Tag: Vaccination

What’s the Big Deal with Vaccines?

If you’re anti-vaccinations, especially if you have children, you’re helping to spread diseases and even reinstate some of them that science has, through a lot of hard work and brilliance, basically eradicated decades ago. You’re ignorant, anti-scientific, and superstitious. Vaccines are basically harmless. The alleged link between vaccines and autism has been debunked by dozens of studies.

…Or so the prevailing wisdom goes. Even smart people usually believe this, mostly because other smart people believe it. And because smart people tend to side with the establishment. But I think those who side with the establishment on this probably know very little about vaccines.

Yes, the first part of the above is true: vaccines do help to prevent certain diseases. But the question is, at what cost?

Here are some facts about vaccines:

  • The vaccine industry is the only industry whose corporations can’t be sued. This means there is no liability, and therefore no incentive to be safe. And since a corporation is a fundamentally amoral entity whose sole purpose is to make as much money as possible, they’re not going to try very hard to make vaccines safe just out of the goodness of their hearts.

    (Yes, there is the Federal Vaccine Court, but the companies don’t even defend themselves there; the Department of Justice (DOJ) acts as the defense. And the money they pay out doesn’t come from the companies’ pockets, it comes from patient fees (a $0.75 tax on every childhood vaccine administered in the US), so the Federal Vaccine Court doesn’t actually effect any liability. And, though this isn’t directly relevant to the main point, it’s worth mentioning that Lawyer Rolf Hazlehurst told congress in a briefing for a hearing on the subject, “If I did to a criminal in a court of law what the United States Department of Justice did to vaccine-injured children, I would be disbarred, and I would be facing criminal charges.” The hearing was shortly cancelled.)
  • Vaccine companies are exempt from safety-testing their products. Only some of them do safety tests. Some details of those tests follow.
    • The polio vaccine’s safety test only monitored subjects for 48 hours.
    • The hepatitis vaccine’s test only monitored subjects for 5 days. The hepatitis vaccine is given to every child.
    • MMR has no safety testing listed on its insert, so Robert Kennedy Jr. and Del Bigtree sued The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for the information. They gave it to them. Some of that information follows:
      • They only tested on 800 kids. Normally you’d have at least 20,000 subjects.
      • The testing lasted only 42 days.
      • 50% of the kids involved in the study had serious gastro-intestinal illnesses during the study, some of them for the full 42 days.
      • 50% of them had respiratory illnesses, some of them for the full 42 days.
  • A few decades ago, the developmental diseases ADD, ADHD, language delays, speech delays, tics, Tourette Syndrome, ASD, and autism; the auto-immune disorders Guillan-Barre, multiple sclerosis, juvenile diabetes, and rheumatoid arthritis; and the anaphylactic diseases food allergies, rhinitis, asthma, and eczema all exploded in popularity. Congress then ordered the EPA to find out in what year the explosions of all those diseases started. The EPA found that they all soared in 1989. It so happens that in 1989 they changed the vaccine schedule, raised the levels of aluminum and mercury in vaccines by 300% to 500%, and went from 3 different vaccines to 72. If you were born before 1989, your chances of having a chronic illness are 12.8% according to the HHS. If you were born after 1989, your chances are 54%.
  • Each of the four companies that produce the 72 now-mandated vaccines is a convicted felon.
  • Since 2009 those four companies have collectively paid $35,000,000,000 in criminal penalties and damages and fines for defrauding regulators, falsifying science, bribing doctors, lying to the public, and killing many people.
  • Merck sold a drug as a headache medicine that they knew could cause heart attacks and kept that information a secret. The medicine killed somewhere between 120,000 and 500,000 people. Should we expect they’d be any more scrupulous with vaccines, where there’s no liability?
  • Everyone is bought; the various regulatory agencies might as well be appendages of the industry, so they can’t be trusted when they say vaccines are safe.
    • The FDA, which is supposed to protect us against these products, receives 75% of its budget from big pharma.
    • The WHO receives 50% of its budget from pharma. 
    • The CDC is a pharmaceutical company.  It buys and sells vaccines for about $5,000,000,000 / year.
    • Individuals within HHS who worked on vaccines (at taxpayers’ expense) are allowed to get royalty payments on those vaccines. For example, there are high-level people at HHS who are making money on every vile of Gardasil that’s sold, totaling $150,000 / year. And HHS owns part of that patent and is collecting money every year.
    • So is National Institutes of Health (NIH).
  • The pharmaceutical companies are the biggest lobbyists on capitol hill. There are many more pharma lobbyists than congressmen and senators combined. They give double to lobbying what oil and gas give combined.
  • Congress named the Institute of Medicine as the ultimate authority on the safety of vaccines. The Institute of Medicine says there are 150 diseases that they think are caused by vaccines. In 1994 the CDC was directed to study them. They refused. They directed them again in 1998. They refused. And the same again in 2011.
  • Over 1,000 independent studies, not funded by pharmaceutical companies, show vaccines to be harmful.
  • Half of all children now have a chronic illness. In the U.S. we’ve never been sicker.
  • The government’s own top expert vaccine court witness, world-renowned pediatric neurologist Dr. Andrew Zimmerman, took aside the DOJ lawyers he had been working for defending vaccines and told them that he’d discovered “exceptions in which vaccines could cause autism.” “I explained that in a subset of children…vaccine-induced fever and immune stimulation…did cause regressive [brain disease] with features of autism spectrum disorder”, he said. That was on a Friday, and over the weekend the DOJ called him and told him his services would no longer be needed. They then proceeded to misrepresent Zimmerman’s views on vaccines, saying on record, “We know [Dr. Zimmerman’s] views on the issue… there is no scientific basis for a connection between vaccines and autism”, which Dr. Zimmerman says is “highly misleading” (source).
  • Congress members say they face pressure, bullying, or threats when they raise vaccine-safety questions (source).
  • Multiple CDC officials claim they were told to destroy documents (source). Here are a couple of excerpts from an EcoWatch article:

