Autoimmune Disease and Military Service: Friendly Fire?
Originally published May 19, 2012, on www.thinkingmomsrevolution.com
(Today is National Armed Forces Day. This blog is dedicated to all the service men and women who risk their lives to protect this country.)
Having witnessed the war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity committed during World War II, nations of the world explicitly embraced human rights in the United Nations Charter. . . . In the aftermath of World War II, the world embraced the human rights principles of the Nuremberg Code, a set of ethical principles that forbids experimentation on human subjects without free and informed consent.
Mary Holland, J.D., Vaccine Epidemic: How Corporate Greed, Biased Science, and Coercive Government Threaten Our Human Rights, Our Health, and Our Children
This country has recognized since the end of World War II that human beings have an inalienable right to bodily integrity. It sounds perfectly reasonable, doesn’t it? But would it surprise you to know that at least one huge sector of United States citizens is excluded from these principles written into the International Bill of Rights? And would it further surprise you to know that this sector is the very group charged with safeguarding the liberties of this “free country” – the American military?
Members of the armed forces may be ordered to take medicines or receive vaccines against their will. Refusal comes with a price: loss of pay, incarceration, or dishonorable discharge. For a career serviceman or woman, that’s a bitter pill to swallow indeed. If a credible military threat or Presidential Executive Order exists, the military may waive informed consent, meaning the doctors in charge don’t even have to tell service people what they’re doing to them. And if something goes wrong as a result of this coerced – and uninformed – treatment, service people may not sue the federal government. All this means that our nation’s armed forces “serve” in the capacity of unknowing, uncompensated, and powerless research subjects, which amounts to torture of our own citizens.
December 1994, the United States Senate produced a report, “Is Military Research Hazardous to a Veteran’s Health?”
This report outlined the unethical use of servicemen and women as test subjects. The report revealed that the Pentagon had quietly used soldiers in clinical trials and did not record the resulting information in their medical records, preventing the soldiers from receiving appropriate follow-up care. Many were simply left to die. –
Captain Richard Rovet, USAF (Ret.), Vaccine Epidemic
After the first Gulf War, many veterans (approximately one in four) came home complaining of unusual symptoms. At first they were told it was “all in their heads.” But when you’ve got enough people complaining of the same illness, who were all in the same place at the same time, pretty soon someone has to admit that it can’t all be psychosomatic. Thus, eventually, Gulf War syndrome (or illness) became a recognized condition. Figuring out where it came from, and/or getting real information from the military complex was another challenge altogether though. Symptoms of GWS include chronic fatigue, severe join pain, neurological problems, unexplained rashes and sores, etc. Many of our savvy readers will probably recognize those symptoms as indicative of autoimmune illness. Our savvy readers may also know that vaccines are often associated with the creation and/or worsening of a number of autoimmune illnesses.
The best theory I’ve seen on the subject says that injection directly into the bloodstream of adjuvants, designed to stimulate an immune response, bypasses the usual first line of defense for an infectious agent: the gut. The body recognizes the vaccine as “foreign” and develops antibodies to attack it. But the vaccine sometimes has ingredients that are common in the human body, and developing antibodies to attack those ingredients turns out to be a bad thing. The adjuvant squalene is one such ingredient. A healthy human body contains squalene in the nervous system and the brain. So, after an injection containing squalene, the subject may develop antibodies that attack the subject’s own joints. And there you have it: autoimmune disease.
So on the surface my first reaction is to say, “Wow. Sounds like vaccine injury to me.” And, lo and behold, Russell Blaylock claims that armed forces were given approximately 17 vaccines in a short period of time during the Gulf War. That number seems to have included seven injections of anthrax vaccine and another series of botulinum toxoid that, oddly, don’t appear in vaccination records or appear as merely “Vac A” or “Vac B.” Now, Paul Offit notwithstanding, that has to strike people as dangerous, unless of course you believe that vaccines are always safe. (If you do believe that, then I’d like to hear your explanation for the existence of the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, and the over two (Update: now three) billion dollars it’s paid to victims of debilitating or fatal vaccine injuries. I’m sure it would be very amusing.) And – as we know from LuvBug’s blog dated April 27, 2012 – even the federal government classifies vaccines as “unavoidably unsafe.” (You might find this story of one soldier with autoimmune disease who got the vaccines, but did not go to the Gulf, interesting.)
According to Blaylock, adjuvants stimulate the immune system. The adjuvants remain in the body a long time, and if vaccines are repeated within a short period of time, the immune system doesn’t get a chance to calm down. It ends up producing large amounts of free radicals, highly reactive particles that pretty much destroy everything in their path. That’s okay if it stays localized, but if there are too many for too long, they spill over, sometimes flooding the whole body. Lupus is an autoimmune disease characterized by high levels of free radicals throughout the body.
Garth Nicholson has discovered that a large percentage of veterans suffering from GWS are infected with mycoplasma – a known contaminant in some vaccines. Their spouses and children are often infected as well, with the spouse having symptoms of chronic fatigue or fibromyalgia, and the child often having autism. So not only does the service man or woman get sick, he or she stands a good chance of passing that illness on to his or her loved ones as well. Mycoplasma has been specifically linked to another autoimmune disease: approximately 85% of ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease) patients have systemic mycoplasma infection.representation of the chemical structure of squalene
The official story is that the anthrax vaccine has been “cleared” of any wrongdoing. The spin machine seems to be trying to pin the cause of Gulf War Syndrome on the Sarin gas that was used or the chemical used to neutralize the Sarin gas. For various reasons neither seems plausible, but that won’t stop someone from making the claim. And what if there isn’t one cause, but instead, what Blaylock calls a “synergistic toxicity” – two or more toxins in combination having an additive effect? Maybe the anthrax vaccines don’t harm many unless they happen to come in contact with Sarin gas or botulinum toxoid. The search for one cause will inevitably miss these combination causes, and maybe that’s what the folks in charge want: obfuscation. (Update: a recent study identified a genetic difference between those who got sick and those who didn’t, predisposing those who got sick to damage from anti-nerve agent pills. Of course, that doesn’t mean that they aren’t also predisposed to damage from other pharmaceutical agents.)
Despite the obvious problems with anthrax vaccination, the military made anthrax vaccination mandatory in the late 1990s, and once again many service people got ill, with much of the illness resembling Gulf War syndrome. Captain Richard Rovet watched as flyer after flyer at Dover Air Force Base came down with autoimmune illnesses post-vaccination. They were specifically told, contrary to his own observations, that autoimmune illness was not on the rise at Dover and, though the military possessed an experimental anthrax vaccine containing squalene as an adjuvant, that none of it was sent to Dover. But that was a flat-out lie. In 2000, the FDA tested lots of anthrax vaccine at Dover and found that they contained squalene in varying dosages, just as you would expect if someone were performing a study on dose range.
The first Gulf War introduced me to a term that I had never heard before: “friendly fire.” It’s the inadvertent firing on one’s own troops while trying to engage the enemy. I always thought it was a crazy term – fire just isn’t “friendly,” no matter how you try to spin it. However, the term does make a distinction that I appreciate at the moment. Friendly fire is the inadvertent destruction of your ally. The creation of autoimmune illnesses in our armed forces is not friendly fire. What was done to these people was done deliberately, and with callous disregard for their rights as human beings. I don’t know about anyone else, but I find it completely unacceptable – not to mention despicable – that those who are charged with the duty of keeping this country safe, are being used as human guinea pigs. Any understanding of human rights doctrine has to consider this situation an outrage.
Featured image by Staff Sgt. Suzanne M. Day, U.S. Air Force.
