Questions to Ask About Vaccines

One of the most disturbing things I learned from this article is that people will accept government stats about decreased rates of polio, even if it means ignoring an INCREASE in paralysis and death. I've been saying for years that we have the same rates of paralysis in this country that we've always had, but we just don't call it "polio" so that vaccine companies can make false claims about efficacy and safety.

I hate that we put the agenda of vaccine companies and government fat cats above health and safety. It is evil.

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4 Questions that May Change Your Mind About Vaccines

A Vaccine Guide for the Researching Parent

I thought this was fabulous and I couldn't not share it.

The Only Vaccine Guide a New Parent Will Ever Need  by J.B. Handley

The Measles - I'm Not Frightened

At some point we need to wake up to the fact that our government, in order to remain relevant and to make sure we understand how desperately we need it, is continually manufacturing fear. Terrorists! Ebola! Vampires! and now Measles! 

Don't believe the hype. Don't get frightened. The chance of someone dying from measles in the United States is something like .2% And that would require that a person actually contract measles. Currently there have been about 100 cases in the current outbreak. So that is 100 out of 350,000,000 people, right? Last year there were between 600 and 700 cases nationwide.

One of the most interesting things about this scare compared to past scares is the the thing itself is not even all that scary. If you happen to be the one poor soul who encounters a murderous terrorist or contracts ebola, you are in deep doo-doo. But even if, regardless of the narrow odds, you DO contract measles, it is not likely to change your life at all.

Take positive actions to keep yourself healthy and resistant to all infectious diseases, not just measles, by eating real food, keeping sugar to a minimum and making sure you have sufficient vitamin D.  No need to let fear cause you to inject poisons into your body (or the bodies of your children) under the false belief that it will make you safe. Life isn't safe. But we can make it safer. Wellness isn't something you put into your body, it is something your body gives you as a reward for treating it as the Designer intended.

Vitriol From Pro-vacs

It is common when there is an outbreak of so-called "vaccine preventable diseases" that there will be news articles attempting to shame those who choose not to vaccinate themselves or their children. Actually, they really only get upset with those who won't vaccinate their children because Nazis people just love to tell others how to raise their children or have the government force parents to do what the Nazis people want. Rarely do I see a call for adults to get themselves vaccinated because it violates the liberal mantra to interfere with the "choice" of an adult. Anyway, this article from The New York Times is a classic example. It was stimulated by the resent outbreak of measles in Ohio.

The text of the article itself is entirely predictable and not noteworthy. What was shocking to me were the comments. There are comments that stop just short of advocating violence against parents who don't vaccinate. The common theme is that unvaccinated children should live their entire lives under quarantine inside of their homes. The humorous comments are the ones that start out with, "I was vaccinated against X and still got X... " which then go on to talk about how all children should be forced to get vaccinated. Huh? And it seems as though big pharma has succeeded in convincing a great number of people that measles is deadly.

This is disturbing, of course. But what frustrates me more is that at the same time that these people are accusing anti-vacs like me of getting my information from Jenny McCarthy and not being able to do my own research and not knowing any facts about disease or vaccines, they remain blissfully (or in this case angrily) unaware that over a single 12 year period in the United States only 4 people died of measles. None of them were children. Nearly all of the "victims" of the current Ohio outbreak of measles are adults.

Predictably, there was one pro-vac commenter who stated that big pharma can't use double blind studies to prove the safety and efficacy of vaccines because it would unethical. I guess it is more ethical to simply start giving the vaccinations and use everyone as test subjects?

Against Disease

I want to continue the conversation started here about vaccinations. In that piece I mentioned that pro-vacs tend to mischaracterize what it is that anti-vacs actually believe and say. If I understand the terms of logic, this represents a straw man argument, where one party provides a counter-argument to an argument that was never even presented. It is like setting up a straw man and then knocking it down. Anyone can defeat a straw man. It is much more difficult to address the actual arguments being made.

Recently I was accused of believing that getting diseases is healthy and that I am hoping that my children contract all sorts of illness because I believe it benefits their immune systems. Let me be clear here -- disease is the opposite of health. When a child is experiencing a diseased state of the body it is always, in my estimation, not a good thing. I have no wish or desire for my children to get diseases. I do not think only in terms of healthy and unhealthy but rather whether my children exist in a general state of wellness.  Over the past year my children have been exposed to and some of them contracted both pertussis (whooping cough) and chicken pox. How do I feel about that?

Their short term discomfort from those illnesses caused me to sympathize with them for sure, but at no time did they become seriously ill or need a doctor's care. They certainly were never anywhere near death. And now they have a lifelong immunity to whooping cough and long-term immunity against chicken pox. In addition, the entire family received a varicella zoster booster, in the form of exposure to active chicken pox, which will hopefully help us keep shingles at bay. I don't view this as being "good for the immune system". The immune system is good on its own. The fact that no one dies in our home from their daily exposure to viruses and bacteria is a pretty good sign that their immune systems are functioning well.

