It’s that time of year again, and I don’t mean Christmas. I mean flu season. A time when when old and young alike are cautioned to run to the doctor to get their shots before this year’s supply runs out. After all, we never know when the next pandemic will arrive, right? And by then, it will be too late.
Or won’t it?
Fact is, there hasn’t been a flu pandemic since 1968. I was only an infant then, but if you listen to the media and to your doctor and to the government, the next big worldwide pandemic, a ravaging disease of unimaginable virulence, lurks in the closet like the bogeyman. It may pounce at any moment, and what will you do if you’re unprotected?
Can anyone say “bird flu”?
On the crest of this wave of seasonal panic is the announcement that New Jersey is about to become the first state — and the first governmental body anywhere in the world, in fact — to require flu vaccine. REQUIRE it.
Granted, the requirement is only limited to children under 10. And aside from that, only other high risk groups, like older people and those with respiratory or immune diseases, are strongly encouraged to take the shot. Those who are healthy and young, ie 20’s to 40’s, usually can risk going without, but if you listen to doctors and the CDC you are making yourself vulnerable if you make that choice. Flu, after all, kills 36,000 people a year, according to the CDC.
However, those numbers are widely disputed, and, as someone who has chronic asthma, I can definitively state that I have never taken the flu shot. Nor do I ever intend to. And I strongly counsel my family and friends to do the same, and if I had children, I would NOT let them get it. I wouldn’t want them to risk their health with this dangerous and unnecessary procedure.
The reasons for this are simple. First of all, I have only had the flu one time in my entire adult life, and that was the winter that I got divorced. The stress of that event played a huge role in compromising my immune system I am certain. It wasn’t the swirling miasma of germs that the CDC and most doctors claim is a persistent and pernicious threat.
The second reason is the true purpose of this article: I don’t believe vaccinations are safe, and I think the “science” they are based on is specious at best. And there is a growing body of evidence that supports my stand.
The problem is that questioning vaccination in our society is like doubting evolution or global warming. True believers defend their gospel with the zeal of inquisitors. To question is not only to commit heresy, but it also calls into question your intelligence, your sanity and your fitness to exist in society. This is no mere “agree to disagree” situation; it is full-on battle, as is evidenced by Maryland’s threats of sending parents to jail if they do not get their school age children vaccinated.
One of the vaccines in question is chicken pox, a childhood disease that almost everyone survives. In addition, research shows that surviving chicken pox actually helps to strengthen the immune system, not weaken it. Besides, doctors rarely discuss what is a basic scientific fact: vaccines carry risk.
The truth needs to be at least considered. A good place to start is an Australian documentary that raises serious questions about the science upon which vaccination policy is founded. It questions, quite convincingly, the idea that antibodies fight disease. What it suggests is that antibodies only mean the body has been exposed to disease. It uses the AIDS epidemic to demonstrate this. If you have antibodies, you can still catch the disease and die from it, but if you have no antibodies, you will not die from it. HIV antibodies do nothing to fight the disease; in fact, most people see their presence in a body as a death sentence.
The Australian film also argues that deaths by childhood disease had drastically declined before vaccination was ever begun. It claims that improved sanitation, nutrition and other health practices contributed to the decline of disease for almost 50 years before widespread immunization policies. Its evidence is probably strongest in the charts and statistics it provides.
One of the most compelling questions raised is the effectiveness of vaccines at all. It points out that smallpox outbreaks still occur throughout the world, and that often in measles and whooping cough outbreaks, it is often those who have been vaccinated who get sick, not those who have not. The implication here is that vaccinations actually cause disease, and at the very least weaken the immune system of those who are vaccinated.
The Vaccination Risk Awareness Network is a Canadian group of parents who have children damaged by vaccination. Their fact sheet echoes the Australian documentary, also questioning the “germ theory” and how it is flawed. It claims that toxic conditions in the body are what cause disease, not germs. And it supports its ideas by insisting we have all been exposed to germs, but not all of us get sick. Every epidemic has people who are clearly exposed but don’t get ill. Also, doctors are among the least vaccinated groups in the population; yet, they don’t seem to be sick all the time, as germ theory might suggest.
Then there is the issue of contaminants in vaccines, mainly foreign animal proteins and hazardous chemicals like thimerosal and mercury. Earlier this year, Robert Kennedy Jr. appeared on MSNBC’s Scarborough Country, promoting an article called “Deadly Immunity” in Rolling Stone. In it, he claims that thimerosol in vaccines is directly related to the huge increase in autism in children in the last 20 years. One of the most intriguing facts he presents is what happened in 1989. That is the year when the schedule of vaccinations was increased by the CDC and other organizations from the 10 that most of us received as kids to a stunning 24! He claims we are injecting our children with 400 times more mercury than the FDA says is safe. Autism, it should be noted, went from 1 in 2500 children in the 1970s to 1 in 166 children today. In addition, autism was so rare before vaccination began that it was almost unknown in our grandparents’ time. Therfore, Kennedy’s evidence is convincing, yet so few people are aware of it. Why?
The medical profession, the government, especially the CDC, and pharmaceutical companies all have a great deal at stake in keeping the vaccination culture in place, even though much of what they base their claims on is junk science. Dr. Mark Randall, who worked for many years developing vaccines before he changed his mind after an extensive personal investigation, is quoted in Nexus magazine as saying:
“Vaccines are superstitions. And with superstitions, you don’t get facts you can use. You only get stories, most of which are designed to enforce the superstition. But, from many vaccine campaigns we can piece together a narrative that does reveal some very disturbing things. People have been harmed. The harm is real, and it can be deep and it can mean death. The harm is not limited to a few cases as we have been led to believe.”
The superstition he refers to can bring us back to the flu vaccine, where we started. If you listen to the CDC, flu deaths reach 36,000 per year. But if you look at the American Lung Association, the numbers are quite different. According to their study, the most virulent year in recent memory was 1981 with just over 3000 deaths. In 2001, the year of the study, a mere 257 people died (PDF). In a country of 200 million, that is statistically almost non existent.
And, as an asthmatic, I’m supposed to put a vaccine that still contains mercury in my body to protect me against something that kills fewer people than car accidents, suicide, murder, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and many other things I feel no threat from or feel the need to be immunized from? Doing so seems crazy.
So I leave you with the question: who benefits from vaccination? The mainstream medical community would claim that all of us do, and they point to how smallpox has been “eradicated” and how deaths by childhood disease is down by 98% in the USA. However, they neglect to focus on the risks of vaccines, and the growing number of vaccine-related injuries. They dismiss the growing proof of links between widespread vaccination and the increase in autism and meningitis.
So who benefits? The doctors certainly benefit by denying the risks of vaccination. To admit they might be prescribing unsafe procedures on their patients, especially the very youngest ones, would tarnish the medical profession beyond recovery. The pharmaceutical giants certainly benefit in terms of profits. The CDC benefits in terms of the control it exerts over public health; with each requirement governmental bodies diminish the power of citizens and parents to control the health of themselves and their children.
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