One of the questions I am often asked concerns what parents can do when officials claim that they absolutely must vaccinate their minor children. Is it so? Can the children be kept out of schools? Can the parents themselves be forced to get vaccinations to maintain employment, in a hospital setting, for example, or prior to foreign travel, for instance? What can be done if the parents want to opt out?
In the Cases book (J. Oller, S. Oller, & Badon, 2010), we have done a review of the history of laws pertaining to communication disorders, an extensive one from the Revolutionary War forward to 2009, and in our Autism book (J. Oller & S. Oller, 2010) we have dealt with the history of vaccines and the theory underlying them. What we have discovered in both instances is that the connection between disorders, man-made disease conditions and world-wide vaccination programs, is deeper than any casual observer might imagine.
Vaccines have often been spoken of as if they were panaceas, solutions to disease problems without serious risks. Or, it has been claimed that the risks are greatly outweighed by the benefits. Are such claims valid? Does the research, or do the theories underlying the practice of vaccination, support the claim that vaccines involve minuscule risks in comparison to the supposedly much greater risks of childhood diseases? What about the long history of the use of vaccines all over the world?
The 150 year history with vaccines actually shows that vaccine risks have been under-rated and benefits have been over-rated. Are the safety claims made for vaccines and their components, judging from the toxicology research, consistent with the fact that vaccines must challenge immune systems, sometimes very immature systems in tiny infants? And what about toxic exposures to the mother that impact unborn babies during gestation? To suppose that the risks of taking vaccines are merely imagined is a lot like claiming that live fire military exercises are perfectly safe. If we do a bit of thinking about how our immune systems and biochemistry work, it is clear that combining toxins that we already know are harmful, with disease agents that are also harmful, can result in interactions that are even more so. There is good reason, therefore, to critically examine vaccine safety claims and the general doctrine of vaccines from many angles.
Vaccination is universally a second choice to sanitation and hygiene. It is better to stay healthy and keep the immune system operating at peak efficiency than to deliberately expose yourself, or your babies, to disease agents, toxins, and their interactions. It is especially unwise to impose the exposures on tiny infants when their systems are immature and most vulnerable to toxic injuries. Though some pediatricians and advocates for vaccines have claimed that there is no evidence that exposures of the tiniest infants are more harmful than the same sort of exposures for older children, that claim is false.
There is no toxicology research or rational theory suggesting that exposures could possibly be less harmful at earlier stages of development. The opposite is true. All else being equal, earlier exposures must be more harmful. Why is this? It is simply because the more development there is that must take place in the future of a developing organism (or a tiny human being), the more likely it is that a toxic injury will have cascading effects downstream. All else being equal, the earlier the toxic injury takes place, the worse its effects can be expected to be. Hence, toxic exposure from something as ubiquitously available as the small amount of alcohol in a glass of wine, is more likely to do lasting damage during the rapid cell division at or just after conception than, say, nearer to a full-term pregnancy.
Clinical opinions on the issues at stake, even experimental evidence, of which there is a dearth during the earliest stages of human pregnancies, are subordinate to the logic of cell division and DNA replication. In view of the fact that the first two cells must replicate their DNA to pass it on to 4, then 8, then 16, and so on, damage earlier in the cycle has a greater likelihood of affecting either the whole organism, or a greater number of the organism’s cells, than the same sort of exposure at a later stage of development.
There is no logical basis for supposing a scenario where earlier toxic damage results in a lowered risk of deleterious effects. The reverse holds by strict logic. Is Paul Offit’s claim that tiny infants can handle up to 10,000 vaccine administered disease agents in a single exposure reasonable? He actually said this in a paper published in 2002 in the journal of Pediatrics. If it were true, why expose them deliberately to so few mandatory vaccines? There are 14 vaccines in the current CDC “mandatory” schedule. Why so few?
On the other hand, if Offit’s claim is true, why does the baby need any additional help at all? Why not just let the immune systems the baby is born with do their work on thousands of distinct disease agents? In fact, the scientific research actually shows that infants can produce antibodies against more than 10 billion distinct disease agents (Fanning, Connor, & Wu, 1996). So, why are specific artificial challenges necessary at all? Are they necessary, or even salutary? Are childhood diseases running rampant among the Amish people, for instance, because of their religious objections to taking vaccines? They should be if Offit’s arguments were correct. On the other hand, if not, the absence of certain diseases among the Amish people, notably autism, would be evidence against Offit’s claims.
