Anti-Vax Action Alert: VaxCBS

This advertisement by the Mercola and National Vaccine Information Center is set to run in New York City’s Time Square on the CBS Outdoor JumboTron on 42nd street.

Both of the groups behind this “PSA” are well-known for their anti-vaccination efforts. They want people to question the safety and efficacy of vaccines, to believe that it may be safer for your child to not vaccinate, that vaccines cause more injury than not vaccinating.

Forget that.

This is a dangerous advertisement, and while the ad might seem mild, what it implies is a lie that has been debunked time and time again by science-based medicine. What they want their viewers to believe has the potential to harm.

Elyse from Skepchick and Women Thinking Free Foundation is organizing an effort to make this ad not happen. From her post on skepchick.org:

Mercola and the NVIC are determined to convince Americans that vaccines are dangerous and optional, that more harm is done by administering vaccines than by letting infectious disease ravage a population.

And that message needs to be stopped. Especially right now.

Right now:

• A measles outbreak has hospitalized up to a half dozen young children in Minnesota. This outbreak is directly linked to Andrew Wakefield’s hoax of an anti-MMR study.
• Blue Mountain School (PreK – 8 ) in Roanoke, Va, which does not require it’s students to be vaccinated, is closed due to a whooping cough outbreak. The small school of 45 students has at least 30 confirmed cases between students and staff.
• Thirty unvaccinated high school students and two pregnant faculty members have been removed from a school in Utah after one unvaccinated teen contracted measles, putting the school’s population at risk.
• Over the past four years, almost 77,000 people have been infected and 710 have died from vaccine-preventable diseases.

Right now we need to be promoting vaccines. Right now real people are at risk because of unfounded vaccine fears. Right now measles should be eradicated in the US.

If you feel that Mercola/NVIC’s deceptive advertisement should not air to hundreds of thousands of people on CBS’s JumboTron, here’s how you can make your voice heard:

• Sign the petition on Change.org and leave a comment so CBS knows that you are an individual who feels that Mercola/NVIC’s vaccine scare tactics are unacceptable.
• Make sure to visit the Elyse’s original post on Skepchick.org and spread the message by blog, tweet, facebook or other media-sharing tools. On Twitter you can use @CBSOutdoor and #VaxCBS to increase the visibility of your posts.
• You can email CBS Outdoor Customer Relations and CBS Outdoor CommunicationsVP to let them know how you feel.

As one commenter on change.org put it “This is not a case of two opposing but valid sides of a disagreement – this is a seriously damaging misinformation campaign that misrepresents established knowledge with speculation based on already-rejected nonsense masquerading as science.”

Let’s help make sure that we don’t give credence to this dinkus-ness, okay?

Tags: Activism, Anti-Vax, Dinkus-ness, Vaccination