Vaccine Skeptics vs. Your Kids
Commentary: Immune to reason, are vaccine deniers putting children at risk?
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in the last trimester of her pregnancy, Helena Moran caught a cough that she couldn't get rid of. She figured she'd picked up the germ—whatever it was—from one of her patients at a Boulder dentist's office. But the real nightmare began after her daughter, Evelina, was born: The baby began to cough and cough, and then she'd curl up in a little ball and turn blue. At the emergency room, she was diagnosed with whooping cough. She spent the next five weeks in intensive care and suffered permanent lung damage.
It turned out that by working in Boulder—one of the wealthiest, most well-educated towns in the country—Moran had put herself at risk of contracting a disease that largely disappeared after widespread vaccination against it began in the 1950s. Since the early 1990s, whooping cough has periodically whipped through Boulder, where a large percentage of parents do not immunize their children, public health officials say.
There's a Boulder in almost every state. Childhood vaccination rates nationwide are near record levels, in part thanks to a Clinton-era program that guarantees free vaccines for the poor. But as I learned while researching my book, Vaccine, a history of immunization, resistance is also growing, especially among affluent and well-educated people—to the point where living in a place with a high percentage of PhDs is a risk factor for whooping cough. "These are people who know better," ucla whooping cough expert James Cherry told me, "but they don't know enough."
Vaccine resisters are motivated by a range of convictions—immunization isn't "natural" (the wellness set), it's suspect because it's government mandated (Christian home-schoolers), and so on—but the movement got a huge boost from the controversy over the mercury-laden preservative thimerosal, which some theorized might be linked to autism. That link has been disproven—by, if nothing else, the fact that autism rates remained steady after pediatricians and public health authorities told manufacturers to stop making thimerosal-containing childhood vaccines in 1999. But the anti-vaccine movement has kept going, finding ever new reasons to distrust immunization. Some, including celebrity pediatrician Dr. Robert W. Sears, have raised fears about aluminum in the shots, while others—like the 2,000 or so protesters at a Washington rally this June—simply charge that kids get "too many vaccines" full of "dangerous toxins" that overwhelm their immune systems.
The skeptics have many things going for them: our justifiable distrust of medical authority; our admiration for do-it-yourselfers, mavericks, and the self-taught; even a dose of celebrity appeal from the likes of Charlie Sheen, Jenny McCarthy, and Jim Carrey. What most of them don't have is an understanding of the science. Thanks to vaccines, polio and diphtheria are now pretty well confined to the world's medical backwaters. But tetanus lives everywhere in soil and rusty nails, and as many as 6 million Americans are exposed to whooping cough each year, according to surveys of blood antibodies. This year, measles has returned, with the worst US outbreak since 2001. Most of the patients have been unvaccinated children and adults, and nearly a quarter have been hospitalized. In Third World countries with no measles vaccination, the disease killed nearly a quarter-million children in 2006.
Current medical practice is to vaccinate babies against whooping cough beginning at two months of age. Widespread vaccination creates "herd immunity"—the disease has fewer hosts, which means there are fewer people to spread it to those at serious risk, from immunocompromised adults (think chemotherapy patients) to newborns such as Evelina Moran and Teddy Hickenlooper, the infant son of Denver mayor John Hickenlooper, who caught whooping cough from an unvaccinated older child in 2002.
Here's where we get to the deeper, fundamentally progressive reason for vaccination: The point is to protect not merely ourselves, but the community. To not vaccinate is to threaten the immunological commons, the array of trillions of antibodies and T cells that decades of vaccination have built up in our bodies, draping a web of germ-fighting agents around our most vulnerable neighbors. To not vaccinate is to affirm an overweening individuality. It's a form of selfishness.
Right now, in many states, all it takes to get an exemption from vaccine requirements is signing a form. Some, including a group of doctors at Johns Hopkins University, have proposed making it harder—allowing a philosophical exemption only after parents demonstrate a good-faith effort to educate themselves.
True, medical experts have failed us before; to make sure they are doing their job, we need to strongly support the public health programs whose job it is to watch out for serious adverse reactions to vaccines. But while questioning authority is healthy, facts are facts. If vaccines really were responsible for autism, it would be too much to ask parents to do the altruistic thing. But more than a dozen studies have failed to discover such a link—and not a single legitimate study has shown that one exists. I have spent many, many hours reading these studies and talking to vaccine scientists. I find no reason to believe Jim Carrey more than I believe them. Call me a dupe of the establishment, but I'd rather trust the doctors.
Arthur Allen is the author of Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine's Greatest Lifesaver.
Did Mother Jones get cyberjacked!
What's next Alex Jones to expound on the virtues of the globalization?
Sad day for journalism.
By you saying "Call me a dupe of the establishment, but I'd rather trust the doctors." is blindly and ignorantly throwing your "trust" away.
Most all doctors are decent people, the problem stems from their "practice", most all doctors do what the medical association tells them to and just who do you think controls the medical association? That's right BIG BUSINESS.
Doctors,FDA,MA,politicians and just about every other entity you have to protect YOU, the common person of your land has been bought and paid for for the last 20 years.
Enlighten yourselves and do a google search on something called "Codex Alimentarius"
You can go to there nice rosey site here
http://www.codexalimentarius.net/web/index_en.jsp
and try to decipher what it is they are doing.
Or you can use this
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5266884912495233634
as a guide and see where it is we are really heading.
Follow the guide and you be the judge.
