Pertussis: The Fear Factor – by Meryl Dorey

Posted 12 December 2011 by The Refusers?

Fear is one of the most effective marketing tools – advertising gurus have known this for many years. If you can make someone afraid, they will buy what you have to sell without thinking too much or asking too many questions.

Seth Godin, author of Permission Marketing and All Marketers are Liars, states that, “Marketing with fear is a powerful tool. Fear is a universal emotion, it’s viral and people will go to great lengths to make it go away. Some items can’t be marketed without fear. Seat belts, for example. They’re not convenient, good tasting, fun to use or profitable. Fear works great in this case. …What if the marketer not only doesn’t create peace of mind, but intentionally destroys it for his own benefit? Sometimes, fear is used as a marketing tactic even if it doesn’t benefit the prospect at all.”

What many people don’t realise is vaccines are actually products. Like cars, refrigerators and breakfast cereal, vaccines are made by companies (multi-national pharmaceuticals) as a money-making venture. Drug companies don’t produce drugs and vaccines because they want to make people healthy. They make them for one reason only – to make a profit for their board and their shareholders – end of story. When it comes down to it, there is nothing that makes a drug company inherently any different from a tobacco company. As the research begins to emerge showing that vaccines are causing very serious problems and are not as effective as we’ve been told, the pharmaceutical industry has begun to use the same sorts of cover-ups and shonky research which the tobacco companies pioneered once the evidence that cigarettes caused cancer became irrefutable. And the media has been more than complicit in helping them get that message across.

In Propaganda (1928) Bernays, the father of modern marketing, argued that the manipulation of public opinion was a necessary part of democracy:

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …We are governed, our minds are moulded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. …In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”

Fear is used to sell vaccines
Nowhere is the use of fear as a marketing tool more evident than in the push to force parents to vaccinate their children. This is not new. Historically, we have seen the use of fear in vaccination campaigns and it has only gotten worse as the years have gone on and more vaccines have been added to our already overcrowded schedule