A New Meme Being Circulated

[Katee]

disgusting.jpg

I've seen this before. I think other people have responded to its misconceptions. But someone i know posted it today and i have just spent the afternoon writing my response. Please forgive me if this is a repetition of what has been written before.

Where to begin? There are so many things to say.

First, this assumes that those who are opposed to vaccines are mindless, unreasonable, brainless people, or if nothing else naive and foolish. Many of us who are opposed to vaccines have spent hours and hours over months and years researching this. And our research is not from opinions of others but documents from NIH and the FDA and CDC and the US Supreme court as well as the actual research on the vaccine package inserts (not the dumbed-down version given to parents and patients) which are written and provided by the vaccine manufacturers.

First, let me say that i am absolutely amazed that so many Christians who are pro-life are willing to receive vaccines, given that at least 1/3^rd of those on the market are developed in fetal tissue, the products of abortion. Now, what is injected into the patient doesn’t come directly from fetal tissue, but its parent (great-great-great grandparent) was originally grown in fetal tissue.¹ The Catholic Church has many websites with their position on vaccine concerns. ^2,3,4 In spite of this, the Catholic Church supports vaccination and tends to overlook the connection between abortion and vaccines. There are many other problematic components of vaccines, but i will let it rest here.

Second, it has been known for some time that vaccine damage is related to certain genes and gene mutations.⁵ I, personally, would not be as opposed to vaccines if the children were tested for these genes and gene anomalies before being given a vaccine. The percentage is tiny, something like 0.02%. Even so, that results in two children in 1000 being damaged, and that becomes a very large number over time.

Third, pharmaceutical companies (PC) determine what is taught in medical school and told to doctors regarding vaccines and meds. In the late 70s and 80s there were a number of vaccine injuries leading to lawsuits against doctors and PCs. The PCs began to put pressure on Congress saying that lawsuits were likely to impair their ability to continue to create vaccines. So Congress created the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986.⁶ It essentially protects doctors and PCs from any liability related to vaccines and provides an independent “vaccine court” for the victims of vaccine damage. This is funded by a surcharge on each vaccine given. Vaccine damage is difficult to prove and most families never make it to this court. Nevertheless, over $3,000,000,000 (three BILLION US dollars) has been paid out to families since its inception.⁷ (Page 9 of the document.) The US Supreme court has ruled that vaccines are “unavoidably unsafe.” ^8,9

This is the actual language used:

No vaccine manufacturer shall be liable in a civil action for damages arising from a vaccine-related injury or death associated with the administration of a vaccine after October 1, 1988, if the injury or death resulted from side effects that were unavoidable even though the vaccine was properly prepared and was ac- companied by proper directions and warnings. 10

Part of my concern arises from an internal document from the Wyeth Company in 1979. In Tennessee in 1979 there was a rash of several infant deaths ruled SIDS. They occurred within a short time of vaccination and all but one had received a vaccine from the same lot number. What was Wyeth’s response? To make sure that no one area in the US received too many doses of vaccine from the same lot, so therefore there wouldn’t be these “pools” of death in one area which could then be associated with a certain lot number of a vaccine and therefore tie SIDS and vaccine reaction to the manufacturer. ^{11, 12}

It was at this point that these manufacturers begin to put pressure on Congress. Since their exemption from liability in 1986 the number of childhood vaccines has exploded exponentially. Many of these illnesses were considered a normal part of childhood and in first world countries had a very, very low percentage of adverse effects, and an extremely low rate of death. These illnesses, while inconvenient, gave the child a life-long immunity and helped to build their bodies in other ways we are only just beginning to understand. ^13,14 And, we are finding that vaccines are not very effective and a person depending on a vaccine for immunity then needs a lifetime of booster shots because the immunity (if it ever developed) wears off although natural immunity from the illness does not (usually). ^{15, 16, 17}

Also, safety of these vaccines is overstated. Many times no testing has been done on safety or effectiveness. Even when it is done, vaccines often are given an “end date” of when a reaction is considered due to the vaccine. Say, the stated date in a study is 10 days. Any child having a reaction on day 11 would not be included in those statistics. Long term studies of any reaction is not followed or documented.

Currently, there are several vaccines being pushed for pregnant women, even though the safety for either mother or child has not been studied or documented. But if the expectant mother should lose her baby or the child have birth defects, the PC cannot be held accountable and most doctors will dismiss this as “coincidence.” (I’m taking a shortcut for this reference. Someone else has listed all these vaccines and their varied statements of “There are, however, no adequate and well-controlled studies in pregnant women.”)¹⁸

But even more, there is a trend that leads thinking people to deep disquietude. That is, in the history of the USA, individual choice and independence was esteemed. Our current culture tends to ridicule anyone who makes choices that are different from the masses. It was a given that short of physical abuse and neglect, people and parents for their children had the right to make their own choices regarding religion, medical care, and many other variables. We have embraced the idea of elite professionals, doctors, social workers, therapists, lawyers, Congressmen, who know better than we do to make decisions on our behalf and that of our children.