"Money is the root of all evil"
"Corporations are the evil that grows from those roots"
Wake up before it is truly too late.
Good luck..we will need it.
No one here has suggested a reputable alternate authority on the safety of modern vaccines. Jim Carrey and girlfriend Jenny McCarthy don't count. Just as having a child with leukemia does not automatically make one an expert on its causes, having a child with autism does not automatically grant one an in-depth understanding of its causes. It makes you care. It makes you want answers. It makes you much more likely to be interested in seeking out answers. Without critical thinking and education based in understanding reputable research, there's no guarantee that the answers you find will be anything close to right. McCarthy's anti-vaccine, Indigos and Crystals line on autism, so far as I can tell, is nowhere close to right.
If you say you want a safe vaccine, implying you don't believe you have one already, please be so kind as to describe what constitutes a safe vaccine in your opinion, and how safety could be proven.
It would also be lovely if we could have a civil discussion here. With namecalling ("arty farty?") and yelling at people to shut up for holding differing opinions, so far no one has done anything to improve my opinion of the anti-vaccine case. If anything, several of you have further undermined whatever legitimacy your group could hope to claim in my mind.
And before someone yells at *me* to shut up, mu cousin is autistic, as is my friend's teenaged son. I am friends with people with varying degrees of autism and Asperger syndrome. I have Asperger syndrome myself. Their views are not unified, but many would disagree with the idea that autism is "too much" to "pay," or that autism is "suffered" by autistics. One reference for that contingent's position is autismcrisis.blogspot.com
The chances of a child developing the autism that causes parents to recoil in horror is smaller than that same child contracting a disease preventable by vaccine. Evidence to date does not show that vaccines cause autism to begin with. Choosing not to vaccinate is still unlikely to cause harm, but it is more likely to cause harm than vaccinating.
Truly, these are the people who represent the cream of the autism/antivaccine movement.
Thank you Mr Allen for shining a light on these people. The rest of us parents of autistic people don't think vaccines cause autism.
Please vaccinate your child.
I've got autistic triplets, and while I can understand the fear and desperation of newly-diagnosed parents who need something to "blame", hopefully SOON we can put the time and energy that's being wasted on such a clearly-proven issue into actually helping autistic people to build better lives for themselves. To me that's at least as good a reason to listen to the science as the horrendous issues in public health that we're going to be facing in our future thanks to non-immunization.
If the Ph. D. earned is not in an appropriate field (e. g., medical sciences, applied biology, toxicology, pharmacology, etc)... it's likely that they won't understand the science so well.
That would be the 'clue'.
You already have "safe" shots, with constant efforts to make them even safer. Moreover, waiting until age 2 leaves babies vulnerable to serious diesease like pertussis.
The problem is, antivaccinationists like yourself will not accept the scientific evidence, no matter how copious. Every time a new study comes out failing to find a link between vaccines and autism or other problems, they find reasons to reject it even if they have to torture logic and science to do it. Antivaccinationism is not a scientific belief; it is ideological and/or religious more than anything else, which is why it is so stubbornly resistant to reason and science.
http://www.epa.gov/epaoswer/hazwaste/mercury/regs.htm#hazwaste
Second, while Public Health and most other vaccine advocates say vaccines must be mandatory or these diseases will spread, if the vaccines work, anyone choosing them will be protected. If they don’t prevent the spread of the disease to the vaccinated, what is the point? It hardly seems right that those who don’t want to be vaccinated should be required to be vaccinated, because vaccines don’t always work.
And to whatever extent vaccines are being required because the “immune suppressed” cannot be vaccinated, and are more vulnerable to the adverse effects of disease, while my heart goes out to such people, they are not more important than children who are harmed by vaccines. Nor should the notion that vaccination may in itself be creating immune suppression be left out of this equation.
Besides there is documented proof of outbreaks in 100% vaccinated populations.
I also consider any notion of "public health" to be suspect, which sacrifices the individual to some alleged higher goal. Many of us find it way scarier that the state would sacrifice children to someone's idea of the common good, than to take our chances with Mother Nature. Who decides? What's the right number? Who's counting? Even in wartime, the draft of adults is only used very judiciously and sparingly. We also go to considerable effort to avoid enemy civilian casualties. Yet we seem to think nothing of sacrificing our own innocent children.
Like it or not, there is plenty of evidence that vaccines are doing harm. We just doing know how much.
The bottom line? We need good information, we need a choice, and we need it now. If we had such a choice, the vaccine manufacturers just might improve their products. Why, on earth, do they need to improve them now, when we are required to have their vaccines, and they are not accountable for the outcome?
Sandy Gottstein, President, Vaccination News, A Non-Profit Corporation (http://www.vaccinationnews.org) and author of Scandals (http://www.vaccinationnews.com/Scandals/past_scandals.htm)
The Burbacher study, the cornerstone of your rants on this board and many others, NEVER tested (by isotopic means) the origins of Hg in the brain. That's one reason, other than poor experimental design and execution, that body of work is easily dismissed (except by those looking for any justification of their pre-established beliefs, regardless of the experimental results and real conclusions).
While we are STILL (after decades of research) on the topic of mercury, can anyone...please!...explain how mercury causes autism when the clinical diagnosis of symptoms (used by all doctors around the world, for centuries now) for mercury toxicity look nothing like autism? Has anyone met any doctors who had a difficult time trying to differentiate whether their patients have autism or mercury poisoning? No? Yeah, it doesn't happen. Maybe some of you can ponder over that little detail.
