The American Academy of Pediatrics: Mining Children for Profit

The American Academy of Pediatrics: Mining Children for Profit
by David Bell at Brownstone Institute

American healthcare is currently providing us with an excellent lesson in what capitalism looks like in the absence of a moral framework. The biggest losers are America’s children.

The Union Profiting from Childhood Sickness

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the major professional association of North American pediatricians, has overseen the rising rates of chronic illness and medicating of American children over recent decades. With 67,000 members in the United States, Canada, and Mexico, AAP distinguished itself during Covid-19 for its strident insistence that children’s faces should be covered and they should be injected with modified RNA vaccines, despite knowing from early 2020 that severe Covid-19 was very rare in healthy children. 

Funded by sources including Moderna, Merck, Sanofi, GSK, Eli Lilly, and other pharmaceutical companies, the AAP’s members are the cornerstone of the rapidly increasing pediatric pharma market in North America – by far greater than any other region. As a professional organization dedicated to ensuring income for its members, the AAP is like any similar professional association or union and acts in this manner.

The loss of trust in the medical profession since 2020 is fortunately removing the misconception that AAP-like medical societies were primarily altruistic, dedicated to the welfare of others rather than their members. The recent publication of AAP priorities, developed by its membership, should reinforce this loss of trust and so, despite its unusual callousness of approach, serve ultimately to strengthen public health by exposing more clearly the motivations of those profiting from rising illness.

Setting Priorities to Ensure Long-Term Profit

The AAP’s first stated priority is to remove parents from any authority when it comes to decisions on whether to inject their children with various substances produced commercially by its sponsors. While this should be ridiculous, it has some chance of succeeding as the ultimate beneficiaries, apart from pediatricians, are the same pharmaceutical manufacturers who heavily sponsor the election campaigns of most members of the US Congress.

Of relevance, promoting or abetting chronic disease in children ensures almost certain chronic disease through adulthood. The AAP is therefore helping to set up lifelong pharmaceutical consumers. Pharma companies are purely for-profit entities, and this is exactly what their CEOs and executives are charged by their shareholders with promoting. The AAP is simply acting as a very willing enabler.

The AAP considers that bodily autonomy is subservient to State-imposed requirements and that the post-World War II human rights of non-coercion and informed consent are subservient to the opinion of someone receiving money to perform an injection. Its approach coincides with the pre-War technocracy movement or medical fascism (in which a declared ‘expert’ decides on imposing healthcare measures rather than the patient themselves choosing it).

However, before discussing bodily autonomy and coerced medicine further, it is worth commenting on the priority list of the AAP overall, as it is fascinating, coming from a group that insists publicly on prioritizing the health of children.

Firstly, what is not there. Among the ten priorities of the AAP of which the elimination of parental rights or religious or cultural exemptions over vaccination of children is the highest, there is not a single mention of what are perhaps the three most prominent issues facing children today, and widely discussed publicly; increasing obesity and the epidemic of autism that the CDC heralds as of extraordinary proportions. While the AAP notes this problem elsewhere, it concentrates on identification and management rather than cause identification. Nowhere among its ten priorities is there any expression of interest in identifying and addressing the causes of rising chronic illness. The closest is a mention of lower costs for childhood insulin injections. The AAP’s priority list ignores diet and reducing levels of physical activity while actively promoting medicalization, seemingly oblivious to the quite catastrophic reduction in health status of the very populations they claim to be serving.

Unsurprisingly for a purely marketing organization, but inconsistent with a science-based healthcare body, the priorities include nothing regarding very obvious concerns of the impact of over 70 vaccinations, with their associated adjuvants and preservatives, now given to children by ten years of age. This number has grown from just a few 40 years ago in association with the deterioration in child health outcomes. The only interest expressed in vaccines is to remove choice from those concerned about such things, and force compliance. For a society of thinking, truth-seeking people this would be extraordinary.