But many of these elite have financial incentives that have financial benefits for corporations and themselves rather than their clients or constituents. It has gotten to the point that fear is used to the point that many believe the propaganda of vaccines and fear those who make other choices. Suddenly we are on the verge of no longer being allowed to determine what we will or will not put into our bodies or those of our children. This is all in the name of “the greater good,” but often the benefits are overstated and the risks minimized or denied. “The greater good” is also a slippery slope leading to a loss of rights. It was much used in Nazi Germany. We are rapidly losing our rights in this country. There has been a small but consistent number of families who have had children removed from the family because the parents made decisions contrary to that of the doctors. It is termed “medical child neglect,” but in many cases the parents had reasonable and rational reasons to make choices other than what a MD provided.

This meme is part of that new culture. It debases people who make choices that are contrary to the popular sentiment pushed by the prevailing “experts.” It indicates, in spite of evidence – some of it listed here – that people who claim their children have been injured by vaccines are deluded and that vaccines are safe. It implies that parents who make these decisions do it lightly, without proper research, that they are easily led, and rather ignorant. The fact is, the people who choose to vaccinate without doing any research on the issue are being led and trusting an authority that may have an agenda. At the very least, most parents are given a very simple “vaccine information” sheet that usually doesn’t state actual risk and benefit information rather than the actual package insert.

This meme greatly denies the amount of time and effort people put into their decisions and reduce them to imbecilic simpletons who should not be allowed to make decisions on behalf of their children. It is a very rude and insulting thing to do.

Vaccines are just the tip of the iceberg. ALL pharmaceuticals have risks, often minimized by the medical profession. There is currently a TV show with the key phrase, “All magic comes with a price.” The same can be said about pharmaceuticals: “All medicine comes with a price.” The problem is we are rarely warned of the full implication of that price.

Sources:

¹ http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/...ins-essential/

² http://www.immunize.org/concerns/vaticandocument.htm

³ http://www.ncbcenter.org/resources/frequently-asked-questions/use-vaccines/

⁴ https://cogforlife.org/catholic-exemptions/

⁵ https://metabolichealing.com/genetic...accine-injury/

⁶ http://www.nvic.org/injury-compensat...igihanlaw.aspx

⁷https://www.hrsa.gov/vaccinecompensa...late3_1_17.pdf

⁸ https://www.ebcala.org/unanswered-qu...ccine-epidemic

⁹ http://thinkingmomsrevolution.com/unavoidably-unsafe/

¹⁰ https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/10pdf/09-152.pdf

¹¹ http://www.ageofautism.com/files/wyeth79.pdf

¹² http://www.ageofautism.com/2008/08/by-dan-olmsted.html

¹³ http://www.vaccinationcouncil.org/20...scheibner-phd/

¹⁴ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2951028/

¹⁵ http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...ryId=130433634

¹⁶ http://freepdfhosting.com/bd8c153d5d.pdf

¹⁷ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/merck-cr...nting-doctors/

¹⁸ http://deliciouslyorganic.net/are-va...ing-pregnancy/

https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/09-152.ZD.html

[Islander]

Katee, that's an outstanding, well done, comprehensive and rational informational essay.
I think you'd be interested in this conversation between a consumer and a pharmacist that I recorded from Facebook not long ago: http://www.hawkeshealth.net/communit...ad.php?t=17725

[Katee]

Thank you.

Interesting conversation. Very illuminating.

[Suzanne]

I’m coming into this from a different angle. Before I go into why I think that vaccines are (generally) a good thing, I would like to point out that pro-vaxxers are frequently attacked by anti-vaxxers. We’re called libtards, shills and sheeple, treated as if we don’t have a single functioning brain cell between us, ill-wished for vaccine harm to our children/grandchildren, and subjected to baleful prophecies that the vaccine damage we definitely have, even though it’s not visible now – except for our clearly fried brains – will show up later and leave us writhing in torments of regret and self-hatred. Fear-mongering is not reserved to pro-vaxxers either - I've seen plenty of that, in hyperbole.

