December 21, 2017
I know many people want to hear from medical professionals about how their vaccine views have evolved. So here you go. I’m a nurse practitioner, and here is my story.
My dad is a pediatrician, and I was raised as conventional as you can get. If we had a fever, we took Tylenol. Cough or congestion? We took cough medicine and often antibiotics. We went to every well visit and received all of our vaccines. It wasn’t even a question to not get them.
Fast forward, and now I’m a nurse with two babies, and they are, of course, all vaccinated per the CDC schedule. Didn’t even question what was being injected into my babies, didn’t bat an eyelash, because the pediatricians are the good guys. They know what is best for my child. I remember even joking with my mom when it came time for each of their four-year-old shots, “Oh no, we have the four-year-old shots coming up. They don’t know what they are in for, poor things.” It honestly makes me nauseated just thinking about it.
As a nurse I had to get a flu shot every year, which I got the very first day it was offered and would fuss at my husband because he never got one. In fact, my nursing friends and I would make fun of anti-vaxxers, asking ourselves, “How could they possibly be so stupid to think they shoudn’t get vaccines?”
I went back to school in 2015 to become a nurse practitioner, and halfway through was my pediatrics course. We learned about the vaccine schedule. We watched a pro-vax video (a mother was crying, talking about how she didn’t give her baby the whooping cough vaccine and she was so sick for so long, etc. . . . that type of video). And then, here’s the interesting part, the professor spent about an hour talking about how Dr. Andy Wakefield is a fraud, how vaccines are safe, even what to say and do if parents don’t want to vaccinate. We did not learn about side effects. We did not learn about the VAERS system or how to report a vaccine injury. Heck, why would we because we were taught that there are no injuries from vaccines. Even though I still had my blinders on during this class (and, oh man, how I wish I knew then what I know now; I would have politely and articulately dismantled everything that professor said), I remember thinking it was odd that she spent so much time talking about Andy Wakefield.
Image from Max Pixel.
Okay, so now not only do I have my years experience growing up with my dad’s advice, I have also learned all about vaccines from grad school. Then THE conversation happened: A dear friend of mine, whose children are 12 and 10, for some reason brought up the fact that when her 12-year-old was a baby, she delayed his vaccines. I immediately started with, “Oh my goodness! Why would you have done that? Don’t you know that all you were doing is increasing his chances of obtaining a deadly disease?” And she said that she couldn’t remember all of the details it was so long ago, but that she and her husband spent a lot of time researching what little info there was available back then.
Soooooo . . . I could try to paint myself in a positive light and say that, because I respected my friend, I researched what she said thinking she might be right. Wrong! I was basically being a huge jerk and thought, “Okay, well I’m just going to prove her wrong. I’m going to find research that proves my point, and then I will show her.”
So the research began. I was trying to find studies showing that children who were on delayed schedules of vaccines had worse outcomes than children who received them on the CDC schedule. Well, no shocker, I couldn’t find any! And you know how it goes, once you start researching it takes you down so many rabbit holes, some that you don’t even want to go down they are so dark. Vaccines became my new obsession, and I would procrastinate doing my grad school work because I had found another amazing documentary to watch or book to read on vaccines. And it’s interesting, during my research for vaccines, I also came to believe many other things I had learned from Western medicine were incorrect. So much so that my friends in school lovingly called me the “Voodoo Nurse Practitioner,” and they would ask me all of the time for advice on natural solutions for peoples’ health problems. But interestingly enough, when the topic of vaccines came up, all of a sudden I lost all of my credibility and my friends would say, “Well, now you’ve taken this whole natural thing too far.”
I went from All vaccines for everybody, to Well, maybe not everybody should get every vaccine, to Well, I think vaccines used to be safe, but now there are just too many and it’s not safe, to How could anyone think that vaccines are a good idea? and I will never give my children another vaccine, and if that means we have to move or I need to homeschool them, then so be it. If I could go back in time, my children would have gotten zero vaccines, and I would have rejoiced knowing that I was doing the best thing I could to help protect my children. But it took me a full year to get there. All of my family (except my husband) thinks I have totally lost my mind, and I am perfectly okay with that.
So here are my three big takeaways:
1) Let’s stop putting medical professionals on a pedestal. Because we don’t know jack about vaccines. I mean it. We are not taught anything about them. Even my dad, who is one of the sweetest and smartest doctors I know and is very pro vaccine, even he admits that he had “maybe an hour” of vaccine education in med school.
2) Research until you are 100% confident in your decision. Whether it’s to give your kid every vaccine, or only a few, or none, whatever your choice is, own that decision. You should not vaccinate out of fear. That is not being an empowered parent; it simply means you have not done enough research. If you’re saying, “Oh, my little one’s shots are coming up and I don’t know what to do! I’m scared to give them, and I’m scared not to give them.” That means you have not done enough research because you are not confident in your decision. Keep going until you reach a place of confidence, but in the meanwhile, don’t vaccinate. You can always vaccinate later, but you can’t unvaccinate.
3) Lastly, don’t give up on people. Keep speaking the truth. There is a time and a place to share what’s in your heart, and there’s also a right and a wrong way to share it, but don’t stop sharing. When my children were babies, if any of my friends had come up to me and said, “Amy, I know that you think vaccines are safe, but if you haven’t looked at the ingredients in them, I really think you should,” I would have listened. I may not have agreed with the person right then and there, but it would have planted a seed that, “Holy crud, there might be ingredients in there that aren’t safe?” And I would have researched. And yes, you will get people who think you’re crazy. That’s okay, just move on. There are people out there who are searching for the truth and will know it when they find it, but if you are not speaking the truth, they may never hear it.
~ Amy Thompson Austin
http://www.thelibertybeacon.com/pharma-co-has-license-suspended-as-vaccine-blamed-for-sterilization-of-500000-women-children-video/
Kenya’s opposition leader Raila Odinga—who swore himself in as president on Tuesday—claimed that at least 500,000 young girls and women may be infertile, following a tetanus vaccine administered by the government in 2014 and 2015.
Odinga says they confirmed through analysis of samples that the vaccines used were tainted with the hormone.
“Today, we can confirm to the country that the Catholic Church was right. Hundreds of thousands of our girls and women, aged between 14 and 49, from the fastest growing populations in the country will not have children, because of the state-sponsored sterilization that was sold to the country as tetanus vaccination,” he declared.
“The Church’s position was informed by what had happened in Mexico, Nicaragua and Philippines, where the various governments together with WHO/UNICEF had conducted similar campaigns using tetanus toxoid impregnated with beta human chorionic gonadotropin (BhCG) that causes permanent infertility among girls and women,” Odinga continued.
Even if that happened as they claim, there are some holes in the article. The substance, hCG, itself is not “harmful” to young women. It’s the INJECTION of it that makes it harmful. It’s a natural substance secreted in pregnant bodies. The injection of it stimulates the production of anti-hCG antibodies. And vaccines wear off. There is no evidence that these women would be infertile for life.
In any event, it’s a huge human rights violation to have subjected these women to vaccines that could make them infertile.
“Vaccines wear off”, meaning that the supposedly protective immune response wears off, as conventionally measured via antibodies titres. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the additional substances, all the non-antigenic additives, leave the body, and an individual’s capacity to detox from injected substances is necessarily going to be variable.
The idea that vaccine additives, preservatives and adjuvants hang around unless actively removed through chelation and other means, appears to be true for the aluminium that makes its way into the brain after vaccination (as discovered in the recent Keele University Exley team’s dissection of the brains of deceased teenagers with an ASD diagnosis).
So can we say with any certainty that fertility would be restored with time? And who gets to decide when fertility is restored to these women and girls from whom it is taken away without consultation?
I get that you are broadly critical of the atrocious human rights abuse involved in this case, though.
Oh no, of course we can’t say with certainty that fertility would be restored with time for any particular person. While vaccines do indeed wear off, they wear off at highly variable rates, and as you pointed out, that says nothing about the staying power of the ingredients in the body. That is governed largely by the body’s ability to detoxify itself and is also quite variable. One of the most important things to know about vaccines is that their effects are far less predictable on an individual basis than anyone manufacturing and selling them would like us to know.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7683889 1993
Vaccines for control of fertility are likely to have an important impact on family planning methods. They are designed to act by mobilization of an internal physiological process and do not require external medication on a continuous basis. A number of birth control vaccines are at different stages of development, the most advanced being a vaccine inducing antibodies against human chorionic gonadotrophin (hCG). This vaccine consists of a heterospecies dimer (HSD, beta hCG associated with alpha-subunit of ovine luteinizing hormone, beta hCG:alpha oLH) linked to tetanus toxoid (TT) or diphtheria toxoid (DT) as carriers. The vaccine has recently passed an important milestone; it has completed the first leg of phase II efficacy trials. Women of proven fertility leading active sexual life were protected from becoming pregnant at antibody titres > or = 50 ng of hCG bioneutralization capacity per ml. This vaccine has previously been demonstrated to be reversible in its effect. It is free from any notable side-effects on endocrine, cardiovascular and other body functions. Ovulation was not disturbed and menstrual regularity was maintained. A logistic disadvantage of the present vaccine is the requirement for multiple injections. This is expected to be overcome by encapsulation of the requisite doses of the vaccine in biodegradable microspheres, which could be given at a single contact point for sustained antibody titres lasting over a year. A live recombinant vaccine has also been made that elicits high anti-hCG titres in monkeys for nearly 2 years following primary immunization and a booster at 8-9 months.
Vaccines for control of fertility? What about oral contraceptives? What about IUDs? What about diaphragms, condoms, sponges, abstinence, rhythm method? Why propose an additional intervention which could disrupt one’s genetic makeup? Ever hear of endocrine disruptors?
This vaccine consists of a heterospecies dimer (HSD, beta hCG associated with alpha-subunit of ovine luteinizing hormone, beta hCG:alpha oLH) linked to tetanus toxoid (TT) or diphtheria toxoid (DT) as carriers.
Sounds like a far too complex solution to contraception, fraught with high potential for harm. Pass.
Under Barack Obamas tenure (and his Kenyan ancestry)
https://www.nation.co.ke/news/Raila-joins-Catholic-Church-in-opposing-tetanus-vaccine/1056-4091820-11g3lhi/index.html
https://africacheck.org/2017/09/13/analysis-what-could-kenyas-odinga-gain-by-dredging-up-an-unfounded-tetanus-vaccine-claim/
http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/news/2015/01/19/kenyan-bishops-call-for-no-more-tetanus-vaccines-until-further-tests/
http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/news/2014/11/21/kenyan-bishops-continue-to-say-no-to-tetanus-vaccine-with-hormone/
Eric Blair (George Orwell) forewarned us all of their plans. No one listened !
http://www.thelibertybeacon.com/whats-id-2020-and-are-you-ready-to-become-impacted-by-it/
An apparent New World Order (NWO) numbering of the world’s population is in the works, which will affect and impact every human being on the planet from the first day of birth forward!
Below is a schematic of their ‘game plan’. It’s called the “ID2020 Alliance” and is the most comprehensive surveillance database probably to date and being implemented on a GLOBAL basis, as you can see from the International Organizations involved, governmental agencies feeding it statistical data, and the countries that will fund it.
If you look closely, you realize the importance vaccinations will play in that Alliance and the apparent role(s) Big Pharma will take in providing ever-increasing numbers of vaccines, which probably will never see legitimate scientific testing for safety and/or efficacy!
The other thing that jumps off the page is the apparent close relationship between GAVI and the UN’s UNICEF!
*sigh* No one has yet convinced me that there is any true motivation for a “depopulation agenda.” Why would powerful people wish to do this? They derive their power from the subjugation of large numbers of workers. Reducing their numbers does not increase their power in any way. It doesn’t make sense. In addition, I have yet to see legitimate documentation of any such thing.
Of course GAVI is related to UNICEF. The UN and WHO are convinced of the importance of vaccines to “saving the world.” Does that mean there can’t be someone at any of these organizations who has a different sort of agenda? No, but it certainly doesn’t imply the sort of agenda that you and many others hypothesize.
nssm 200 (Henry Kissinger Useless eaters)
Agenda 21
Richard Day diaries
Gardasil , ovarian failure, teenage pregnancy falls.
Georgia Guidestones 500m
Every vaccine insert in black and white.
The documentation is amazingly freely available.
When you already have everything, what more would you wish for than a personal safari park (I dunno lets call it Africa).
http://beforeitsnews.com/alternative/2018/01/they-want-you-dead-this-is-how-3585714.html
http://vaxxter.com/softouch-abortion-device-makes-terminating-pregnancy-easier/
200 experimental anti fertility vaccinations purportedly being worked on in the pipeline.
The African American population of the US is in decline ?
How many African American abortions since 1970 ? 40M ?
Mercury Amalgams
Fluoridation of water, salt, milk
GM frankenfoods
Chem Trails
Vaccinations Extermination Assassinations
Glyphosate
Aids
The fake flu vaccine
Vaccine mandates of vaccines that are a complete fraud
Zero vaccine accountability
For me the evidence is simply overwhelming.
