Motivated Reasoning and How It Works Regarding Vaccines

Guest Post by Catherine J. Frompovich


Recently, I came across a rather provocative article titled “You Can’t Trust the Supreme Court, Science Proves It” wherein the author, Ian Millhiser, postulates that partisanship and personal preferences rule emotions and decisions, regardless of who you are, including members of the U.S. Supreme Court. [1]

To prove his point, Millhiser directs readers to the phenomenon known as “motivated reasoning” [2] studied in cognitive science and social psychology. In his article Millhiser states, that “A recent study adds to the growing evidence that our brains reject information that rebuts our strongly held beliefs.” That is the “jumping off point” for me, since I contend that motivated reasoning is a deliberate byproduct of social programming accomplished through the media, advertising, and most emphatically, by what’s called “branding,” i.e., when you successfully establish your product, services, or beliefs as those that satisfy the general public’s preferences, needs, and wants. [3] Or, here’s another facet: Opponents successfully rebrand their opposition to discount them as inferior in every capacity so as to neutralize them thereby leaving the opposition damaged – or as a pariah – in the public’s opinion, as currently is being done when there is legitimate disagreement.

Branding, in my estimation, often branches out far afield into various aspects for guarding one’s brand or turf, which can include lobbying [7], gifting, ad hominem remarks, even possible subversive activity – or dirty tricks – against one’s opponent in order to get others to see your way of thinking about a product or issues, such as political candidates engage during election cycles. In the Resources at the end of this blog there’s a link to the Ten Worst Dirty Tricks in American Politics.

Millhiser uses a ‘sidewinder remark’ of sorts regarding vaccine deniers as an example of motivated reasoning. Here’s what he says:

Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan and three co-authors presented parents with various messages intended to encourage them to vaccinate their children. What they found, however, was that “[n]one of the interventions increased parental intent to vaccinate a future child,” and, among the parents who were most likely to be skeptical of vaccination, the messages actually backfired. Staunch deniers of the health benefits of vaccination actually said they were less likely to vaccinate their children after being presented with information supporting vaccination. [1]

The last sentence in the above paragraph obviously shows just how effectively motivated reasoning works since Millhiser apparently hasn’t done any research into vaccines about their neurotoxic ingredients and adverse events, but accepts Big Pharma’s branding that vaccines are ‘safe’, ‘effective’, and did away with infectious communicable diseases, which is not the case! So, Millhiser himself apparently falls victim to the very social programming ‘problem’ he’s pointing out and rejecting within the U.S. Supreme Court.

A key factor that Millhiser makes to his credit, though, is:

It should be noted that these motivated research studies largely examine situations where the test subjects have a great deal of personal investment in a particular belief — if a test subject, or a judge, for that matter, does not feel strongly about a particular subject then they are much less likely to fall victim to motivated reasoning.

I couldn’t agree more heartily with Millhiser about “a great deal of personal investment in a particular belief.” There’s a huge investment by Big Pharma, vaccine makers, federal and state health agencies, and the deliberately-dumbed-down healthcare consumer, who knows nothing about the adverse effects and neurotoxic ingredients vaccines present. Consumers know only what they hear from branding advertisements, which are targeted to establish “motivated reasoning.”

However, more and more parents are researching vaccines and finding that they have dangerous side effects that are printed on vaccine package inserts, which pediatricians do not give to parents nor tell them about, thus a breach of medical ethical standards, I contend. Why? Parents and others are prevented from making informed consent decisions about a medical procedure – an injection into the body of poisonous and probable unknown elements like mycoplasmas, which should be considered a criminal act. Instead, rebranding occurs with physicians and others calling vaccine-safety-conscious parents ‘vaccine deniers’, ‘anti-vaxers’, or even ‘child abusers’.

Millhiser’s concluding paragraph,

The implication is that Supreme Court justices cannot be trusted with our Constitution, at least as long as they are selected by political officials with a strong motivation to ensure that the justices are themselves highly partisan.

could not be more applicable or suitable to what’s apparently going on within the U.S. CDC/FDA regarding distorted facts about vaccines safety while not advertising vaccine contraindications or adverse events, I contend. Furthermore, there is the need for parents to be more discerning about trusting physicians and vaccine makers who push toxic vaccines on children starting as young as 24 hours old – the questionable Hepatitis B vaccine.