All of the pro-vaxxers that I know share of the concerns articulated by Katee. We’re concerned about adverse events, and want to see urgent, well-funded, public-domain research ondeveloping safe, fast, easy and CHEAP tests for the genes associated with adverse events, that can be routinely run before vaccination is carried out, so the vulnerable can be protected. Our kid might be the one in 1,000. We want transparency in the development process, much more rigorous regulation of vaccine developers, protection of researchers from financial coercion and threats of career-wrecking, rigorous oversight of public officials, and severe punishment of those involved either as givers or takers in corruption. We want the vaccination programme evaluated and updated. While pro and anti vaxxers engage in endless useless battles, we get nothing done, and often end up radicalized because of the constant offense-defense positioning.

Overall, I support vaccination programmes because of my personal observations and my anthropological training. Archaeologists are first anthropologists, and we are trained in sociocultural, biological (including medical), and historical anthropology, as well as archaeological theory and practice.

My personal experiences include seeing a group of blind, microcephalic children in Lesotho; the local doctor told me that their mothers contracted rubella when their husbands started working in the mines in South Africa, and brought it back with them. The children were abandoned; families struggle too hard to survive to be able to maintain a non-contributing member. I’ve seen scrawny teenagers, crippled by polio, dragging themselves between cars at stoplights in Pretoria, begging for a few cents. I’ve seen children die of typhoid in Swaziland.

In my own white-skinned socioeconomic group in the country then known as Rhodesia, I saw one of my classmates struck down by polio. Her parents were Christian Scientists who trusted in Natural Hygiene, so their two kids weren’t vaccinated. The boy died in the iron lung, the girl was left with a totally wasted left leg. When we got measles, most of us recovered just fine. One girl was left with irreversible heart damage marked by purple lips; a younger boy got encephalitis and irreversible brain damage; we were terrified of him, as he lurched about, grunting and flailing. We’d known him when he was normal, so many of us had nightmares that it would happen to us. This is only two cases of permanent harm resulting from measles, in a school of about 500 children, so the rate was about 1 in 250, which would work out at 4 per thousand. One of my cousins, (five boys in the group), was left sterile after we all got mumps and he got it in the testicles. I saw a cow die of tetanus and have never missed a tetanus booster since! One of my ex-husband’s cousins died, very painfully and protractedly, of rabies; his neighbours didn’t believe in vaccination and never got their cats jabbed. One of the cats got infected, and the cousin was bitten by it while rescuing it from his dogs.

Anthropologically, the diseases that many first-worlders now consider minor, were not so in the past. Wherever Europeans went, indigenous people were devastated by measles and whooping cough. InHawaii, the first measles epidemic killed more than 10% of the entire population within a few weeks. Native Hawaiians still call this the Great Dying, or the Great Horror. Lewis and Clark reported spending a night in a village, and finding all the inhabitants dead when they returned a week later. In Europe, and Britain, and the USA, the “minor” or “childhood” diseases killed adults and children alike.

Very few parents raised all the children born to them. Whooping cough and diphtheria occurred in epidemics. A baby dying of whooping cough now makes national and international news, as does a death from diphtheria. 4-5 of every 1000 measles cases died. Vaccines have eradicated the smallpox that killed or disfigured literally millions of people, across the globe. Scarlet fever was endemic; Louisa May Alcott, in describing Beth’s illness, was drawing from life: her own sister, Lizzie, died of scarlet fever. Scarlet fever left Mary Ingalls blind, and is regarded as the most probable cause of Helen Keller’s impairments. In my own family history, two of my maternal grandmother’s sibs died of measles in a British concentration camp in South Africa; more than half of all Afrikaner children died in the camps, most frequently of measles and its complications.
http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/women-children-white-concentration-camps-during-anglo-boer-war-1900-1902
https://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/chm/research/archive/morbidity/outcomes/

Even now, measles, which seems to be the poster child for both pro- and anti-vaxxers, kills 1 in every 1,000 cases in developed countries, and up to 1 in 10 in countries where malnutrition is endemic and medical help a rare commodity. https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2015/02/24/toddler-dies-of-measles-in-berlin-1st-death-in-outbreak.

I think this review is fair: http://www.aafp.org/afp/2002/1201/p2113.html

This is a very long post! I’ll finish with my concern for the vulnerable populations in the USA: the working poor. They are poorly-educated, poorly nourished, and poorly paid. They have no health benefits and little to no access to medical care; they go to work when they’re sick because they can’t afford to lose any pay. They often work several jobs, 60 or more hours a week, doing shift work, which leaves them short of sleep and immunocompromised. They live in neighbourhoods like San Francisco’s Hunters Point, where the ground and air are heavily polluted and drinking water may be less than pristine. They do the dirty jobs: work in slaughterhouses, harvest and pack our produce, do the grunt work in whatever industry remains in the area. They’re janitors in our public buildings, collect our carts in supermarket lots, stock the shelves. They’re subjected daily to a barrage of infectious agents. Vaccination may still be a first line of defence for these people, who are often scared off by anti-vaccine hyperbole, or by tales that the vaccines are designed to sterilize the girls and women, kill baby boys, and sterilize adult men. The risks of vaccinating and going the natural infection route should both be clearly explained.