Isn’t the failure of vaccine proponents to ask such questions prima facie evidence that vaccination spokespersons and “research” experts could benefit from more training in foundational theoretical thinking? Or, here is another problem that will give pause to those inclined to take everything the pediatrician says as if it were virtually certain to be true: Consider the established fact that many pediatricians have believed and propagated the notion that infants smile because they have intestinal gas. They suppose this to be true in spite of the fact that more mature children, adolescents, and adults smile because of their contentment, security, recognition, and so forth. They bought into this “gas theory of smiling” because they accepted the notion that babies must learn to smile socially by observing others. However, we now have incontrovertible evidence from babies smiling before birth that the old ideas about imitation and learning to smile have been wrong all along. Those theories have been vaporized along with the gas theory of post-birth smiling. It never was a good theory. Are we not reminded of the Lewis Carroll character, wasn’t it the Red Queen who told Alice, “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
When does the amazing change take place so that infants actually start grimacing when they have gas pains? Or, why don’t adults smile when they have gas pains? Should we trust a professional, one who can believe and promote such a remarkably false theory about infant smiling, to inform us about the toxins and disease agents in vaccines? Shouldn’t it give parents pause when the white-frocked individual who believes in the gas theory of infant smiling also tells them that adding multiple toxins, and as many as 10,000 disease agents, and their potential interactions into a single shot can’t hurt their babies? What is Dr. Offit really thinking about? Apparently, he is not taking the toxicity of mercury, aluminum, fragments of animal proteins, and their interactions with disease agents, with each other, and with extraneous viruses from monkeys, pigs, chickens, etc. seriously.
We may wonder whether vaccine proponents who practice pediatrics actually study toxicology? If so, why would they claim that it is safe to put a neurotoxin that has been banned from topical applications (thimerosal) directly into the tissues of a tiny infant, a pregnant mother, or any living mammal for that matter? Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has described the absurdity of doing so as analogous to the “tobacco science” by virtue of which it was claimed for many years that smoking cigarettes had nothing to do with heart disease, lung cancer, and so on. Was it not ridiculous then for tobacco companies to claim no harm for exposing humans to the toxins in tobacco products? Is it any less so for vaccine proponents to claim no harm was ever done by mixing toxins with disease agents galore and expecting good results from the pot pourri even when injected into bodily tissues?
The research suggests that sanitation is better than vaccination as a disease preventative measure. The historical record also shows that it was sanitation that defeated the epidemic infectious diseases of the 19th and 20th centuries rather than the introduction of mandatory vaccines. The great epidemics that peaked in 1918 were not for want of vaccines, but because wartime brings lots of unsanitary conditions. In the Philippines the worst small pox epidemic in the history of the world took place after the U.S. military had effectively given 2.5 vaccinations to all of the 10 million people living there. Did the vaccine prevent small pox? On the contrary, it seems have contributed to a worsening of the epidemic that occurred. There is much more historical evidence along that line and it does not present the happy view of vaccines that the manufacturers have claimed. (There is also the matter of the stockpiling of hundreds of millions of doses of small pox vaccine supposedly to combat the threat of weaponized variants of a disease that was reportedly eradicated in 1977. As noted in another blog, the sinister side of vaccine research and the development of bioweapons is an interesting though hidden part of the same vaccine story.)
There is much historical research evidence favoring sanitation over vaccination. It is, however, only recently coming out in published work by independent researchers, e.g., see the history of both the theory and practice of mandatory vaccinations in our 2010 book on Autism, also see Olmstead and Blaxill 2010.
It now seems clear that the feared “military industrial complex” that former President Eisenhower once worried about, has merged with the interests of the so-called “health professions,” especially the industries that profit from illnesses and their maintenance, e.g. selling you on a drug that you must, according to the manufacturer, use perpetually for the rest of your life. Oddly, the life-time treatment drugs are typically ones that deal only with symptoms, not causes and they often lead to inevitable toxic build-up.
How can we follow the preferred route of avoiding exposures to toxins and disease agents? By washing our hands, faces, eyes, noses, and body, brushing our teeth, eating a healthy diet, getting plenty of rest and exercise. Aren’t these approaches to health and well-being preferable to deliberately exposing our tissues to infectious disease agents, toxins, and their potential interactions?
If Paul Offit’s approach and theory were correct, instead of providing clean water, healthy meals, and sanitary waste disposal in refugee camps, we ought just to vaccinate the daylights out of the people there. But the latter approach would certainly (based on the 150+years of vaccination data) increase the incidence of disease in those camps, while sanitation, clean water, food, and sanitary waste disposal are certain to reduce disease and human misery under such conditions.