Thanks for publishing P_TMR
But its Hg-enocide on a global scale never before imagined.
Hans, this is just a list of unfounded accusations. You’ll get much further with people with actual documentation.
An easy one to “debunk” (God, I hate that word) is that the African-American population in the U.S. is “in decline.” The AA population in the U.S. totaled 38.9 million in 2010, or 13% of the population: https://www.google.com/search?q=2010+black+population+in+u.s.&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS774US774&oq=2010+black+population+in+u.s.&aqs=chrome..69i57.6974j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
In 2016, that was up to 46.8 million or 14.5% of the population. http://blackdemographics.com/ In nobody’s definition does that constitute “decline.”
PLEASE, I beg you to stop posting whatever you find without analyzing it. It’s not helping your cause.
Ok fair enough , I was misled by a site I thought I could rely on. However you aren’t calling the staggering number of abortions into question (and that number I haven’t strictly verified) but it is of that order. And as for everything else I stand by it .
Regarding those demographics , I wonder if it could still be true but being disguised by immigration.
I didn’t even mention the incredible falls in fertility rates around the world , the deliberate & orchestrated demise of the family by simple sexual message bombardment through the lamestream media’s (I assume you will dispute this however haha).
https://www.hoover.org/sites/default/files/uploads/documents/0817998721_95.pdf
I’m not at all focused on the depopulation agenda area of explanations regarding why vaccines are being pushed so hard, to me a straight out business and market monopoly model explains it, but one could argue that technology is replacing people as workers. Maybe robots would do, and there would be no robot uprising once things get really bad, if robots are entirely programmable to do the bidding of their masters?
Also, the motivations of an elite are not necessarily pragmatic ones – the exercise and abuse of power over others, as though we are objects to be owned, used and discarded, as is the planet, isn’t necessarily driven by reason.
To the detractors and distractors on here .
Can we talk about the Tetanus vaccine drive in Kenya 2015 (under Obaminable)
And the hidden sterilising agent HCG given to millions of unsuspecting Kenyan women until the Catholic church blocked the CDC-EIS from their dirty work .
It is Estimated they sterilised 3M Kenyan woman against their will .
Then when you deny those events , lets talk about
The Philipines 1995
Nicaragua
Sri Lanka
Nigeria
Mexico 1974
Hans, calling President Obama “Obaminable” does not lend your argument credibility. I’ve looked up these accusations, and while it is absolutely clear that this COULD be done (scientific papers demonstrating the mechanism), it is much less clear that it HAS been done. I’ve found plenty of rumors, but very little in the way of legitimate documentation. Of course if such a thing WERE happening, one would expect there to be little in the way of documentation, but that’s hardly proof that it’s happening.
Wow. Just wow. The Thomas Davis / John Collins poster (s?) appear to be here only to argue, not to engage in genuine conversation. Stephen Covey said it well; “Most people listen with the intent to reply, not to understand.”
It’s *obvious* when some people just want to argue, and not consider information that might not align with their long-held beliefs.
200 years ago, all the “highly educated” doctors of the day thought the best way to help someone with a fever was to cut open a vein and drain off some of their boiling blood. Thank God someone had the guts to get ridiculed when challenging *that* practice. And then there’s the physician Ignaz Semmelweis, who, in the mid-1800’s, found that when doctors washed their hands between examining cadavers and examining pregnant women, the number of infant deaths dropped to less than 1 percent. He tried to get the word out, but was ridiculed and even terminated from his employment at the hospital where he worked, then run out of the profession altogether.
Hopefully, the reader will understand that these examples underscore the fact that even the most learned, highly trained, and experienced physicians can still suffer from cranial rectitis.
When experiencing a transition of awareness (i.e., overwriting old learning with new learning), people often experience cognitive dissonance, which is an actual, physically painful process. Neuroscience research has revealed that this pain occurs when long-established neurons in the basal ganglia strive to process their “established” information while competing for the brain’s electro-chemical energy as new neurons containing the new information are growing.
And lo, before I get labeled as not having an education (by Mr. Davis/Collins), my doctorate is in Organizational Learning and Leadership, with 30 years of practice in the field.
I am most impressed with ProfessorTMR’s patience with this gentleman (or possibly these gentlemen). I personally would have banned all comments from these men / this man until Mr. Davis/Collins indicated an actual understanding of the links and suggested reading provided by the Professor. Oh, and I fully acknowledge that “understanding” is not a synonym for “agreement,” but up until this point in time, the aforementioned poster(s) has (have) not even indicated an understanding of the research and data provided.
Your comments are hypocritical and have a “one way” directional. The road “road” usually goes TWO directions.
There’s nothing hypocritical about what James has said. He has pointed out that “understanding” does not equal “agreement.” There is no question that a significant percentage of the comments on this blog are from people who do NOT understand, and do not appear to be making an effort to understand, the arguments presented to them. That is not two-way communication. I (and others) have provided plenty of material for them to digest, and they have chosen to ignore virtually all of it. We continue to provide information, however, because we know that even if they do not read it and digest it there will be others who are reading who are capable of actually assessing the quality of their previous “knowledge” (a.k.a “assumptions”) and adjusting it.
Sometimes I wish this could just be a place for people who have done the research and who know the truth. I do learn much from the professor always always always but the “other side” is the pervasive cultural norm, can’t we just use our time to read wonderful articles like this and hear what people are experiencing and learning and not ALWAYS defend, defend, defend???!!! I want a safe space free of these people. Sorry, just venting!
Oh Kate, you have put your finger on the hardest thing about running this blog. We want this to be a safe space, but we also want to reach the folks who have not yet begun thinking of all these questions, and that makes for a tricky divide. We must address rational criticism, even if the people involved haven’t done anywhere near the level of research because it increases our credibility with those who are just beginning this journey. But we don’t approve comments that are simply attacks on people because they do not move the conversation forward. For your own sanity, you might want to just skip the comments for a while since they are triggering that for you. I think we all have to do that sometimes. Because our opinions are outside the mainstream’s understanding, we come in for way more than our fair share of attacks.
You said “but it is highly likely that vaccines are a primary driver of the explosion in incidence that we have seen.” WHAT is the basis for this? Has nothing else changed in the environment in the past 30 years?
“WHAT is the basis for this?” You seemed to have missed the point of this post. Stacks and stacks of scientific studies that support parental observations. Just like the author of this piece, I’ve READ the science, for and against. If you are truly interested, start here: http://vaccinepapers.org/. There’s a lot more where that came from, but that’s a good place to start.
Simple answers to complex questions aren’t satisfying. Is medical education biased? If you mean biased by leaning towards reproducible science rather than conjecture, yes, it certainly is. That is why Medical schools in the US are guided by formal certification (not the AMA), and don’t teach chiropractic, naturopathic, homeopathic, or other practices which don’t have a scientific grounding. Is there “bias” in favor or Medical and Surgical approaches to treatment? Sure, that’s what works for large number of people and why randomized control trials are done, generally prospectively, to demonstrate benefit (and harm) of an intervention. If the incidence of harm from vaccines were truly as high as some apparently believe, physicians would see it, report it, and publish their findings.
You don’t seem to have a clue the extent to which medical education is influenced by the pharmaceutical industry. Nor do you seem to have a clue to the extent to which scientific journals are influenced by the pharmaceutical industry. Despite the fact that physicians are not truly educated on the subject of adverse vaccine reactions, many physicians ARE beginning to see it and report it, but they are branded as “quacks” by the pharmaceutical PR machine the instant they step out of line. Just like the physicians who first talked about their patients dying after receiving Vioxx. Paul Thomas is a pediatrician with a practice in Portland Oregon of 13,000 children. He personally observed the kinds of vaccine reactions we are speaking about and it got him thinking. Like “Dr. Bob” Sears before him, he came up with a lighter vaccination schedule that he recommended in his book “The Vaccine-Friendly Plan,” but since then he has analyzed the data from his practice where he has statistically significant numbers of children who are vaccinated according to the CDC schedule, others who are partially vaccinated according to his own schedule, and others who are not vaccinated at all. There are no cases of autism in the last two groups. Since publishing his book, he has had his data analyzed further and discovered to his own surprise that, unpopular as it may be, the completely unvaccinated children are by far the healthiest in his practice.
I have to agree with you ProfessorTMR about the corruption of the medical literature by BigPharma, something I have railed about for a long time. However, I doubt you have much knowledge about medical education; despite your honorific “Professor”, I don’t think you have ever taught at a medical school. I have. The only education that medical students get in Pharmacology is in their first or second year, at a time when they have little or no bases for correlating what they are learning in the classroom with clinical medicine. It is a major deficiency in medical education (one of many). Having said that, I really believe that if there were this tsunami of injured kids after vaccinations, people like Paul Offit at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia would be educating physicians, and others about it, instead of encouraging vaccinations. I know there is a large distrust of the medical community, going well beyond the Tuskegee study, but the reality is that there is an alternative view of science which is getting much worse, whether it be climate change, evolution, age of the earth, etc. I would hope that if some pediatrician, someone with more stature than Andrew Wakefield, truly finds “healthier” kids without immunizations, or with fewer immunizations, he/she would publish. If that is true, it is important information, but it needs to be peer-reviewed, not bandied about as anecdotal information. The plural of anecdote is not data.
I appreciate your perspective as a lecturer in medical school. I assume then that you don’t think the issues illuminated by these Harvard Medical School are widespread: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/03/business/03medschool.html?pagewanted=all
And I’m sorry, but Paul Offit educating physicians on vaccine reactions? You must be joking. You do know that the man has made millions off his rotavirus vaccine, don’t you? And that he makes LOTS of money as the industry’s mouthpiece? https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-independent-are-vaccine-defenders/ Ever heard the Upton Sinclair quote “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it”? Nowhwere is that more applicable than with Paul Offit.
Your “reality” with regard to an “alternative view of science” is not applicable with regard to this subject. A study was done on “anti-vax” vs. “pro-vax” comments on a Mark Zuckerberg post about vaccines, and the study authors to their obvious surprise found that the “comments showed evidence of greater analytical thinking, and more references to health and the body. In contrast, pro-vaccination comments demonstrated greater comparative anxiety, with a particular focus on family and social processes.” Though that article was heavily biased, even they noted the much stronger emphasis on science by the so-called “anti-vaccine” people. Instead of reaching the obvious conclusion, that these people KNEW and cared much more about the science than the so-called “pro-vaccine” people, they made conclusions that fit their preconceived “anti-science” ideas.
Andrew Wakefield had a great deal of “stature” before he stood up and told the world something it didn’t want to hear. The exact same thing happens to every other physician who does so, which is why so few are doing so, much less “publishing” it. Upton Sinclair strikes again.
AND FUCK YES IT NEEDS TO BE PEER-REVIEWED. PLURAL “ANECDOTES” ARE FUCKING DATA, IT IS SIMPLY UNQUANTIFIED DATA. WHY DO YOU THINK NO ONE WITH GRANT MONEY IS DOING THE ANALYSIS?! WHY are there NO studies that analyze the health outcomes of fully vaccinated children against fully unvaccinated children? Why do we not know the autism rate in unvaccinated children? Wouldn’t that be the FIRST thing you’d want to establish if you were “proving” that vaccines have nothing to do with it?
On the off-chance that it will get you thinking more critically, I’m going to post a link to an article that SHOULD be eye-opening. It’s a large-scale study done in the U.K. that is the closest thing to a comparison of health outcomes in vaccinated vs. unvaccinated kids, and it found eczema to be 9 times more common and asthma to be 14 times more common in vaccinated kids. Those were statistically significant results that were rationalized with the fact that unvaccinated kids had not been to the doctor more than three times in their first six months of life. But why are healthy kids SEEING a doctor more than that in their first six months of life? The only reason in THIS country is for vaccines. So, instead of assuming the obvious, that these kids are simply healthier, they assumed that in a country with socialized medicine, these kids are just as sick but not seeing a doctor. In other words, they are assuming that parents of these children are watching them struggle to breathe and NOT bringing them to a doctor. If you honestly believe that’s an acceptable assumption to make, then I submit that you may be suffering with Upton Sinclair’s difficulty as well.
If you are interested in further understanding the scientific underpinnings of vaccine skepticism, I wrote a piece about this awhile back. I apologize in advance for its length, but I felt it was important to be thorough: https://thinkingmomsrevolution.com/anti-science-you-keep-using-that-word-i-do-not-think-it-means-what-you-think-it-means/
And this is a truly marvelous piece about “The Autism Literary Underground,” which discusses the reading material that goes into “anti-vaccine” activists: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/664291.
I guess it’s something you feel strongly about, but I find when people resort to 4 or 7 letter words, the strength of their arguments diminish. Wakefield sold out and really created a great deal of disruption in the pediatric world.
By the way, some of us go to places like Haiti, African countries, South America , and other places to do good, like for Habitat for Humanity.
No question that Big Pharma has corrupted scientific publications in this country, and elsewhere. Pseudoscience is not a great alternative.
FWIW, I wasn’t a “lecturer “ but a professor.
