Patient Resource: National Vaccine Information Center
VACCINATION: THE RIGHT TO KNOW & THE FREEDOM TO DECIDE
by Barbara Loe Fisher, Co-founder and President
National Vaccine Information Center
International Chiropractic Association Conference
November 23, 2002
New Orleans, Louisiana
Those tiny miracles. God’s most precious gift to us. We hold them in wonder just moments after they are born. We love them in a way we never thought we could love anyone. And they love and trust us in a way that no one else ever will. And then, one day, we wake up. And they’re as big as we are, ready to go out into the world and make their own way and hold their own babies in their arms, completing the natural order of life.
But for many of the children you just saw, the natural order of life will never be completed. Some have already died. Some will one day join the ranks of the working disabled. And others will grow old and die in state homes with the bodies of adults and the brains of babies. For these children, and for countless others around the world, the natural order of life has been forever changed by viral and bacterial vaccines they were required by law to use.
2002 marks the 20th anniversary of the national grassroots vaccine awareness and informed consent movement that Kathi Williams and I launched in 1982 with other parents in the Washington, D.C. area, whose children had been injured or had died from reactions to the old DPT vaccine. Since our founding in 1982, our national, non-profit organization has worked to prevent vaccine injuries and deaths through public education. And, since 1993, our message about vaccine risk awareness and the right to informed consent to vaccination has been embraced and carried forward by members of ICA. So I am really glad that my good friend D.D. Umber has invited us back again to be a part of your conference this year. Kathi was unable to come this time – she is usually by my side – but she sends her greetings and best wishes to all of you.
Actually, Kathi is back at the office where we are dealing with the aftermath of the incredible events of the last two weeks. On November 7, the first day of our Third International Public Conference on Vaccination was broadcast live on C-Span2 for five and a half hours. We heard from families across America who were watching our conference unfold on Cspan and hearing for the first time about soldiers being crippled by anthrax vaccine they were forced to take; and little children being vaccinated at gunpoint in Africa; and how a vaccine manufacturer failed to clean up monkey virus contamination of live polio vaccine; and how mercury in vaccines is causing autism and how conflicts of interest between vaccine manufacturers and federal vaccine regulators and policymakers puts our children at risk whenever they get vaccinated. And then just six days later, we found ourselves at the center of the Senate debate on the Homeland Security Bill, which was also broadcast live on C-Span, as the vaccine reaction issue was featured in a bitter battle on the floor of the Senate between those senators who wanted to protect vaccine manufacturers from lawsuits and those senators who did not. We mobilized thousands of parents of vaccine injured children, many of them with autism, in every state to send emails, faxes and make phone calls to the Senate and White House. Soon it became clear that the Homeland Security Bill was in serious jeopardy because we made our voices heard in Washington. Although we narrowly lost the battle for an amendment to the bill which would have removed liability protection for vaccine manufacturers, the level of awareness about the vaccine risk issue in Congress and in the minds of the American people has been profoundly raised in the last two weeks. The media is crawling all over this story and most of the time our NVIC headquarters functions like a news room. I will talk more about what is happening a little later but first I want to take a look back at where we have been and how far we have come – with your help – in the past 20 years.
Two decades ago, when we began talking to parents, doctors, legislators and journalists about vaccine reactions and described how our children changed physically, mentally and emotionally after getting the DPT shot, most people looked at us like we were from another planet. In every congressional hearing, every scientific meeting, every newspaper article, doctors and public health officials and drug company executives would vehemently deny that vaccines ever harmed a child in any way, much less caused permanent disabilities or death. “It is a myth” they would tell politicians and medical reporters. What happened to the child after vaccination was “ a coincidence.” And because they were M.D.’s and Ph.D.’s, most people believed them.
