Stephanie Messenger
Stephanie Messenger, anti-vaccination liar who has built a life of anti-vaccination advocacy on the lie that her son was “killed by vaccines” has unsurprisingly turned her anti-vaccination lies to another family’s tragedy. A family who lost their baby to a vaccine preventable disease.
The tragic loss of Stephanie’s baby was due to Alexander Disease a rare genetic disorder and mostly affects infants and children. A brief outline from Wikipedia states that Alexander disease is a genetic disorder affecting the midbrain and cerebellum of the central nervous system. It is caused by mutations in the gene for glial fibrillary acidic protein that maps to chromosome 17q21. It is inherited in an autosomal dominant manner, such that the child of a parent with the disease has a 50% chance of inheriting the condition, if the parent is heterozygotic.
Despite this, and the fact that she and her husband at the time were told by doctors not to have any more children due to the llikelihood of them also having Alexander Disease, Messenger maintains the lie that her baby died from vaccination. Last year she was responsible for the distribution of anti-vaccination pamphlets to people’s homes with her life-long lie on the front page.
Now it’s one thing to lie about her own baby’s death, but this week (and not for the first time I might add), Messenger stooped to a low that is not unusual for anti-vaxxers; lying about another baby’s death, Riley Hughes, who died from whooping cough. It started with a question in anti-vaccine group Unvaccinated Australia:
Messenger had no problem stepping in first with her well worn lie about her own baby’s death, but then went on to lie about the circumstances of baby Riley’s death:
“as a parent who lost her baby to vaccination – I would say there are two side to every issue. From what I read, baby Riley’s parents received the pertussis vaccine so more than likely they or someone close to them was recently vaccinated and passed Pertussis on to baby Riley. Interesting how much publicity the rare baby deaths get from pertussis and the ones who commonly die from vaccinations are put down to SIDS or a concidence.”
Riley’s mum Catherine Hughes has responded to these lies from anti-vaxxers in the past, saying:
“Nobody around him was recently vaccinated. Close family had the booster 3 years before when our daughter was born. What I didn’t know was that we lived in a suburb with one of WA’s lowest vaccination rates.”
There is no low that anti-vaccination activists won’t stoop to. This is just one example of many.