"What's worse is that ethylmercury, the type found in vaccines and seed fungicides, has been shown to be more toxic than methylmercury due to its rapid conversion to Hg++ in the brain."
Ethylmercury is much less toxic than ethylmercury because of a very much shorter half life in the body. It's also excreted by the kidneys unlike methylmercury. So, our fake chemist is not telling you that there's precious little mercury left to be converted to inorganic mercury, again, unlike methyl mercury (pollution style mercury). He also misrepresents the limitations of the Burbacher study he's using in one important way. There was no way of telling where the brain inorganic mercury was coming from. It was assumed that the monkeys had no prior exposure to mercury, and that would be in the form of methylmercury. This has to be false. Mercury on planet Earth is everywhere.
In your studies did you ever learn the difference between a compound and an element? How about chemical properties, are they the same? And, as in the case of "aluminum in vaccines", are elements the same as salts? Because if that's the case, I'm going to start putting elemental chlorine and sodium on my food.
Hey chemist Mike, how exactly is thimerosal 50% mercury again? Your math seems to be fuzzy since mercury is one of 23 atoms in its composition. Maybe you can re figure your ppb math in light of that fact (yes, yes, we all know what 'by-weight' means, but you seem to miss the fact that we're talking about a molecule here).
Hey Mike, how would elemental mercury be liberated metabolically from the compound? Can you explain the mechanism, because according to what's published about organic decomposure processes, elemental mercury couldn't possibly be a metabolite, and certainly, the others from the molecule from your "magic mechanism" would be detected (and, sadly for you, they are not).
Hey Mike...do yourself a favor. Go get a organic chemistry refresher because you seem to be lacking some fundamental (I mean really basic) concepts.
" It came from one source, injected thimerosal. "
How do you know this? No one knows this. The researchers never made that claim. It was never tested or determined to be true. You are assuming, guessing, wishing, whatever...this was never determined by their experiments. Is that too difficult of a concept for you to grasp?
And you always seem to ignore the questions posed as to why the diagnosis for autism is nothing like that of mercury toxicity, you know, acrodynia. Know any kids that have acrodynia? Ever meet a doctor that's confused the two?
Go back and run your samples lab-tech Mike. Some research might be depending on your core facility function for something worthwhile.
Thank god I got my vaccinations when I was younger. I think that those people are nuts for not getting vaccinated. Now they can deal with their miserable kids and the possible chance that they could kill some babies while they are at it. Idiots.
"And you always seem to ignore the questions posed as to why the diagnosis for autism is nothing like that of mercury toxicity". Here you are Einstein.
Toxic levels of mercury in Chinese infants eating fish congee
Stephen J Corbett and Christopher C S Poon
Medical Journal Australia 2008; 188 (1): 59-60
To the Editor: We report elevated mercury levels in three infants, each the only child of Chinese parents living in Sydney. All three children had eaten fish congee (a rice and fish porridge) as a weaning food and ate fish regularly as toddlers. Their parents had sought medical advice for either developmental delay or neurological symptoms in the children.
A boy aged 2 years and 10 months presented with delayed speech and some autistic features. Since weaning, he had eaten fish (barramundi, sea perch, salmon and rock cod) up to eight times a week. He had no history of herbal medicine use, and his thyroid function, blood lead level, and a DNA screen for fragile X syndrome were normal. The childs blood mercury level was 350 nmol/L and urine Hg/Cr ratio was 14 nmol/mmol (NR, less than 10 nmol/mmol*). The boys father did not eat fish, and his blood mercury level was 19 nmol/L. The childs mother did eat fish, and had a blood mercury level of 27 nmol/L. Two weeks after removing fish from the diet, the childs blood mercury level had fallen to 99 nmol/L and his urine Hg/Cr ratio to 7 nmol/mmol. However, his behaviour did not improve, and he was subsequently diagnosed with classical autism.
How many do we really need?
The immunization schedule is out of control, forcing parents to "dissent" and think for ourselves...
ENTIRELY DISSAPPOINTED IN MOTHER JONES FOR PRINTING THIS!
Stephen J Corbett and Christopher C S Poon"
NICE! Just read through the paper. Again, the authors make no mention, anywhere in the paper, that their research demonstrates or implies that mercury was the causal factor in the child's autism. Additionally, you neglected to include the subsequent subjects where they describe pronounced neurological impairment, specifically, limitations in mobility and kidney failure (all part of the world-widely accepted medical diagnosis for mercury toxicity) that is not seen within the scope of those diagnosed within autism spectrum disorders.
The paper is about methylmercury and how excessive consumption of certain fish species during pregnancy may cause birth defects. So, along your lines of reasoning and what you've provided as evidence that autism is mercury poisoning, we should expect a lot of autism in families that eat a lot of fish, right? Maybe feeding children fish gives them autism, right? Because 1 tuna fish sandwich supplies more mercury (in the form of methylmercury) than an old-style, 8 year old, thimerosal-containing vaccine. Maybe it isn't big pharma that's out to get your kids...maybe it's big fish.
acrodynia (a·krō·dīˑ·nē·),n pediatric disease caused by mercury poisoning. Symptoms include generalized skin rash, pruritus, edema, painful extremities that appear pink, profuse sweating, clammy skin, scarlet-colored cheeks and nose, photophobia, polyneuritis, digestive problems, irritable episodes that alternate with apathetic attitudes, and general failure to thrive. Also called
erythredema polyneuropathy, Feer's disease, pink disease, or
Swift's disease.