Thomas Frieden, the director of the Center for Disease Control (CDC), has blocked CDC whistleblower, Dr. William Thompson, from testifying on scientific fraud and destruction of evidence by senior CDC officials in critical vaccine safety studies regarding the causative relationship between childhood vaccines and autism.

[…snip…]

In August 2014, Dr. Thompson revealed that the data underlying CDC’s principle vaccine safety studies demonstrated a causal link between vaccines and autism or autism symptoms, despite CDC’s claims to the contrary. According to Thompson, based upon interpretation of the data, “There is biologic plausibility right now to say that thimerosal causes autism-like features.” Dr. Thompson invoked federal whistleblower protection in August 2014.

Dr. William Thompson is listed as author or co-author on the principal studies—Thompson, et al. 2007, Price, et al. 2010, Destefano, et al. 2004—most widely cited to “debunk” the link between autism and vaccines. Thompson said that his bosses, including the CDC’s Immunization Safety Office Branch Chief Frank Destefano, specifically ordered him and three other CDC scientists to destroy data demonstrating vaccine induced autism in CDC’s seminal 2004 study—Destefano, et al. 2004. The data unexpectedly showed a 250 percent increase in autism among young black males who received the vaccine on time—before their third birthday—compared to those who waited until after their third birthday. The data also showed a significant link between the vaccine and isolated autism (autism in normally developing children with no other medical problems), the kind suffered by Yates Hazlehurst, who is mentioned below. According to Thompson, Destefano called his four co-authors into a room and ordered them to dump the damning datasets into a giant garbage can. The published study omitted those data sets. That study, now cited in 91 subsequent papers on PubMed as proof of vaccine safety, is the principle foundation stone of the theology that vaccines don’t cause autism.

Vaccines proponents don’t argue for peer review, they argue from authority. They say vaccines are safe because the CDC and WHO say they’re safe. But as we’ve seen above, the CDC and WHO can’t necessarily be trusted.

Another factor influencing public opinion on vaccines is the media, who are also influenced by vaccine-industry private interests.

  • Multiple networks have reported that 80,000 people died of flu last year. The CDC says 2,300 people died of the flu.
  • Networks say 1 in 1,000 people die of measles. The CDC says it’s 1 in 10,000 and 1 in 500,000 Americans.
  • NBC had Lester Holt on showing a frightening picture of a baby supposedly afflicted with measles bumps. It turns out the picture was faked. Lester Holt is sponsored by Merck, the company that makes the vaccine for measles. Merck is whipping up a frenzy in the media to make us terrified of measles, which is the first disease we think of when we think of the enterprise of vaccines.

One author, whose name escapes me, proposes that society in a state of collective PTSD over the horrors of past widespread diseases, and I think that’s why people react so viscerally, intensely and unthinkingly when it comes to vaccines and “shutting down” anti-vaxxers.

