#2737: Guggie Daly [pseudonym]

Despite increased popularity of anti-vaccine messaging, antivaccine views are still widely regarded with the suspicion and ridicule they deserve. One tried-and-tested method for changing people’s minds, however, is: Newspeak. If you can’t change the facts, obscure them by inventing a new nomenclature. That, at least, was the motivation for antivaccine lunatic Guggie Daly in an article (‘Vacctivism Terminology: How to Empower Instead of Cower’) she wrote for the insane rot of pseudo-religious pseudoscience and denialism Natural Mother Magazine: Instead of calling your kids “unvaccinated,” wrote Daly, use “vaccine-free” or – to maximize the potential for being misleading – say that your child “has an intact immune system”; and instead of “vaccine-preventable diseases”, use “vaccine-associated diseases” (Daly denies, against all evidence, and all of reality, that vaccines effectively prevent disease). And of course: instead of calling yourself “anti-vaxxers” – a term that media manipulation has made so “negative” – use “vaccine safety advocates”: That, by the way, is an Orwellian ploy as old as the antivaccine movement itself. “I encourage transparency and better ethical standards from pharmaceutical companies,” added Daly while encouraging precisely the opposite for her own group of fervent denialists.

 

Of course, redecorating the map doesn’t change the terrain, and in reality, vaccines were and are safe and effective. But Daly and her ilk have left reality behind a long time ago. As Daly mistakenly sees it, vaccines “are an optional, experimental product based on an unproven theory. Informed, consenting adults can choose to take them if they want. But it’s medical malpractice to force them onto non-consenting children. Instead of people demanding that vaccine companies, doctors and the government prove that this medication is safe, effective, necessary treatment in our children [which we do demand, and the demand has been thoroughly met], we take on undue responsibility to prove that vaccines are ineffective, unsafe and unnecessary. Completely backwards.”

 

As for Daly herself, ‘Guggie Daly’ is apparently the pseudonym of a Missouri-based “mommy blogger” who has, apparently, achieved some popularity in antivaccine movements for her (deranged) posts on vaccines and home birth. There is a brief portrait of her here.

 

Diagnosis: Absolutely insane antivaccine conspiracy theorist who has elevated her antivaccine views and her ‘crunchiness’ to a New Age-religious identity. She is garbage, and anyone who takes advice from her is garbage, too.