Vaccine Injury Denialism: A Modern-Day Semmelweis Reflex

The question has been asked in many forms, endlessly, earnestly, and incredulously, both before Covid, and at an accelerated rate after the release of the Covid shots.

“How can doctors not see what is happening?”

“Do you think all these doctors are in a conspiracy?”

“Why would all these doctors lie?”

Today on Twitter one doctor commented:

“I can't believe they did this. More than that, I can't believe the number of people who fervently and feverishly went along with it. My mind refuses to acknowledge this. There simply cannot be that many Satanistic people in this world. It's an interesting phenomenon to observe...”

The answer to all these queries is 175 years old. Decades before Sigmund Freud outlined “Denial” as a psychological defense mechanism, we saw The Semmelweis Reflex in action. It is a specific kind of defense mechanism seen in medical personnel when given unwelcomed information and evidence.

The mass denial of vaccine failure and vaccine injury is not a mass conspiracy, or an evil plot by all medical workers. It is simply one of the most basic psychological defense mechanism used by the human psyche, that the vaccine industry works very hard to feed.

From my chapter on Government and Politics in our book, "Vaccine Epidemic: How Corporate Greed, Biased Science, and Coercive Government Threaten Our Human Rights, Our Health, and Our Children," 2012:

“Just as government hails vaccines as a cornerstone of public health, the medical community upholds vaccination as a miracle of modern medicine. If it seems almost impossible that public denial of vaccine injury could exist on such a huge scale, it should be recognized that there is established precedent for such a phenomenon.

In the mid-1800s in Vienna, Austria, mothers were dying shortly after childbirth from a now-extinct illness known as puerperal fever or “child bed fever.” A woman entering the hospital to give birth had a roughly 16 percent chance that she would die before taking her baby home. The mortality rate of mothers giving birth in the midwife centers, however, was lower.

In 1847, Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis, professor of obstetrics at the University of Pest, performed an autopsy on a colleague who had died from the fever, and then fell ill with it himself. He postulated that small particles of the disease may have been left on his hands and surmised that the maternal death rate from childbed fever was so high because doctors and medical students at the teaching hospital were not properly washing their hands after exams and autopsies of fever patients, before delivering newborns.

He instituted new sterilization guidelines and the death rate in the obstetrics and gynecology ward fell to 1.27 percent.i

When Semmelweis's colleague published the information, rather than finding it cause for celebration, the medical community lashed out against Semmelweis. He was mocked, attacked, and run out of the profession. He subsequently suffered a nervous breakdown. Semmelweis was invited by a colleague to visit an asylum for the mentally ill under the pretense of offering his professional opinion, but was instead locked inside, where he died two weeks later. Conflicting stories report that he died after being physically assaulted by the staff, or alternatively, that he died from puerperal fever. Two decades would pass after Semmelweis's discovery before the work of Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister helped to usher in the modern era of sanitation and hygiene, including medical sterilization.

In serving the public, Semmelweis delivered the unwelcome news to doctors that they were largely responsible for the deaths of new mothers. It was bad news that they were not prepared to hear. This phenomenon has come to be known as the Semmelweis Reflex—the reflex like rejection, often in the medical community, of new scientific information without proper investigation.ii

Today’s vaccine injury denialism is a modern-day Semmelweis Reflex. Pediatricians who care passionately about the welfare of children understandably find repulsive the idea that autism is largely iatrogenic. Statements offered by government agencies (i.e., HHS and the CDC) and medical professionals (i.e., the AAP) offer plausible deniability to those who do not want to know or admit that the vaccines they are administering are capable of causing serious damage to a population, let alone to the individual children in their own practices.

i Notable Name Database, Ignaz Semmelweis, http://www.nndb.com/people/601/000091328/

ii Bálint P, Bálint G, “The Semmelweis-reflex,” Orv Hetil. July 26, 2009;150(30):1430.”