Autism: A spectrum of neuropsychiatric disorders characterized by deficits in social interaction and communication, and unusual and repetitive behavior. Some, but not all, people with autism are non-verbal.
Do those look the same to you? No, me neither.
Vaccine refusals fuel measles outbreak
Posted 2008/08/21 at 1:07 pm EDT
WASHINGTON, Aug. 21, 2008 (Reuters) — Parents refusing to have their children vaccinated against measles have helped drive cases of the illness to their worst levels in a dozen years in the United States, health officials reported on Thursday.
In 2008 alone, 131 cases of measles have been reported, with 15 serious enough to be hospitalized, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.
Most of those infected were not vaccinated and there is no reason for any cases to occur when vaccines can prevent them, the CDC said in a weekly report on death and diseases.
"Measles can be a severe, life-threatening illness" the CDC's Dr. Anne Schuchat said in a statement. "These cases resulted primarily from failure to vaccinate, many because of philosophical or religious belief."
Only 13 percent of the cases were imported, the CDC said, naming Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, India, Israel, China, Germany, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Russia. "This is the lowest percentage of imported measles cases since 1996," the CDC report reads.
At least 15 patients, including four children younger than 15, were hospitalized, although no one has died, the CDC said.
"In the decade before the measles vaccination program began, an estimated 3 to 4 million persons in the United States were infected each year. Of these, 400 to 500 died, 48,000 were hospitalized, and another 1,000 developed chronic disability from measles encephalitis."
Encephalitis is a life-threatening inflammation of the brain that can be caused by viral infections such as measles.
More than 90 percent of the patients were not vaccinated, the CDC said, had no evidence of having been vaccinated, or were babies too young to have been vaccinated.
"Of the 95 patients eligible for vaccination, 63 were unvaccinated because of their or their parents' philosophical or religious beliefs," the CDC said.
Some religious groups refuse vaccination but many parents have fears that vaccines are unsafe or may cause conditions such as autism -- fears the CDC says are unfounded.
"Increases in the proportion of the population declining vaccination for themselves or their children might lead to large-scale outbreaks in the United States," the CDC said.
Outbreaks of measles are being reported now in Israel, Switzerland, Austria, Italy and Britain among people who are declining the vaccine.
British health officials said in June that measles had again become endemic for the first time since the mid-1990s due to parents declining to get their children vaccinated.
The last serious U.S. outbreak was in 1989-1991, when 55,000 people got measles and 123 died. The CDC said 55 cases of measles were reported in 2006.
Measles kills about 250,000 people a year globally, mostly children in poor nations. The disease causes fever, coughing, irritation of the eyes and a rash. Serious complications include encephalitis and pneumonia that can be fatal.
"Measles knows no borders, but can be prevented for less than one dollar per child in a developing country. We must be steadfast in our efforts to reduce measles cases globally," the Measles Initiative, which includes the American Red Cross, CDC and United Nations agencies, said in a statement.
Well thank goodness you had Leave it to Beaver! Perhaps that's what we can do for the millions that get it annually (except the quarter million that will die from it...and the tens of thousands with brain damage from encephalitis, I doubt they will get the jokes anyway).
There will never be an identifiable cause for autism. There are though 11 published papers which identify the underlying medical condition of autism as neuroinflammatory disease. My favorite is ' Neuroglial activation and Neuroinflammation in the Brain of Patients with Autism'. This was published by John Hopkins University. Now, do you want to debate whether mercury, a known neurotoxin, added to childhood vaccines at levels 250 times higher than what the EPA identifies as hazardous waste, causes neuroinflammatory disease? Do you want to debate whether brain damaged kids behave in a way so that some psychiatrist can label them as somewhere on the 'spectrum'?
Again, you re-hash the same old, tired talking points. None of which holds any credence. None.
But go ahead. It's Sept. 11th. Maybe you can spin that conspiracy in there with this one too.
Just out of curiosity Joe, since all these organizations, consisting of literally tens of millions of people around the world are in on the conspiracy, do they vaccinated their kids too, or do they have some special "secret placebo" vaccines just for show? Do these doctors and scientists you are accusing of being in on this conspiracy, do they not vaccinate their children (because, being in on the conspiracy, they would know the debilitating effects, right?) Just curious Joe, because apparently...in your mind...you've got this all worked out.
As a resident, I used to see blood infection from pneumococcus at least once a week. Since the pneumococcal vaccine became widespread, I haven't seen a single case. That's a lot of hospitalizations, spinal taps, antibiotic treatments that didn't have to be done. A lot of young children (all but one of the cases I've seen were under three) who didn't have to suffer. My mentors used to see Haemophilus influenzae infection -- meningitis, more spinal taps, mostly very young children. I've never seen a case, thanks to vaccines. My parents had childhood friends who died of polio. I've never seen a case, thanks to vaccines.
I suppose EVERY GIRL IN THE WORLD should take Gardasil!
every single one!
immediately!!
go! go NOW... inoculate an entire generation of young women!!!!
either its a MORAL MANDATE or its FEMINISM.
or so says BigPharma.
but we all know, its easier to jab & bill than educate & investigate alternative therapies that don't involve the WORLD'S MOST EXPENSIVE (x3) vaccine.
