The Dwoskin
Family Foundation has for a long time served as a generous source of a substantial part of the funding for various anti-vaccine organizations and anti-vaccine activist
efforts. Indeed, the foundation has contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to organizations like the National
Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) and Generation Rescue, provided substantial funding for
Leslie Manookian, Kendall Nelson and Chris
Pillard’s antivaccine propaganda movie The Greater Good, and generously supported antivaccine
activist Chris Shaw’s group at the University of British
Columbia – including 125 000 dollars to cover lab costs for the “Aluminum Toxicity Project” to enable it to reach the
conclusions the Dwoskins wanted it to reach. There are more details about the
foundation’s funding of anti-vaccine efforts here.
In 2013,
the Dwoskins – Albert and Claire – also founded the organization Children’s Medical Safety Research Institute (CMSRI) to streamline their anti-vaccine efforts: the organization governed the
Childrens’ Medical Safety Research Institute Endowment Fund, which was set up
to provide “research grants” to groups and individuals willing to
coordinate their results with what the Dwoskins thought the results should be,
in particular research on what the Dwoskins determined, prior to research, to
be “vaccine induced brain and immune dysfunction”; the CMSRI was founded because “[a]s
a private foundation, the Dwoskin Family Foundation was limited to how it could
raise and use donated funds. Laws governing tax-exempt organizations made it
difficult to dedicate 100% of all donations to philanthropic [i.e. antivaccine]
causes. In many situations, especially when dealing with international research
organizations, donations were heavily taxed.” And the list of people who
have received funding from the CMSRI is long, and includes most of the usual
suspects involved in anti-vaccine junk research and misinformation, such as Yehuda
Shoenfeld (Israel), who invented the
made-up, allegedly vaccine-associated autoimmune disease ASIA, Christopher Shaw (Canada), Lucija Tomljenovic (Canada) (more on Dwoskin’s
funding and Shaw & Tomljenovic’s research here), Christopher “no government
funded this research [because the Dwoskins did]” Exley (UK), Anthony Mawson, Martha Herbert, glyphosate loon and conspiracy theorist Stephanie
Seneff, David & Mark Geier (no less) and Brian Hooker, who have used to funds to produce
a string of strikingly flawed and later retracted papers and
articles in predatory journals, such as this one by Anthony Mawson (and funding from the CMSRI).
There is more information on CMSRI and their efforts here, as well as here – that the Dwoskins have also been
substantial contributors to political campaigns (e.g. Hilary Clinton’s 2016
presidential bid) at least ensured that their preferred semi-anonymity as
antivaccine activsts became hard to maintain. The institute also ran its own blog, where people like conspiracy
theorist Celeste McGovern could write about how there is a “conspiracy”
to “suppress” anti-vaccine studies by retracting them due to obvious and
demonstrable methodological flaws and dishonesty. Fortunately, the CMSRI closed
down a couple of years ago after Claire and Albert got divorced.
Claire
Dwoskin has herself served on the board of the NVIC. And according to her, she
is, like most antivaxxers, officially “not antivaccine but pro-safe vaccines”, as illustrated e.g. by her
comment to a segment John Stossel aired on
his daughter’s struggle with pertussis: “What his daughter went through is
NOTHING compared to what the families of autistic children go through every day
of their lives. No disease can match this record of human devastation. Vaccines
are a holocaust of poison on our children’s brains and immune
systems. Shame on you all” (our emphasis). Spoken like a true advocate for safe vaccines (and for
the record: vaccines demonstrably do not cause autism) … heck,
Claire Dwoskin’s email address is “novaccine4me@XXXXX.com”.
Notably, throughout
its existence, the CMSRI and the Dwoskin Family Foundation provided substantial
funding for efforts to paint vaccines as unsafe and no funding whatsoever for
the development of safe vaccines. Rather, the CMSRI “firmly believes”, falsely, that vaccines are “significant
causal factors in the onset of Alzheimer’s disease, autism, autoimmune diseases
and other serious chronic health conditions”. In 2011, the Dwoskins did
arrange what they called a “Vaccine Safety Conference” at a luxury resort in Jamaica, where the talks included “Rethinking the germ theory” and Andrew Wakefield himself speaking about “Autism
& Vaccines: a Research Strategy Focused on Cause”; there was nothing
about safe vaccines.
And CMSRI had
a long history of promoting demonstrably false antivaccine misinformation. With
regard to the largely mythical increase in the prevalence of ASD
based on an increase in ASD diagnoses, the center – presumably Claire
Dwoskin herself – falsely stated that “[t]he reason for this increase
may be linked to certain ingredients found in vaccines, specifically aluminum
formulated vaccines” (nope)
and that “current research is suggesting that the use of vaccines are [sic]
playing a role in its development.” “current research”, of course, means antivaxx
rants; real research unambigously shows
that vaccines play no such role.
Then there are the toxins gambits,
of course; according to CMSRI,
but (predictably) not reality,
“[c]ertain toxic ingredients
in vaccines have not been individually tested for safety such as aluminum adjuvants,
polysorbate 80
and Thimerosal”.
Now, the
CMSRI fortunately closed down when the Albert and Claire started their divorce
proceedings, and among the Dwoskins, we have focused on Claire insofar as
Albert has apparently come to his senses: “After seeing a great deal of
evidence, I have concluded that concerns about the safety of vaccination are
unfounded. The best way to protect children is to make sure they have all their
vaccinations as recommended by scientists, doctors and other healthcare
professionals. […] I regret my participation in the CMSRI’s work and disagree
with her [Claire’s] views on the dangers of vaccination.” Good for him. Claire
Dwoskin, however, appears unrepentant and proud of her antivaccine efforts,
while marketing herself as “a child health advocate, philanthropist and
leader of an international effort to address the increasing incidence of
chronic illness and disability, including autoimmune diseases, and age related
neurological diseases”.
Diagnosis:
Although she has hopefully lost access to nearly endless funding for her
conspiracy theory-fuelled anti-wellbeing projects, Claire Dwoskin remains a
deranged conspiracy theorist and a major danger to everything that is nice and
good in the world.