The theory underlying vaccination in general not only contradicts the foundations of medical practice (to avoid harming patients) as well as sound rational theory, but vaccines themselves are plagued with a host of additional components and disease agents that come into play surreptitiously. Here, I refer to animal viruses and protein fragments, not to mention traces of toxins left over from processing equipment that are now increasingly coming to light. Many undesirable “adventitious” elements have been found lurking in vaccines that have been promoted as safe for tiny human babies.
If readers have been following the discussions about Rota Teq (Paul Offit’s creation for Merck) and the pig virus found in it, as well as a similar virus found in the recalled Rotarix (also a rotavirus vaccine but this one being produced by GlaxoSmithKline), they know that the government argues no harm will come to humans while the research evidence suggests that such an “adventitious” element can induce “Postweaning multisystemic wasting syndrome (PMWS)” in pigs. This disease in pigs resembles “mad cow disease” and the condition seen in humans known as Subacute Sclerosing Pan Encephalitis (SSPE) as well as variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD).
Unintentionally feeding the pig viruses in question to human beings poses a genuine health threat that has been known at least since 1998 when Morozov and others wrote about the pig virus in question in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology. A search on the Web of Knowledge on September 28, 2010 at 4:26 PM showed that the article detailing the possibility of an infection of that pig virus in human populations has been cited 158 times in peer-reviewed scientific journals. Evidently, there are quite a few researchers who think the pig virus in Rota Teq is worth additional critical study.
Is it sensible to suppose that the Rota Teq vaccine is safe for human babies? Although the pig virus in Rota Teq has supposedly been declared safe for human babies by the Food and Drug Administration, a 2009 study by Victoria et al. in the Journal of Virology, that same pig virus has been found in the stools of some very sick children with what is described as “acute flaccid paralysis”, a problem not very different symptomatically from the wasting disease in pigs, not to mention SSPE and Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease in humans. The pig virus in Rota Teq is not directly implicated as the cause of “acute flaccid paralysis” in humans, but the symptoms ought to give pause to the Rota Teq proponents. While the FDA has not pulled Rota Teq from human use, vaccine researchers, in the meantime, are working on a vaccine to protect the pigs against the virus that human children are getting from Rota Teq… Does this sound like fiction? It isn’t; see Shen et al. 2010.
Can the government invade your very bodily tissues and those of the babies and others that depend on you? For a glimpse into the rational opposition to such encroachment, see Attorney, Mary Holland, Director of the Graduate Legal Skills Program at New York University School of Law. Educated at Harvard and Columbia Universities, Holland has worked in international public and private law. Here she is speaking at the May 26, 2010 American Rally for Personal Rights: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASIj7lBBnLY]
With all the foregoing in mind, what are your rights? Can you refuse a vaccination that you know (or believe) is loaded with harmful disease agents, toxins, and foreign animal protein fragments, and the like? Can you refuse it if the research shows that it can permanently or even fatally injure you or your loved ones?
As a place to start, I recommend consulting folks who are experts on the law and/or have access to expert legal advice on these questions. Here is a resource: http://www.mercola.com/article/vaccines/legally_avoid_shots.htm
I also recommend you consult, VIC at http://www.vacinfo.org/.
If you choose to seek an exemption, here is a site that offers authoritative information and forms by states, including my own which is Louisiana: http://www.vaclib.org/exempt/louisiana.htm
In that connection, here is the relevant law providing for exemptions from vaccination under Louisiana code:
LOUISIANA ADMINISTRATIVE CODE
TITLE 51 PUBLIC HEALTH-SANITARY CODE
PART II THE CONTROL OF DISEASES
CHAPTER 7 PUBLIC HEALTH IMMUNIZATION REQUIREMENTSLAC 51:II.701 (2006)
§ 701. Immunization Schedule
A. Appropriate immunizations for age for regulatory purposes shall be determined using the current immunization schedule from the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practice (ACIP) of the United States Public Health Service. Compliance will be based on the individual having received an appropriate number of immunizations for his/her age of the following types:
1. vaccines which contain tetanus and diphtheria toxoids, including DTP, DtaP, DT, or Td or combinations which include these components;
2. polio vaccine, including OPV, eIPV, IPV, or combinations which include these components;
3. vaccines which contain measles antigen, including MMR and combinations which include these components.B. A two-month period will be allowed from the time the immunization is due until it is considered overdue. Medical, religious, and philosophic exemptions will be allowed for compliance with regulations concerning day care attendees and school enterers. Only medical and religious exemptions will be allowed for compliance with regulations concerning public assistance recipients. A copy of the current Office of Public Health immunization schedule can be obtained by writing to the Immunization Program, Office of Public Health, 4747 Earhart Boulevard, Suite 107, New Orleans, Louisiana 70125 or by telephone (504) 483-1905 or toll free 1-800-251-2229. [my bold emphasis]
C. [Formerly paragraph 2:025-1] Any child 18 years or under, admitted to any day care center or residential facility shall have verification that the child has had all appropriate immunizations for age of the child according to the Office of Public Health schedule unless presenting a written statement from a physician stating that the procedure is contraindicated for medical reasons, or a written dissent from parents. [my emphasis] The operator of any day care center shall report to the state health officer through the health unit of the parish or municipality where such day care center is located any case or suspected case of reportable disease. Health records, including immunization records, shall be made available during normal operating hours for inspection when requested by the state health officer. When an outbreak of a communicable disease occurs in a day care center or residential facility, the operator of said day care center or residential facility shall comply with outbreak control procedures as directed by the state health officer.