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Evil Slutopia: 10 Things You Might Not Know About Gardasil
http://evilslutopia.com/2007/01/gardasil.html
Gardasil? for health or profit?? / Gardasil & HPV?
http://www.breadnroses.ca/forums/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=21321
The Politics & PR of Cervical Cancer
http://www.prwatch.org/node/6216
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Spread Love...
BlueBerry Pick'n
ThisCanadian com
" ... tolerance of intolerance is cowardice... " ~ Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
"We, two, form a Multitude" ~ Ovid.
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"True Pacifism is not unrealistic submission to an Evil power...it is rather a courageous confrontation with Evil by the Power of Love, in the faith that it is better to be the recipient of violence than the inflicter of it, since the latter only multiplies the existence of violence & bitterness in the Universe, while the former may develop a sense of shame in the opponent, & thereby bring about a transformation & change of Heart." - MLK
"Silent Freedom is Freedom Silenced"
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So, people are living longer and healthier mainly because of vaccines, but it has nothing to do with advances in sanitation, the development of antibiotics, pasteurization, and the understanding of the role that bacteria plays in disease causation. All of these things are sorely lacking in the developing countries whose statistics the proponents of vaccines cite so exuberantly. So we should continue to overlook these areas including improving water quality, and just give them vaccines. Yep, that'll solve it. This sounds like the industry line to me.
http://www.garynull.com/Documents/n iin/incao_hepatitis_b_vaccination_te.htm
He states:
"In 1994 a special committee of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences published a comprehensive review of vaccine safety which had been commissioned by federal law. Of five possible and plausible adverse effects of the hepatitis B vaccination which the committee investigated, they were unable to come to any conclusion for four of them because they found to their dismay that the relevant research had not been done!"
He continues:
"Since July 1990, 17,497 cases of hospitalizations, injuries and deaths in America following hepatitis B vaccination have been reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) of the U.S. government. This figure includes 146 deaths in individuals after receiving only hepatitis B vaccine without any other vaccines, including 73 deaths in children under 14 years old. In 1996 alone there were 872 serious adverse events in children under 14 years old reported to VAERS. 658 of those injuries were following hepatitis B vaccination in combination with other vaccinations and 214 of these injuries were after hepatitis B vaccination alone. In these children under 14 years old, there were 35 deaths after hepatitis B vaccination in combination and 13 deaths after hepatitis B vaccination alone, for a total of 48 deaths. Compare these statistics with the total number of hepatitis B cases nationwide reported that same year (1996) in children under 14, just 279, and the conclusion is obvious that the risks of hepatitis B vaccination far outweigh its benefits. In those infants who died under one month of age, most of the deaths are classified as Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). However, in the past this syndrome has never struck infants so young, and SIDS is officially defined as beginning only after one month of age."
With 6,000 children dying of SIDS every year, we have no idea how many of these deaths are actually caused by hepatitis B vaccination. Though the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting system was created by federal law to permit a more accurate assessment of the risks of vaccination, and although the raw data it generates is analyzed, the individual reports of injury or death are rarely, if ever, investigated. If one factors in that fewer than 10% of physicians report adverse reactions to vaccines because we are taught to regard them as merely "temporally related", as only a coincidence, it would be quite plausible to say that the risks of hepatitis B vaccination clearly outweigh its benefits for 99% of the children who receive it."
Finally, I will add from his testimony:
"A critical point which is never mentioned by those advocating mandatory vaccination of children is that children’s health has declined significantly since 1960 when vaccines began to be widely used. According to the National Health Interview Survey conducted annually by the National Center for Health Statistics since 1957, a shocking 31% of U.S. children today have a chronic health problem , 18% of children require special health care or related services and 6.7% of children have a significant disability due to a chronic physical or mental condition. Respiratory allergies, asthma and learning disabilities are the most common of these. Three controlled studies comparing vaccinated to unvaccinated children in England and New Zealand have shown that the vaccinated children have significantly more asthma, ear infections, hospitalizations and inflammatory bowel disease than their unvaccinated cohorts. Since vaccinations have a lasting effect on the immune system, and since it is known that many vaccines shift the balance of the immune system away from its acutely-reacting "Th1" side and toward its chronically-reacting "Th2" side , it is a very plausible scenario that vaccines are contributing greatly to the large-scale and unprecedented increase in chronic conditions such as allergies, asthma, diabetes and a wide range of neurological dysfunctions including learning disabilities, attention deficit disorder, seizures and autism in U.S. children today.
The shocking facts that 31% of U.S. children today suffer from a chronic condition and that the rate of disability from such chronic conditions in children has seen nearly a fourfold increase since 1960 ought to seriously challenge our medical research establishment. But, far from taking a proactive approach toward these disturbing facts, our medical establishment remains curiously uninterested in children’s chronic diseases and instead continues to pursue its narrow focus of using vaccines to eradicate every possible acute childhood illness, even those like hepatitis B and chicken pox which pose no threat to 99% of children."
Granted the link to autism has been disputed by current research. However, what other factor is there that has been introduced since 1960 to which the increased in chronic conditions can be attributed besides mass childhood vaccination?
Petrik MS, Wong MC, Tabata RC, Garry RF, Shaw CA. Aluminum adjuvant linked to gulf war illness induces motor neuron death in mice. Neuromolecular Med. 2007;9(1):83-100.
Pediatrician's who observe their own healthy, outgoing children suddenly withdraw and regress within hours of receiving a vaccination. These doctors are routinely said to be mistaken and untrained.