When someone resorts to four-letter words after the zillionth comment, it’s not a measure of their argument, it’s a measure of their frustration with dealing with the same BS over and over again.
You are simply using up people’s time and energy at this point, and I won’t be approving any more of your comments until you make it clear that you have actually read a great deal of the material people have provided for you. (Hint: The word “pseudoscience” gives you away. Anyone who has actually READ the science (and the Freedom of Information Act materials associated with some of it — Google “Generation Zero” and “Verstraeten Thimerosal study”) knows that the science exposing dangers of vaccines is far stronger than that claiming “safety.”)
For someone to “sell out” they actually have to receive a financial reward of some kind. Wakefield, on the other hand, lost his position, his profession, and even his country for his position. Your definition of sellout leaves a hell of a lot to be desired, and your knowledge of the Wakefield situation does as well. Read up: http://ahrp.org/laffaire-wakefield-shades-of-dreyfus-bmjs-descent-into-tabloid-science/.
Of course people go to Haiti and other countries “to do good.” They are not, however, “vacationing.” And people who go to such countries to do such work (like my nephew who was with Doctors Without Borders) have very different factors to weigh into their risk vs. benefit calculations.
Do you castigate Baruch Blumberg (Noble Prize in Medicine) for consulting with Merck on Hepatitis B immunization orRobert Austrian (Lasker Award winner for his work on pneumococcus) who helped develop pneumonia immunization if they profited from their research?
I’m not castigating anyone, just pointing out what should be OBVIOUS conflicts of interest.
“I have to agree with you ProfessorTMR about the corruption of the medical literature by BigPharma, something I have railed about for a long time. ”
Perhaps this explains why not many medical professionals are prepared to publish their findings for fear of being torn apart by the BigPharma sponsored ‘scientists’. However, more and more people are beginning to wake up and take notice of the mountain of anecdotal evidence. If you want to wait for all this to be turned into data many more lives could be damaged while BigPharma is in control of what research is published.
“Dr. Zajac admits that he used to be a “vaccine bully,” because his clinic needed to achieve certain vaccine rates. But his attitude changed as he had to start making decisions about vaccines for his own children, and his own clinical practice had shown that the rates of vaccine injuries were not what the CDC and drug companies were claiming, such as “one in a million,” but more like one out of 100 were being hospitalized from vaccine injuries.”
“There were patients who were seeing the local chiropractor who were healthier than my other patients, and they were doing some other things for their health other than just taking medication for whatever condition they might have.
“They also had a lower vaccine uptake, and they were healthy. And that was really hard for me to recognize.
“My partially unvaccinated patients, and none of us liked them, quite honestly, back then they were going against their medical doctor’s advice. And with the ego that I had, it was really hard to swallow.
“It took me a couple of years to start learning about vaccines.
“And the moment I started reading research about vaccines, it changed my life forever.”
-Dr. Bob Zajac
Board Certified Pediatrician and expert on child development, talks about his own journey into awareness of vaccine dangers.
http://vaccineimpact.com/2017/former-vaccine-bully-board-certified-pediatrician-now-claims-unvaccinated-children-are-healthiest/
By the way, Dr. Zajac has a PhD, an MD, and an MBA. So he went to school for MUCH longer than the average pediatrician, and yet he came to the same conclusions as our nurse practitioner did.
Dr. Zajac got his PhD training before med school, and does addiction medicine, somewhat far afield from traditional pediatrics. Just sayin’.
What difference does it make WHEN he got the additional years of school if those years (in child development) inform his pediatric practice? Not sure what Dr. Zajac you’re talking about, but this one, according to his own practice’s website, IS a practicing pediatrician: http://www.newkingdomhealthcare.com/dr-robert-zajac/
Well, since everyone posting here has their own interpretation of what they think the science is, I will pose an epidemiological question. What is an acceptable benefit (number needed to treat) to prevent one case of a serious infectious disease balanced against the number of people who suffer a serious adverse effect (number needed to harm)? There is not necessarily a “right” answer, only a decision point on a continuum.
The most blatant Big Lie of Pharma and pro-vaxxers is the phrase “vaccine-preventable disease.” There is no data that “proves” that vaccines “prevent” anything. Pasteur’s “germ theory” is just that–a theory. It may be well-propagated, but it’s still just a *theory.* Yes, you possibly may be able to measure blood serum antibodies, but there’s no proof that such antibodies actually protect against disease. In fact, many “outbreaks” of various so-called “vaccine preventable diseases” occur in fully-vaccinated populations. It’s voo-doo “science” at its best!
There is no possibility that vaccine did not play a role in the fact that there are so few active measles infections in the United States today. Prior to the first measles vaccine there were three to four million cases of measles every year. The total number of cases has been in the hundreds for many years now. To pretend that isn’t true is to be as myopic as those who think vaccinating every human being with every conceivable disease is a good idea. We can acknowledge that vaccines HAVE played a role in lowering incidence of acute infectious disease, while asking the all-important question: At what cost? And doing what we can to find the answers to that question.
Let’s take an example that pretty much everyone agrees is THE major advance in medicine in the 20th century. That is the eradication of smallpox. Prior to the 1960’s, HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of people died from smallpox. The vaccine is KNOWN to have caused injury and death in a small but real number of people. Not a theory.
Tetanus, a frequently fatal disease is exceedingly rare disease in the US, typically affecting those never immunized or immunoincompetent. The truth is, and I would agree with anyone, we get tenaus immunization too often (thank you legal system), but there seem to be few serious effects.
Having said that, I would ask ProfessorTMR, who seems quite interested and knowledgeable what, if any, immunizations he would eschew, limit, or promote, if any, of the following:
Hepatitis A, Hepatitis B, Mumps, Measles, Rubella, Tetanus, Diphtheria, Pertussis, Haemophilus influenza’s type B, Polio, Pneumococcal, Influenza, HPV, Meningococcus B and ACWY, and Rotavirus?
Thanks
“Having said that, I would ask ProfessorTMR, who seems quite interested and knowledgeable what, if any, immunizations he would eschew, limit, or promote, if any, of the following”
First of all, I am indeed interested and knowledgeable, but why would you assume someone with the moniker “ProfessorTMR” is male? This website is named Thinking MOMS’ Revolution. Surprisingly enough, I am a MOM.
Secondly, you seemed to have missed one of the major points of the post, which is to do one’s OWN research and one’s OWN risk-to-benefit calculation for one’s OWN self and one’s OWN family. It should not matter to you or anyone else, which vaccines I would “eschew, limit, or promote.” I don’t make those choices for anyone but my own family, and firmly believe that that is the way it should be.
On this website we frequently provide information on vaccines, information that is generally available in the scientific literature yet parents will generally NOT find in the mainstream media, information that should help parents make more accurate calculations of the vaccines’ risks to benefits. If you want to know the sort of information I provide, you have only to read my blogs. I’ll post some here to get you started:
https://thinkingmomsrevolution.com/sugar-trans-fat-vaccines-common-industry-government-collusion-undermining-health/
https://thinkingmomsrevolution.com/the-evidence-on-gardasil-modern-miracle-or-dangerous-scam/
https://thinkingmomsrevolution.com/critical-thinking-201-vaccine-science/
https://thinkingmomsrevolution.com/scientific-proof-vaccines-cause-autism/
https://thinkingmomsrevolution.com/flu-shot-clinic/
https://thinkingmomsrevolution.com/vaccines-allergy-autoimmunity-autism/
https://thinkingmomsrevolution.com/seven-major-flaws-zerbo-et-al-2016-association-influenza-infection-vaccination-pregnancy-risk-autism-spectrum-disorder/
https://thinkingmomsrevolution.com/anti-science-you-keep-using-that-word-i-do-not-think-it-means-what-you-think-it-means/
https://thinkingmomsrevolution.com/top-10-lies-told-during-the-vaccine-preventable-diseases-hearing/
https://thinkingmomsrevolution.com/american-academy-pediatrics-kids-f/
Others also provide vaccine-related information. ShamROCK, in particular, frequently covers global HPV concerns for us.
True Science would be where vaccines are put through proper rigorous safety testing against genuine placebos. Look up the shenanigans of the Gardasil vaccine and how that abomination was brought to market .
The placebo used was an aluminium adjuvant and people died in Denmark in those tests (and they even swept that under the carpet).
The Flu vaccine is only 10% effective this year John ? (that is 10% more than I believe Cochrane Collaboration says its 0% )
Autism rate now at 1 in 36 ? Tripedia Vaccine insert ?
Will Thompson – John ? Heard of him ? Seen the Garbage Bin Science the CDC employed there ?
Autistic Brains coming back with huge levels of aluminium John ?
Do you think its the aluminium baby mats we are all using ?
Damn lying scoundrels .
Aluminum baby mats? Is that a thing? Or just a facetious suggestion?
I’m a CNM, and a Women’s Health Nurse Practitioner. My story is similar. I’m the daughter of a public health nurse. I fully vaccinated my kids (born in ’78 and’83, so far fewer vaccines then.) I also took the yearly flu shot. I began investigating vaccines at the behest of clients who were concerned about the vaccine-autism link. (I’m a home birth midwife who had already gone down a few of those rabbit holes.) I also had a client with a vaccine injured child who encouraged me to learn about vaccines. I’ve studied vaccines for a couple of years now. It was such a shock to learn what I know now. Vsccines are not safe and have never been adequately studied, to begin with. Thankfully I have plenty of opportunities to share this information with pregnant couples. I know that I’m saving babies from injury and death today. It’s clear that unvaccinated children are exceptionally healthy…much healthier than their vaccinated peers. The word is spreading, and more medical practitioners are waking up. (See the group, “Physicians for Informed Consent”.) We should start a group for enlightened nurses! I wish you the best!
I hope your knowledge about delivery of infants is greater than your knowledge about vaccines.
This is an incredibly arrogant and dismissive comment. You don’t know this woman from a hole in the wall, but you assume that because she has done more research on this subject than you have that her knowledge is somehow “less than.” And you wonder why you don’t hear about vaccine skepticism from medical professionals? I’m sure your biased dismissive attitude has nothing to do with it.
I’m secure in my knowledge of both. I’m also accustomed to derisive comments, which are common among the vaccine religious. You obviously have not taken the time to read or consider anything that does not support your vaccine dogma. How sad. “Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in.”
― Isaac Asimov
Polio wasn’t eradicated was it John \ Thomas ?
They just renamed it muscular dystrophy .
http://www.harmonyenergyconsultants.com/web/en/vaccine-the-lid-is-off.html?PHPSESSID=8b16ddef9df5629f97a20fd3e779da4b&loc=GH
But first a small digression. The medico-pharmaceutical sickness industry has developed a habit to cover up lack of progress. Where there has been no progress with a particular disease for many years the name is simply removed from the list of illnesses and “magically” a new malady with amazingly similar symptoms appears out of nowhere. You may well have noticed, for example, that manic-depressives are no longer a burden to our society; their problem appears to have been eliminated by medical “science”. Simultaneously with this medical “victory” Bi-Polar Disorder has appeared out of nowhere. When you compare the symptoms of both maladies, you instantly perceive that they are identical and all that has actually taken place is that the name has been changed.
So it is with muscular dystrophy.
The first thing that Dr. Haecker told me was, “It’s polio and they’ve just changed the name!” He then continued, “All polio (and muscular dystrophy) cases since 1947 have been caused by the polio vaccine and the source of the problem is the way in which the so-called vaccines are manufactured.”
Hans, the article you quoted is all over the place. John Thomas is right about bipolar disorder. The name was changed in plain sight and virtually no one is confused about it. https://www.verywell.com/why-did-manic-depression-become-bipolar-disorder-379822
While we know that the definition of “polio” was indeed changed in the 1950s, that article offers NO support for the idea of an equivalence between muscular dystrophy and polio. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary documentation.
There are genetic diseases (Duchenne’s, and others) which have NOTHING to do with the polio virus, but many are X-linked, inherited disease, only affecting males.
Bipolar disease and manic-depressive disease ARE the same disorder; no one has any impression otherwise. Medical science, as it progresses, one step forward, one half step back, sometimes changes names, manifestations, criteria, etc. as more knowledge is gained.
Someday, if there is a link between autism and whatever are the DEMONSTRATED causes, it may be called (whatever)-caused encephalopathy.
Funny, you should mention encephalopathy. Encephalopathy is a table injury for both the DTaP and MMR vaccines: https://www.hrsa.gov/sites/default/files/vaccinecompensation/vaccineinjurytable.pdf
It also happens to be one of the two most compensated brain injuries by the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. When approximately 200 of the families compensated for brain injuries were contacted by investigators, approximately 40% reported that their children had autism, implying that there are over 500 cases of vaccine-induced encephalopathy resulting in “autism” that have ALREADY been compensated despite the government’s insistence that “vaccines don’t cause autism.”
Just because something is compensated from the vaccine fund, doesn’t mean causality. As i’m sure you know, the vaccine fund was set up to limit liability costs, like similar programs with asbestos and tobacco, and various other, non-vaccine pharmaceuticals.
