I semi-regularly write about Mike Adams, the internet entrepreneur who got his start selling Y2K scams 20 years ago, moved on to “natural health” grift, and now runs an online empire dedicated to everything from alternative medicine to various conspiracy theories ranging from QAnon to claims that “holistic practitioners” are being murdered by big pharma, to just about any conspiracy theory that arises in the fever swamps of 4Chan. Of late, Adams hasn’t been very happy, as his Alex Jones-like screeds have gotten him banned from YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms, while new updates to the Google search algorithm have massively deprioritized quacks like Joe Mercola and him. Even before that, the FBI had looked into Adams’ activities when he published what sounded like a hit lit of GMO defenders called Monsanto Collaborators, and Google had delisted him (briefly) once before. These days, I tend not to write about Adams as much, at least not his content as much as his reaction to efforts of social media companies to slow the spread of the sort of misinformation that he churns out in an unending stream, but occasionally he writes something so out there, so nutty (even for him), that it attracts my attention and I consider it worth commenting on because people just don’t believe there are propagandists who will go this far. So it was that yesterday I was drawn to a video by Adams called Vaccine Holocaust, which appeared in an article by Adams himself entitled ALERT for humanity: The “perfect storm” for a vaccine HOLOCAUST is now here, subtly enough, with a graphic showing a hand holding a syringe in front of a massive pile of skulls (just like in The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day):

Now, I know what you’re thinking: Why is Orac bothering with this? This isn’t news. This isn’t the first time that an antivaxer has likened vaccination to the Holocaust or referred to a “vaccine holocaust.” Far from it! “Vaccine holocaust” is an all-too-common trope used by antivaxers ranging from even Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. himself to Dr. Bob Sears to Del Bigtree to any number of antivaxers, some of whom even misappropriate the symbols of the Holocaust to falsely liken themselves to Jews being marched to the gas chambers in Nazi Germany. All of this is, of course, quite true and something that I like to point out to antivaxers who claim that they’re “not antivaccine” but rather “pro-vaccine safety” or “pro-informed consent” or “pro-choice about vaccines” but have also in the past referred to a “vaccine holocaust.” Still, I think it’s worth checking out what Adams said and wrote for one very simple reason. The average person, who’s basically pro-vaccine not out of any deep knowledge but because she trusts her doctor and health authorities, has no idea just how far antivaxers will go in all seriousness. Sure, in Adams’ case it might be part of his grift, but he knows his audience. He knows what they want to hear and what they believe. He knows that any conspiracy theory is better if you add aliens. That’s why he takes those beliefs and goes as far as he can with them to produce verbiage like this:

The Holocaust of history saw the coordinated, government-run murder of six million Jews, capping off one of the most horrifying chapters of human history. Yet another holocaust is being repeated right now by the vaccine industry, also run by fascist government much like the Third Reich. Except this holocaust’s impact goes far beyond six million people; it involves the maiming, injury and deaths of hundreds of millions of people around the world, spanning at least three decades. Just like Adolf Hitler criminalized anyone criticizing his authoritarian regime, the vaccine deep state in America — led by the criminal CDC — has achieved the coordinated censorship of all criticism of vaccines across every tech platform of today: Google, Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, Twitter and others. All channels containing content or videos that dare point out the government-admitted statistics of children being killed by vaccines — quarterly stats are readily available via VAERS.HHS.gov — are systematically de-platformed and censored.

As I said before, it’s all about the grift with Mike Adams, and he really, really doesn’t like that Google’s algorithm adjustments have caused his website traffic to plummet, thus threatening his core business. He really, really doesn’t like it that Facebook has kicked him off, eliminating a major avenue to recruit new marks. He really, really doesn’t like it that YouTube kicked him off, eliminating a lucrative source of income derived from monetizing the videos he produces with advertising and not having to pay for bandwidth to stream his videos. (He clearly views this as so important that he created his own video streaming platform for “free expression”; i.e, spreading conspiracy theories and misinformation without penalty.)