Enlightened physicians and independent journalists who did not buy their denials were ostracized and punished. I remember what they did to Washington, D.C. broadcast journalist Lea Thompson, who was the first to tell American parents about the dangers of the DPT vaccine in her Emmy award winning 1982 documentary, “DPT: Vaccine Roulette.” She was branded as “amoral” and “psychopathic” in the pages of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
And as I look back on 20 years of work, I see the road littered with the sacrifices of brave doctors, who have lost their careers after publicly speaking out about the dangers of vaccines. Most of them simply discovered that they had been lied to by drug companies making vaccines and the leaders in their medical profession whose advice they had followed without questioning. And after discovering the truth, they simply it was their moral obligation to tell what they had learned in an effort to prevent more people, especially children, from being harmed by those lies.
Betrayal cuts deep, whether it is experienced by the parent who knows nothing about medicine or the doctor who does. And people with integrity do not turn away from truth when they know that turning away will perpetuate human suffering.
But there is more than a pound of flesh exacted from those who leave the brotherhood. Many of these courageous doctors are left wandering alone without little or no funding to continue their research because government and industry, which hold almost all of the research grant money in this country, refuse to fund research into the biological mechanisms of vaccine injury and death. So the gaps in knowledge about exactly how vaccines affect the human body continue to grow as the number of vaccines mandated for children continues to grow and research to prove that vaccines carry far more risks than the brotherhood will ever admit is never done. That is as true today as it was 20 years ago when we started this work.
But much has changed, too. What took weeks or months to do in the 1980’s, takes hours or days to do now. In those early days, we did not have fax machines, computers, federal express or the internet. Kathi and I worked out of our basements with IBM typewriters, index card files, the telephone, and snail mail. I remember conducting research the old fashioned way for the 1985 book, DPT: A Shot in the Dark, that I coauthored with Harris Coulter: spending days pouring through medical articles we had retrieved from the Library of Medicine and xeroxing on primitive copy machines; sending letters of inquiry to scientists in Germany and Sweden that would take weeks to get there and longer to receive a reply; and doing phone interviews with parents of DPT vaccine injured children by taking shorthand, then typing out the interview so there would be a record.
As we look back on two decades of work to prevent vaccine injuries and deaths through public education, we have a lot to be proud of and thankful for, such as increased public awareness that vaccines, like all pharmaceutical products, carry different risks for different people. There is so much more information available today for parents who want to make educated vaccination decisions for their children, information I wish I had had when my babies were born in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s.
When I became a Mom for the first time in 1978 I remember assuming that vaccines were 100 percent safe and effective. I am amazed I was so uninformed about vaccines because I considered myself an educated woman when it came to science and medicine. My family was full of doctors and nurses and I had been a medical writer at a teaching hospital before I had my first child.
And, yet, when I witnessed my healthy, precocious, two and a half year old son having a classic pertussis vaccine reaction in the fall of 1980 after his fourth DPT shot, I had no idea what I was witnessing. Chris was the brightest of my three children as an infant and toddler. He started saying words at seven months and by age two he was speaking in full sentences, knew the upper and lower case alphabet, numbers up to 20 and had memorized the deck of cards.
It never occurred to me that a medical intervention like a vaccination could take all that away. When I walked into his bedroom within four hours of his DPT shot and saw him sitting in a chair, staring straight ahead as if he couldn’t see me or hear me call out his name; when I watched his eyes roll back in his head and his head fall to his shoulder as if he had fallen asleep sitting up; when I couldn’t wake him and had to carry him like a dead weight to his bed, where he didn’t move for hours, I knew it was strange but I didn’t know what was happening because my doctor had told me nothing about how to monitor my child for vaccine reactions. And when I finally got him awake and he didn’t know where he was and couldn’t walk and I had to carry him to the bathroom, where he fell asleep again in my arms and then slept for 12 more hours, I didn’t know that my son was in the middle of an encephalopathic reaction to DPT.
And in the weeks and months after, when Chris no longer knew his alphabet or his numbers and could not concentrate for more than a few seconds at a time; when he would not look at the books we once read together every day or play with his cards; when my little boy, who used to be so happy, no longer smiled and would cry at the slightest frustration; when he was constantly sick with ear and respiratory infections and unrelenting diarrhea that left him weak and emaciated; when he basically regressed physically, mentally and emotionally and became a totally different child, none of the doctors could tell me what was wrong with him. One doctor thought he might have cystic fibrosis or celiac disease but every diagnostic test came back negative and the best they could do was tell me to take him home and love him.
