The Encephalitic Cry: not just a Durutti Column / Psychedelic Furs crossover band

The search for hilarity to ensue took me to the Twiddle machine, and introduced me to the concept of the Encephalitic Cry.

It turns out to be an accepted, unquestioned fact within the Antivax belief system that a distinctive high-pitched infant cry is a diagnostic symptom of (post-vaccination) encephalitis. "Unquestioned" because to question that part of the catechism would be to deny parental experience. The cry is so well-known as to need neither a medical-textbook or academic citation, nor actual reports from the throngs of parents experiencing it. Instead it is brought to us by the impersonal They Say and the all-powerful Passive Voice (is there anything that can't be accomplished by it?).

Some people call that scream the "encephalitic cry" because it sounds similar to the high-pitched crying often associated with encephalitis

[Pediatricians] even have a name for it. It's called an encephalitic cry, meaning that it is caused by inflammation and swelling in the brain.

I tried to engage the twitters in friendly corrective badinage, for "Clinical diagnostics through acoustic analysis of baby cries" was once my area of expertise (a few regenerations ago), and I can happily bore people at parties with idle talk of vocal stridor and subharmonics and jitter index and prematurity crying and cri-du-chat syndrome. Also I have memories to share from the 4th International Cry Workshop in Munich (1992)... of learning the proper way to hold a stein, and losing drinking races with Mechthild Papoušek, while Freddy DeHaen explained his rubber-band device for eliciting controlled, calibrated pain cries. But it was not to be.

In contrast, Russell Blaylock's expertise in cry acoustics (and pediatrics) came from his training in neurosurgery. For it was from Blaylock's forehead that the whole construct leaped fully-formed, in the manner of Athena Pallas, in a 2008 word-dump at the Mercola supplement-scam webstore.

Mothers and fathers are familiar with the high-pitched crying their babies have after such a series of vaccines. .... This is not due to the pain of the injection, as the pediatrician will assure you, rather it is secondary to brain inflammation – what we call an encephalitic cry.63

We are referred to a 1990 paper for proof that "we call [it] an encephalitic cry". Alas, although crying and "an encephalopathy" are mentioned in [63], they are separate -- one is not a symptom of the other -- which is to say, Blaylock was lying giving artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.

Wrong Blaylock, but nice un-Athenaed forehead!

Blaylock's fabrication was distributed by CIA Parker, who is admired in the Antivaxosphere for her energetic on-task willingness to copy-paste identical comments to countless newspapers and blogs. Parker's Origin Story is that she refused the offer of a HepB vaccination for her infant. However, the infant later cried, proving that she had encephalitis, proving that the vaccine had secretly been inflicted contrary to instruction... together constituting incontrovertible proof that vaccines do cause encephalitis, which causes the diagnostic cry (and autism). Parker's response at the time of her diagnosis of a life-threatening brain inflammation was to rush the child to hospital sleep through it.

she reacted with four days and nights of endless screaming, vaccine-induced encephalitis, and was later diagnosed with autism.
it caused four days and nights of endless screaming, vaccine-induced encephalitis, and she was later diagnosed with autism.
she reacted with four days and nights of endless screaming, vaccine-induced encephalitis, and was diagnosed with autism at 20 months.
She reacted with four days and nights of constant, inconsolable screaming (vaccine-induced encephalitis, see Merck Manual), and was later diagnosed with autism.

However, the title of "Second stage in the human centipede" properly belongs to Christina England, another antivax Thought Influencer, who has found the EC construct useful in her day-job of "Apologist for Infanticide".

Professionals often refer to high pitched screaming or seizures shortly after this vaccination, indicating a problem. Neil Z Miller an American medical research journalist, anti-vaccine and natural health advocate wrote the following in the Vaccine Safety Manual.
“Many of the mothers noticed that their children had a high-pitched cry soon after their vaccination or vaccinations. This is called the encephalitic cry, meaning that it is caused by an inflamed, swollen brain. It also explains the difficulty many mothers have in waking their children, the vomiting, passing out and irritability following vaccinations. These are all signs of an inflamed brain.”

England affects to be a Journalist and Independent Researcher. As such, she is unfamiliar with the possibility that the Foreword of a book can sometimes be written by someone other than the author of the book per se, so here she is crediting Neil Z. Miller for a passage which was in fact from Blaylock again.

Later in Blaylock's Foreword we meet a population of Schrödinger's Pediatricians. Simultaneously they (1) know about the Encephalitic Cry, but conceal it from parents for fear of lawsuits, and (2) are unaware of the EC because they confine themselves to mere evidence as a source of knowledge rather than Blaylock's superior Aristotelean intuition, unsullied by observation.

The reason that pediatricians are telling these mothers that their children’s reactions to these vaccines are normal is based on at least two factors. One, most pediatricians, in my experience, know absolutely nothing about a child’s brain. When I was practicing, if anything happened to a pediatrician’s patient that in any way indicated something was wrong with the child’s brain, the doctor was on the phone with me in an instant. Most admitted they knew nothing about the brain. The second reason is that they are trying to avoid a lawsuit. If they can convince the mother that everything is well, they may avoid a trip to the courtroom.

But the notable point here is Blaylock's formulation -- "It is called..." or "We call it..." -- with its simultaneous appeal to objectivity, popular acceptance, and the authoritative voices of the leprechauns in Blaylock's underpants. It was conserved as the construct entered the antivax catechism of consensus fact. Perhaps it fitted well into the lab-coat-&-stethoscope Clinician Cosplay that dominates the antivaxosphere. It also minimises any personal investment in the claim one stakes. At any rate, the word-pair of "Encephalitic cry" is seldom encountered on its own: the whole phrase is the unit or single building-block for conceptual prefabrication.

The Argument-by-Encephalitic-Cry is preserved in an almost prototypal form, down in the archives of a 2017 Respectful Insolence comment thread.

That high-pitched encephalitic scream after vaccination–don’t worry, it’s all perfectly normal...
So many parents have noted a distinctive high-pitched scream in the hours or days following vaccination...
Some people call it the “encephalitic cry” because it is similar to the high pitched scream observed in children with encephalitis. Some theorize it is caused by a swelling of the brain following vaccination.

I can only speculate that Blaylock's thought process, such as it was, worked by magical-thinking analogy with a whistling kettle. Just as the pitch of the whistle goes up as the kettle boils and the pressure increases, so the inter-cranial pressure of imaginary encephalitis would manifest as a higher-pitched cry. If babies' skulls happened to be kettles.