There’s that stellar logic again. Why are trust funds set up to “limit liability”? Because there is overwhelming scientific evidence that the exposure DOES cause harm (and in the case of tobacco, overwhelming evidence that the executives knew that and didn’t care); otherwise there is no need to “limit liability.” The vaccine fund isn’t any different. As a matter of fact it’s even clearer for vaccines. The point of the 1986 law that created the fund was that vaccines are “unavoidably unsafe” and DO cause harm. Congress did not want the manufacturers to be liable for that harm because fiscal responsibility might cause them to stop making vaccines altogether. While a reasonable concern given the widespread beliefs about the general miraculous wonderfulness of vaccines, that lack of liability has had some serious unintended consequences. It single-handedly transformed the vaccine industry from a loss leader into the fastest rising profit sector for the pharmaceutical industry, because as we know pharmaceutical companies simply don’t care about the harm their products are doing as long as they are making a tidy profit. (Personally, I find it fascinating that vaccines did so much harm that the liability was threatening to bankrupt the manufacturers back when only DTP, polio, and MMR were on the childhood schedule, but somehow they have magically become SO safe that we now “recommend” hep B, Hib, pneumococcal, rotavirus, influenza, varicella, hep A, meningococcal, and HPV vaccines for children, all without any testing synergistic reactions, as well as influenza and Tdap for pregnant women.)
Vaccine table injuries are ON that table because of the overwhelming evidence that those injuries are caused by vaccines. When someone has one of those injuries immediately after receiving a vaccine, HHS ASSUMES (and concedes) causality for one very good reason: the evidence is overwhelming. Encephalopathy is on the table. Vaccines cause it, period, just like smoking causes lung cancer and heart disease and asbestos exposure causes mesothelioma. Causation is accepted and conceded for every single one of those brain injuries.
Does that mean that the vaccines caused the resulting autism? Not necessarily, but if they didn’t we would expect autism rates in the vaccine-induced brain injury population to be similar to that of the general population. Are they? I’ll spare you the “coarse language” I might ordinarily answer that question with and say, nope, not even close. We are not yet at the point where 40% of the population has severe autism, but we’re getting there. Currently the CDC says 1 in 68 kids who are currently about 14 years old have autism, that’s 1.5%. So your odds of having autism if you have a documented vaccine-induced brain injury are at least 27 times higher than they are if you don’t (most of the compensated cases were from a time period when autism was far less common than it is today). A relative risk of TWO is considered evidence of causation in a court of law because it is “more likely than not” that the exposure caused the condition. What do you think a REAL court would make of an RR of 27?
Asbestos – yes, definite cause and effect; tobacco – yes, definite cause and effect; vaccines- certainly NOT proven, but an an attempt to limit liability from runaway juries (eg. A $10,000,000 lawsuit for some perceived, but not demonstrable harm). The most egregious was Benedictin, which led to near bankruptcy for Dow over what was, ultimately, junk science. Google the origin of the Daubert rule.
Let me state this categorically: every medication causes some harm, and I have no doubt that there are SOME individuals who have suffered harm from vaccinations (beyond Gillian-Barré), but I don’t think a link with autism, or all the harmful effects attributed to the HPV vaccine have been established to my satisfaction.
“some perceived, but not demonstrable harm”
Sure, dude. Keep telling yourself that. Because it makes sense that vaccines cause SOME harm, but NOT the harms that are KNOWN to happen, happened immediately after vaccine administration, were devastating in nature, and were compensated by an incredibly hostile supposedly “no-fault” compensation program.
Or is that you you think the “harm” ITSELF was “perceived” and “not demonstrable”? If so, I would like you to say that to my friend Karen Kain, the mother of Lorrin Kain, who was injured by her one and only shot at the age of six weeks. Please tell her that the “harm” her daughter experienced was just “perceived” and “not demonstrable.” Lorrin was one of the “lucky” few whose injuries were so severe and so obviously due to the vaccine she received that they were actually compensated, but not of course before raking Karen over hot coals for YEARS.
If it were your kid, there would be no talk of “perception” of harm, would there? Just as there wasn’t in the case of Hannah Poling, whose parents are a neurologist and a nurse-and-lawyer. THAT case, which was so similar to most of the other 5,000 autism petitions to the VICP that it was to serve as one of the test cases in the Omnibus Autism Proceeding, was pulled and quietly conceded. Why do you suppose that is? Me, I think it was two things: fabulous and meticulous documentation that most parents can’t even begin to manage (heaven forbid, the 5,000 other autism cases had access to their evidence), plus the fact that no one was going to believe that Hannah was “born with it” and her neurologist father and nurse mother just hadn’t noticed the autism before those nine vaccines in one day.
For some good background on many of the ways that the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program is failing the people it is meant to serve: https://news.stanford.edu/2015/07/06/vaccine-court-engstrom-070615/
“I don’t think a link with autism, or all the harmful effects attributed to the HPV vaccine have been established to my satisfaction.”
That would be because you haven’t READ the science, or you don’t understand it, or both. In other words, literally no one here cares that YOU are not satisfied because we’ve read it for ourselves.
Read it, understand it, and then we’ll talk. Don’t bother commenting till then. This time the conversation really is over.
Okay, I read the NEJM article you referenced. It says, among other things, that Hannah, unfortunately, had a mitochondrial enzyme deficit (genetic, pre-existing, likely unleashed by vaccination).
Further, it states, as has been mentioned, that the VICP was established in response to lawsuits, so that there would be companies that made vaccines. It mentioned that “If scientific studies supported the notion that vaccines caused an adverse event ….. children and their families were compensated quickly, generously, and fairly”. I know that isn’t happening, and it’s wrong , but part of the reasoning it isn’t being administered fairly is the large number of non-related events being attributed to immunizations.
I would ask if we had no immunizations would our world, country, society, etc. be healthier? If you answer this yes, I can assure you that most medical people would disagree. If there are some immunization schedules you think are better, than show the science.
“part of the reasoning it isn’t being administered fairly is the large number of non-related events being attributed to immunizations”
This is an ASSUMPTION that is not supported by facts, science, or critical thinking. Manufacturers are not liable, and Health and Human Services does not WANT to pay out, so research is not done to establish whether these “events” are related or not. It is not a coincidence that none of the newer vaccines have anything other than anaphylaxis, shoulder injury, or fainting on the injury table. No one with even a modicum of sense can believe that those are the ONLY harms they cause. But not documenting any others makes it far easier for VICP to deny a causal link and force each petitioner to PROVE that the vaccine caused their injuries. And the Special Masters get away with ignoring research that HAS been done because it is not government-sponsored. You have no clue the difficulty of prosecuting one of these cases. As Rebecca Estepp said, “Government attorneys defend a government program using government-funded science before government judges.” Precious few people walk into THAT frivolously and even fewer lawyers are willing to take on even good cases because it is anything but a great career move.
Yes, Hannah Poling was the victim of a “genetic, pre-existing” mitochondrial disorder, so so the spin says… In reality, according to the neurologists at Kennedy Krieger where she was treated “Our clinical experience at Kennedy Krieger over the last 15 years has shown that a deficiency of mitochondrial complex I is a common cause of regressive autism.” [emphasis mine] http://mitomedical.com/2013/04/16/evaluation-and-treatment-of-autism-with-mitochondrial-disease-by-dr-richard-kelley/
And specifically in Hannah’s case: “As documented in the Report, mitochondrial dysfunction of a ‘mixed complex’ type became apparent . . . . Such mitochondrial dysfunction may arise from multiple genetic or epigenetic causes. Genetic causes include mutations in nuclear or mitochondrial DNA. Epigenetic causes include environmental toxins, infections and various pharmaceuticals. The mitochondrial genome polymorphism described in Hannah is not suspected to be pathogenic but instead is a benign variant, as detailed in Dr. John Soffner’s notes.” (http://www.rescuepost.com/files/rh-4.pdf, Exhibit 3) [The “Report” mentioned was written by Dr. Robert Zimmerman of Kennedy Krieger and is unavailable to the public, but would be if the Poling case were part of the OAP as was originally intended.]
In other words, Hannah did not have an underlying “genetic” mitochondrial dysfunction. She had genes that made her more susceptible to vaccine injury and subsequent mitochondrial dysfuction, as is “common” in regressive autism. And indeed, the description her mother gave of the night she received those vaccines sounds eerily like the stories so many other parents tell: “CHILD developed a fever of 102.3 degrees two days after her immunizations and was lethargic irritable and cried for long periods of time . . . . She exhibited intermittent, high-pitched screaming and a decreased response to stimuli . . . . According to CHILD’s mother, this behavior continued over the next 10 days, and CHILD also began to arch her back when she cried.” (Exhibit 1 of the above link.)
Moreover, Yates Hazlehurst, another of the other OAP test cases, had EXACTLY the same diagnosis from the same place, Kennedy Krieger, and the same health history as Hannah, but THAT case did not have access to the crucial testimony of Dr. Zimmerman. Instead, AFTER the Poling concession, the Special Master in the Hazlehurst case relied on PREVIOUS, contradictory, testimony that Dr. Zimmerman had made to deny the petition, and the DOJ attorney, Lynn Ricciardella, claimed that “we’re not even at the stage where it’s medically or scientifically possible” that vaccines cause autism, even though she herself had sealed up the opinion of the government’s own medical expert witness which stated that vaccines did cause Hannah Poling’s autism. http://www.rescuepost.com/files/rh-memo-1.pdf
It’s particularly galling and appalling when you understand the the DOJ lawyers and HHS Special Masters KNEW that hundreds of cases of autism had ALREADY been compensated and still chose to lie about it to the American public and the families devastated by vaccine injury. Personally speaking, the kind of “callous disregard” for the suffering of children and their families that enables this sort of behavior makes me sick to my stomach.
You’re still thinking I care what “most medical people” would say about anything. “Most medical people” thought that high cholesterol diets were causing heart disease, even most cardiologists, while the science indicate otherwise for DECADES before they caught on. “Most medical people” do not read the science and, frankly, I don’t think most of them would understand it either. My own physician thought that hypoglycemia was protective against diabetes. I was so astounded, I didn’t even bother correcting him. In fact it is a precursor in many cases, a symptom of the hyper-insulin response that eventually LEADS to type 2 diabetes. http://www.nbcnews.com/id/24716880/ns/health-diabetes/t/even-thin-person-can-get-diabetes/#.WlOMUN-nE2w
When someone says “show the science” about revising vaccine schedules, they are saying “do my research for me.” I’ve already provided plenty to get you started. Do the research yourself.
I don’t currently practice law, but you don’t seem to have an understanding of how the law works. A successful lawsuit, whether toxic tort, malpractice or other civil action is decided (generally) by a jury (most plaintiff attorneys do not want a bench trial where the facts are decided by a judge, as any emotional sway is taken out of the mix). This is a large factor in why the Vaccine Fund was established. Not so much because there might be some causality from vaccines (and I have no doubt that there is SOME), but rather that juries can be unduly swayed by an attorney (my work was on the defense side), and settlements can be unrealistic. One case that I was involved in, on the defense, involved a man who had a stroke. A hired gun testified that a particular treatment (discredited at the time, and since) was the standard of care. The insurance company chose to settle, rather than face a sympathetic jury who might award more. The science was in favor of the defense, but that doesn’t matter.
You may be able to convince YOURSELF that it was a piece of cake for some persuasive lawyer to wrest damages from juries when it comes to injury from vaccines–products that have widely and regularly been touted as the single best medical advancement in history–but anyone with a modicum of sense knows damned well that those cases had to have been meticulously documented in order to overcome a jury’s bias. I met one of the winning attorneys from the pre-VICP era a couple of years ago. His documentation was incredible. The science was most definitely NOT in favor of the defense–nor were the interoffice emails and memoranda. The documentation he had made it clear that not only did the executives KNOW that the vaccine was hurting kids badly, they didn’t give a damn. Just like tobacco company executives, they simply did all they could to hide the fact that their products were not safe. The big difference between tobacco and vaccines? By the time the first state tobacco suit was settled in 1998, no one actually believed the tobacco companies’ claims because the media covered the science fairly. If the media covered vaccine science as well, there would be indictments.)
The “large factors” involved in the establishment of the VICP include:
1. DPT vaccines caused tremendous harm, including death in some children.
2. Vaccine manufacturers petitioned Congress to relieve them of liability, not because the products were NOT doing the harm they were accused of but because they WERE and they knew they would continue to lose in courts.
3. VICP was supposed to make compensation an EASIER process for families (not harder), so parents of injured children lobbied for its creation not knowing how egregiously it was to fail other families.
4. With the VICP compensation could happen quietly so that people would never hear about the devastating injuries vaccines could cause and thus would not lose faith in the “vital” vaccine program.
See my above reply.
Here is a question: would someone who does not vaccinate her children assume liability if the child had an infection (measles, mumps, rubella, H. Influenza, etc.) and passed it on to another person who became ill?
If not, why not?