On the other hand, I do believe that the lack of live chicken pox virus floating around the populous is resulting in an increasing rate of shingles and the appearance of shingles in younger and younger people. Let me explain. When I was growing up in the 1970's and 1980's, shingles was nearly unheard of. The general understanding was that after having chicken pox, usually as a child, that a person was then immune to the illness of chicken pox for life, however, the virus would remain dormant, possibly hiding within nerve cells, and inexplicably would occasionally manifest itself as shingles. When I say "occasionally," I mean rarely. I never knew anyone with a case of shingles while I was growing up. Today, shingles is practically common. It seems that we are always praying for someone at church who is suffering from a painful case of shingles.

Is there something different about today's elderly people that makes them more susceptible to shingles? Yes there is. They don't get regular "boosters" of exposure to live cases of chicken pox. Because of the use of chicken pox vaccination, there are fewer young children running around with chicken pox than there used to be. In addition, the elderly tend to spend less time surrounded by lots of children, choosing instead to live in isolated communities and homes with other elderly. If they do have grandchildren that visit them, it is probably only  one or two, rather than 10. In contrast, when I was a child, we were around our grandparents all the time. And children who had chicken pox did not isolate themselves because everyone older had already had chicken pox and everyone younger was bound to get it. It was not considered a serious illness, because it isn't. This means that nearly everyone in the population who had any contact with children, including in public places like stores, was getting continual re-exposure to the virus that causes chicken pox.  This probably stimulated their immune systems to keep the varicella virus in check within their bodies, protecting from an outbreak of shingles.

Once an elderly person withdrew from exposure to children, he also withdrew from re-exposure to chicken pox and so his chance of getting shingles increased. How long does a person have to be away from chicken pox before she becomes vulnerable to a shingles attack? I can't find this information anywhere, but from personal experience in our family I know it can be as soon as 10 years. How did I discover this? Because my oldest son, who had chicken pox when he was about 7 got shingles when he was not yet 15. My second daughter had chicken pox when she was around 5 and got shingles at 20. My second son had chicken pox at around 3 and had shingles at 18. The pharmaceutical industry's answer to the massive increase in shingles is just another vaccine, recommended for the elderly. The shingles vaccine contains 14 times the strength of the chicken pox vaccine.

Have you heard anything about shingles in younger and younger people. Probably not because people do not go to the doctor when they have a small shingles lesion.  People don't go to the doctor for shingles until they need help with the pain or develop a secondary infection. So shingles, like most disease, is under reported. Younger people don't develop complications from shingles at the same rate as the elderly. How long before shingles is no longer classified as a disease of the elderly? How long until the shingles vaccine is recommend for all adults every 5 or 10 years?  A problem created by the combination of lifestyle changes plus vaccines is "cured" by yet another vaccine.

So, I don't want my children to have the diseases for which there are vaccines. But at the same time, I don't fear those diseases either.

The Scientific Method Has Fallen Out Of Favor

Full disclosure -- I am not a scientist. I don't pretend to be a scientist and I don't play one on television. Some may describe me as an evangelical fundamentalist Bible-thumper and declare me to be, therefore, anti-science, but that is untrue: at least the "anti-science" part. I love science. I love discovery. I love how science has been used in the development of technologies that make my life better. I hate that under the guise of science certain entities have furthered their agendas and done damage to liberty, public and individual health and the reputation of true science. Of what do I speak, you ask? Vaccines.

If I have to hear one more accusation that I am brain-washed, that I only know one side of the debate or that I just don't "understand the science" I am going to scream. It is particularly irksome to hear these accusations from anyone who has never even read a single article, let alone an entire book, which questions the wisdom of vaccinations and cannot even reasonably state the objections against vaccines. These accusations almost always start with the straw man "I know you think vaccines cause autism, but this has been proven to be false." I have yet to tell a single person that I don't vaccinate my children because I am afraid the vaccines will give them autism. 

Besides being frustrated by the pro-vac crowd always telling me I'm ignorant and that my children live under a continual threat of death from the looming, evil chicken pox, I am also frustrated that almost no one in the anti-vac crowd confronts the underlying theory upon which the entire vaccine house-of-cards is built. I reject that theory and the vaccines that flow from it.

At the risk of having a bunch of scientists tell me I'm an ignoramus, I'm going to talk about the scientific method and why I admire it. I've taken several science classes in both high school and college. In most of those course I had to be able to demonstrate that I understand the basic concept of the method. It is called a method because it is a particular process, a series of steps, used to make discoveries. It isn't so much about proving things as it is about eliminating ideas that are not accurate. This is not how vaccine science works because the very foundation of this method is undermined. Using the scientific method any given hypothesis can be supported by testing or it can be eliminated  by testing. If the hypothesis is not tested (using the rules of the scientific method) or if testing is accepted as valid only when it validates the hypothesis, then whatever is being done is simply not science. It might be technical, it might involve scientific subjects, it might involve studies, but it is not science.

