VaxTeen: Grassroots organization or Big Pharma front?

Everyone has their obsessions. For some, it’s politics. For others, it’s entertainment. For still others, it's sports, religion, or cooking. 

And for some, it’s vaccines. 

Meet VaxTeen, an organization with one simple goal: Teach children how they can get jabbed against their parents’ wishes. 

The organization’s website has a Consent Laws by State section, where it lists the 50 states and their laws regarding the age of consent for vaccinations. In states like Colorado, where children must have parental consent to get vaccinated, VaxTeen provides material to help the children persuade their parents, and even goes so far as to give Colorado children information on how to get other types of medical care without their parents’ consent. 

VaxTeen portrays itself as so grassroots, it’s almost a high school project. According to the website, Kelly Danielpour is a high school senior in California who saw children asking for answers about vaccinations on social media, so she created VaxTeen.  

While the organization might seem as creepy as a Joe Biden hug, that’s all it is at first glance. 

But with a closer look, VaxTeen begins to take on a much larger, Stacy Abrams-like shape. 

For one, Danielpour is a member of the teen advisory council for UNITY, another organization crusading for child vaccinations. UNITY’s members include Pfizer, Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, and others. 

VaxTeen also partners with the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases (NFID), alongside Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline. Strategic partners for the NFID include AstraZeneca, Janssen Therapeutics, Merck, and Moderna. 

Yet another partner of VaxTeen is an organization called Stronger. Stronger is dedicated to fighting “vaccine misinformation”. It is supported by Google and the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO), whose executives come from Merck, Takeda, Kite Pharma, and other pharmaceutical companies. 

Then there’s the matter of the language. 

All of these organizations – all of them – use eerily similar wording on their websites so that they read like a Facebook Community Standards alert. 

As part of its mission, VaxTeen aims to help kids “counter this dangerous tide of misinformation”. BIO promises to “combat and actively rebut scientific misinformation”. Stronger’s goal is to “stop the spread of harmful misinformation” and, in fact, mentions “misinformation” no less than 12 times on its homepage. UNITY “aims to eliminate misinformation”. 

While misinformation hasn’t been this scary since Stalinist Russia, it still seems like a big undertaking for a small, grassroots organization. 

Unless that organization isn’t grassroots at all.