You Should Worry About Vaccine Safety

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www.coastalpost.com/04/03/07.htm
Costal Post Online, CA
March, 2004 - Volume 29, Number 03 By Carol Sterritt

Why do some parents and researchers now question vaccine safety? Are their fears reasonable or mass-induced hypnosis? Let's examine the situation and focus upon crucial experiences that have come into play. As you read this, may you come to an awareness that at the very least, the vaccination prescription needs to be altered to reflect the fact that 1) some children may simply not be able to tolerate some vaccines, and 2) certain vaccines, especially the hepatitis B vaccine, cause more injury and death than the disease that they supposedly remedy.

In the early 1980s, a young mother, Barbara Loe Fisher, brought her oldest child, who was two and a half years old, to the doctor's. They were there for what should have been a routine vaccination. Within hours following the shot's administration, the boy experienced convulsions and collapsed. He was unresponsive or more than six hours as he lay motionless in his bed. Everyone concerned was frantic.

Luckily for this child and his family, he did not stay unconscious or die. However during the following weeks, "he suffered physical, mental and emotional regression including severe gastrointestinal dysfunction, failure to thrive, respiratory and ear infections, personality change, and loss of cognitive memory concentration, and motor skills. He was eventually diagnosed as having minimal brain dysfunction that included multiple learning disabilities and attention deficit disorder." (Quoted biographical material from B.L. Fisher)

This incident brought Fisher to a height of awareness. She began to question the "science" behind vaccines. She began, as so many activists must do, to unravel the link between industry profits and their production and distribution of a financially lucrative product, in this case, vaccines. She became effective in her work. By 1986 she had co-authored a book, "A Shot in the Dark." Also she together with other parents of vaccine-injured children founded an organization that became known as the National Vaccine Information Center. (Ph. 703 938-3783, website www.909shot.com)

Over the years, she watched the development of the vaccination-governmental-industrial complex and its effect on our population. As time went by, more and more vaccines came on the market. The number of immunizations now suggested or required is staggering. A baby can experience as many as thirty-one vaccines by the time of its first birthday. These include shots for diphtheria, measles, mumps, whooping cough, hepatitis b, chicken pox, polio and flu. Other vaccines that were thrown on the market have been withdrawn due to the fatalities that these hastily created and examined products inflicted on their target population: babies. (Parents in the late nineteen nineties who vaccinated their children for a rotovirus lost their children to the bowel obstruction side-effects of the supposed health aid. Fortunately it was rather quickly pulled from the market, but it was lack of government oversight that allowed it on the market to begin with.)

The group that Fisher heads, the National Vaccine Information Center, offers links to resource groups to families whose children are negatively impacted by vaccination. It is a clearinghouse for information, with its personnel and its website giving out information on lawsuits, new vaccine regulations, etc. As the number of "routine" vaccinations increases, so does the likelihood of a child having autism, asthma, Attention Deficit Disorder, seizures, and other impairments. Scientists are belatedly getting involved by designing studies to sort out which, if any, of these problems can be traced to vaccines.

There are now three camps of thought on the vaccine issue. One camp says, "Look. I'm educated. I understand fully the science behind the vaccine products. I have read about Edward Jenner and his discovery of a smallpox vaccine in the late 1700's. I am pleased that modern generations have not experienced polio, whooping cough, large pandemics of measles or chicken pox, etc. We have, until lately, put the spectre of smallpox to rest. I do not understand any people so uneducated, so backwards in their thinking that they will not consider vaccinating their child. Their doing as they please endangers everyone."

The more extreme camp says, "I would never vaccinate my child for any reason whatsoever."

And the more moderate crowd says, "I understand the issue both scientifically and from a consumer viewpoint. I might favor vaccination if I had not fully investigated the issue and discovered that vaccination material contains heavy metals such as mercury, thallium, tin, copper, and also bacteria and virus material unrelated to the vaccine serum's desired effect. I am aware that vaccine products are often created in labs that are not fully investigated as to their cleanliness or in terms of the purity of the product. I am also aware that some children are simply not able to ingest certain vaccination materials, much the way that some members of the population cannot withstand a shot of penicillin."

Lately. more and more people are falling into the latter camp of thought. Included in this group is Senator Dan Burton (R-Indiana.) In the spring of 2000, he assembled a Congressional hearing on the vaccine controversy. He specifically targeted the issue of autism and measles and the MMR vaccine. His stake in the issue is personal, as one of his grandchildren had become autistic after receiving a MMR vaccine. Among the witnesses that he called to present scientific findings was Dr. Wakefield from the UK.