Additionally, the revolving door employment policy between Big Pharma and the CDC/FDA guarantees strong motivation to keep vaccines highly partisan in favor of more and more toxic vaccines – whose effectiveness becomes more and more questionable for adverse events – being promoted and pushed by federal-agency, former-Big-Pharma-employees, and vice versa.

Factually, vaccine damage claims paid by the U.S. Court of Federal Claims (the Vaccine Court) per the U.S. HHS HRSA March 5, 2014 report total almost $3 BILLION for claims and attorneys’ fees: $2,857,926,807.60 to be exact. [4]

Furthermore, the U.S. government collects a tax on each vaccine dose. Here’s the schedule for each dose taken from the CDC Vaccine Price List Footnotes [5] To understand how the legend (1 to 6) applies, please access the link in the Notes below.

1. Vaccine cost includes $2.25 dose Federal Excise Tax
2. Vaccine cost includes $3.00 per dose Federal Excise Tax
3. Vaccine cost includes $1.50 per dose Federal Excise Tax
4. Vaccine cost includes $3.75 per dose Federal Excise Tax
5. Vaccine cost includes $0.75 per dose Federal Excise Tax
6. Vaccines which contain Thimerosal as a preservative

Question: Can mandating that everyone receives more vaccines build up quite a financial nest egg for Uncle Sam? Or, should it be a question of “follow the money”?

Readers should note the CDC admits that mercury still is in vaccines! Footnote 6 confirms Thimerosal, which contains 49.6% ethylmercury, is in some vaccines. However, motivated reasoning and branding convince consumers to believe there is no more mercury in vaccines. ‘Taint so!

Everyone in the allopathic healthcare paradigm is rabidly and highly partisan about vaccines, yet vaccine apologists totally disregard the irreversible damage vaccines cause. So, is that why many physicians don’t vaccinate their own children? [6]

Trust even should not be mentioned since, apparently, no one within HHS/CDC/FDA has taken seriously all the post-marketing vaccine adverse events reported in VAERS that indicate vaccines harm hundreds of thousands of vaccinees, yet no one is blowing the whistle on vaccines as would be done with other harmful products. That’s how motivated reasoning works.

Notes:

[1] http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/04/21/3428832/you-cant-trust-the-supreme-court-science-proves-it/
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivated_reasoning
[3] http://marketing.about.com/cs/brandmktg/a/whatisbranding.htm
[4] http://www.hrsa.gov/vaccinecompensation/statisticsreports.html#Stats
[5] http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/programs/vfc/awardees/vaccine-management/price-list/index.html?s_cid=cs_000
[6] http://cure-guide.com/when-doctors-dont-vaccinate-their-own-children/
[7] http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2014/04/24/drugmakers-lobbying-medicare-payments/8055901/

Resource:

Ten Worst Dirty Tricks in American Politics
http://listverse.com/2014/01/18/10-worst-dirty-tricks-in-american-politics/

Catherine J Frompovich (website) is a retired natural nutritionist who earned advanced degrees in Nutrition and Holistic Health Sciences, Certification in Orthomolecular Theory and Practice plus Paralegal Studies. Her work has been published in national and airline magazines since the early 1980s. Catherine authored numerous books on health issues along with co-authoring papers and monographs with physicians, nurses, and holistic healthcare professionals. She has been a consumer healthcare researcher 35 years and counting.

Catherine’s latest book, published October 4, 2013, is Vaccination Voodoo, What YOU Don’t Know About Vaccines, available on Amazon.com.

Her 2012 book A Cancer Answer, Holistic BREAST Cancer Management, A Guide to Effective & Non-Toxic Treatments, is available on Amazon.com and as a Kindle eBook.

Two of Catherine’s more recent books on Amazon.com are Our Chemical Lives And The Hijacking Of Our DNA, A Probe Into What’s Probably Making Us Sick (2009) and Lord, How Can I Make It Through Grieving My Loss, An Inspirational Guide Through the Grieving Process (2008).