Even though it’s all about the grift, Adams still taps into what a lot of antivaxers believe. Portraying himself (and his fellow antivaxers) as persecuted by the government, big pharma, and the like. The “vaccine holocaust” is a trope that antivaxers freely speak about among themselves but tend to be wise enough to know that it’s a concept that generally won’t be received kindly by anyone who’s not an antivaxer. I like to point to the example of RFK Jr. Here’s what he said six years ago, as related by the late Dan Olmstead, who, until his death, was editor of that wretched hive of scum and antivaccine quackery, Age of Autism:

Each of us will have our highlights from last weekend’s extraordinary Autism One gathering in Chicago, but for me it was Bobby Kennedy Jr. saying, “To my mind this is like the Nazi death camps.” “This” is the imprisonment of so many of our children in the grip of autism. Talk about cutting through the neurodiverse claptrap! When Bobby Kennedy says something, it gives “cover,” in a sense, for others to use the same kind of language and frame the debate in the same kind of way. (Language that reminds me of David Kirby’s phrase, “the shuttered hell” of autism, in Evidence of Harm.) Those who can advocate for themselves should do so. Move right along, please. Those who cannot have advocates like their parents and RFK Jr. who are sick of mincing words.

And, lest you don’t yet get the reference to a “vaccine holocaust”:

The enablers may not belong in Nuremburg, but they do belong in jail, Bobby said. “I would do a lot to see Paul Offit and all these good people behind bars,” he said, after listing Offit’s litany of lies and profit. Just to make sure people got the point, he returned to it in his speech. “Is it hyperbole to say they should be in jail? They should be in jail and the key should be thrown away.”

Amusingly, apparently RFK Jr. was none too pleased that Dan Olmstead had related in public what he had said among an audience of true believers, and the AoA article was promptly taken down, so fast, in fact, that it was never archived by the Wayback Machine at Archive.org and contemporaneous sources, like this blog and Discover, are the only record of what Dan Olmstead wrote about what RFK Jr. said.

Of course, we have other examples. For instance, as I noted in 2015, RFK Jr. said:

But some parents fear information about the hazards of vaccines has been suppressed, largely because of what they call the pharmaceutical industry’s influence over health officials. Many parents believe their children have been damaged by vaccines. When Kennedy asked the crowd of a few hundred viewers how many parents had a child injured by vaccines, numerous hands went up. “They get the shot, that night they have a fever of a hundred and three, they go to sleep, and three months later their brain is gone,” Kennedy said. “This is a holocaust, what this is doing to our country.”

Pretty vile, right? So Mike Adams is doing nothing more than riffing on a theme that’s been rampant among antivaxers for almost as long as I can remember since I first started paying attention to the antivaccine movement, that of the “vaccine holocaust.” He just cranks the vaccine holocaust up to 11, with a major dose of projection before he gets to the aliens and people dropping dead in the streets, like in The Omega Man:

Defenders of the scientific static quo claim that science is “self correcting.” But there can be no self correction when no voices of dissent are allowed to be heard. Vaccines have become a cult-like “faith” matter across the scientific community, where total belief in vaccines is required at all times, or you will be fired from your job, stripped of your medical license, isolated from research funding, denounced by the medical establishment and censored by the tech giants. No dissent is allowed to be voiced, which means vaccines aren’t “scientific” at all. They represent an absolutist, cult-like fanaticism that smacks of deep intellectual corruption, not rational thought. No one is allowed to criticize vaccines. No whistleblowers are covered in the media. No investigative findings can be shared on social media. The cover-up is now complete, and the vaccine industry answers to no one, but hopes to violate everyone. Mass death has now descended upon us, and it’s all being carried out in the name of “science.”

I have…questions. First of all, why would the vaccine industry want to do all these horrible things? Profit alone can’t explain it. Power? I don’t know that that could explain it either. The projection, of course, is that Adams accuses science advocates and those trying to refute antivaccine misinformation of a “cult-like faith” that will brook no dissent, but that sounds far more like the alternative medicine beliefs that tend to undergird antivaccine beliefs than any sort of science. Still, again I consider this a useful exercise to examine how far antivaxers will go in their rhetoric. I’ve described the violent rhetoric of antivaxers before, but this goes beyond violent into the apocalyptic.