A vaccine compensation program enacted in the 80's to "compensate" parents whose children were damaged by vaccines. This was a result of problems with the pertussis vaccine.
14 healthy teenage girls who died shortly after receiving the Guadasil vaccine, not to mention the hundreds who have collapsed into convulsions in their doctor's offices. All this for a vaccine which has not been proved to be any more effective at preventing cervical cancer than a PAP smear.
We need to keep in mind that we can never prove that something does not cause autism or other chronic health risks. All we can say is there are no known links. It is entirely possible that we were simply looking in the wrong place or that there is a mechanism at work that we are unaware of.
I would certainly be more comfortable with the CDC if they responded to the criticism with science instead of propaganda.
Anyone remember the Prevnar scare a few years ago when a manager had to blow the whistle on shoddy manufacturing practices at the vaccine factory? No one would listen to him - he finally had to go a stockholder's meeting to be heard. As recently as this year, FDA has been insufficiently staffed to properly oversee pharmaceutical manufacture (especially in offshore facilities)as they are mandated to do.
Also, what about all the FDA scientists who refused to give up their financial relationships with pharmaceutical companies even when ordered to do so by their director? The director had to cave and let them continue in their consulting roles to Big Pharma or there would have been virtually no one left at FDA.
Last, but not least, what about the ethical considerations of testing vaccines and drugs on minor children? Who decides what the acceptable casualty level is among test subjects?
http://www.ajph.org/cgi/eletters?lookup=by_date&days=30
Mercury, Vaccines, And Autism: One Controversy, Much Propaganda
In the article, "Mercury, Vaccines, and Autism: One Controversy, Three Histories" the author, while trying to sound impartial, misrepresents several facts in order to support his conclusions. He starts by citing the many findings of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) without mentioning that the IOM was commissioned by the CDC to issue a report on "Vaccines and Autism." The CDC approves, mandates, promotes, and distributes vaccines. He does not mention that every member of the IOM committee had ties to the vaccine program (1). There were no independent toxicologists on this committee. One would think this would be important when considering the safety of mercury in vaccines.
The author cites the inventors of thimerosal and writes, "extensive in vitro testing shows that thimerosal was 40 to 50 times as effective as phenol against Staphylococcus aureus." He then claims "concerns over neurotoxicity in infants receiving thimerosal from vaccines were never raised by medical or government authorities before the late 1990s." This is false. In 1982, an independent panel was convened by the FDA (2). The panel called for the removal of mercury, including thimerosal, from all over-the-counter products. It declared thimerosal as being both unsafe and ineffective. It was singled out as being "no better than water in protecting mice from fatal streptococcal infection." It was shown to be 35.5 times more toxic to embryonic chicken heart tissue than the aforementioned Staphylococcus aureus.
He goes on to declare that the "comparatively miniscule exposures [of thimerosal] involved in vaccines were well within all published guidelines for mercury exposure." Unfortunately, he never took the time to analyze a vaccine vial for mercury concentration. The Hepatitis B vaccine, administered at birth for over ten years, contained 25,000 parts per billion (ppb) of mercury in the multi-dose vaccine vial. The multi-dose DTP and Haemophilus B vaccine vials, administered 4 times each in the 1990s to children at 2, 4, 6, 12 and 18 months of age, contained 50,000 ppb mercury. According to the EPA, any liquid that contains more than 200 ppb mercury is to be classified as hazardous waste based on toxicity (3). It's hard to believe that a level of mercury 250 times higher than hazardous waste levels would be referred to as "miniscule." The fact is, on any given day of receiving even a single thimerosal containing vaccine in the 1990s, all published guidelines for mercury exposure were exceeded.
Several pages of the paper examine the toxicity of methylmercury and its past use as a fungicide. We are led to believe that this form of mercury is much different than ethylmercury, the type found in vaccines. This is in spite of the fact that ethylmercury was used for the same purpose. In fact, Ethylmercurric Chloride, the material used as a fungicide (which was banned long ago) is what is used to make thimerosal. This can be easily confirmed by looking in a Merck Index. We now know that this type of mercury deposits twice as much inorganic mercury in the brains of primates as compared to equal doses of methylmercury (4). Inorganic mercury, following the de-methylation of organic mercury, has been identified as the primary neurotoxic agent in primate studies (5).
The author mentions the book, "Evidence of Harm: Mercury in Vaccines and the Autism Epidemic" by David Kirby. It contains 436 scientific references. The author did not disclose if he read the book. This may have helped his argument since this book was read by many parents of autistic children.
We are then told about the impact of trial lawyers concerning this situation. The author does not disclose how much money has been awarded to trial lawyers who represent autistic children. It's my understanding that this number is zero.
(1) http://www.iom.edu/subpage.asp?id5981
(2) U.S. Food and Drug Administration, proposed rules, Federal Register 47/436-01, January 5, 1982.
(3) http://www.epa.gov/epaoswer/hazwaste/mercury/regs.htm#hazwaste
(4) Burbacher T, Shen D, Liberato N, Grant K, Cernichiari E, Clarkson T. 2005. Comparison of blood and brain mercury levels in infant monkeys exposed to methylmercury or vaccines containing thimerosal. Environmental Health Perspectives. 113:1015-1021.
(5) Charleston J, Body R, Bolender R, Mottet N, Vahter M, Burbacher T. 1996. Changes in the number of astrocytes and microglia in the thalamus of the monkey Macaca fascicularis following long-term subclinical methylmercury exposure. Neurotoxicology. 17:127-138.
