According to Newsweek, Dr Sherri Tenpenny is one of 12 people who between them are responsible for 65% of all vaccine disinformation on social media. Nevertheless she was invited to testify before the Ohio House Health Committee.
The Committee was taking evidence concerning Bill 248 which would make it unlawful for an employer to require an employee to have an anti-Covid vaccination and would allow individuals to decline a vaccine on the grounds of medical conditions, reasons of conscience such as religion and natural immunity.
True to form, Tenpenny didn't pass up the opportunity to spread yet more baseless misinformation including the claims that:
- The vaccines contain metal which turns people into magnets. She cited 'the Internet' as her source, claiming to have seen photos of people with spoons stuck to their face!
There is no metal in the vaccines and even if there were, it would not be enough to magnetise an entire person. - The vaccines modify your Genes and so will upset God.
The vaccines do not change a person's DNA which is contained in the nuclei of the cells. The mRNA vaccines insert RNA into the cell cytoplasm where it manufactures part of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, so provoking a response of the immune system to produce antibodies and 'program' T-cells to respond to future infections. The antibodies bind to the viral spike proteins preventing them opening a cell to gain entry and causing them to clump together so they can be destroyed by phagocytic blood cells. The RNA does not enter the cell nuclei so cannot modify the DNA. Unlike retroviruses, the vaccines do not include the enzyme reverse transcriptase, so could not modify the DNA even if they could gain access to it. - She then resorted to playing on the religious fears and superstitions of people, telling them the people who administered the vaccines would have to answer to God for their interference with the DNA he gave us. She asked the Health Committee:
For those of you that say that you are Christians, what will your life review look like at the end of your life? Will the Lord say to you something like you coerced people to be injected with this gene modification technology that irreversibly disrupts your chromosomes?
Whatever your beliefs, it is a lie to call the vaccine 'gene modification technology' (see 2 above). Perhaps Sherri Tenpenny's god doesn't mind that she is misleading people with lies in order to discourage people from protecting themselves against a deadly virus, or that she is knowingy breaking her oath to first do no harm*. Bearing false witness to a Heath Committee appears to be an exemption to which she feels entitled. - The vaccine is untested so those being vaccinated are participants in an experiment. She told the Committee:
If a person is so crippled by fear over a virus that has a documented death rate of less than 1 percent globally and they want to bow to an untested pharmaceutical product out of fear that needs to be their decision.
All the vaccines have been through rigorous double blind clinical trials and safety checks. Had this not been so, they would have been available from about the middle of 2020. What took the time was the clinical trials in places where there was a sufficiently high infection rate for the control group to produce a statistically significant comparisons with the experimental group, then for the data to be analysed and vetted by the licensing authorities. Frightening people with the notion that they are being given an untried and untested vaccine, the effects of which are unknown, is a lie of the first order, and one which is easily debunked. She may have chosen to ignore the facts but that doesn't make her false claims into true claims.
Last February, Out of the 50 US states, Ohio ranked 35th in terms of the number of adult who had had at least on dose of the vaccine. A survey by Ohio University found that 40% of Ohioans did not intend to get vaccinated. According to Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center (13 June, 2021), Ohio has had 1,106,796 cases of Covid-19, of which 20,091 have died. Only 38.69% of the population has been fully protected with two doses of the vaccines.
The number of daily deaths has recently begun to rise again in Ohio:
*As a physician, Dr Sherri Tenpenny will have taken the Hippocratic Oath which includes the promise to 'first do no harm'..
I’m so ashamed to say I live in Ohio. The Republicans have super majorities in the legislator and control every major state office. I live in rural northwest Ohio. Virtually every officeholder is a Republican. So #%^*+# depressing.
ReplyDeleteI remember a day when Ohio was a moderate/centrist state. Those days are gone. God, Guns, and Trump — that’s what Ohio is known for now. In rural northwest Ohio, almost 60%of people have not been vaccinated. We are a pandemic waiting to happen.😢
Personally, I think a physician like Sherri Tenpenny who deliberately spreads dangerously false information and so puts people at risk, should be struck off and prevented from practicing, especially if she gives bad advice to a patient in consultation.
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