When a hypothesis is presented, a true scientist does not become so invested in the hypothesis being correct that he is unable to design or unwilling to use tests which will lead to the destruction of the hypothesis. For example, I will describe in very simple language the hypothesis behind why vaccines prevent disease. It goes something like this: In nature, if a person is exposed to a disease pathogen such as a bacteria (pertussis, for example) or a virus (chicken pox, for example), this exposure and subsequent disease process in the body cause the body to develop a resistance so that future exposure to the pathogen does not result in illness in that individual. The individual is said to be "immune." A vaccination is a process whereby the disease organism is introduced into the body in a manner that does not cause illness but stimulates the body to create the same or similar immune response as if it had contracted the illness, resulting in the individual becoming immune.

The hypothesis does not need to attempt to describe how the body creates an immune response or what the factors are within the body in order for the hypothesis to be tested. In the case of vaccines, another related hypothesis was developed which says, roughly, that the way the body exercises immunity is by creating antibodies which recognize and attack the disease organism if it should present itself to the body after the original exposure and that the existence of these antibodies is a legitimate test of immunity.  This hypothesis has already been disproved,  although support and belief in this hypothesis remains high within the pro-vac community.

The International Medical Council on Vaccination has posted an article this month dealing with the measles and the measles vaccine which shines a light on what happens when your hypothesis isn't testing out to be true and you persist in using it as a basis for dealing with disease. The information shared in this article has been around for over 50 years, that is, it is dealing with vaccine events that happened as far back as 1963 when the measles vaccine was first introduced in the United States. Reading this article just strengthened my suspicions that the whole vaccine theory is flawed.

My basic objection to the theory behind all vaccines is that the mechanism behind immunity is not fully understood by medical science nor can it be. As the above article points out, even children who have a disorder whereby they cannot produce antibodies are able to become immune to measles (and other diseases) by being naturally exposed to the virus and experiencing some level of illness from the disease, even though they did not produce antibodies against the virus that allegedly causes measles. Without knowing fully the cause of disease or the mechanism of immunity development, how can pharmaceutical companies justify creating and injecting potentially harmful chemicals and disease causing organisms into humans in the attempt to create immunity?  Additionally and also pointed out in the article is the fact that any immunity created through the use of vaccines does not mimic natural immunity and is short-lived at best and non-existent at worst. To date, not a single vaccine has been tested and shown to be as effective in creating immunity as natural exposure and none have been shown to create a life-long immunity as originally promised and as continues to be promised in the case of some vaccines.

Pro-vac folks tell me that double blind studies on humans would be unethical and that is why they are not done. But doesn't that make all humans test subjects who submit to the vaccine? In the case of measles vaccine, we see that a killed measles vaccine was introduced into the U.S. and was used for several years until it became obvious that it didn't work and was dangerous, or rather until another vaccine could be approved for use. That is the way of the vaccine market. Untested products are used on real human subjects until they are shown to be dangerous AND there is a replacement waiting in the wings. We saw the same thing with the live polio virus in the U.S. I was telling my doctor that I didn't want my children to have it because they would be shedding live polio virus for months and I was poo-pooed. 15 years later, it fell out of favor in the U.S. for that very reason, but not until a replacement was ready. If I knew about the dangers in the days before the internet, the medical community knew about it, too. But the agenda said to keep going regardless of what the science says.

So this is my beef, the theory behind vaccinations doesn't pass scientific muster. The hypothesis that injecting pathogenic organisms into humans causes an immune response that is similar to or identical to the natural immune response to actually contracting the disease is flawed. It has not been proven through scientific testing using the scientific method. There is no scientific evidence that vaccines reduce the rates of disease or the rates of death from disease.

This is enough for me. Even if I didn't have genuine concerns about the safety of injecting poisonous chemicals and dangerous disease organisms along with foreign proteins into human bodies and even if I didn't have genuine concerns about the damage these vaccines cause to the immune system and the contributions they make to auto-immune disorders, I wouldn't vaccinate my children because I have no confidence that they do any good whatsoever. Our bodies were not designed to learn to resist disease that enters our bodies by injection, which is not the normal path of infection with the possible exception of tetanus.

The theory behind vaccines also relies heavily on the questionable "germ theory" which states that exposure to pathogenic organisms is the primary mechanism behind disease rather than the theory that the state of the body, its health and vitality, determine whether a body will become diseased and the extent to which it will resist and recover from disease. There is also no consideration in the vaccine industry about whether there is any disease for which the risk of death is so low that the risks of the vaccine are greater than any benefit that could come from avoiding the disease. This is most obvious to those of us who grew up in an age where everyone we knew had the chicken pox with no apparent danger to life and limb. But as the above article documents, this was also true for measles at the time the vaccine was introduced. Not only did very, very few people die or even need to be hospitalized for measles, modern medicine had discovered very effective vitamin treatments which completely cured measles in a matter of days.

I am always open to discussion of this issue as long as there are no ad hominem attacks. I am not afraid of any facts. Scare tactics don't work on me, so keep those to yourself. There are so many more aspects of this issue that are not discussed. Please surprise me with an argument I haven't yet heard.