At this point, I was almost afraid to watch the video, but I consider it a duty to my readers; so in I plunged to see what Adams considers to be the “vaccine holocaust.” Adams doesn’t disappoint. Right in the first scene of the video, which is in black and white to let you know Adams is serious, ma-an, we see him intoning in the first sentence:

If you line up to be injected, you will find yourself very likely dead before very long, and this is the whole point. Vaccines have become weaponized. They have become a kill switch vector for humanity.

Again, so…many…questions. For instance, if this were true, where are all the vaccine-caused deaths? I’ve “lined up to be injected” many times, and I’m not dead. Am I just lucky? Everyone I know has “lined up to be injected” many times. They’re all alive, and most of them are in pretty good health. Maybe he’ll explain. But why would vaccine manufacturers want to make a product that kills? After all, there’s no repeat business if its customers die off after using their product. Adams has an “explanation” (if you can call it that):

Remember, the globalists don’t want humans to be around, at least not most of us. They want to depopulate the planet by 90%.

Excuse me, but doesn’t that seem…counterproductive? Economic growth depends on population growth. Countries with declining populations generally have economic problems. Also, who’s going to do all the heavy labor for the Illuminati elite billionaire overlords if 90% of the population is gone? Who’s going to make their lattes?

Adams doesn’t waste any time after this going full on “vaccine holocaust” mongering. First, he goes on a rant about how social media companies are trying to suppress the “truth” or any criticism of vaccines. Of course, it’s not criticism of vaccines that they are trying to control, it’s pseudoscientific misinformation about vaccines. There’s a difference, but of course to Mike Adams they are one and the same. This suppression of information, according to Adams, has cleared the way for vaccine manufacturers to put “anything they want” into vaccines, including radioisotopes, cancer-causing viruses, and live full strength viruses instead of weakened viruses. Hilariously, he also claims that doctors, pharma, tech companies, and the like are “colluding with the vaccine deep state” in order to bring about this vaccine holocaust.

Hilariously, Adams also invokes the Vaccine Court, claiming that it’s a secret court, which led me to ask: If it’s so secret, how come I get to read its decisions in PDF form and blog about them? If it’s so secret, why does the government publish its proceedings and decisions and list how much compensation has been paid out? (Adams also claims that the Vaccine Court places itself above the Supreme Court, which is utterly ridiculous.) I also can’t help but ask: If, as Adams claims, the Vaccine Court receives almost no publicity, why have there been so many stories about, say, the Autism Omnibus, Hannah Poling, a child’s family who was compensated despite the lack of evidence because the child died of SIDS after a vaccine. In any event, Adams claims that there’s no method of reporting a bad batch of vaccines and that all vaccines must be worshiped as being “absolutely good” and “absolutely effective” with “absolutely no risks at all.” To Adams, you must have “absolute obedience” to the “vaccine fraud.” (And, no, Mr. Adams, vaccines are not like tobacco.)

When Adams gets to the “why” of the “vaccine holocaust,” predictably his explanation is muddled. He can’t help but talk about abortion and “after birth abortion” (the latter of which does not exist) by the “medical industry” and then claim that the “vaccine holocaust” is really the use of children as human guinea pigs, even going so far as to say that the “CDC is to human health what the Third Reich was to human freedom.” Oddly enough, though, I had a hard time figuring out what this “medical experimentation” is supposedly about. What are the hypotheses being tested? What, exactly, is pharma trying to discover by “experimenting” on children in Africa (something Adams emphasizes without attribution)? I kept waiting to find out and kept being disappointed. I mean, if you’re going to do an experiment, there must be something you’re trying to find out, right?

Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your point of view) Adams does eventually get around to trying to explain the “why” of the “vaccine holocaust.” Not surprisingly, it involves Nazis. After an extended riff on the Holocaust and how Hitler merged the power of the state, industry, and science to carry out mass murder, in which Adams likened Hitler’s desire for total control and the elimination of all opposition to the vaccine industry and the Democratic Party (I kid you not), he then goes on to claim that vaccines are a vector for mass murder. Who’s going to be the victims? Adams claims that “globalists” want to eliminate “useless eaters” (just like Nazi Germany) and “sheeple” stupid enough to line up for vaccines. These people will be “culled in a kill switch vaccination program.” No, seriously. That’s what Adams claims.

