At the end of the last year, two regional anonymous websites published that “pharmaceutical companies’ contract killers murdered another holistic doctor” because “he has been warning on the risk of vaccines.” Not only is this story utterly fake but it is also highly distasteful.
“The news” has appeared on an anonymous website Isitinom protiv laži and we have already established that this website is prone to publishing fake news. According to its visit-counter, this website had been read 7,889 times.
“Prof. Dr. Louis Cantilena is just a recent example in the long sequence of doctors and holistic healers who were murdered in the last two years. As we found, Dr. Cantilena is the 83rd doctor who has been killed by pharmaceutical companies’ contract killers. Professor Cantilena, who warned on the danger of vaccines produced by pharmaceutical companies with the aim of depopulation of the world, died in an aeroplane crash together with his daughter, which took place in a forested area approximately 40 miles Northwest from Cincinnati. Dr. Cantilena was a professor at Uniformed Services University for Natural Sciences in Bethesda and was well known for his extraordinary views on Big Pharma. In his lectures, he has been pointing out that mandatory vaccines which corrupt politicians are trying to impose are actually part of a pharmaceutical plan for enormous money-making and depopulation”.
But first, to clarify, Louis R. Cantilena wasn’t “a holistic healer” as it was stated in this article. Cantilena used to be a doctor of Clinical Pharmacology and Toxicology, and those were respective courses he lectured at the Military Medical Academy in Maryland (Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences) – therefore not at the “University for Natural Sciences” as the report initially stated.
Professor spent a great deal of his life in federal institutions such as National Institute of Health and Food and Drug Administration and not only that he has never dealt with any form of “alternative medicine”, but he has not been a promoter of conspiracy theories about “corrupt politicians planning to depopulate the Earth”. A statement that Cantilena was in conflict with pharmaceutical corporations is even more absurd since he was a member of the advisory board at a company called 3D Communications, which works with pharmaceutical companies – specifically to prepare applications from these companies to the Food and Drug Administration that issues selling licences.
Cantilena was also a member of the Civil Air Patrol, and he was the one piloting the aeroplane which crashed in December.
These data are available on the websites of institutions that Cantilena had worked for, leaving no doubt that his professional career had nothing to do with “holistic healing”, nor was he “well known for his extraordinary views on Big Pharma” (“Big Pharma” is an expression used by conspiracy-theory websites to portray the pharmaceutical industry)
However, this “news” has not been fabricated by Istinom protiv laži, neither “Facebook reporter” which published it as well, but by a website Neon Nettle where the news appeared two days after the crash.
This website was the first and the only one (at least up to the point when other fake news websites did not redistribute the text) that interpreted the aeroplane crash as a murder. News reporting the tragedy in which Cantilena and his daughter who was a co-pilot on the flight lost their lives, pointed out that the cause of the crash was an engine failure, and that it’s possible Cantilena was unable to land the plane because he was using a non-updated map. Commenting for WCPO, the local pilot said that maps were not updated with information that the nearby airport was shut down at the beginning of December. The flight trajectory indicates that Cantilena was trying to land the aeroplane after the engine failure on a runway that has been shut.
Furthermore, News Nettle was the very first source which linked Cantilena with anti-vaccination actions and the first one to denounce him as “distinguished opponent of vaccination”. Before Cantilena’s death, which took place in December of 2017, a search of his first and last name together with term “vaccine” shows that in a 30-years long career he has never dealt with such topic. There is no single academic work neither public action related to vaccines nor does any of the available reports from scientific conferences he participated in indicate such topics.
This is how a person who did not have any public appearance on the topic on vaccines, has been declared as “Anti-vaccine Doctor” on the basis of only one fact – that he died in an air crash.
If this statement sounds meaningless to you, let’s take a look at a part of the text which explains this conclusion:
“Dr. Cantilena is just the recent example in a long sequence of doctors and holistic healers who were murdered in the last two years. As we found, Dr. Cantilena is the 83rd Doctor who has been killed by pharmaceutical companies’ contract killers”.
Deriving such conclusion is based on a well-established practice in which the label “anti-vaccine” is automatically attributed to people who are dealing with anything that could be related to health, and who did not die naturally. Their death is proclaimed as murder by anonymous websites – more precisely as an execution ordered by “pharmaceutical mafia” in order to silent them – and the person is added onto the phantomic list of “ the murdered”. That is how the website Istinom protiv laži got the number of 83 “murdered Doctors”.
Neon Nettle did similar things before and therefore is considered as a completely non-credible source of information (Snopes describes it as a frequent source of viral fake news and conspiracy theories, adding that “nothing published by this website should be trusted without additional checks”).
Fabricating murder stories
In April of 2017, Politifact as another distinguished fact-checking website wrote about an article, published by Neon Nettle, where the death of five non-related people was portrayed as an “execution” done by “vaccine mafia”. As it was stated, among five “murdered doctors” there was one who dealt with anti-vaccines theories. His name was Jeff Bradstreet and the police found that the cause of his death was suicide. Four out of five “executed” had no links to the anti-vaccine movement. Snopes had written about similar “murders of holistic doctors” as well.
Istinom protiv laži continues its fake news with a completely unrelated paragraph about “the fight with the pharmaceutical mafia” which was allegedly joined by Donald Trump (?), and therefore concluding an absurd statement:
“Of course, this news, like many others related to mass murders of doctors we have published, would not be distributed by the main Croatian servile media. It is not hard to guess why!”
We can agree on one thing – it is not really hard to guess why this nonsense hadn’t been shared by any serious online media. Besides being apparent that this “news” was completely made up, it is a type of “news” that anyone having at least a minimum of respect to journalistic ethics would not go for. Making up the story about the murder only two days after the deaths of Louis Cantilena and his daughter is an utterly senseless and unscrupulous usage of personal and family tragedies with the aim to “promote” conspiracy theories and to fabricate evidence for anti-vaccines theories.
The whole story is rated as fake news and a conspiracy theory.
(Raskrinkavanje.ba)