It would be another year before I saw Lea Thompson’s television documentary “DPT: Vaccine Roulette,” began research into the medical literature and found clinical descriptions of pertussis vaccine reactions in the pages of Pediatrics, the New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, and British Medical Journal which exactly matched the pertussis vaccine reaction symptoms I had seen my son suffer within hours of his fourth DPT shot. I learned that the 1981 British National Childhood Encephalopathy Study had found a statistically significant correlation between DPT vaccine and brain inflammation leading to chronic neurological damage and that the UCLA-FDA study had found that 1 in 875 DPT shots is followed within 48 hours by a convulsion or collapse/shock reaction just like my son had suffered.
I was stunned. I felt betrayed by a medical profession I had revered all my life.
The day my child reacted to the pertussis vaccine, he should have been in an emergency room not unconscious in his bed. As his mother, I should have had the information I needed to recognize a vaccine reaction and take steps to deal with it, including calling my doctor and later making sure the reaction was recorded in his medical record and reported to the vaccine manufacturer and health officials.
Chris was eventually diagnosed with minimal brain damage that took the form of multiple learning disabilities and attention deficit disorder. He remained in a special self contained classroom for the learning disabled through gradeschool and high school, where he was labeled “bright LD” and the discrepancy between his intelligence and his short term memory delay, visual and auditory processing deficits and his attention span problems was a source of great frustration, anger and low self esteem for him. Today, Chris is nearly 25 years old. This past year, for the first time in his life, he is succeeding in an educational setting as he studies to be a film maker at a school where one-third of the students are learning disabled and receive appropriate special education support.
But Chris and I both know how lucky he was. His brain inflammation could have progressed and he could have become autistic or mentally retarded or epileptic and or he could have died like so many of the children I have come to know over the years.
What has haunted me is that, if I had not walked into my child’s room when I did, I would not have witnessed the post-pertussis vaccine convulsion, collapse shock and six hour state of unconsiciousness which, not counting the few minutes I was able to rouse my son to a state of semi-consciousness, was actually an 18 hour state of altered consciousness. If Chris had been a four month old baby and not a precocious two and a half year old, the regression he underwent following vaccination may not have been so immediately and dramatically apparent. How many mothers are not in a child’s presence to witness a seizure or collapse, which could easily occur in the middle of the night? And how many infants are regressing after vaccine reactions but are never diagnosed until long after the damage has occurred, thereby preventing even a temporal relationship between vaccination and neuroimmune dysfunction from being recognized?
What happened to my son 22 years ago is typical of the experiences parents have reported to NVIC for the past two decades. Mothers tell us how they took a happy, healthy, normally developing child to the doctor to be vaccinated and then, within hours, days or weeks, their child regressed physically, mentally and emotionally and became a totally different child. Mothers describe acute symptoms like hours of screaming sometimes alternating with extreme lethargy; twitching and jerking of the body or unresponsiveness; high fever or persistent low grade fever; diarrhea; body rashes or swelling; restlessness; loss of eye contact and dramatic changes in eating, bowel and sleeping habits. These acute symptoms are often followed by a gradual deterioration in overall health that includes chronic ear and respiratory infections and onset of allergies; loss of appetite and persistent diarrhea; sleep disturbances that turn night into day and day into night; loss of developmental milestones like the ability to roll over or sit up; development of strange or violent behavior that includes head banging, hyperactivity, screaming, biting, social withdrawal and repetitive movements like flapping, rubbing, rocking and spinning; older children will complain of muscle weakness, joint pain, vision problems, severe headache, disabling fatigue and exhibit loss of memory and cognitive skills and begin to suffer depression.
The once healthy, normally developing child becomes a totally different, sick child. And the mother, who carried that child inside her for nine months and nursed that baby after birth and whose every waking moment is connected to preserving the well being of that child, knows her child in a way no one else does. She knows her child changed and is different now, even if she doesn’t know why. Depending on the child and therapy interventions available, there is either gradual full recovery or the child is eventually diagnosed with varying degrees of permanent brain and immune system dysfunction ranging from severe and profound mental retardation and seizure disorders to autistic behaviors, learning disabilities, ADHD, arthritis, asthma, or other chronic health problems.
Upon questioning, many parents reveal that their child suffered previous vaccine reaction symptoms that were dismissed by their doctor as unrelated or unimportant. I remember that my son had had a violent local reaction to his third DPT shot that was dismissed by the nurse as unimportant. Many parents say their child was sick at the time of vaccination and were on antibiotics. My son was recovering from a bout with the flu he had had three weeks earlier, had just finished a course of antibiotics and was still having slight diarrhea before getting the DPT shot that hurt him. Many parents report a strong family history of autoimmune disease. My family has a history of autoimmune disorders, including lupus, rheumatoid arthritis and thyroid disease and allergies to foods, pollen, medicines and vaccines. One of the markers that became apparent when I interviewed parents of DPT vaccine injured children in the early 1980’s for “DPT: A Shot in the Dark” was that many of the babies who reacted to DPT either had a milk allergy or developed a milk allergy after their reaction. My son who reacted to DPT was the only one of my three children with a milk allergy. Still other babies, especially those whose vaccine reactions are followed by death, were born premature, were underweight or had a history of health problems prior to repeated vaccination.
Whether the vaccine reaction results in minimal brain damage, as was the case with my son, or more severe and profound brain damage, as is the case with those who have been awarded compensation under the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, what cannot be denied is the pattern and common experience that emerges. And that pattern and commonality of experience is what has distinguished the anthrax vaccine reactions being suffered by soldiers in the military, just as it distinguished the recombinant hepatitis B vaccine reactions first suffered by adult health care workers in the late 1980’s before the pattern was repeated by teenagers and children when they got hepatitis B vaccine in the early 1990’s. The pattern and commonality of experience, reinforced over and over again with almost every vaccine reaction report, has contributed in no small way to why the vaccine safety issue will not go away - despite the concerted efforts by industry, government and medical organizations to convince the public that, when acute and chronic health problems follow vaccination, it is always just a coincidence.
That coincidence argument used by most doctors – which I often refer to as the “It wasn’t my fault, it was an act of God” rationale, is the main scientific defense offered by vaccine makers and policymakers to refute the compelling patterns of experience that are being manifested after vaccination across this country. With cheerful self confidence, pediatricians have been carefully taught to believe in and repeat the “coincidence” mantra, which is the cornerstone of government and industry’s vaccine risk communication program. Although the “coincidence” argument has not changed in 20 years, what has changed is that fewer parents are believing it.
Last month at the American Academy of Pediatrics National Conference, pediatricians were told that there is a lot of parental anxiety and confusion about vaccination due to the QUOTE “conflicting and misleading” information they are getting from television, newspapers, friends and the internet and that the solution is to engage Mom and Dad in a one-on-one dialogue that QUOTE “teases out an individual parent’s specific questions and concerns and provides appropriate, accurate responses.”
While we totally agree that respectful dialogue between doctor and patient is the first step toward building a meaningful, trusting relationship, we know that the average pediatrician is not being given appropriate, accurate information about vaccines in medical school much less in professional conferences, where doctors with financial ties to vaccine manufacturers are much more interested in teaching pediatricians how to engage in spin control than be truthful about what is and is not known about vaccines so pediatricians can give accurate responses to parents’ legitimate questions.
Yes, parents are anxious about vaccines - but not because pediatricians don’t make the coincidence argument or spin the “benefits outweigh the risks for every child “ line well enough. Parents are anxious about vaccines today because everybody either has a child or knows somebody with a child, relative or friend who got really sick after being vaccinated and was left with learning disabilities or ADHD, autism or asthma, convulsions or guillain barre syndrome, irritable bowel disease or arthritis, thrombocytopenia or thyroid disease or some other kind of chronic immune system or brain problem. Parents are anxious because they have done what their doctors told them to do and have given their children all these vaccines and, now, so many of these same children are stuck on sick. Mothers instinctively know something isn’t right about that.