I’ll answer your question with a question: Would someone who insists that others vaccinate their children to decrease the possibility that their own children will get an infection assume liability if a child develops a chronic illness as a result of those vaccines? If not, why not?
If society recognizes that as the “standard”, then any injury suffered should be compensated by society. I’ve already stated that the VICP program should be easier to deal with, but that the specter of allegations (leaving aside the most serious – autism, spectrum disorders, seizures, encephalopathy, ) has drained the system of money, wasted efforts, and heightened skepticism.
Anyone exploring the role of the microbiome in all this?
What is the incidence of autism, spectrum disorders, and encephalopathy in kids that have not been vaccinated? Amish, others?
Why does “society” get to tell people they MUST give their healthy children a preventative treatment for something they are (often extremely) unlikely to get when that treatment can result in permanent disability or death (putting aside the question for now of how often it does so)? I suspect you’ll say that “the benefits outweigh the risk,” but do they? And for whom? And who gets to decide? The CDC The committees that are manned by people making pots of money from their pharmaceutical careers? Clearly, any benefits aren’t outweighing the risk for the individual who derives no benefit from a polio vaccine but is severely injured by it. But from the point of view of many parents who perceive their children to be at greater risk from infectious disease, the benefits of OTHERS’ children being vaccinated outweigh the risk TO THEM.
The assumption you’re starting with is that THAT attitude should call the shots, not the one that says, “the benefits of this vaccine cannot possibly outweigh the risks for my child.” But that’s ridiculous, it’s saying that it’s okay to prioritize threats to one segment of the population over threats to another. It’s even saying it’s okay to prioritize certain KINDS of threats over others because as I’m sure you’re aware, all threat of infection transmission simply cannot be eliminated if someone leaves their home. It has even been demonstrated that vaccinated people can be asymptomatic carriers of pertussis, so vaccination is no bar to transmitting pertussis. Yet it is still assumed that it is okay to bully others into incurring a lot of personal risk to reduce risk for a small number of severely immunocompromised by a smidge. There’s nothing logical or fair about that.
“Anyone exploring the role of the microbiome in all this?”
NOW you are starting to think! Yes, people ARE “exploring the role,” and it’s a HUGE one. Monumental even. Restoring the microbiome was a first priority in almost any autism recovery scenario. And you know what’s incredibly ironic? All this work is a direct outgrowth of Andrew Wakefield’s work which was among the first to detect a huge correlation between autism, especially regressive autism, and bowel disease (which is always at least accompanied by a highly disturbed microbiome).
“What is the incidence of autism, spectrum disorders, and encephalopathy in kids that have not been vaccinated? Amish, others?”
More thinking! I may pass out. Really great question isn’t it? I’m assuming you would be surprised to know that NONE of them have been asked or answered by the CDC or the scientific community at large. Certainly Bernardine Healy, ex-head of the NIH, was surprised to find in 2008 that such “basic research” had not been done. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-open-question-on-vaccines-and-autism/
Surely, it’s been done in the last decade though, right? Wrong. In this hearing in November, 2012, Rep. Bill Posey nailed CDC representative Dr. Coleen Boyle on whether they had ever compared autism rates in vaccinated children versus unvaccinated children. Answer: No. https://www.c-span.org/video/?309672-1/federal-response-rise-autism-rates
In the five years since then? Oh, nooooooooooooo. We’ve been spending all our time worrying about measles to do such “basic research.” Yet we’re in the middle of a multi-year study to “identify factors that may put children at risk for autism spectrum disorders,” but according to Dr. William Thompson, a co-author on many of the epidemiological studies that supposedly “exonerate” vaccines in any role in ASD, one question they are not even going to ask is what role, if any, did vaccines play?” https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/seed.html
There HAVE been some hints from independent scientists who don’t have the resources of the NIH that such outcomes are much higher in children such as this study http://www.oatext.com/Preterm-birth-vaccination-and-neurodevelopmental-disorders-a-cross-sectional-study-of-6-to-12-year-old-vaccinated-and-unvaccinated-children.php. The study is of course controversial because as soon as publication was announced the PR machine went to work to have it retracted. Are there problems with the study? Certainly. It is based on a survey of homeschooling parents (where there are significant numbers of non-vaccinated children). That population is likely not to be representative of a cross-section of the population of the country. In addition, people had to be motivated enough to fill out the questionnaire and that likely adds some selection bias, but that certainly doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be published.
Then there’s Dr. Paul Thomas who has a practice of 13,000 children. He’s actually got significant populations of fully vaccinated, partially vaccinated according to his own suggested schedule, and non-vaccinated children, and he had the guts to actually compare them. Not one case of autism in the non-vaccinated or the partially vaccinated (though several children were showing possible signs of neurological decline and the decision was made to stop vaccinating them), and the fully vaccinated population has approximately the number you’d expect. Dr. Thomas has since analyzed the data further and says that unpopular as it may be, the fully unvaccinated population is by far the healthiest. He’s having trouble getting his data published. I wonder why?
The ONE person who asked about the Amish was not a medical researcher, but a UPI journalist, Dan Olmsted. The first thing you have to understand is that “the Amish” are not homogeneous. There are Amish communities around the country, and they have varying philosophies on the practice of vaccination, with younger people in particular increasingly acquiescing to vaccinate at least partially. Olmsted went to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania to investigate autism levels in the Amish community and he wrote a two-part series reprinted here: https://www.upi.com/The-Age-of-Autism-The-Amish-anomaly/95661113911795/
In a community that should have had about 130 cases by then-current rates Dan could only find three cases: one a vaccinated child who had been adopted from another country, a second who had had a vaccine reaction that sounded very much like Hannah Poling’s, and one more. The series became ongoing and he traveled to other Amish communities. Autism rates were consistently low and most individual cases were connected to high mercury levels in the environment or Fragile X syndrome. Of course that wasn’t a scientific study, and the Amish population differs from the mainstream population in a significant number of important ways that could confound the results if there was one.
This is the closest thing that I have ever seen to a large-scale vaccinated vs. unvaccinated study. It’s large scale (n = 29,238 children), and since it was 1988-1999 in the UK, the population studied was not vaccinated anywhere near as much as today’s children; 96% had received DPT and 71.3% had received MMR. So the category distinctions are easier to establish. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1448377/ Interestingly, asthma was 14 times more common in the DPT-vaccinated kids, and eczema was 9.4 times more common, but the association was strongest in kids who went to the doctor the least. In fact most of the 9 children who were not vaccinated had been to the doctor fewer than 4 times in the first six months of life, which was the definition for the lowest “consulting frequency” category. The author found these huge associations and then proceeded to completely dismiss them with “but these associations appeared to be limited to the minority of children who rarely seek care from a GP. This limited association is more likely to be the result of bias than a biological effect.” This implies that parents were keeping their children who were gasping for breath at home, away from doctors, even though the U.K. has socialized medicine and it would not cost the parents anything to have their children treated. And even “adjusted” for consulting frequency, the relative risk was STILL 10.33!!! The author never explains why a healthy child would or should see a doctor more than three times in the first six months. Nor does she discuss how often these children saw doctors after the first six months. Given the breakdown for consulting frequency at 18 months for kids who did not receive MMR, it seems apparent that non-vaccinating parents were not nearly as reluctant to consult a doctor as the author implies. In short, the author found extremely alarming results and did her best to pretend she didn’t. Does that sit well with you? It sure doesn’t with me. (By the way, allergy is strongly associated with autism.)
If one assumes that there are multiple factors in causing or associated with autism, as many people believe, it defies logic to believe that none of the partially or un-vaccinated children would have any signs of autism. Too many other risks – pesticides, endocrine disrupters, antibiotics in the food supply, fracking chemicals, etc.
No, it doesn’t. As I mentioned before, vaccines, especially in combination with acetaminophen and/or antibiotics, are the PRIMARY driver of the autism epidemic. Most other exposures that contribute significantly do so synergistically with vaccines. It’s a practice with an emphasis on holism. Dr. Thomas figured out a long time ago NOT to vaccinate a sick child or one on antibiotics. He also prescribes fewer antibiotics (remember that microbiome discussion?) and tells his clients NOT to use acetaminophen. And his practice is in Portland, OR, long known for its “crunchiness.”
Why isn’t there an epidemic elsewhere in the world, where, presumably, similar practices as vaccines and acetaminophen exist?
There is. While getting reliable prevalence numbers can be as problematic in other countries as it is here, it is clear that autism rates are rising nearly everywhere in the world. https://www.focusforhealth.org/autism-rates-across-the-developed-world/
That is not to say that vaccines are the primary driver in EVERY country. The United States vaccinates the hell out of its children and most pediatricians still recommend Tylenol to deal with vaccine reactions. Few countries vaccinate at anywhere near the rates we do, but they may have other compelling environmental exposures like mercury-emitting coal power plants which would offset kids’ lower vaccine exposures.
Great article. Sure vaccines have saved lives. But at what cost? I believe doctor training is biased. The AMA and industry decide what they are taught. So they get a one sided look at vaccines. They see only the good and none of the problems. They are never shown the countless studies showing problems with vaccines.
I am with the people who would skip certain vaccines and delay others by a year or so. Your kid is not going to get measles if you delay a year. And if by some freak chance it happened, there is still only 1 chance in a 1000 of something serious happening. Everybody over 60 here has had measles when they were a kid.
Some of the latest studies to come out.
http://medcraveonline.com/IJVV/IJVV-04-00072.pdf
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27669365
http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyt.2017.00003/full
“Your kid is not going to get measles if they delay the immunization for a year”. Your kid is “probably” not going to get measles at all, but that is because of herd immunity. Your child is more vulnerable the longer the interval between birth and time after recommendation of immunization.
“Herd immunity” is complete and utter BULLSHIT. We do not have now, nor have we EVER had anything approaching “herd immunity.” Ask yourself, exactly how many adults have received the entire CDC-recommended vaccine schedule? Well less than the 95% or so recommended to obtain “herd immunity.” And what of all the *other* communicable diseases for which there aren’t any vaccines? Where are the pandemics?
The herd immunity question (or “community immunity” as is the current PC term) is more nuanced than both sides generally acknowledge as well.
There are many diseases that we vaccinate for where it simply isn’t an issue: Tetanus is not contagious. Invasive meningococcal disease is extremely rare and just barely contagious (98% of all cases are “sporadic” and many are immune before they ever get to a college dorm). The flu vaccine doesn’t promote any sort of “community immunity” because there are too many rapidly mutating strains in circulation at any time (not to mention a boatload of other organisms that can cause “flu-like illness”). Our current pertussis and polio vaccines do not actually prevent active infection or transmission of such infections.
We did approach “herd immunity” levels for measles when most adults had had measles and most children had been vaccinated. But the vaccine fails in about 5% of the people who receive one dose and a smaller percentage of those who receive two. In addition to that, contrary to the prevailing belief when eradication of measles was first dreamed of, immunity wanes over time in an unpredictable pattern based upon the particular person’s immune system. So at this point in time, we have a lot of adults wandering around who are susceptible to measles infection, and we have no way of knowing who those people are. As a result, as predicted by scientists back in the 1960s, measles has become a “childhood” disease that primarily attacks adults and infants (and evidenced in the Disneyland outbreak where one might have expected children to be the primary population). Eventually, it is going to be the elderly who are most susceptible to measles, mumps, and rubella. Wonderful.
And chickenpox? That’s crazy. All these kids had the vaccine so chickenpox isn’t circulating like it was and adults are no longer getting the boost that exposure would have given to keep the virus from erupting as shingles. Suddenly, shingles is everywhere, even in little kids. I never heard of shingles as a kid, even though my father was the youngest of six and my mother was in the middle of 13. And the fact that shingles is everywhere means that we CANNOT eradicate chickenpox because shingles is contagious and vaccinated people can get shingles. I got shingles about five years ago and my two kids came down with chickenpox as a result. Of course the “answer” will be shingles vaccines and chickenpox boosters. Oh joy, oh rapture. Just what our already dysregulated immune systems need, more vaccines to dysregulate further.
…and if the child does get measles, s/he will then have life-long real immunity just like us oldsters. S/he’ll be sick for a few days, but if you’ve been feeding your family good food and keeping them healthy, the kid(s) will be none the worse.
John Collins Yes you are correct that herd immunity is keeping the infant from getting measles. Measles is now under control because of the vaccine. Today if every parent delayed by one year the measles vaccine are we going to see an epidemic of measles? I doubt it. I am not saying to never get the vaccine, just delay. All choices have risk.
They give the mmr right before you really know if your kid is normal for sure. I WOULD LOVE TO SEE EVERY NEW PARENT DELAY THE MMR ONE YEAR. Then the kid is more developed and then we can find our for sure if the mmr vaccine is a problem.
These parents should also skip the Hep B at birth of course as that is insane, and may be screwing up vulnerable kids before they even get the mmr.
History is written by the winners. Want to go back to the ‘50’s?
New report of 45 cases of diphtheria in Haiti……be careful where you vacation with your un vaccinated children….
Thanks, but you really don’t have to worry about us. We’re not usually “vacationing” in poverty-stricken areas that have been hit by repeated natural disasters.