Colitis is one of the biological ailments. CDC states that the cause of colitis is unknown, but respiratory infections can cause attacks of colitis. Guess what? Measles is a respiratory infection and is mandated.
(Adverse reactions listed on the manufacturer's information sheet are diarrhea, ear infections, diabetes and pancreatitis.)
If you check the literature, bottle feeding is a risk for colitis and ear infections. So why are people bottle feeding their children and allowing the children to be vaccinated? Do they think they are guaranteed that the result will be different for their children?
Kanner was correct about the correlation between autism and refrigerators in the household. It is not cold and uncaring mothers, but it is refrigeration prevents spoilage of both formula in baby bottles and vaccine in its vials.
Avoiding bottle feeding and vaccines capable of respiratory infections will reduce the incidence of regressive autism.
Bottle feeding predisposes the child and the vaccine triggers it.
PR dollars at work ..
I wont give my kid any shots for a while..and then just the most important ones..
Hey didn't AIDS epicenter was in Africa on the same place were some vaccines where tested a few decades earlier ??
Even if one does not wish to consider the autism connection in the vaccine debate, there are plenty of other reasons not to vaccinate. As a parent who has chosen not to vaccinate my child, I feel highly insulted by the tone of this article. My husband, I, and many other non-vax parents we know are probably much more aware of the issues and problems that can arise from vaccines than those who blindly follow whatever their doctor tells them to do, without knowing how vaccines work, what is in them or what they can do to a child. To call us "idiots" as a previous poster did is beyond insulting. (And for the record, our free-thinking pediatrician supports our choice not to vaccinate.) Whatever happened to freedom of choice?
Sorry, Mother Jones, I lost a great deal of respect for you today.
http://www.vaccinesafety.edu/thi-table.htm
For those concerned about what is happening to our kids and our planet, register for the conference "Saving our Kids, Healing our Planet" to be held in Charlotte NC on Sept. 26-28, 2008. Speakers include David Kirby, Holly Robinson Peele, Deidre Imus, Dr. Elizabeth Mumper. See http://www.sokhop.com/
The MMR vccine is a respiratory infection and respiratory infections can initiate attacks of colitis. As you know colitis and diarrhea go together.(This from the CDC web site)
Bottle feeding is a risk for colitis and for ear infections, a couple of ailments associated with regressive autism.
Why should children be bottle fed? Don't we ever learn from the past. Do the pediatricians tell you to breast feed your child because if you don't it will be at risk for colitis and ear infections, and that these ailments are associated with autism?
You may wish to read:
http://www.sleepnet.com/apnea134/messages/253.html
Let us try to solve the problem, and us not declare any factor "out of bounds" before the cause is known.
Let us put our efforts where they will do the most good.
Might I advise any other beginning to question the new shift in MJ thinking turn to a new source for the Truth. Check out Global Research at http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=home . Here you will find the truth, presented by people with actual knowledge and insight! This mother Jones stuff is now approaching the mainstream attitudes towards the dangers of today's living and, personally, I am not even disappointed, it has happened so many times before. Every publication that preaches common sense and decent values seems to have become corrupt in the past while leaving me wondering what big fish swallowed MJ that such articles are now presented for our consideration.
Still waiting on the photos of semi nude "Chickie of the Day" to increase readership!
All it takes is to study the higher levels of autism and other difficulties to see the correlations.
So, 911 was NOT an inside job and VACCINES are good for you? Admittedly they serve a great and humanitarian purpose when appropriately administered. But, as with all else, things have simply gone too far.
I may have rambled here, I am not even fully awake. But I am awake enough to recognize shilling when I see it.
I am also the mother of two vaccine injured children and a third that is and will remain unvaccinated. I also had a mother die of ALS, which has been linked to overexposure to formaldehyde, of which she would have had plenty of through vaccines that she got all the time (she even bought into the 70s swine flu vaccine!).
My husband has documented hearing loss through the military from his series of Hep B shots and was actually waived for his third shot in the series. Vaccines kill. There is no doubt about it. Diseases kill. There is no doubt about it. But if disease still kills with more than 90% of the U.S. vaccinated, then clearly vaccines DO NOT WORK.
In fact, they are turning us into a sickly medical seeking cult. What is the point of poisoning yourself through vaccines if you can “still” catch whatever it is you are vaccinating against? Oh, that’s right, herd immunity. Ask Allen to prove herd immunity. He can’t. No one can and no one has. It’s a THEORY. Meanwhile we have literally destroyed our own DNA. We have introduced Simian viruses into our systems via the polio vaccine. We have created the sickliest generation ever that can’t survive without pills, interventions and a constant barrage of pharma advertising.
This is propaganda at its worst because people have come to trust Mother Jones to give it to them straight. This isn’t straight. This is a fear mongering article to get the masses to line up for a whooping cough vaccine that DOES NOT WORK. And it never really has.
Ugh………..I get so tired of pro vaccine people trying to push drugs into my system and my children’s systems. Go away already.
Only by being injected into our bloodstreams they are safe???? Oh please, how stupid do you think we are?
The studies proving a definite and direct connection between childhod vaccinations and Autism, ADD, allergies, and many other disabilities are deliberately left out of government studies.
Those "experts" telling us how safe vaccines are have strong financial ties to pharmaceutical companies. Some hold patents on certain vaccines.
Most unvaccinating patients and parents know more about vaccines than the physicians that push them on us.