No, our children don’t get measles, mumps, rubella, or chicken pox like we did when we were their age and missed school for a week or two. Instead our children have become the walking wounded, filling up special education classrooms in schools around this country in numbers that are so staggering there is no way to estimate the price that will be paid by generations to come. Moms and Dads aren’t staying up at night putting calamine lotion on their children’s arms and legs to lessen the discomfort of chicken pox, they are staying up at night trying to deal with children screaming and banging their heads against walls who cannot tell the difference between night and day. Moms aren’t missing a week of work because they have to stay home until their kids get over the measles, they are having to quit work so they can provide full-time attention, medication and support to chronically ill, disabled children and teenagers who may never be able to function independently in society.
With the addition of the two dose flu vaccine recommendation made this year, children in America are now supposed to get 38 doses of 12 vaccines by the age of five, nearly double the number of doses they got two decades ago. During that same time period, aggressive mandatory vaccination programs have pushed the vaccination rate for children entering kindergarten to nearly 100 percent. And during that same time, American children have experienced a doubling of learning disabilities, ADHD and asthma; a tripling of diabetes and a 200 to 600 percent increase in autism in every state.
To quote a well known Senator from New York in a letter she wrote to the New York Times several weeks ago, “Today chronic diseases, including autism, cancer, asthma, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and diabetes, strike more than a third of our population and cost our citizens and our country more than $325 billion a year. By 2020, these costs will climb to almost $1 trillion dollars and these diseases will afflict more than 130 million Americans.”
130 million chronically ill Americans? That is nearly half our population! And the question everyone should be asking is: Why are so many highly vaccinated people not leading healthier lives, but instead are trying to cope with crippled immune systems that leave them in constant pain or attempting to navigate through life with brains that cannot respond the way the human brain should?
One of the speakers at the recent pediatrics conference said “Vaccines have had a greater impact on protecting children from death and illness from infectious diseases than any other public health intervention.” Well, even if we accept that statement as true, which can be debated, we are still left with the fact that individual and public health is not measured solely by an absence of infectious disease.
The larger question hanging over the head of every drug company executive, public health official and doctor doggedly touting the benefits of our children using more and more vaccines, is this:
Is the atypical introduction of lab-altered viruses and bacteria and repeated manipulation of the developing immune system in early childhood with multiple vaccines causing more and more children to become chronically ill, disabled children and adults?
Other potential co-factors in the alarming increase in chronic disease is increased exposure to pesticides, chemicals and other environmental toxins; overuse of antibiotics and other pharmaceuticals; nutritionally compromised food sources and unhealthy lifestyles. But there is a compelling argument to be made that the dramatic increase in chronic brain and immune system dysfunction in our population, especially the rising number of reports of regression in previously healthy children, is due to an early exposure that is being experienced by all children but which is harming an ever expanding minority of them.
At our Third International Public Conference on Vaccination held two weeks ago, we heard independent researchers whose investigation into adverse responses to vaccination suggests that vaccines can cause a wide range of immune and brain system dysfunction and that genetic factors may increase the risk. Genetic factors alone have been suggested as the sole cause of autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders. But if the presence of certain genes were the sole causal factor in autism, for example, in order to explain the huge rise in autism cases in the past two decades there would have had have been a significant genetic shift in the whole population. A more likely explanation is that the presence of certain genes, together with one or more new environmental exposures which act as triggers, account for the increases in autism and other chronic diseases in childhood.
Many biological responses are at least partially under genetic control and the American population is one that is particularly biodiverse. With each dose of vaccine or simultaneous injection of multiple vaccines, there may be a cumulative risk for vaccine-induced immune and brain dysfunction in children with certain genotypes. So the pool of genetically susceptible children has not changed in the past two decades but the environmental triggers, such as multiple doses of vaccines, have increased.
My son, born in 1978, was part of the first bubble that turned into a tidal wave of learning disabled, hyperactive, autistic children that required the creation of special classrooms in the public school system to deal with this new phenomenon. Were he and his classmates the canaries in the coal mine, ignored by doctors because, as German immunologist and DPT vaccine critic Wolfgang Ehrengut once suggested, “What must not be, cannot be?”