Yes, and people die fro diphtheria, and other preventable disease.
Yes, they do, but they don’t have to. Diphtheria is a bacterial infection that can be treated with antitoxin and antibiotics. https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/001608.htm
Diphtheria antitoxin is no longer used in the US
Diphtheria is no longer in the U.S. If you have a problem with medline’s info, take it up with them.
Just commenting on your statement.
YOU were, or “Thomas Davis” was? Or is it that you ARE “Thomas Davis” as well? Your time would be much better spent reading than commenting.
Well, what is that in Td, DT, or Tdap, Boostrix ?
People travel, and may be exposed to a variety of air-borne, food-borne, and water-borne diseases. What immunization, if any, does ANYONE think is appropriate.
Wonder how many posting here will feel good if their child falls ill, or dies, from a vaccine preventable disease?
We have grown up in the US where infectious disease is relatively uncommon, but that is not the case worldwide. Prevention reduces the incidence of many diseases, but it is not without side effects.
No one here will feel good if their child or anyone else’s falls ill, or dies, from a vaccine-preventable disease. The difference between these people and you is that they also care about the children who fall ill, or die, from the so-called “rare” “side effects” of the “preventive” treatment that are meant to keep them well.
And of course, infectious disease rates are not the same here. That’s a huge part of what goes into the risk/benefit calculation. The risk vs. benefit curve for each vaccine can be drastically different here than it is in some other places. It does not make sense to vaccinate according to the risks of another country. You have only to ask yourself why we are not forcing U.S. infants to take the yellow fever vaccine to realize that. “Yellow fever is deadly! Costing many lives a year! Your infant MUST have the vaccine!” Except that yellow fever simply isn’t a risk in the U.S.
Or falls permanently ill or dies from a vaccine.
Its the Vaccine Promotable Diseases VPDs that we worry about here .
Autism
Cancers
ME
ALS
Hogkinsons
Parkinsons
SIDs
Diabetes
MS
ADHD
Obesity\Anorexia
Alzheimers (its goes on and on )
There is a holocaust out here and you and your little friends are defenders of the biggest crime in all history .
Very Vague and this concept could apply to a million other things in medicine. While I agree in part it’s a burden versed benefit issue. Plus if “the masses” weren’t vaccinated the risk of not vaccinating a certain child or group would be higher; as the disease would be more prevalent. Lots of things to consider
Good lord. This is a freakin’ blog post about her experience, NOT a scientific treatise. There are plenty of blog posts on this site and countless others that DO give the science. Why aren’t you reading those?
Of course the “risks” of not vaccinating would be “higher” if specific viruses were circulating. Do you HONESTLY think she hasn’t thought of that? Now, have YOU thought about the fact that it’s ridiculous to be as aggressive about measles vaccination here as it is in Africa? Or to use African measles death rates to scare people into vaccinating? In the United States, before the measles vaccine was licensed, measles was considered a benign self-limiting “rite of passage.” Did people sometimes die? Yes, but they were most often poor and undernourished, and even when there were three to four million cases of measles in the U.S., there were only about 400 deaths. The death rate had been dropping rapidly for decades and showed no sign of stopping. In addition, we’re finding that were actually benefits to having had measles infection. As you said, lots of things to consider.
Hi Ruth,
Get your skates on ’cause you’ve got a long way to go! ; )
Wow!! Thank you!! My youngest daughter, now 24 years old has ODD or ASD and just 2 years the head doctor conducting the world genetics study on Autism confirmed her genes are fine, and her Autism came from environmental influences which most certainly were vaccines. I have video of those days before her last set of shots….i never felt good about it. She was 18 months old. Now she has no option, but to live with my mistake.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
Sorry for your daughter’s problems but association does not imply causation.
John, I’m assumimg what you’re trying to say is correlation doesn’t equal causation unless you’re trying to prove the decline of diseases when vaccinations were introduced, right?
The sun will come up tomorrow throw morning ang some people will die at the time sunlight is first seen. Association isn’t causation.
There are many factors which MAY be associated with autism, spectrum disorders, etc. Doesn’t mean any particular environmental exposure is the cause. The definition of autism has been broadened over the years, and there is more awareness of the spectrum. If you NEVER saw it in an inimmunized child, that might be significant, but it occurred before immunizations were widespread, or even available. Science is full of apparent causation which, on closer study, was not correlated. Google Bendectin for one of the most egregious examples.
No one, repeat no one, believes there is ONE cause of autism spectrum disorders. There ARE many factors which ARE “associated” with autism, and there is a great deal of science already on the subject. If you REALLY are interested in the subject, stop spouting talking points and READ it. Start with The Environmental and Genetic Causes of Autism, by James Lyons-Weiler, a scientist who believed as you do that what he was told about scientific evidence on the subject was accurate UNTIL he actually did a literature search for himself. Like Bernardine Healy before him, he discovered that it was nothing of the kind. He chose to read and digest a huge volume of research, and that book is the dazzling result.
By the way, virtually every reader of this blog quite a bit about the widening of autism’s diagnostic criteria, and they also know that it doesn’t begin to explain the huge increases we are seeing in incidence. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4177682/
You, as a supposedly logical human being, should know that you don’t have to have ZERO cases of autism in unimmunized children for autism to be a direct cause of autism. Cigarette smoking causes lung cancer. My father died of lung cancer, yet he never smoked a day in this life. Does that mean that the anomaly of my father’s cancer is evidence against smoking causing lung cancer? No indeed.
Autism, especially severe nonverbal autism, was very rare before vaccination was widespread. It wasn’t even described until the 1940s. Mark Blaxill and Dan Olmsted did a thorough historical literature search for ANY description of a syndrome that could be equated with autism prior to that point. The book Denial was the result. Read it. It’s a fascinating and rigorous historical exploration.
We know that vaccines are by no means the ONLY cause of autism, but it is highly likely that vaccines are a primary driver of the explosion in incidence that we have seen.
Amateur !
No one uses that old line anymore .
Sure they do. It’s EVERYWHERE, and of course it’s true. The problem is that so-called “skeptics” (ha!) say that as if it is — or should be — “end of discussion.” Of COURSE correlation does not equal causation, but it sure as hell isn’t evidence AGAINST it. Establishing correlation is in fact the first step toward proving causation. The “powers that be” haven’t DONE those subsequent steps though (they don’t recognize them when others have) because they know those steps would establish causation, and that’s the LAST thing they want to do.
Your daughter can be detoxed. Many are helping their children and reversing autism now. 😃
I would like to see some info on the detox process.
It is called the Andy Cutler protocol.
Only could be vaccines? How about endocrine disrupters, heavy metals, antibiotics fed to cattle, pesticides, etc. all of which can cause serious health problems.
So…after your research you’ve decided that vaccines are dangerous and you’ll never have your future children get them? Would you mind elaborating on exactly WHAT your research uncovered to make you feel this way?
I think the concept was for us to do our own research. That was the theme after all.
Exactly.
My letter to my child on graduation said to let no one make healthcare decisions for you. The decisions made must be owned by you because the consequences will last a lifetime.
The internet has the biggest library on earth so learn to use it!
I call complete Bull. If you were a nurse with any kind of experience, you would have seen unvaccinated children hospitalized or die. This is why people actually in the medical field are so passionate on the subject and so frustrated to see parents not vaccinate their children. You should be ashamed to the disservice to your fellow human beings, especially if you’re a medical provider.
And I call bull on your bull. We’ve heard LOTS of medical practitioners talk about people they saw die from “vaccine-preventable diseases,” but they usually say it’s polio (eliminated in the U.S. since the ’70s, so yeah) or measles (even BEFORE the first vaccine was licensed in 1963, there were only 400 people a year who died from measles complications, that’s 8 per state). Maybe they say it’s pertussis, because pertussis is on the rise, but THAT has NOTHING to do with current vaccination rates which are at historic highs and EVERYTHING to do with the pertussis vaccine used in this country). Maybe medical practitioners see someone die of bacterial meningitis, but then they look up the stats and realize that there are VERY few cases a year, many of which aren’t covered by a meningitis vaccine, and the meningitis vaccine has a ONE PERCENT serious adverse event rate).
When Dr. Paul Thomas talks about why HE was passionate about vaccines, you can actually believe him. He grew up in Africa, and one of his best friends died from measles. And yet, even HE can look objectively at the data in front of him (a pediatric practice of 13,000 children) and determine that, unpopular as it sounds, the completely unvaccinated children in his practice are by far the healthiest.
You should be ashamed that you haven’t done the research the author has, but feel perfectly qualified to shame her.
Amen, Professor.
The bull is knee deep today.
Delighted, Professor, to see that you are a fellow Williams grad, though I was there before you, when it was all male, without the distractions, plus and minus, of women students.
I would ask you, and others, what immunizations, if any, you think might be appropriate for a parent in the USA? I can agree if you’re starting to rule out chickenpox (varicella) for children. I think the best thing for that is a “chickenpox party”; ditto for Zosterix or the newer one for “reducing” the symptoms of herpes zoster (shingles) and, for that matter, the rare form of meningitis given as a preventative by vaccination. Where, and when, do you draw the line?
Even if some of the horrific side effects attributed to the HPV vaccine are true, do you feel that reducing the incidence of genital and oral cancers which are attributed to it is worth the risk? Or not?
At what point, from a societal perspective, is the risk-benefit ratio tilted towards a vaccination? Smallpox (eradicated, essentially except for a few labs), Polio (essentially eradicated in a first world country (and, by the way, I don’t think FDR had polio but rather Guillain-Barré)), Tetanus immunization (at least once), – perhaps diphtheria and pertussis? What’s your thought about immunization against Mumps, measles, and rubella – at least in women prior to pregnancy. How about hepatitis A and B – at sometime in one’s life? Just trying to suss out whether or not you feel there is a role for infectious disease prevention.
Thanks for your comments.
If you know I went to Williams, then you have to have done SOME reading.
I’m glad to see that you are not in the “everyone should get every available vaccine regardless of ‘side effects,’ family history, effectiveness, or prevalence” camp, not delighted that you consider women a “distraction.”
As you can see from my response to Thomas Davis, part of the point of this post is that everyone has to determine the risk-to-benefit ratio of each vaccine for themselves. In other words, part of the problem has been that we have delegated such decisions to authorities in public health whose only concerns are on the population level. “From a societal perspective,” it cannot be moral to force or even coerce people to inject themselves or their healthy children with preventive treatments that can cause permanent harm, or even death. That is the essence of “informed consent” and is a cornerstone of international human rights since World War II and the experiments of Josef Mengele and Shiro Ishii. Of course there is “a role for infectious disease prevention,” but it is not my right to decide for someone else which things they should prevent or which means they use to achieve it. My job as a parent is to assess specific threats and specific methods of prevention from the point of view of my own family’s medical history.
Well, one vaccine we could do away with right off the bat is the flu.
I think the only reason it was assumed that you were male was the coarse use of language, which is, more typically, male.
My comment on Thomas Davis is that it was his observation, which I sort of agree with.
I viewed women as a potential “distraction” in college, not in a disparaging sense at all (happily married for many years), but in my attempts to get the best possible grades so as to get into a highly competitive graduate program (which I did), having women would have been something that may have taken me away from study. I did go to an all-male parochial high-school, so wanted to continue that tradition, which Williams was until after I was graduated.
It’s too bad that you had felt the need to sequester yourself away from women in order to obtain your high grades.It may have helped you to get good grades so you could get into a competitive graduate program, but I suspect you lost much more than you gained by it. Our society, and the medical profession in particular, has long denigrated so-called “feminine” traits, traits which have a long history of aiding the healing process. There is so much lost ground to be made up for as a result. That’s probably the single biggest reason our children (and our society) is so sick right now. And it’s up to the mothers to reclaim so much of what has been lost so that we may survive to have a future.
Coarse language? That’s what gave “Thomas” the impression that I was male, huh? Sorry, not buying it. I’m sure you had your impression LONG before I used that “coarse language” in my one burst of emotion, and you are by no means the first to make such an assumption. I suspect that for you and the others, the absence of any sex-identifying markers simply reveals your unconscious belief that rational and logical arguments are the purview of men. Perhaps that’s a natural result of considering women as nothing more than a “distraction” at institutions of higher learning.
Whoa, Professor, quite a leap. FWIW, my concern about attending a single-gender school was because of my older brother’s promising college career was nearly derailed by a failed romance, from Junior year Phi Beta Kappa, to nearly not graduating, but I digress.
My question remains open – based on your research, what, if any, vaccinations did you get for your children?
My recommendations are – H influenza, TDAP (once), Hep B, HPV, MMR. Polio is +/-
Did it ever occur to you that your older brother may have had OTHER reasons for derailing his “promising college career”? FWIW, single-sex institutions are no bar to “failed romance.” In my experience, people who are truly into their studies cannot be “distracted” by romantic partners. My own college boyfriend graduated magna cum laude with a double major in Economics and History and is currently teaching at Northwestern.
