The Vaccine Program: “Victim of Its Own Success?
Originally published March 17, 2012, at www.thinkingmomsrevolution.com
Since today is St. Patrick’s Day and my father’s sisters were all born in Ireland (my mother’s family got here a bit earlier, but they’re pretty much all Irish as well), I figured my father would be turning over in his grave — and if not him, certainly my grandfather — if I didn’t take the opportunity to post on St. Patrick’s Day.
In Thomas Cahill’s book How the Irish Saved Civilization, he described how classical religious and non-religious books were saved from destruction by invading Vandals by Irish monks who — due to the influence of St. Patrick — systematically went about collecting and copying whatever they could find. As the Vandals were destroying Rome — and much of the civilization Rome had established — the Irish were flourishing intellectually and keeping the flame of knowledge going through the Dark Ages on a tiny island that no one was interested in. And, as the Dark Ages came to an end, the monks went back to the continent with their precious manuscripts and relit the flame of literacy in Europe.
I see this as a metaphor for our work here at Thinking Moms’. The world is currently in a medical Dark Age, where bad influences have destroyed much of what is good and healthful without ever considering the consequences. Those influences are in power at the moment and are anxious to quell all who do not agree with them, but they do not have truth on their side. We do. We lowly moms, in the far corners of the empire, are the keepers of the truth, and we will keep it safe until it can shine again for the world to see. The Dark Ages lasted several hundred years, but with electronic communication being what it is, I don’t think this one will be around for much longer. There is only so long that people will deny what is in front of their eyes when their kids’ health is at stake.
So, in the spirit of St. Patrick, I’m going to put out a little more truth.
One of the things I read over and over again (many seem to believe that if you repeat something enough it will become true, or at least “truish”) is that the vaccine program “is a victim of its own success.” Of course, the first thing to consider is that term “victim.” Victim, really? I’ve rarely seen stats that claim less than 90% of children in any population in the U.S. has not had the MMR, even in the most “liberal” of areas. Yet I’ve heard of children being vaccinated against their parents’ wishes and expressed orders,1 children being taken away from parents who refuse to vaccinate, and doctors coercing their patients to vaccinate with bogus information. From where I’m standing the vaccine program isn’t a “victim,” it’s a bully.
Yes, I know what people mean when they claim “victimhood” for the vaccine program. They mean that more and more parents are saying,
“What? You’re adding more shots to infants’ schedule? But you didn’t test the safety of the last ones in combination with the others!”2
And
“Why should I be vaccinating my newborn against a sexually transmitted disease?”3
And, my personal favorite,
“What recourse do I have if my child is harmed by this shot?”
That one’s my favorite because there is none. Vaccine manufacturers are not held liable for any harm they do to you or your child due to vaccines. They can kill or maim your kid, and you can’t even sue them. If you’re lucky and you can prove it was the vaccines, you may get some money from vaccine court, which is funded by you.4 They mean that parents aren’t just doing what they’re ordered to do anymore; they’re asking questions. Questions about the safety of those chemicals and bioactive ingredients you’re proposing to inject into their eight-pound darling, which will bypass the digestive system and go straight to the bloodstream.
Apparently just the act of asking questions turns us into bullies and the vaccine program into “victim.” Wow! Who knew our questions had such power?
I will agree that the vaccine program is “losing face.” When I was a kid, there were few who questioned a doctor when he or she proposed a new vaccine. Vaccines were considered the cutting edge and finest preventive medicine money could buy. Why, vaccines had stopped smallpox and polio in their tracks! (Turns out, with a little digging you can see that it’s not so clear what the role of vaccines were in the eradication of smallpox and polio. Tracking incidence with vaccine uptake is by no means straightforward.5 Seems that the biggest influence on death rates from infectious disease came from modern plumbing.6 Interesting that the sewer system is not held in the same regard as the vaccine program, isn’t it?)
Today, however, a growing minority of parents are anywhere from “mildly annoyed” to “mad as hell” that they are required to get an ever-increasing number of shots for illnesses their children are unlikely to get in the first place, and are unlikely to cause permanent harm if they did. One of the reasons that so many are “mad as hell” is because they have witnessed their own previously healthy children regress horribly mentally and become physically very ill soon after receiving vaccines. Those parents wish to spare other children the same fate.
Seems to me they have good cause for asking questions, don’t you?
Some people actually want to answer those questions, and they are doing research to provide them. The architects of the vaccine program get very upset when that happens. They start lying about those people. They lie about their research. They lie about their character. And they get other powerful people to take away their funding and/or credentials.
What does that tell you? It tells me they don’t want us to have answers to those questions.
Now, why wouldn’t they want us to have answers to those questions? Only two reasons I can think of: 1) They’re so arrogant, they can’t handle being questioned by someone with a legitimate concern; and/or 2 ) they’ve got something to hide.
They’re constantly asking us what it will take to gain our confidence again. Well, I can tell you it certainly isn’t being arrogant to the point of dismissing our legitimate concerns out of hand. So either they start eating some humble pie and seriously address safety concerns, or they’re going to continue to turn off more and more parents every day.
But, you know, anyone with half a brain could tell them that, and did — years ago. So, why aren’t they?
The other possibility — they have something to hide — is even more disturbing. That implies that they know there is something wrong with the program. They know they are making children sick and — because they’re making pots of money off them — they just don’t care. What’s that called? Oh, yeah . . . “callous disregard.”
Children today are much sicker than they were when I was a child in the ’60s. Back then, allergies were pretty rare, asthma made you exotic, and chronic ear infections made you a freak. I should know, I developed all three by the time I was a teenager. My younger brother had the asthma and allergies, too. We were the seventh and last of eight children. None of the older siblings developed asthma or allergies as children. We were by far the most vaccinated. A recent study found that more than 40% of today’s kids will suffer from a chronic illness before they make it to adulthood.7 Many of them requiring medications they may take for the rest of their lives.
If all this “preventive medicine” is so great for us, why are our kids sicker than ever?
So let’s recap. To the extent that the vaccine program can be called a “victim,” what is it a victim of? Certainly not its “success.” Most people still don’t question the importance of vaccines, or their role in eradicating polio and smallpox. (And, by the way, children are no longer vaccinated for smallpox because the last case of smallpox in the U.S. was in 1949. The last “naturally occurring” case in the world was 1977.8 The reason they say “naturally occurring” is because there have been cases of smallpox . . . caused by the vaccine.9)
The vaccine program is losing face because of the greed, arrogance, intellectual dishonesty, and callous disregard of its architects. They want us to do as they wish without addressing legitimate safety concerns, and that’s just not going to fly anymore.
1) http://www.independent.co.uk/news/baby-faces-vaccination-against-parents-wishes-1336754.html
http://birthofanewearth.blogspot.com/2012/03/teen-who-was-vaccinated-against-her.html
2) http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5751a5.htm
3) http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs204/en/
4) http://www.in.gov/isdh/files/VICP.pdf
5) http://www.whale.to/vaccine/smallpox_graphs_h.html
6) http://childhealthsafety.wordpress.com/graphs/
7)http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1876285910002500
8) http://www.bt.cdc.gov/agent/smallpox/overview/disease-facts.asp
9) http://www.gaia-health.com/articles401/000419-smallpox-vaccine-outbreak.shtml
