Pediatricians Suing Anti-Vaxxers For Social Media Posts

The war between the staunch anti-vaccine movement and the staunch pro-vaccine movement is getting rough. And rougher by the day. Now pediatricians are filing defamation lawsuits against people who they feel “attack” them with social media posts.Dr. Eve Switzer of Enid, Oklahoma, is a pediatrician who’s all in with a lawsuit. She’s accusing Oklahoma ophthalmologist Jim Meehan and Oklahomans for Vaccine and Health Choice of making a false claim about her practice. She says the group accused her of not providing informed consent to parents about vaccinations. Switzer says that’s not true.

“Anti-vaxxers have gotten out of control,” Switzer told NBC News.

“As a pediatrician, the way that it has affected me personally, my practice and my staff, even, I really felt like I needed to have some sort of remedy and my only remedy was a legal remedy.”

Unfortunately, incidents such as this can cause tears at the fibers of freedom of speech. And that could be the point, depending on all the details of the lawsuit, which we don’t have. What we do know is that shutting down free speech is typically a precursor to complete subjugation. And we do know that any hesitancy with vaccines enacts an immediate label of “anti-vaxxer.” Even saying you don’t like flu shots causes the universal label to be applied. If the extreme anti-vaccine movement is bothersome, so is the extreme pro-vaccine side for deploying such identity tactics as a way to scare off even the slightest bit of hesitancy. The goal, of course, is to eliminate any semblance of questions from both old and new vaccines. And vaccines we’ve not yet even heard of.

No one is arguing that all persons don’t have the right to protect their reputations in a rightful manner, however, this is a slippery slope. And most certainly, it should work both ways. The deeper concern is using the law in a manner that silences the herd.