vaxxed’s medical crime story. On the other hand, this is a story that has likely contributed to the approximately 3.5 million American children and adults with autism today.

In fact, none of these journalists or reporters even know the film’s entire storyline themselves. It has never been publicly released. Any journalists who have seen it would have done so illegally and in violation of the confidentiality agreements between Tribeca and the producers of Vaxxed.

What is rather extraordinary and beyond coincidence is that all of these publications convey identical messages and even share the same quotes and sequential ordering of content and statements. For example, why is a statement by film director Penny Lane, a relatively unknown person with no association whatsoever to vaccine science and policy, notably mentioned in a significant number of these articles? How does this person’s vitriolic comments against Vaxxed end up appearing in The Guardian, New York Times, CNN, Vanity Fair and other news reports all at once? The original script(s) was evidently composed by an unnamed third party(s) and distributed throughout these publications for personalized editing and immediate release. Nevertheless, the message remains the same. And even more curious, none of this press accurately addresses the film’s central story.

During the past eight years, we have directed and produced three award winning documentaries about vaccine injury, autism, and the serious flaws and failures in CDC-approved vaccine science. These films, however, have focused more upon the medical science that challenge vaccine safety and efficacy rather than the rampant corruption in our federal health agencies in Washington. There was no outcry over these films being screened at film festivals across the nation, although considerable venom came forth from the pharmaceutical paid trolls in the blogosphere and the Sci-copaths in the cult of evidence based medicine. While our films are explicitly anti-vaccination, Vaxxed isn’t. So what might account for this massive media outrage?

Vaxxed is not anti-science. Nor is it anti-vaccine. Instead it presents unquestionable evidence of corruption and fraud that is anti-CDC. The film endangers the professional credibility and integrity of the nation’s most powerful federal health agency as well as the private vaccine industry’s profits that the CDC protects. If it were simply a visual screed of voices opposing mandatory vaccinations, the documentary would have its burst of limited popularity and quickly be forgotten as so many anti-vaccine films are. Vaxxed, on the other hand, incriminates federal officials and scientists at the highest levels, including former CDC Director Julie Gerberding, with the intentional coverup and manipulation of the agency’s own research data to continue its public relations charade that vaccines under no circumstances are associated with the US’s increasing autism crisis in our midst.

According to Dr. Stephanie Seneff at MIT, the autism rate can be projected to reach 1 in 2 boys by 2025.[2] In the meantime the CDC has preferred to seal its eyes and ears to this trend. Instead it scrambles to find any other culprit or explanation besides the toxic stew of chemicals and viruses contained in the 10 million vaccinations given annually to approximately 4 million American babies under one year of age.

To sustain the nation’s vaccination rates, to preserve corporate profits, and to keep Americans convinced that vaccines will keep their children protected and alive, the CDC requires a dynamic marketing and public relations apparatus. And the tentacles of the government’s health agencies are today wrapped around mainstream media and the entertainment industry. Unknown to the general public and many in the medical profession is the existence of the CDC’s sophisticated public relations and media operations. Tax dollars are spent to train journalists about framing medical news and articulately contest controversial stories that challenge the federal agencies’ and pharmaceutical industry’s national health and vaccine agendas. This broad network of journalists are employed by mainstream media companies, magazines and newspapers, and freelancers and provide the CDC with a daunting army of writers, reporters, columnists and newscasters to commence its bidding. Threats, fear mongering, and outright hatred written towards vaccine opponents are commonplace mainstream journalistic schemes. What they also share in common is either complete ignorance or denial of the science challenging cherished pro-vaccine beliefs.

When we try to understand how and why so many mainstream journalists, writers and television and radio broadcasters can recite the identical mantra about vaccine safety, promulgate identical storylines and share a similar disdain and animosity towards those who question the CDC’s claims that deny vaccines’ contribution to autism, we can look at the joint CDC-Association of Health Care Journalists (AHCJ) fellowship program. Scores of health editors, writers and reporters throughout the nation’s leading mainstream media corporations and publications—MSNBC, NPR, the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle to name a few on the fellowship’s webpage—have passed through the CDC’s Atlanta campus for a week’s worth of intense instruction in national public health policy. According to the AHCJ’s fellowship information, journalists are indoctrinated in conventional federal health policies regarding epidemiology, global disease prevention, pandemic flu preparedness, vaccine safety and autism. They also receive training in “navigating databases such as the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey and CDC publications” to assist their research and writing. Afterwards they return to their companies to propagandize the CDC’s ideological stance on vaccination and receive notices and scripts about stories to report and release.[3]

For example, during the 2004 National Influenza Vaccine Summit, then director of Media Relations at the CDC and spokesperson for the National Immunization Program, Glen Nowak, presented the agency’s “Seven Step Recipe for Generating Interest In and Demand for Flu Vaccination.” His Powerpoint presentation outlines a concise public relations campaign, along a timeline covering the flu season, for journalists and media agencies to follow in order to increase flu vaccination rates. The outline includes specific periods during the flu season when the media is recommended to induce and increase public fears about the pending dangers of influenza and even possible death. In defense of the CDC’s PR efforts, Nowak publicly stated on National Public Radio that the vaccine “manufacturers were telling us [CDC] that they weren’t receiving a lot of orders of vaccine for use… It really did look like we needed to do something to encourage people to get a flu shot.”[4]

Five years later, during the H1N1 swine flu non-epidemic, we observed and reported how the CDC’s flu propaganda outline and storyline recommendations continue to be put into practice to the letter by mainstream news sources such as the New York Times, Washington Post and almost every large television news network.[5]

Yet that is not all. The CDC’s control over the media runs deeper.

During a recent interview on the Progressive Radio Network, award-winning investigative medical journalist Celia Farber introduced an organization that has remained relatively hidden from the public’s view: Hollywood Health and Society (HHS), headquartered at the Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communications.[6] According to its website, the organization “provides entertainment industry professionals with accurate timely information on health storylines.” Farber describes HHS as “both horrendous and fascinating.” It delivers consultation, writers and scripts for television, Hollywood films and documentaries. And who offers this expert consultation? HHS’ top funders, including the CDC, the National Cancer Institute, the Office of National Drug Control Policy, and the world’s largest private financial source for vaccine development and propaganda the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.