Jayne Donegan

The Sunday Times 21 Feb 2020 Anti-vaccine doctor Jayne Donegan says World Health Organisation uses ‘Nazi techniques’ A British doctor who supports the anti-vaccine movement told a talk in Ireland that the World Health Organisation uses the same propaganda tactics as Nazi Germany to promote inoculation. Dr Jayne Donegan said vaccines were pushed for financial rather than medical reasons. She said that the WHO’s method of repeating statements about the importance of vaccines in order to get the message across was similar to “Nazi techniques”. The London-based GP made the comments during a talk entitled “Vaccination — the Science” in the Riverbank House Hotel in Wexford on Wednesday. The talk, attended by a Times undercover reporter, was organised by Arnica Ireland, a non-profit group set up by parents interested in “building their family’s health and immunity naturally”. The group’s website states: “Arnica is pro-informed choice, pro-debate, pro-awareness of risks and respectful of the difficulty some parents find in making decisions whether or not to vaccinate or medicate their child.” The exact location of the event was not revealed until 7am on the day of the talk due to previous protests. Tickets were €35. There were about 25 people present, mainly young mothers, some with their children. Some said they would not be vaccinating their children, with a young father saying that he had lost friends over the issue. Dr Donegan expressed extreme scepticism about the efficacy of vaccines. She cited a number of studies that she said were used as evidence that vaccines worked and claimed that they did not prove what they purported to. Speaking about the role of the WHO in promoting the use of vaccinations she said that in a 2017 publication about vaccine hesitancy, the term for people who are reluctant to get vaccinated, it made the point that people’s attention spans are not that long and that a message needed to be repeated multiple times. “I’ve got a copy of Mein Kampf by Hitler. And he says the same thing, you must use a simple message because the capacity of the masses to remember things is very small,” she said. “If you look at what the WHO is saying, it’s exactly the same as what Hitler was saying. And you think that’s nice, they’re using Nazi techniques.” Dr Donegan also implied that politicians pushed vaccines as they were making money from them personally. When asked by the Times reporter why vaccines were so widespread when there were apparently so many questions about them, she initially declined to answer. She then said: “The people pushing it are the politicians, and the people feeding them are the people who make the vaccines.” She claimed that some politicians in the UK involved in promoting vaccines also had shares in vaccine companies. She was referring to Porton Biopharma, a British state-owned company whose shares are formally the property of the position of health secretary, not any specific individual. She also defended Andrew Wakefield, the disgraced doctor who was struck off after promoting an unsubstantiated claim that linked the MMR vaccine to autism and bowel disease. She has previously called him a “champion of academic and scientific integrity”. In the talk she said he was a victim of “label libel” and was referred to as “disgraced” to ensure that his views were not taken seriously. A spokeswoman for the Department of Health said: “Vaccination is recognised as one of the most cost-effective and successful public health interventions that exist. The World Health Organization estimates that 2-3 million deaths a year are prevented by vaccination, and a further 1.5 million could be avoided if global coverage of vaccinations improved.” She added that vaccine hesitancy has been recognised as a major threat to global health by the WHO. “All medicines, including vaccines are subject to ongoing review and evaluation of all available data from a range of sources, including systematic scientific literature review, to consider any impact that their data may have on the overall assessment of the benefits and risks of a medicinal product,” she said. A spokesman for Arnica declined to comment on Dr Donegan’s remarks. When contacted by The Times yesterday Dr Donegan rejected that she had expressed scepticism about vaccines. She said: “Are Vaccines of any benefit? I think that vaccines are of benefit to those people who, after being given full information about the pros and cons of the diseases and the pros and cons of the vaccines, make the informed decision to have the vaccines.” She also rejected comparing the tactics of the WHO to that of Nazi Germany, saying: “I found it distressing that the wording of the 2017 WHO document regarding vaccine hesitants on how to persuade people to accept vaccination was almost word for word what is written in Mein Kampf.” She denied defending Andrew Wakefield and said that she had given other examples of possible “label libels” such as “middle class” or “Irish”. The Times has previously reported that Dr Donegan told followers how to forge their children’s medical records to trick schools into thinking they have been inoculated. She claimed her remarks were taken out of context. “I and other concerned health professionals are trying to help, including ensuring parents can have independent, objective, unbiased advice. I do not advise parents to not vaccinate nor do I advise that in my capacity as a medical doctor,” she said at the time.