But please, if we can’t deal with the thought of a resurgence of these past diseases, we could at least stop the social short-circuiting of the process of making the vaccines so that a little bit of safety and accountability is added, lest the top .01% continue to take advantage of us in one of the biggest ways—not only through the unregulated production and sales of mandatory vaccines, but also indirectly through providing medications for all the chronic diseases that result from those vaccines, in a double-whammy that adversely affects our very health which is central to our well-being.

Short of that, and, I would prefer, even in addition to that, we could make all vaccines non-mandatory and give parents proper advice regarding the risks of those vaccines. Forcing-by-law or otherwise coercing people to have chemicals injected into their bodies is extremely and unacceptably intrusive. We should have a right over our own bodies. Where is the Roe-v.-Wade for vaccines?

Speaking of properly informing patients about vaccines, according to this doctor and owner of his own clinic (with a degree in Business Administration and 15 years of degrees in Child Development), allowing patients informed consent about vaccines causes doctors and businesses to lose money, because 1) they lose 15 minutes explaining risks, benefits, etc. to the patient, and 2) they lose the revenue from the administration of the vaccines in the patients that decide against the vaccines.

This doctor used to be a staunch supporter of vaccines, then noticed some things about his patients and researched a lot and changed his mind. Now it’s the policy of his clinic not to make everyone take vaccines. He calculated the revenue for each vaccine that he gives and for each vaccine that the patients chose not to receive on that day, and the result was that he was losing $700,000 / year—and that’s just as a pediatrician, not as the clinic owner. Now his losses are significantly higher—about twice as high—because they can’t get a favorable contract with an insurance company because their vaccination rates are so low.

So the monetary incentive to issue vaccines goes all the way down to the doctors, and that’s another area of the system that could use a little bit of improving..

And last but not least, here are some videos and articles worth watching/reading, as I didn’t cover everything in this essay:

And a couple more..

Addendum: Here’s part of an interesting conversation I had with a friend who believes that vaccines cause autism:

Him: Basically you have to show them that the government and medical authorities and ‘scientific’ organisations are all corrupt. That’s like showing a Catholic how corrupt the church is

Me: what’s their motivation to be corrupt?
their incentive / how they make money or whatever

Him: Basically ppl are super skeptical of other people’s ideologies and authorities but super naive (by choice) about their own
The incentives are the old ones – money and power and avoiding pain and loss
The RFK Jr article you linked gives a good example

Me: sure but why do they get money or power or avoid pain or loss by incorrectly concluding that vaccines don’t cause autism

Him: Because it’s a trillion dollar liability and no one would ever trust them (the government and its medical authorities) ever again
They’d all have to admit they have been tragically wrong and lose everything
They’d have to admit to destroying the brains of millions of children
Hardly anyone has the psychological integrity to do that

Me: the people who do the studies aren’t the same people who sell the vaccines, though.. no?

The studies were done by CDC
They create the vaccine schedule
And they profit from vaccines
And they spend more money on vaccine propaganda than on safety research
There is a revolving door between CDC and pharma
It’s called regulatory capture
The regulators (eg CDC) are sock puppets for the industry they are supposed to regulate
And the government doesn’t want to admit it has poisoned its population and damaged millions of children
And then pay out a trillion dollars
It would be the worst public relations disaster in history
No one would ever trust governments or doctors ever again

Obviously the whole vaccine program would grind to a halt worldwide
As millions of parents refused to vaccinate
Costing pharma billions
And making scientistics (most ppl) consider the collapse of civilisation
Because they would be terrified of epidemics of every ‘vaccine-preventable’ disease
The stock market would prob crash

Pharma and prob some government agencies would insist it’s all a lie and pit out disinformation
And most ppl, including most doctors and scientists, would prob refuse to believe it
The studies that proved causal association would not be published
(Pharma owns the journals)
And every possible means would be employed to criticise the studies and demonise their authors

And even if all if this magically didn’t happen and the injured were compensated to the tune of a trillion dollars, that money wouldn’t come from pharma but from you – the taxpayer
So the ppl would foot the bill

Autism cases have risen manyfold in the past few years, and something has to have caused it. I’ve seen graphs of frequency of vaccine administration against frequency of autism diagnoses where they coincide too closely for it to be coincidence within reasonable doubt. Yes, correlation isn’t always causation, but it’s enough to raise suspicions, especially given the contents of some of the links above.

Here’s an example of such a graph: