This is what the American Council on Science and Health (Promoting science and debunking junk since 1978) has to say about Children's Health Defense:
Anti-Vaccine Group 'Children's Health Defense' Smells A Coronavirus Conspiracy
By Cameron English — April 1, 2020
Children's Health Defense says governments and corporations are using the coronavirus (SARS-COV-2) to advance a "global immunization agenda." The anti-vaccine group claims that our leaders just needed the right pandemic as a pretext to goad us into getting vaccines. This is a clever story. It's also false.
If you think the new coronavirus pandemic is an unexpected tragedy public health officials are hoping to end swiftly, you're mistaken, says anti-vaccine group Children's Health Defense (CHD).
Sure, the US government is eager to bring the virus to heel, fearing the global economy could collapse with so many people stuck at home. But never mind such inconvenient facts, the group argues, because the rich and powerful are dragging out the pandemic to advance the “global immunization agenda”—all so “Big Pharma” can profit:
Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, is predictably shining a spotlight on risky and uncertain coronavirus vaccines that may not be available for two years … Will Big Pharma ... be allowed to cash in on this catastrophe with speculative, patentable vaccines at the expense of the therapeutics needed to save lives now?
Even worse, these plans have been in the works for a long time, CHD claims:
For those who follow the global immunization agenda … the announcement of a new pandemic didn’t come as a surprise. “Pandemic preparedness” has been well-funded and a buzz word for a long time … The latest simulation for preparedness was Event 201, a rehearsal of a coronavirus pandemic organized on October 18, 2019 in New York by Johns Hopkins University, the Gates Foundation and the World Economic Forum.
… What better than viral terror to influence public opinion and health policies on vaccine battles raging on both sides of the Atlantic?
This version of events takes factual information and contorts it into a nonsensical narrative that collapses under scrutiny. The bigger problem, however, is that spinning a sensible policy like pandemic preparedness into evidence of a worldwide conspiracy misleads politicians and the public into making decisions that amplify the risk posed by pandemics.
Planning ahead is a conspiracy?
It's true that governments and international organizations prepare for and try to anticipate disease outbreaks. This isn't the scandalous revelation CHD implies, though. Since there are seven coronaviruses that can infect humans (we knew of six before SARS-COV-2 was identified), and three cause severe illness, it makes sense that we'd prepare for one to cause a pandemic. As Johns Hopkins said of the Event 201 conference,
“The exercise illustrated areas where public/private partnerships will be necessary during the response to a severe pandemic … Experts agree that it is only a matter of time before one of these epidemics becomes global … A severe pandemic … would require reliable cooperation among several industries, national governments, and key international institutions.”
The school has denied that conference participants predicted the current crisis or modeled its impacts on public health, as the three-hour event video will confirm. But here's the CliffNotes version if you want to spend your shelter-in-place time watching Netflix: 15 experts said it was imperative to develop treatments for a novel coronavirus and a plan to quickly move resources around the globe to mitigate a pandemic.
These concerns were well founded since researchers are now rushing to develop or identify drugs that can combat the virus and health care providers are facing shortages of vital medical supplies. The more important point is that the conference was designed to prevent the very sort of “viral terror” CHD believes could be used to manipulate parents into vaccinating their kids.
“A techno-communist global government”
CHD also says international disease preparedness campaigns are designed to institute a “techno-communist global government” that can “bypass informed consent laws and constitutional rights.” We shouldn't discard our civil liberties for the sake of public health, but such over-the-top rhetoric confirms the group doesn't comprehend the threat we're facing.
Pandemics like the one we're living through are not new. There will be more in the future, and immunization will be our best bet at surviving them. Call me a globalist shill, but I'm not bothered by rich people and governments encouraging the public to get vaccinated before an infectious disease hits.
Think of the alternative: a deadly virus begins making its way across the world, taking thousands of lives as it spreads, and people with the resources and influence to stop it do nothing—or worse, encourage its spread. Now that'd be a conspiracy worth calling out.
Ironically enough, that scenario is actually closer to reality than the “globalist agenda” story. With over a million dollars in donations and Robert F Kennedy, Jr. as its founder and spokesman, Children's Health Defense is part of a well-funded movement that continues to convince parents to forgo their children's immunizations.