Parents as an Obstacle to Return on Investment

The justification reported from AAP President Kyle E. Yasuda, M.D., FAAP for removing any remaining personal choice regarding prophylactic medical treatment (vaccination) is “the measles outbreaks” in North America in recent years. Jesse Hackell, MD, chair of the AAP’s Committee on Pediatric Workforce, notes that they were associated with the deaths of two children, the first in “many years.” The AAP simply states, regarding safety, that vaccines are “safe,” a stupid claim in medicine and biology in that adverse events do occur to injected organic substances and metal salts, and they vary from person to person (if rare events occur, then ‘safe’ is a relative term). Associations with recent DTP injection and sudden infant death are, for example, fairly well documented.

Regarding measles, it is likely that many AAP members mean well, but are genuinely misinformed regarding the impact of mass vaccination. In wealthy countries including the United States, nearly all measles mortality ceased before mass vaccination was commenced. This is not controversial – it was once stressed in medical school and is well established in national health statistics. An underlying improvement in nutrition, particularly in micronutrient deficiencies, was a likely reason. Mass vaccination then greatly reduced circulation of the measles virus, but could have only a limited impact on overall mortality. Therefore, weighing costs of vaccination (adverse events) against a very low likelihood of averting early death or disability is a real issue, and to ignore it by just reiterating ‘safe and effective’ is ignorant and foolish.

Measles vaccination is good at stopping transmission because it is very effective at preventing infections from being established. This efficacy is significant to the argument that having many vaccinated is a public good. Nearly all vaccinated people will be protected, and at no risk from the unvaccinated. Thus, mass measles vaccination really only makes sense if it is accepted that people should not have freedom to choose over their own bodies and healthcare, or that of their children. The very low measles mortality, far lower than drowning even before mass vaccination commenced in the United States, effectively removed an argument for overriding parental rights. Unless, of course, we are also going to ban children from swimming or walking near rivers or on a beach.

Lastly, regarding concerns over vaccination, many parents are uncomfortable with the role of cells harvested from induced aborted fetuses, often still alive at the time of harvesting. Again, many AAP members may believe the rhetoric that this is untrue, but nonetheless it is factual. It is how we derive cell cultures to develop many vaccines, so the DNA of these dead unborn humans can still contaminate the injection. The AAP, as an institution, officially holds that cultural and religious concerns arising from this should be overridden.

So, in the end, the AAP’s argument seems to come down to one of two possible drivers.  Either (1) they have an ideological belief that they should simply be the authority or decision-makers on children’s healthcare rather than parents (a medical-fascist approach), or (2) they see their role as promoting an extremely lucrative market for their sponsors, from which they also directly benefit, and setting children up for an entire lifetime of chronic illness and pharmaceutical consumption. It is challenging to decide which is less noble.

A third possibility is also possible. Most AAP members are simply going with the flow and have not actually stopped to think through the implications of their union’s policies. However, the motivation for willfully ignoring rational thought probably does come down to a mixture of money and ego, which goes back to the two potential drivers mentioned above.

Medical Fascism Should Have No Future

The AAP will almost certainly continue its path of child polypharmacy, blind adherence to protocols based on the products of their sponsors, and denigration and exclusion of the opinions of parents who recognize the stark reality of deteriorating health in North American children. Parents reading the AAP’s list of priorities would be foolhardy to then entrust their children to such care. Providing that politicians retain integrity and respect freedoms that most assumed were guaranteed in the US Constitution and through basic human rights norms, the AAP will fail in its endeavors and become increasingly irrelevant to public discourse. If they get their way, we will return further toward an approach we thought we had fought wars to overcome.

Fundamental rights of each human to make their own way in life, and protect and oversee their children, underpin any decent societal model. In fascist societies, such decisions are removed and taken into the hands of experts and authoritarian institutions. The people must simply comply as slaves. Medical professions and their academies have a long history of supporting such approaches, and the AAP seems increasingly determined to replicate that path. It should receive all the respect that such an indecent approach deserves.

The American Academy of Pediatrics: Mining Children for Profit
by David Bell at Brownstone Institute – Daily Economics, Policy, Public Health, Society