The a priori assumption that increased use of multiple doses of vaccines over the past quarter century has played no role in the rise in chronic disease and disability in children is as potentially dangerous as the assumption that an individual child’s regression following vaccination is only coincidentally and not causally related to vaccination.
Epidemiological studies will be fatally flawed by the coincidence assumption in the absence of objective criteria for determining what is and is not vaccine-induced. This is especially true when, for the past 35 years, virtually all American children have been vaccinated with at least DPT and polio vaccines. Therefore, the true background rates in unvaccinated children for mental retardation, medication resistant-seizure disorders, learning disabilities, attention deficit disorder, asthma, diabetes and other chronic diseases is unknown. The only way to prove that the use of multiple vaccines does not significantly contribute to the incidence of chronic disease such as autism, asthma, learning disabilities and diabetes is to conduct prospective, large long term studies comparing groups of highly vaccinated and unvaccinated children and measure for all morbidity and mortality outcomes, including pathological changes in immune and brain function in the individual children participating during the entire course of the study.
The Institute of Medicine Committee charged by Congress to evaluate the medical literature for evidence that vaccines can cause injury and death pointed out in 1991 that “There are many gaps and limitations in knowledge bearing directly or indirectly on the safety of vaccines.” Little has changed in the landscape of vaccine adverse event research since that assessment was made and the current Institute of Medicine Immunization Safety Review Committee is once again hampered by the same vacuum in knowledge at it attempts to grapple with cause and effect issues pertaining to vaccines.
But beyond investigating the kind and extent of the chronic health problems that vaccines can cause, there are other outstanding questions about mass vaccination policies that are waiting for answers. Persistent reports of outbreaks of atypical pertussis and measles in highly vaccinated populations associated with different genetic strains of these microorganisms suggest there may be an unintended long term consequence of mass vaccine use reminiscent of the development of antibiotic resistant microorganisms due to mass antibiotic use.
The natural order has a way of adapting to all attempts to alter it. Is the pressure being placed on infectious microorganisms by vaccines causing them to mutate into vaccine-resistant forms?
As we remove permanent, cell mediated immunity to many infectious diseases from the human population and replace it with temporary, vaccine-induced immunity, are we creating super bugs capable of evading that temporary vaccine-induced immunity? This is a possibility well worth considering in conjunction with the mounting evidence that the hygiene hypothesis is correct and that the elimination of all infection in childhood is contributing to autoimmune allergic disease later in life.
So, here we are. Vaccinating more than ever. Sicker than ever. It is very logical to ask why everyone is so sick when all these vaccines are supposed to keep us well. And the more questions being asked about vaccine safety, the more drug company executives are screaming for protection from lawsuits and public health officials are trying to take away vaccine exemptions and doctors are having trouble keeping their nervous memberships in line because the vaccine machine they have so carefully built over the past two centuries and profit from so handsomely is beginning to fall apart before their eyes. The events of the past two weeks has convinced me that this is true. We are approaching the tipping point.
So, as the increasingly well educated, highly vaccinated but chronically ill American population is starting to question the validity of what medical doctors have been telling them to do, this loss of faith is causing them to look around and turn to other, more natural ways of staying healthy. And that is where doctors of chiropractic come in and, actually, that is why I believe you were destined to come in to our history back in 1993.
So now I get to talk about one of my favorite persons, someone who is no longer with us here on this earth but whose spirit will always be with us because of the good works he left behind. Many of you know that when I met Larry Webster, the grandfather of pediatric chiropractic, in 1993, the National Vaccine Information Center was on the brink of collapse. Kathi and I and the crippled army, as we have often characterized parents of vaccine injured children, were tired and broke after years of fighting the drug company-government-medical profession alliance and we had begun the legal process of closing down the organization. So when I was asked to speak to a handful of chiropractors meeting in McLean, Virginia, I almost didn’t go because I thought it would be a waste of time. I didn’t know anything about chiropractors except that they fixed bad backs and I wasn’t sure why I had been asked to speak.