And my answer still stands. It should not matter to you or anyone what vaccinations MY children got, and frankly I consider it none of your business.
And if you are recommending the hepatitis B for newborns of women who do not test positive for hepatitis B and you recommend HPV for anyone who does not have a family history of cervical cancer, then you have not done enough reading. Do more, much more, and we’ll talk. A mainstream study to determine the “cost effectiveness” of HPV vaccines indicated that it might save approximately 0.5% of the lives expected to be lost to cervical cancer in the next 60 years. (By the way, they did deem that “cost effective.”) In other words, our level of death due to cervical cancer is already quite low due to Pap testing and HPV vaccines cannot bring it much lower. By contrast, the shot has already ruined the lives of a number of previously very athletic young women and girls. A personal friend of mine was in the original Gardasil trial and was diagnosed with very aggressive cervical cancer within two years of the shot. She survived, but in spite of her doctors’ advice not because of it.
By the way, the shot for children is the DTaP, and if you have done any reading on that one you will know that it does not prevent pertussis infection or transmission. So much for herd immunity.
Well, the flu vaccine certainly hasn’t been all that effective lately. It seems to attenuate the severity and duration of symptoms in some percentage of people (I think it was around 23% in 2013 – 2014), but there are some people who believe there is merit to getting the shot, especially if you are in healthcare and would otherwise infect a large number of unhealthy people. As with any treatment, you have to consider a concept known as Number Needed to Treat (NNT) and another known as Number Needed to Harm (NNH). Simply put, these represent, respectively, the number of people you need to treat to get a benefit from the treatment, and the number who suffer harm from the treatment. So if 1 in 4 people would not get the disease from the treatment, the NNT is 4. If 1 in 10 develops a rash, for example, the NNH is 10. No medication, including placebo, homeopathic, and any other treatment is without potential for harm, and may have benefit. The Cutler detoxification for mercury treatment, mentioned in another post, is truly frightening for its major potential for harm. Caveat Emptor.
You bring up some very important concepts. Thank you. I’m not sure you understand how the “number needed to treat” actually works with respect to flu vaccine efficacy, however. You imply that the the number of people who must receive the flu vaccine in order for one to receive a benefit is 4 if the efficacy is around 23% (this year official estimates are more like 10%). But in order to benefit from the flu vaccine, one would have to both receive immunity from the vaccine AND be susceptible to the flu virus. But only about 3% of the population gets the flu every year. In order to receive any benefit from flu vaccination, one would have to be the 1 in 4 (in your example) or 1 in 10 (this year) who gets immunity from the vaccine AND be in the 3% who would otherwise have gotten the flu. That puts the number of people who need to be “treated” in order for one to benefit from the flu vaccine at approximately 133 with your example and 333 for this year.
Interestingly, when I investigated FluZone package inserts, I found that a number of “side effects” of the flu vaccine were experienced by people who received the vaccine. Several of these “side effects” are actually symptoms associated with the flu, and approximately 1% of vaccine recipients report being incapacitated from these “side effects,” which means that in most years (and this year seems to be a certainty) more people experience harm from the vaccine than benefit.
And that’s a just a crude estimate. When you add in the possibility of severe harm like Guillain Barre syndrome, or increased likelihood of miscarriage, or the toxic effects of the Thimerosal that is still contained in every multidose vial, and the likelihood that repeated annual vaccination results in even lower efficacies, the case against the flu vaccine looks very damning indeed.
“The Cutler detoxification for mercury treatment” “is truly frightening for its potential for harm”? Have you actually investigated low-dose chelation, or do you just throw this stuff out off the top of your head? Every medical treatment on the face of the earth has the potential to harm SOMEONE, but low-dose chelation was designed specifically to MINIMIZE that possibility, and it does a good job of it. I personally know a number of people whose children have either recovered or come close to recovery from autism through low-dose chelation alone and it was responsible for Eric Gladen’s recovery from the severe mercury poisoning he got from a tetanus vaccine he received on his 29th birthday as he relates in his film “Trace Amounts”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqqiy8DhyH0.
I call truth. As she said, WHEN you begin research on the subject, THEN you learn all the information, including physiological responses to injected toxoids & viruses lumped together. BECAUSE the medical trainee’s are not actually educated on details of any sort of vaccines & physiology, then you have the problem that we have these days with entire sensitive subject of vaccines. And this NP is one of hundreds of thousands of medical professionals who have figured out that vaccines need more research & purity in both creating & administering them. So, YOU “calling bull” sounds like you are one of the millions who have not actually REALLY researched this subject. Because, ya know….it doesn’t have to be all or nothing with vaccines, BUT it does have to be science & truth versus bullying & idolship practice.
Actually, as a 23 year nurse, we don’t see all kinds of people/kids dying from vaccine preventable ILLNESSES (they are illnesses NOT diseases) we do, however, see thousands dying, each year, from vaccine related injuries and illnesses and diseases. Look them up and do your own research. The body is a funny thing. It doesn’t do well with chemicals and heavy metals like formaldehyde, WI-38, MRC-5, polysorbate-80, bovine calf serum, human albumin, neosporin, clindamycin, aluminum, mercury, etc, etc, etc, being injected into it with each vaccine combination (sometimes 5 in one visit). The body’s not a very happy camper when having to deal with all that injected toxin, chemical reactions happen and that leads to all kinds of acute AND chronic illnesses and diseases that we in the medical profession are taught as hereditary and old age. You can call “bullshit” all you want. It doesn’t negate the facts that it’s true, it happens like we are saying, and you are being duped, hoodwinked, taken for a ride and taken for your money. How does it feel to be a pawn in someone else’s game and be toyed with like an insect? Especially at your childrens and grandchildren expense?
Right!
“The Cutler Protocol ..truly frightening…major potential for harm…blah, blah, blah.” You know not whereof you speak. Tell me how it has a potential for harm and I will answer you quite handily. I am coauthor of Andy’s next book which will be published in the spring.
If you have ever worked in the hospitals and actually talked to the doctors (in a trusting and not public conversation), you’d see the deleterious effects of vaccines, often far worse than if you got the disease. Physicians telling me “yea, it’s such a shame she got the flu shot…..the sad thing is it doesn’t even work” and then being told not to say anything because then no one will want to get the shot. Yes, people die of diseases, but they also die from the vaccine or may be permanently disabled. You MUST research the diseases and the vaccines – the incidence of death and complications, the side effects of the vaccines, the risk benefit assessment of the two. You may come to a different conclusion. I used to teach people to vaccinate because I trusted the people who “taught” me, my colleagues. Infection control practitioners. Do your own research and break it down. Be scientific about it. I agree this article should have had more meat to it, but go and get the meat yourself. People are suffering left and right from vaccines. Life long disability. Do what I did and look it up yourself. Not what the drug companies say the conclusion is.
You just keep telling yourself that big lie T. Take some time and educate YOUSELF about what is really going on here.
I call BRAVO and BRAVERY to nursepractioner. To be THE ONE to stand amongst your piers and disclaim the beliefs of the group is BRAVE beyond compare. Please keep right on telling the truth,some are bound to listen and spare their children a lifetime of illness and struggle.
You are never too OLD to learn.
Wow, someone with 1/10 the education of a physician feels qualified to challenge decades of research on immunization and disease. Did you have any public health training on your on-line graduate education?
The major advances in disease reduction have come from immunization. In the lifetime of anyone 60 or older, deaths from smallpox went from millions per year, worldwide, to 0. Hepatitis B has seen major reductions in death rates. Same with measles, etc. vaccines DON’T Cause autism. Are there side effects? Yes, generally but not always mild, and rare. Homeopathic medicines have side effects, too, and they’re water.
Wow, dude. You just made an assumption in the interests of ad hominem attack that makes your whole comment moot.
Fortunately, the author of the piece is MUCH better at scientific research than you are. Hepatitis B has “seen major reductions in death rates”? Did you know that hepatitis C has as well, and there’s no vaccine for it? Same mode of transmission too. But hey, let’s give ALL the credit to the vaccine. 😉
And, sorry, but the literature (not to mention the vaccine injury table) is full of horrible vaccine “side effects” that are not nearly as “rare” as people like to proclaim. In addition, the fact that you say “vaccine DON’T Cause autism” means that you haven’t done any research in that area as well. If you read the TOTALITY of the science, rather than that which is hand-picked for you by Merck or the CDC (and make no mistake they are providing the mainstream media with their talking points), then you will find a HUGE volume of science that makes it pretty damned clear that vaccines ARE implicated in the huge rise in autism and other neurological conditions.
The one thing I’ll agree with is that homeopathic medicines have side effects too, but it’s not because “they’re water.” If they were just water or placebo, they wouldn’t have side effects. 😉
Well, professorTMR, I am not sure what you profess in, but 1) death rates from hepatitis B are declining (mainly due to prevention of liver cancer), 2) hepatitis C is increasing in incidence, and, in the US at least, is the major cause of liver transplants. Better care is keeping people alive. 3) I am sure you’ll agree that eradication of smallpox was a major advance in worldwide health. Right?
4) I don’t deny that there are some harmful effects after vaccinations, but association doesn’t prove causation. 5) Many longitudinal studies refute the purported autism-vaccination link. 6) Even placebos have beneficial and harmful “side-effects”, likely associated with most homeopathic “medications”. Do you really believe in water having “memory”? I hope your doctorate, if you have one, isn’t in chemistry or physics or biology.
Incidence rates of hepatitis B are dropping, so death rates would of course be dropping as well. That doesn’t automatically imply that it was the vaccine that caused that drop. As you so very clearly say, “association doesn’t prove causation.” Incidence of new Hepatitis C cases is CURRENTLY rising, and is mostly due to injected drugs involved in opioid addiction (an epidemic directly due to pharmaceutical company misinformation campaigns). For the period from 1990 to 2002, incidence dropped at a comparable rate to the drop in hepatitis B incidence as can be seen in the charts in this blog http://vaxtruth.org/2012/02/when-we-know-better-we-do-better-or-do-we/ reporting CDC surveillance numbers.
No one’s saying “association proves causation” with respect to harmful effects of vaccines. We are, and have been for a long time, reading the scientific papers on how the immune system, and thus the neurological system, can be affected by the ingredients in the vaccines and by the immune activation that they are intended to cause.
I will heartily agree with you on the “longitudinal studies” that “refute” (in actuality, that is really “don’t support”) the purported autism-vaccination link. I’ve read virtually all of them. Epidemiological studies such as these are are the weakest form of scientific evidence. From an interview with Dr. Bernardine Healy, ex-head of the NIH,
“According to Healy, when she began researching autism and vaccines she found credible published, peer-reviewed scientific studies that support the idea of an association. That seemed to counter what many of her colleagues had been saying for years. She dug a little deeper and was surprised to find that the government has not embarked upon some of the most basic research that could help answer the question of a link.
“The more she dug, she says, the more she came to believe the government and medical establishment were intentionally avoiding the question because they were afraid of the answer.”
This was in 2008, but the “basic research” Healy speaks of has still not been done. It seems obvious to virtually anyone who actually reads the science that there is a group that is genetically susceptible to vaccine injury, yet zero research has been done to identify that group. And the methodology of virtually every study you’re talking about was clearly designed to increase the signal-to-noise ratio, not decrease it.
Smallpox eradication was an advance in worldwide health, but the vaccine’s role in its disappearance is decidedly muddier than you imply. First of all, at no point was the entire population vaccinated. Secondly, mass vaccination programs were abandoned towards the end, and they relied on quarantine and simple ring vaccination of people surrounding the quarantined. This would indicate that mass vaccination may indeed have been counter-productive in attempts to eradicate smallpox. Eradication seemed to be possible because smallpox only becomes infectious once the fever develops with the rash developing two to three days later. That’s a pretty small window compared with other infectious diseases. It also requires person-to-person contact. That is not the case for many “vaccine-preventable diseases,” which obviously cannot be eradicated with the same strategy.
I don’t have a doctorate, but I do have a degree in physics and a good background in chemistry. I took organic chemistry “for fun” at one of the most highly selective colleges in the country (which, by the way, I attended on a prestigious scholarship and graduated in three years). I COULD have gotten a doctorate in either of them if I had chosen, having received 800s on both the math and logic GREs. Because I have such a logical mind, I know that the fact that physics cannot yet explain the action of homeopathic remedies does not mean that there isn’t one. I don’t know whether the action of homeopathic remedies can be attributed to the idea of water having memory or not. There are intriguing experiments that exist with respect to water that make me suspect there is something to the idea, but much more importantly from my viewpoint is that I have experimented extensively with the use of homeopathic remedies, and I know as a result that they are very powerful.
But you said correlation doesn’t equal causation.
You must not realize that a nurse practitioner (NP) is close to being a full fledged doctor. They complete 90% as much in class and hands on education as a physician. They do hospital rounds. They can prescribe medication. They do not receive an online degree.
Doctors do one semester of vaccine education training. One.
And your stats on diseases are overwhelmingly waaay off.