D. [Formerly paragraph 2:025-2] On or before October 1 of each year, the operator of each day care center, nursery school, or residential facility enrolling or housing any child 18 years or under, shall submit a preliminary immunization status report of all children enrolled or housed as of that date. Forms for submittal shall be provided by the state health officer, and shall include identifying information for each child, and for each dose of vaccine received by the child since birth. Any child exempt from the immunization requirement shall also be identified, and the reason for exemption given on the form. [my emphasis] After review of the form(s) by the state health officer or his or her designee, the day care center, nursery school, or residential facility operator will notify, on or before December 31 of each year, the parent or guardian of all enrolled or housed children, who are not compliant, with the immunization requirement of §§ 701.A and 701.C of this Part.
AUTHORITY NOTE: Promulgated in accordance with the provisions of R.S. 40:4(A)(2) and R.S. 40:5. Also see R.S. 17:170, R.S. 22:215.14, R.S. 40:31.15 and R.S. 44:17.
At the same web site, you will find sample letters and forms if you wish to pursue a Louisiana exemption. The law plainly provides for exemptions. Therefore, it is possible to get one or more exemptions for yourself or minor children under the law. The basis for an exemption may be medical, religious, or philosophical unless you happen to receive “public assistance” in which case you are not allowed to use the philosophical route to an exemption. We might wonder why. Do the authorities regard people on “public assistance” as unable to have or express philosophical objections? That aspect of the rules certainly seem discriminatory, but the bottom line is that anyone in Louisiana willing to do some paperwork can get legal exemption under the law.
Those who insist that vaccines are unavoidable by ordinary citizens are either mistaken or misrepresenting the law. It is probable that some do not know the relevant law or code (or the rights of citizens under the U. S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights). In any case, those who insist that vaccines are unavoidable under the law are evidently mistaken about the authority of the CDC and its state or local counterparts. They may need to be reminded that, according to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, in the United States of America the government serves the people for the benefit of the people and by the consent of the governed. We are not obligated by law to submit to recommendations about vaccines coming from the CDC.
We have the right, and increasingly the moral responsibility, to investigate the CDC’s claims for ourselves. Thimerosal, for example, a preservative still recommended as safe by the CDC and World Health Organization for use in vaccines for infants and pregnant women, is a gene-damaging neurotoxin.
Medical practitioners who recommend the continued use of thimerosal, and claim that it never did any harm to anyone exposed to it, can hardly justify their claims on the basis of innocent ignorance in view of the vast amount of incontrovertible toxicology research showing this substance to be harmful in the extreme. It is unsafe in any quantity for topical use and has been banned by the FDA from such uses in products for topical application including thimerosal (also known as thiomersal and Merthiolate) and merbromin (another mercury based topical disinfectant and antimicrobial agent marketed under the names Mercurochrome, Merbromine, Sodium mercurescein, Asceptichrome, Supercrome, Brocasept and Cinfacromin). The FDA ban on topical uses, because they were judged to be unsafe, occurred in 1998, but the same toxic mercury was and is still permitted in vaccines. It is harmful in parts per billion to human cells, tissues, and organs when applied topically, so how does it become safe when injected? It is commonly lethal in parts per million. Can it cause SIDS? Fatal seizures? Permanent brain damage. The toxicology shows that it certainly can.
To say there is no evidence that thimerosal in vaccines is (or ever was) harmful, as the CDC persists in doing, is to promote a line of propaganda that anyone who will read the toxicology can discover to be false. The toxicology shows that thimerosal, with its primary ingredient being ethyl mercury (about 50% by weight) is toxic in the extreme. The CDC points to an amazing litany of failed efforts (carefully orchestrated and cherry picked) by the CDC and its collaborators ( see the various meetings and reports of the “Institute of Medicine”) ostensibly trying to discover evidence of harm from thimerosal. Independent researchers who know the toxicology literature will shake their heads in disbelief. Indeed that is what we are doing. The evidence, as Robert F. Kennedy pointed out in 2005, could fill a small library and is being replicated and amplified at an increasing rate. The evidence against the CDC claims is overwhelming and irrefragable.