Contrary to what the Mr. Allen writes, pertussis never disappeared and in fact increased after pertussis vaccination became mandatory in the 1970s.
Pertussis is cyclical and outbreaks occur every 40-48 months irrespective of vaccination status. Further, deaths from pertussis decreased 99% BEFORE the vaccination was in widespread use. This is true for measles as well.
Let's investigate this - and please forgive my repetition. The mother developed whooping cough after she was most likely vaccinated 5 times as a child (as is required) – this is proof the vaccine does not work.
More proof? There are whooping cough, mumps and measles epidemics of vaccinated children as reported by the US gov’t.
Whenever criticism of vaccination occurs, MDs manufacturer an epidemic. We must ask, especially regarding the 131 measles cases – how many were laboratory confirmed? But let’s also put this in perspective. 131 cases of measles among 300 million people is no epidemic.
In this article blaming the baby's pertussis on non-vaccination is completely illogical. There is simply no way you can tie in low vaccination levels to pertussis outbreaks. That was even stated by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) after an Idaho pertussis outbreak in which almost everyone who caught the disease had been vaccinated.
Infants traditionally don't get pertussis because the receive immunity from their mother. The technical term for that is “transplacental immunity.” Vaccinations interfere with transplacental immunity and that is the reason the baby got pertussis (because the mother had been vaccinated and did not have good immune factors to transfer to her baby). If she had been breastfeeding the baby the child would have benefited and possibly come through the disease unscathed. Was she? We don't know that from the article and yet this is very important.
Had the mother not been vaccinated and been exposed to pertussis she would have anti-bodies etc. to give to her unborn child which would have given the child protection for the first few years of life.
Vaccination is the reason why this infant got pertussis.
When Sweden for example, completely banned pertussis vaccination (due to the high rate of brain damage from the shot (a fact Mr. Allen ignores), the age of occurrence of pertussis changed back from infants young children - who are far better able to handle the disease .
Infancy is a dangerous time to get pertussis, that is why pertussis vaccinations should be halted. If we did that then the age of occurrence would return to normal and infants would not be at risk.
Herd immunity does not work in vaccinated populations. Herd immunity was only observed in populations that contacted measles naturally.
Because MDs almost never report vaccine injury (based on FDA and other studies) we have no idea how many children get sick and die from vaccines. The parents of vaccine-injured children are told it was a “coincidence” their child got seizures, autism, brain damage” etc shortly after vaccination. How can they continue to tell this to hundreds of thousands of parents with a straight face? When do they finally realize the shots are hurting children?
MDs are not to be trusted when it comes to vaccine information because they have a financial interest in selling this product and they downplay (or never mention) the damage.
The damage is extensive - go to any school and see the kids on Ritalin, allergy or asthma medication or suffering from dyslexia or other "learning disorders."
Measles, mumps, chicken pox and even whooping cough may last a few days or weeks but autism is forever. This is the real reason why parents refuse to play Russian roulette with their child's health.
Dr. Tedd Koren
tkoren1@aol.com
Classical homeopathy is a proven treatment.
Other supportive means are:
Thymus: for whooping cough
Botanical treatment:
Elecampane/Inula: persistent coughs with abundant expectoration, chr bronchitis, after colds or influenza, or for vomiting due to irritant coughing. Adult dose--0.6-4ml
Yerba/Eriodictyon: debilitating coughs of chronic bronchitis & excess catarrh. 2ml is adult dose.
Grindelia: chr bronchitis with spasmodic coughs. Combined with other expectorants for rattling coughs with profuse secretion (esp yerba) 2-4ml adult dose.
Sundew/Drosera: for hoarse, resonant, or explosive, or nervous or spasmodic coughs like in measles or whooping cough. Sundew + pleurisy root for cough following influenza. Adult dose: 0.3-1.2ml.
Trifolium: dry, irritable coughs and spasmodic coughs as in measles.
Pleurisy root: acute bronchitis of influenza with tight, painful cough and difficult respiration. For children who have a reduction in respiratory secretions and chest is sore from coughing. Also used for fever with hot, dry skin.
If you are lucky enough to live in a state that licenses Naturopathic doctors, I encourage you to find one. They definitely treat seriously ill people, acute and chronic, daily with dramatic results.
Check out the AANP website for more information:
(http://naturopathic.org)
-- Jon Ritz
Student
scnm.edu
I am amazed when i read the wacked posts here about autism and vaccinations..!!!
What most people fail to address is that the rate of autism has increase with the AGE of PARENTS.!!!
Ever been to an autism support group..?
They are filled with people that SHOULD be Grandparents NOT parents..!!!
Humans were meant to have babies in there 20's, not there 40's!!!
Ask any doctor "Privately", and he will tell you that this is the REAL reason..:-)
If you lib's would have babies when GOD designed your body to have a child, then maybe your OLD breeding parts would stop putting out autistic kids..:-)
BIll
The beauty of having your own website, blog, etc. is that you can really say whatever you want, but the shame in it is that people such as yourself are terribly misinformed and might actually influence a poor vulnerable soul out there.
I'm not stupid (quite the opposite), and I'm not selfish (I spend most of my time thinking about and working for the community). However, given the explosion of neurological and immune disorders in our nation over the last few decades, I believe some risk aversion is in order. The first rule of medicine, and health care, must be 'first do no harm'. And I am far from satisfied that we are doing no harm with our current vaccination regime.
No