I am just finishing my FNP. I have 750 hours of clinicals and about 2.5 years of classwork. MDs have 10,000+ hours not including a speciality. They also have 4 years of undergrad, 4 years of med school and 4 years of residency – not including speciality which is another 1-2 years of residency. So, 6.5 years of college with 750 hours of clinicals vs 8+ years of college with 10,000hrs+ of residency. And my FNP is online 🙂
Pediatricians only have three years of residency, and many nurse practitioners have three or more years of work experience before they even go for their nurse practitioner certification.
Thanks for clarifying.
What? A nurse practitioner has less training after nursing school than a second year Medical student. While many are allowed to practice independently of physician supervision, that is the result of good use of the political process rather than anything approaching equivalent knowledge. I don’t know many people with a complex medical or surgical problem who would choose a nurse practitioner over a physician; do you? Ask your nurse practitioner friends who they would see with a complex problem. Might be enlightening.
For a “surgical problem,” obviously virtually everyone would go to a surgeon and surgeons are not nurse practitioners.
For “complex” problems, on the other hand, you would probably find the answers far more enlightening than the author would. There are precious few MDs who are either interested in tracking down complex issues or would have a clue about how to go about it. In my experience, the nurse practitioners tend to be much more curious and open to finding solutions, perhaps because they don’t have egos to protect and don’t have to go through the cult-like hazing known as “residency.” Personally, I would be much more interested in working with the nurse practitioners I have met to find answers to my children’s healthcare issues than the vast majority of the pediatricians I have met.
By the way, she’s not challenging “decades of research on immunization and disease.” She’s reading it and challenging the rosy interpretation of it that makes it to the mainstream media. Huge difference. There’s a tremendous amount of research and data in the scientific literature on the adverse effects of vaccines, but you won’t see it if you don’t look for it because vested interests would really rather you didn’t know.
I agree 100%
Since 2011, there have been around 175 deaths (I stopped counting in 2014 – & this is factual info from the US government thanks to the VAERS system) FROM the Measles vaccine compared to ZERO deaths from the measles outbreak that “started in Disneyland.” True story.
Exactly
A number of VAERS disclaimers directly from the web site:
“VAERS is a passive reporting system, meaning it relies on individuals to send in reports of their experiences to CDC and FDA. VAERS is not designed to determine if a vaccine caused a health problem, but is especially useful for detecting unusual or unexpected patterns of adverse event reporting that might indicate a possible safety problem with a vaccine.”
AND…
“When evaluating data from VAERS, it is important to note that for any reported event, no cause-and-effect relationship has been established. Reports of all possible associations between vaccines and adverse events (possible side effects) are filed in VAERS. Therefore, VAERS collects data on any adverse event following vaccination, be it coincidental or truly caused by a vaccine. The report of an adverse event to VAERS is not documentation that a vaccine caused the event.”
Anyone, regardless of medical expertise, can make a report to VAERS. Additionally, anyone can download annual spreadsheets of VAERS report data from the web site for analysis (I have). If you take the time and effort to actually review those 175 deaths in VAERS data, you will likely find little, other than a death occurred, that might validate that the measles vaccine actually caused the death. But I guarantee you’ll find many deaths that are very obviously not connected! Another vaccine that has been held up all too often as causing multiple deaths is Gardasil for HPV. Here’s just a sampling of deaths reported to VAERS:
#451701: Death from liver cancer 202 days after immunization
#451703: Death from ovarian cancer 507 days after immunization
#307394: Death 660 days after immunization
#320909 The physician reported that the patient’s mother thought that the patient died related to GARDASIL.
#336473 Received vaccine for six infectious diseases – Which vaccine could be the culprit?
#350666: Attempts to verify the existence of an identifiable patient and reporter have been unsuccessful.
#346674: Attempts are being made to verify the existence of an identifiable patient.
#425513: History of depression & ADHD, committed suicide.
#338452: Death possibly attributed to carbon monoxide.
#379570: …patient accidentally fell in open well (granite quarry filled with water), drowned and expired. This event occurred 49 days of receiving first dose of GARDASIL.
#379874: …the patient committed suicide on 29-AUG-2009 by consuming insecticide.
#379876: Suicide (due to poison intake) and not related to the vaccine.
#380081: The cause of death was determined as “death due to viral fever”.
#389806: The cause of death was suicide.
#393871: The cause of death was suicide.
#405381: Attempts to confirm an identifiable patient had been unsuccessful.
I could post dozens more examples!
Yep, VAERS sucks, but it’s the best we’ve got. Why do you suppose it sucks so much? Don’t you think they could gather data in a better way if they truly wished to? I certainly think so. I also think that they could capture more than the 1-10% of adverse events that the government admits are actually being reported if they wished to. There was money earmarked for publicity to let physicians know they should be reporting those events, but it was left unspent and as a result most physicians still don’t know how to recognize an adverse event, nor do they know anything about reporting them.
And I just want to point out something that people don’t think about. If people are going out of the way to report SUICIDES as “adverse vaccine events,” then the person reporting it almost certainly knew (or at least strongly suspected because of a health and behavior change post-vaccine) that the suicide WAS related to the vaccine. People DO commit suicide when they feel that their lives have been ruined by a vaccine, as is often the case for very athletic girls who receive the Gardasil vaccine: http://sanevax.org/victims-2/vaccine-victims-memorial/ Those suicides sure don’t exonerate the vaccines no matter how many “dozens” of examples you can find.
Kate, thank you for those statistics. I suspected as much about the Dysneyland measles outbreak, since only the number of infected people was ever publicized. Do you know if any of the infected were hospitalized? I never saw anything about it, so I assume it was either zero or a very low number. There were also no interviews –that I ever saw– with people affected by that outbreak. That also suggested to me that there were no major complications or serious outcomes, and that maybe some people (especially parents of non-vaccinated children) even may have been glad to get the illness part over with, and the real lifetime immunity bonus.
Great!! You’re very well brainwashed from the propaganda!!… only looking at the source from CDC and Merck instead of science, but the truth will hit you in the back…
Though the CDC does indeed put out a lot of propaganda, I find that we don’t get anywhere with people if we call them brainwashed. It puts people immediately on the defensive, which tends to shut down the cortical processes needed to reassess what they thought they knew.
Agree. It’s more effective to spread love, but sometimes the frustration takes over…
I hear ya. I’ve definitely been there. Progress, not perfection. 😉
Thank for sharing your experiences with us Amy!
Thank you!
I see a lot of strong feeling here but what is the science behind the anti-vaccine thinking?
Information being withheld. Many studies ahow connections between vaccines and life changing illnesses. They tested digested aluminium salts to show injecting aluminium was safe. Hep shots given to newborns was tested just 5 days. If vaccines were safe there eould be no need for the law that protects vaccine manufacturers from being sued for damages the vaccines cause. The list goes on and on and on…
So it’s a conspiracy to make our children sick ?
No, just to make lots of people mountains of money. The getting sick is just a bonus (customers for life!). Kind of like this: https://thinkingmomsrevolution.com/sugar-trans-fat-vaccines-common-industry-government-collusion-undermining-health/
No. Our children have been made sick through greed and stupidity. “A breathtaking exercise in criminal irresponsibility,” as my late mentor Dr. Andrew Cutler said. The conspiracy has been in covering up the devastation.
Doreen, you are absolutely right. Why aren’t manufacturers held responsible? Because pharmaceutical lobbyists are the biggest game in town.
You are overlooking the legal system in the US which works on the premise of “post hoc, ergo propter hoc”. The vaccine protection program was set up to control risk for vaccine manufacturers, which is why it’s not needed in, for example, Canada, Germany, France, England, etc. where there is not a legal system ready to pounce on any event that is perceived as suit worthy, whether supported by science or not. Google Benedictin and Daubert tile for further edification.
Dude, there’s a MOUNTAIN of it. You’re going to have to be a LOT more specific.
Or you could just start reading the vaccine blogs on this site. Most of them link to a number of scientific studies.
Or you could think of a question you want answered and go to Google scholar just like the author did.
Enjoy the rabbit hole!
The original vaccines i.e polio, MMR were made with disease antigen and a preservative. That’s all.
That’s not true. Polio vaccines were grown on monkey kidneys. There was no way to guarantee that there would be no monkey kidney cells in the final vaccine. In addition, there is an entire book about the SV-40 virus that came as a contaminant in a huge percentage of Salk polio vaccines. In addition, the viruses were “inactivated” by chemical means, and some of that showed up in the final product. They also varied wildly in antigen concentration, making for occasional “hot lots” that would hurt many of the children who received them. Do not make the mistake of believing that old vaccines were “purer” than current vaccines.
Good comments. Most progress involves two steps forward, one step back, sometimes three.
The first step…the foundation of the scientific method…is observation.
Have you been to a library lately? Do you have access to the internet? The most vast collection of abstracts, articles, and research on the planet?
You live under a rock?
What is the science behind vaccinating per schedule now vs schedule 1986!
Thanks so much for sharing your research and viewpoint. I chose not to vaccinate our sons in the early 80s after research. I believe the book I read was “Hidden Diseases”.The toxins stay in the body and can manifest as disease later on. There are many more immunizations now, starting at much younger age. The immune system, the neurological system can be affected. Thanks for sharing!
Such a great read! Where do you practice?? I want to bring my family to you! :). Any advice for someone considering nursing school but just found out about all the required vaccines? Would love some input. I’m looking for loopholes. I’m ready to start and delaying only because of the vaccines.
Whatever happen to building the immune system naturally? Chinese medicine believes catching colds is a good exercise for your immune system. Another example is if you help a butterfly break out of it’s cocoon it will be to weak to fly. Giving so many vaccines to these little infants are compromising their immune systems.
I couldn’t agree more, Deborah. I’m not a scientist but it seems wrong to inject more and more toxic substances into younger and younger babies whose immune systems have not had time to develop. Why has there been no research on the effects of doing this before making it compulsory (as in France from 2018)? I can only deduce that the drug companies are lobbying governments and putting profit before public health.
This is so wonderful to read! The honesty is refreshing – and yeah, it is a rabbit’s hole! Thankfully, I started looking at natural cures when chemo treatments killed my father. From there, you just start questioning things and realizing so much is guesswork, band-aids, not real cures. The thing that did it for me is this: nowhere in nature would the body be exposed to 6 or 8 or more serious pathogens at once. Never. Without even having a science degree, it just doesn’t make sense and I knew in my gut that this couldn’t be healthy and could send the immune system into a tailspin. Then the rest of the learning confirmed my worst fears. Thank you for sharing your story!! We need to hear things like this!
The truth is too much for some people to handle but we can’t stop trying! Thank you for speaking out and lending credence to vaccine choice. Too many are being hurt by too many who believe that we can never have too many vaccines!!
Excellent article! Thank you Amy for being humble enough and courageous enough to speak out about what you didn’t learn in your medical training; for your determination to get to the truth; and for being open minded enough, once you did your independent research, to do that “180” on vaccines. I started asking questions about vaccines back in 1988 when I was pregnant with my third daughter and simply wanted to know why my baby needed more vaccines than her older sisters who were born in 1978 and 1980. Almost 30 years later, I’m still researching, often going down those rabbit holes, and doing all that I can to share information with others. I have heard far too many parents of vaccine injured and deceased children say, “I wish I had known” or “I wish someone had told me.” Those of us who do know have an obligation to do all that we can to inform others, out of love and concern; and then leave it in God’s hands. What they do with that information is not within our control. Thank you again. God bless and take care… http://www.vaccinechoiceprayercommunity.org.
This is a great post. As an RN, I felt and now feel the same as you. I fully vaccinated my oldest son. While pregnant with my youngest, my then-pregnant sister in law basically said to me, hey, why don’t you research some of the ingredients in vaccines. Our youngest is now 11 months and has received zero. It is a scary rabbit hole to fall down once you start researching vaccines.
As a nurse, I fully support every decision my patients make for themselves and their families. But I want their consent to be educated and informed!! It’s a very hard balance to find, while still remaining within the scope of my practice. I wonder what you say to patients, not family or friends, about vaccines in order to ensure they do their research without compromising your position as an NP?
Thank You Thank you Thank you!!!!!!! What an Amazing article! I to will forever share what I know to anyone who wants to hear the Truth! Keep pressing on, and together we can save one baby at a time🙏
Hey Lisa, This is Nichole. Are by chance, the same Lisa I know in SLC?
Loved this article. I to felt that the dr knew what they were doing by vaccinating my child. I trusted them with my daughters lives but that has all changed the last few years. Thank you for sharing this.
Great post. We do need to continue to open other’s eyes but in a gentle, non confrontational way that doesn’t condemn or accuse but gives them true facts to research. Truth will always prevail when we are open minded.
Thanks for the encouragement to continue!
Great piece. Well written. Thanks for sharing the differences between a thinking, researching parent vs medically trained. I have eleven family members who are nurses some who have gone through similar Finally, I have two sisters( nurses) who have started researching and we are in agreement on the horrific ingredients and probable side effects to the human body. Thank you.
Thanks Amy. You did your “due diligence.” That is what I tell young mothers now, “Do your due diligence.”