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.
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