If automobile manufacturers were engaging in the same sorts of practices, could they avoid prosecution? Is the CDC above reproach? The Institute of Medicine (IOM) in all its various incarnations actually operates much like a puppet at the end of CDC manipulated strings. However, the CDC refers to IOM “findings” as if they were completely objective and independent outcomes motivated only to protect public interests. On the contrary, documents summarized succinctly in Autism 2010 and available on line at Putchildrenfirst.org show the CDC has guided IOM findings.
As a result, there is a groundswell of reasonable opposition to policymakers who keep saying they have done and are doing no harm by injecting (or feeding) babies (and others) known toxins and a plethora of disease agents, which in various combinations are known to produce undesirable consequences especially through their interactions. The claim that such practices are safe defies the imagination of thinking persons. The argument coming from the pharmaceutical side is that intelligent people who object are being socially irresponsible, that they are acting out of irrational fear, that they are naive.
On the contrary, responsible citizens and independent researchers studying the toxicology would argue that professionals who administer pharmaceutical products without investigating the side effects, interactions, disease agents, and the toxins they contain are being irresponsible. They need to be called to account and the general public, the moms, dads, grandparents, and thinking adults everywhere need to do research for themselves on prescription drugs. Literate people who have access to the internet can learn, and in many instances, based on reading of the relevant research actually know more than the prescribing doctor.
As an example take the expert on Fox News who recently revealed that he knew less than the mother of a child with autism about thimerosal and vaccines. That should not be the case, but it is. See the program on Fox&Friends with Ainsley Earhardt talking with Dr. Marc Siegel, MD and pediatrician and the mother of a child diagnosed with autism after a series of vaccinations, Becky Estepp): [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sp5YWZVnpeI]
What can it hurt to do some research and reading before agreeing to give our children drugs, vaccinations, or combinations of them? What can it hurt to ask the doctors to do some reading as well? (Dr. Andy Wakefield has said that all the health professionals in the U. S. ought to be required to read Autism 2010 and I would add his book, Callous Disregard and the book mentioned earlier by Blaxill and Olmstead to the required reading list for doctors.) Or, how about getting a second and third “opinion” as the MDs like to say. Personally, I’d rather see the doctors refer to the facts known from toxicology research rather than to their opinions.
It is one of my goals as a university professor and researcher to endeavor to see to it that my own university students know the relevant research better than some of the prescribing MDs who are, sad to say, sometimes acting more as sales agents for pharmaceutical companies than as informed advisors to their patients (e.g., see Jepson & Johnson, 2007, p. 6). This is a sad fact, but I have verified it in more than a few cases through interactions with various MDs. I have been amazed at the toxic combinations that have been prescribed by well-meaning, I believe, but ill-informed practicing MDs.
They and their professional organizations need to be called to account. When the American Academy of Pediatrics and related organizations present the case in favor of toxic mixtures of disease agents, heavy metals (mercury, still recommended in many flu shots; and in vaccines being shipped to “third world” nations), adventitious agents, adjuvants (aluminum) to be injected or ingested, and claim that combinations of say, DPT, MMR, Rota Teq, Rotarix, and the like are as safe or safer than singly administered and widely spaced out doses of the same materials, they reveal an ignorance of simple logic that defies the imagination. They also have to set aside data from multiple clinical trials showing that fevers, seizures, and other adverse indicators rise when vaccines are presented in the “multivalent” forms. Also, CDC published research shows this. When they say that tiny babies, even premature infants of low birthweight, can handle the same dosage of any of the foregoing as easily as full-term larger babies, or older children, they go against essentially all that is known about early development and toxic injuries.
Is it any wonder that many parents are puzzled and alarmed by the CDC’s mushrooming vaccine schedule? In tandem with the increasing use of vaccines as if they were perfectly safe preventative measures, why is it that the rate of autism is rising faster in the younger cohorts than in older ones? It is generally admitted that toxins are to blame, and, unfortunately, some of the most offensive ones are still being recommended for use in vaccines by the CDC. There is a logical and empirical association between vaccine components and vaccine injuries.
For discussion of an important current case before the U. S. Supreme Court, see the following exchange between Judge Napolitano and Attorney, Jay Sekulow on Fox News. The essential issue is whether the government can compel parents to vaccinate their children. The deeper question is, as they point out, a constitutional one: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzWVwE6HDKA]