I'm pro-vaxx, my spouse is anti. I keep up my vaccination schedule and get flu shots; he does DTAP because he too has seen tetanus, but is afraid of flu shots. He gets nasty flu twice a year, I very seldom get it or have a mild attack. I've twice had pneumonia following flu, and consider a microgram of rapidly metabolized ethylmercury far less awful than another bout. I'm far more worried about the mercury in fossil fuel emissions; I don't eat fish, so that's not a concern to me. My spouse does eat fish, from which he very likely gets more mercury, and a more dangerous form of mercury - methylmercury - than I do in my flu shot! Each to their own!
https://people.uwec.edu/piercech/Hg/mercury_water/sources.htm

[Islander]

Suzanne, I have no wish to debate here; the articles posted in this forum serve to speak to my point of view. I hear both viewpoints. Sometimes there are no easy answers. I'd just like to add a bit of personal history.

I'm 76, one of the generation whose only vaccination was for smallpox, and its eradication is no small thing. I suspect that 70+ years ago vaccines did not come with the array of adjuvants and excipients that they do today. My sibs, my friends and I got all the usual childhood diseases. They were mild, over rather quickly, and conferred lifelong immunity. Once, as an adult, I plunged a digging spade into my bare foot and got a tetanus shot. I have never had a flu shot. I did get the flu once, in 1963, the stressed-out result of trying to finish a Master's thesis while teaching 3/5 time in a high school over an hour's commute away from campus. Never again. My cats' rabies shots are all current.

I'm a longtime mercola.com member and a co-founder (with David Hawkes, long since gone) of this site, so one would think I had multiple health issues that drew me. Not so. I'm just interested in preventive medicine and natural (as opposed to pharmaceutical) treatments. I discovered Linus Pauling and Adelle Davis in my teens and became a lifelong advocate for nutrition as the foundation of health. I've had some surgical adventures and I'm a colon cancer survivor but scouts honor, I am never sick. No colds, no flu, no collywobbles. I rely on a handful of supplements, particularly mega-vitamic C and vitamin D in winter. Unlike you, I absorb UVB through spring, summer and fall. I used to throw a blanket down at noon and tan nude for 20 minutes, but raising 60 broilers and 4 freezer pigs leaves me no time for lollygagging around any more so I simply garden in the nude during the midday window. I try to keep my D level at 80 ng/mL but last summer, not thinking to cover up after an hour, I got up to 109. Oops.

I've farmed and gardened to a greater or lesser degree all my life, meaning that my 4 children grew up on organic food. The boys, younger than the girls, were weaned on raw goat's milk and they all grew up on raw Guernsey milk. I'm thrilled that they grew up to be conscious eaters and still honor that sit-down family dinner in the evening. They are all in glowing health.

Sadly, although they know my position on vaccines, both daughters have followed their doctor's advice with the grandchildren. My grandson's mom followed a slow-paced schedule; her son frequently catches the current bug and goes through several rounds of cold and flu every winter, your average 10-y-o. My granddaughter's mom adhered to the recommended schedule; her daughter is severely asthmatic and the slightest complication will send her to the ER. Of course there are colds, ear infections etc. And her mom is even more careful about keeping an organic kitchen, even in Brooklyn. Both kids were breast-fed.

Of course all this is anecdotal but I do feel it's representational. The MMR and especially the pertussis vaccine are no longer effective and require regular boosters. In my heart I'm convinced that the original idea (i.e. cowpox/smallox) was brilliant, but through time, as additional ingredients were added to increase potency, include preservatives etc., too many risk factors were incorporated and the concept became one of profit before protection. The end result is now the push to vaccinate pre-pubescent girls against cervical cancer, with frightening and sometimes fatal results, as you may have read.

I don't expect to change minds with what's posted here, only to inform and plant seeds. I'd like parents to research rather than accept their pediatrician's schedule on blind faith. I shudder than fear-mongering will someday result in mandatory vaccines — in fact, I think most colleges and universities require specific immunizations prior to admission. If the day comes that my Social Security check depends on my getting the flu vaccine, that's the day I go underground. I'm a survivor.