Right, if you live outside the US, chances are slim that you have ever heard names like that of Gary Null. Consider yourself lucky. Technically, he is what psychoanalysts call a crank, a conspiracy-nut, who produces numerous "documentaries" every year, generally through the same cut & paste method. Most will cause scientists, doctors and people of sound mind to face-palm during the first five minutes and then turn this tripe off. Basically they all have the same theme of how science and medicine has got it all wrong and he, Null, got it all right. That deadly diseases like cancer or AIDS don't exist and, if they do exist, can be cured by purchasing Nulls home-manufactured supplement-products (with which Null and a couple of his customers poisoned themselves with in 2010 and, insert irony here, had to be hospitalized. As we can imagine, Null descends from a line of profession that has a long tradition in the US, namely the snake-oil-peddlers and Film-Flam-men.
"Vaccine Nation" was only one of eight "documentaries" that the ever-productive Null has released in 2008. It would now be easy to dismiss all those videos, ignore them on channels like YouTube, just like one would do with a zillion other paranoid conspiracy-"documentaries". However, "Vaccine Nation" is a different beast and by far one of the most dangerous of its self-serving kind.
To put the message of this product in a nut-shell: Vaccines are not actually helping reduce countless diseases from, polio, to mumps, to measles, but causes autism in children, because (according to Null and his ilk) they contain, formaldehyde (used to embalm corpses), aborted fetal matters (here Null caters to the religious right), animal by-products and poisonous metals like mercury and aluminum. If this content alone will make you cringe and shake your head in disbelief, I congratulate you on your common sense. Millions of others aren't so lucky. This army of semi- or medical illiterates will cling to the medical fear mongering that people like Null or former Playboy-centerfold Jenny McCarthy spread and profit from. Yes, we live in a brave new world, where impressionable housewives choose to take their medical advice from quacks, bit-actors and porn-models, rather than doctors. It could be this, that explains why diseases like measles and polio are once again on the rise in certain parts of the United States. If this kind of medical hogwash is allowed to spread even further, we will not only see the return of diseases that have almost died out, but the return of things like the Negative Pressure Ventilator or, as it was "fondly" called during the Polio-outbreaks of the past, the Iron Lung. I dare say: had people like Null had tools like computers, internet and editing-programs at their hands 40 years ago, smallpox would not only still be among us, but that deadly illness would be rampant.
The reader may have noticed that this review deals less with the content of this film and more with the effect that it may have if taken on face-value. There are various reasons for this. One being, that this pedestrian cut & paste job is hardly worth to be taken serious as a documentary film and discussing it would do it an honour that it doesn't deserve. This has nothing to do with documentary film-making but rather propaganda, delusion of the mentally ill-equipped and, not least, a means to promote Nulls own commercial quackery.
On a side-note: I'm fully aware that by writing this review I put myself in line for being harassed with countless lectures on how doctors put mercury in our medicine, the pharmaceutical industry is out to kill our children and that the government is all behind it, etc. This will inevitably be followed by invitations to countless conspiracy-website, where I'll be asked to "educate" myself on a sheer endless amount of "facts", that people have pulled out of an orifice which IMDb won't allow me to mention here. This too has a lesson and teaches us, what the "block"-, "ignore"- and "mark as spam"-buttons are made for.
As to rating it: it gets the mandatory 1/10, courtesy of IMDb and from me noting but a disgusted "thumbs down" on YouTube.
