The last couple of posts have been relatively long and taken up more of my time than usual, given that they required me to read and analyze some papers, one of which claimed the discovery of a hitherto unknown “organ,” the others of which abused complexity theory, quantum physics, and evolution to claim “nonduality” and a sentient universe. So it was with amusement and some eagerness that I discovered a video that showed one of the dumbest arguments against vaccines ever. Are you ready for…Brittney Kara?

I’ll start by just saying that I can’t believe I’ve never heard of Brittney Kara. She’s an antivaxer, and I thought I had heard of pretty much every major antivaxer. On the other hand, perhaps she isn’t a major antivaxer, although she does describe herself on her Amazon.com profile thusly:

Brittney Kara is an Author, Certified Master NLP Practitioner, Hypnotherapist, Nutrition Coach and Mother. Her mission is to inspire people to take control of their health, search for truth, live life with passion, and discover the greatness within them. Brittney specializes in teaching people how to detoxify their lives through cleansing and super foods. Brittney lives in Los Angeles with her family and speaks at various Nutrition and Wellness seminars across California.

So many red flags of quackery! “Detox” and “cleansing“? Check. “Superfoods“? Double check. “NLP”? Most definitely. (Neurolinguistic programming is quackery.) And I’m not even counting her speaking appearances at “nutrition and wellness seminars.”

So what did Kara say about vaccines that got my attention? Well, take a look at this video, edited down to the key statements by The Real Truther:

This is the sort of video that makes one’s brain melt from the stupidity flowing from it. Here’s what she said:

I just decided to just google what the bible says about vaccines. There’s nothing in the bible that talks about vaccines. I just want you to think about that. So if God knew in the future that he was going to create these amazing things that were going to be the best scientific advancements, like oh, my God, they’re so great, why isn’t there anything, any inkling of talk about these things called vaccinations coming into being later to save people? If that was really God’s plan and they’re so amazing, then why isn’t it in there at all? Maybe there’s a chapter where they talk about something like an injection, like this health injection, right? Like, why didn’t God talk about that if he knew that it was going to come and save the world?

Wow. Just wow. What else can I say. I could, as The Real Truther does, list a whole lot of amazing scientific discoveries and products of technology that are also not mentioned anywhere in the Bible, but that would be too easy. Actually, no it wouldn’t. Nothing’s ever too easy for Orac, at least not when he feels that he needs a break. I could mention computers, antibiotics, television, automobiles, airplanes, modern pharmaceuticals, the Internet, and more. None of these things are mentioned in the Bible because even the most recent books of the Bible are nearly two thousand years ago.

Besides, there’s so much more to Kara’s antivaccine lunacy than just her statement that there’s nothing in the Bible about vaccines. Behold:

I will admit right here that I didn’t watch the entire video. Rather, I skimmed and stopped at parts that were particularly egregiously stupid. For instance, very early in the video, she says:

Now, I already knew that there’s absolutely nothing in the Bible about vaccinations, but there’s multiple scriptures about honoring the body and keeping the body clean, and in old Biblical times blood is sacred. Blood is sacred throughout the Bible, and there’s so many chapters that talk about…in the first testament people were always cleansing the blood, and there were sacrifices and all sorts of stuff.

She repeatedly asks questions along the lines of:

Like, if that was really God’s plan, and they’re so amazing, then why isn’t it in there at all. I mean, not even close.

Um, perhaps because much of the Bible was written by Bronze Age people, who knew nothing of germ theory and still thought that disease was due to evil spirits or God’s disfavor, maybe. Just sayin’.

Elsewhere in the video she says:

I really believe that believing in vaccines is a mental disorder, and I believe that people are brainwashed with this disorder to believe in vaccines.

I kid you not. That’s what she said. If you don’t believe me, I assure you that you don’t have to listen to more than the first couple of minutes of her video before you find her statement. You’ll find even more than that. For instance:

And I’m also fascinated and sickened by what’s happening in our modern day culture, and I’m constantly bombarded by seeing children who are being abused and murdered by the pharmaceutical industry, and so many people who are being harmed by this industry are Christians, and it blows my mind that we haven’t connected the evilness of the vaccine world to the pureness of God’s world.

At least she’s honest. No “I’m not ‘antivaccine’; I’m a vaccine safety advocate” dodges and equivocating for our Brittney Kara! Oh, no!

Not surprisingly, she pulls the whole “vaccines as religion” gambit. At one point she goes on and on about how you “can’t question vaccines”; “vaccines are good”; and likens questioning vaccines to “blasphemy.” She then goes on:

But it’s so demonic, guys. First of all, when you realize that God said zero about vaccines, he taught about nutrition and our perfectly amazing immune systems, which are our natural vaccine system, which is your best fighting chance against any disease or illness. To think that we are above that is the most ridiculous, disgusting concept, and it’s worshiping false idols, worshiping this thing that is not from God, that God did not create, to somehow heal you or make you better. The second thing is that there’s nothing in the Bible, really, about pharmaceuticals, except in the old, old version of the Bible there was a word called “pharmakeia””…it’s the root word of the word today that we have, which is “pharmaceuticals.” And do you know what that was defined as in the Bible? Sorcery. Pharmaceuticals in the Bible, that Greek word, where that Greek word came from, were considered sorcery, and it was not good, and God did not want us to do it.

From there, she goes on to the whole bit about how “you cannot be pro-life and vaccinate” because of the “aborted fetal tissue” in vaccines” nonsense that some antivaxers claim. She even says that they are using “aborted humans” to make vaccines, even referring to them as “little bits of humans.” She even says that “metabolically, this is cannibalism.” This is one of the more ridiculous antivaccine talking points.

I had heard of the claim that “pharmakeia” in the Bible is something that is condemned and that that means that modern pharmaceuticals are evil or even sorcery. It’s a distortion of what’s actually in the Bible that some sects use to justify not using medicine and instead relying on prayer for healing (e.g., this rant and this other rant). Apparently, the word “pharmakeia” actually means potion makers who produced potions used to produce hallucinations to facilitate contacting the spirit world, not physicians using drugs or even herbal medicine to treat disease. If Ms. Kara really believes that pharmacueticals are all evil sorcery because the Bible tells her so (even though it doesn’t), I suggest that she eschew it. The problem is that she’ll also deny it to her children.

I also suggest that, because they aren’t mentioned in the Bible, Ms. Kara stop using computers, smartphones, Facebook, and the Internet, thereby sparing us further examples of her brain dead ignorant rants, like this one that she did for the crew behind the antivaccine propaganda film VAXXED:

Because of course Ms. Kara is with VAXXED. But don’t you dare say that the VAXXED crew is antivaccine!