I was able to watch the hearing over C-Span. Wakefield's testimony concerned a finding that when Wakefield examined the intestinal tissue of children in his study, he discovered that the measles component of the MMR vaccine had become active in that location in their body. According to the parents and doctors of the affected children, after their shots, these children began to experience chronic diarrhea and signs of autism. Wakefield concluded that it was this biophysical reaction that led to their becoming autistic. The non-autistic children were not found to have such components in the lining of their gut tissue.

Senator Burton had a colleague of Wakefield's submit his findings, which corroborated those of Wakefield. However critics have pointed out that they believe that Wakefield's testing methods are not sensitive enough to rule out that the measles material came about from a pre-existing, naturally occurring measles infection.

However, the mainstream network of industry and government totally ridicules Wakefield. They remark that his study did not consist of a large enough group of children, that there was never a peer-review of his findings etc. (What is amazing to me is that ALWAYS when a study differs with an industry's need for exoneration, you never find industry, with all its money and vast resources, attempting to duplicate the criticized findings. They refuse to take action, regardless of the significance of the first finding.) As usually is the case, once industry and government make their criticism, the focus of their derision can no longer receive grant funding. Thus, that scientist cannot return to a laboratory setting and conduct the very tests that critics call on them to conduct. It is this way with the pesticide issue, and so it is no surprise that the vaccination issue would handle such a situation in a similar fashion.

So if you are a scientist who establishes a protocol for a study, and the Establishment disagrees with you, your career is over. However, if you are a governmental scientist who heads the American Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and you go ahead and recommend a rotovirus vaccine that has little research done on its safety and if 113 babies are immediately impaired by this vaccine, with one of them dying, what happens to you then? Well, since industry, with its governmental revolving door policies, ever lets any one of its own go down, you will be re-appointed. Such was the case of Dr. John Modlin, whose scientifically lacking and highly questionable rotovirus vaccine approval kept him in his highly paid position during the late 1990's.

But Dr. Wakefield remains a pariah, banished from the halls of science, although his work never injured anyone and might in fact be an important step to understanding vaccines and how they might trigger conditions like autism.

Now there does exist an entire body of research that proves that Wakefield's study was invalid. But, boys and girls, there are also shelves full of studies showing the gas additive MTBE is safe, and that cigarette smoking has health benefits. When industry pays for the scientific piper, and when the government is under industry's control, night is day, black is white, and up is down, and so it shall remain.

In addition to Fisher and Wakefield being tireless forces in the fight for truth about vaccines, a third person should be mentioned. Michael Belkin was one of the world's foremost statisticians. He made his living by running the numbers on market indications. He had done his life by the book. So when his pediatrician stressed the importance of having his newborn daughter inoculated with the hepatitis b series of vaccines, Belkin complied.

Tragically this vaccine killed Lyla Rose Belkin before she was even six months old. The vaccine industry never contemplated having a foe like Belkin. Once he ran the numbers on their various programs, their industry looked pretty shabby. According to Belkin, "Children and adults are developing the same encephalitic and neurological complications after vaccination that science takes credit for eliminating."

Belkin's analysis slams the MMR vaccine. It also destroys all plausible arguments for injecting minor children with the hep b vaccine. The analysis underscores a most important doctrine of common sense much ignored by the pseudo scientific pharmaceutical industry: "Don't attempt fixing something if it is not broken." And also the maxim: "No individual should be subject to a 'remedy' that is more dangerous than the ailment it supposedly wards off."

It is almost unheard for middle and upper middle class families to have an infant contract hepatitis b. Those infants suspected of such an infection can simply be dealt with by their physician doing a blood test on the mother, since the infection is usually passed on in utero.

Initially industry planned on making hep b vaccine part of a protocol for twelve year olds nationwide. But they suddenly changed their minds and issued directives to hospital maternity wards. Nowadays, a healthy baby program at most hospitals involves inoculating a newborn with this vaccine within twenty-four hours of its birth.

Why was this done? My suspicion is that the reason for this change was that newborns have no personal history. This vaccine is perhaps the most dangerous one on the market. Its side effects are pronounced and life threatening. It actually injures and kills more infants than would be harmed were there no vaccine programs for this disease. So its recipients must not have a provable history. Harm a twelve year old, and a wealth of stored data can make a court case that this individual was indeed harmed by the vaccine. There are school report cards, home videos, and anecdotal accounts of how healthy and active the youngster was before their paralysis or death. But a newborn? Damage a newborn and it can quickly be said that the fault was with the newborn and not the outside intervention. Too bad if the side effects that the poor baby endures include a lifetime of migraine headaches, brain dysfunction or worse.

But industry has the trump card. Marin County receives enough monies from the vaccination program that its officials wish only to "Hear No Evil."

Eventually the tide must turn. But at what cost? Across how many more coffins containing infant and toddler bodies must the shadow of vaccination fall?

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