Next up, Adams claims that as a prelude to the vaccine holocaust, there will be controlled outbreaks, releases of bioengineered viruses, citing the Disneyland measles outbreak of 2015 as a test run designed to prod lawmakers to pass laws to require vaccines. (It didn’t work very well, apparently, given that only California did so.) The idea is that this will be repeated worldwide, and everyone will be required to be vaccinated, except that (of course) “globalists” will be given something that gives them immunity to what’s in the required vaccines. Again, I…have…questions. For instance, does Adams really think a scheme like this, even if it were scientifically possible, could be kept secret for long? What about those high up enough to be given the antidote to the “vaccine bioweapon” who have family and friends who aren’t high enough up the food chain to get the antidote? Does anyone really think that each and every one of these “globalists” would stay silent about the antidote that will protect them from death?

In any event, in Adams’ “vaccine holocaust,” the vaccines will have long latency, such that the vaccinated will spread the bioengineered virus around to all their family, friends, and coworkers. Months later, he envisions people dropping dead in the streets of the virus like a scene out of the early 1970s post-apocalypse movie The Omega Man, at which point there will be calls for a second round of vaccinations, which will kill more people after an even shorter period of time, days to weeks.

But why? Why would “globalists” want to kill 90% of the population off? Finally, we get an explanation, such as it is. According to Adams, it’s to save the world. In the meantime, they’ll develop AI and robots to do the work of all those billions of people dying off from their vaccine holocaust due to their vaccine bioweapon. Adams’ contempt for those who accept the science showing that vaccines are safe and effective comes through, too. Multiple times, he states that the “globalists” think that anyone who’s “stupid enough” to “line up to be injected with unknown substances” is “too stupid to be a part of the future of humanity.” He even calls them “sheeple” at least once!

It gets even better, though. Adams winds up by claiming that the “globalists” have actually interacted with extraterrestrials more advanced than our civilization and have come to realize that earth must compete and expand with a cosmic economy. Thus the “globalists” need to redirect resources into science, colonization technologies, and defense. Instead of spending to keep “useless eaters” alive, the “globalists” believe, according to Adams, that these resources need to be redirected to survive contact with advanced extraterrestrial civilizations, compete with extraterrestrials, and ultimately be part of a “cosmic ecosystem of intelligent beings.” I kid you not. That’s really what he is claiming, and it brings us back to the “experiments.” Supposedly the reason that these vaccine bioweapons are tested on Africans is so that the “globalists” can “see what happens” someplace where mass death is less likely to be noticed. When the mass death occurs beyond Africa, Adams speculates, it’ll all be blamed on climate change. Again, I kid you not.

I’ll finish by reiterating that it’s all about the grift for Adams. He might or might not be a true believer (it’s sometimes hard to tell), but he is a grifter whose goal is to profit. This becomes apparent in the final segment of the video, where Adams tells you how to survive the coming vaccine holocaust. According to him, first, don’t get vaccinated because if you do you’ll be dead within a year or two. However, that’s no guarantee, because you could still catch the virus from someone who was vaccinated. So what to do? Well, second, you should “shore up your immune system.” How? Use natural “immune boosters,” traditional Chinese medicine, and move out of the city to get away from the vaccinated. (Not surprisingly, Adams sells lots of “natural immune boosters” and survivalist gear.)

While it is true that Mike Adams is, first and foremost, about the grift, I still think it informative to look at what sorts of conspiracy theories that he’s using to sell his product and brand. The idea that vaccines are devised to kill, not save, and that there will be a “vaccine holocaust” might sound crazy. It is certainly easy to laugh heartily at the utter ridiculousness of Adams’ conspiracy theory. (Seriously, dude, aliens? You had to add aliens to the vaccine holocaust conspiracy theory?) However, Adams is savvy. He’s only taking a common trope used in antivaccine circles and cranking it up to 11. If people like RFK Jr., Dr. Bob Sears, Del Bigtree, and more antivaxers than I can remember weren’t likening mandated vaccines and autism to the holocaust, there wouldn’t be material for Adams to work with to add the additional elements of a globalist conspiracy that wants to depopulate the earth through a “kill switch” vaccine holocaust, so that the elite of humanity can devote resources to surviving first contact and joining a community of advanced civilizations in the cosmos.

Finally, don’t tell me they’re “not antivaccine.”