But that little voice inside that you don’t really understand except you know not to ignore it, told me to go. So I prepared a 15 minute talk and decided to just say what I thought about vaccines and the government and doctors who were blindly hurting kids with vaccines. And there was this bald headed man who kept pacing in the back of the room back and forth like a cat on a hot tin roof and I remember thinking, what is the matter with him? He must not like what I am saying. Well, when I got finished the bald headed man came up to me and shook my hand and said he really liked what I had said. It was Larry Webster. And there was another bald headed man in that room – Arno Burnier – who also said he like what I had said.
And before I knew it, I was invited to give a speech at the ICPA conference in Boston that would host 200 chiropractors from the US and Canada specializing in pediatric care. Again, Kathi and I debated about whether I should go because we were still planning to use the $2,000 we had left in our checking account to close the organization. But Larry and Arno sent me a plane ticket and so I went and stood there shaking as I gave my speech, still not quite understanding why chiropractors would be interested in my message and still afraid they would think I was crazy. But when I finished, everyone stood up clapping and then Larry got up and said “OK, you cheap so and sos, get out those wallets and write out those checks…” and by the time I got to the back of the room, doctors were lined up writing out checks.
The night at the dinner I heard Jim Sigafoose and Eddie Cohen and Larry talk about their trip to Haiti where they had adjusted thousands of poor children for free. And I heard about how chiropractic had to fight to be allowed to practice both in the US and around the world. And I suddenly realized that doctors of chiropractic were up against the very same powerful and wealthy triumverate that we were – big Pharma, the government health officials and organized medicine - and I realized that chiropractors had stood their ground for more than a hundred years and survived. That was when I knew we would never feel alone again.
Late that night, when I got back to my room, I learned that those 200 chiropractors had given us more than $7,000 in donations and I called Kathi and told her what had happened and I said, “We can’t give up. I know now that we are not supposed to give up”
Several weeks later Jim Dubell asked me to speak at New Beginnings seminars and very soon I was invited to speak at DE in Atlanta. And I remember Kathi negotiating with D.D. Umber about whether I would be in a breakout room or address the whole audience, Kathi of course insisting that the whole audience needed to hear our message. Well, D.D. was trying to shift things around to fit me in and being pulled in all directions and finally, D.D. said in his understated southern gentleman way, he said “Kathi, some things are just more trouble than they’re worth, do you know what I mean?” And Kathi, being an extremely intelligent and astute person, said, “Yes sir, I know what you mean.”
D.D., I want you to know Kathi borrows your line whenever she needs to pull rank with someone who won’t back off. It works every time.
But D.D. Umber – the man who makes things happen – did somehow find a way to get me up on that DE platform in 1993 to speak to the whole audience of about 800 students and alumnus of Life College. And standing up there, my voice shaking again, I was given all the support and encouragement I needed when the audience started to applaud just minutes into my speech. I knew then that our message was resonating with chiropractors because you identified with our struggle to give the people freedom of to not choose vaccination just as we identified with your struggle to give the people freedom to choose chiropractic. And you knew from your philosophical roots, that we were right to fear the negative effects of vaccines on the human body.
You know that because no one understood the value of truth and freedom better than the founders of chiropractic, D.D. and B.J. Palmer, who strove all their lives to reveal the true foundations of good health and give the people an enlightened alternative to the narrow minded view of health espoused by organized medicine.
Since I was introduced to the world of chiropractic in 1993, I have done a little research about who you are and why you do what you do. I believe that history is a great teacher and if you understand where we have come from you will better understand why we are here, watching a great paradigm shift take place in the perception of what true health is and how to achieve it. This paradigm shift is taking place in this country, Canada and Europe and even in some countries of the Third World where so many drugs and vaccines are off loaded on the people. In Canada and Europe at least, there is a reason why, today, chiropractic is the fastest growing health care alternative to allopathic medicine.
I have learned that the practice of vaccination is only 200 years old compared to the practice of spinal manipulation, which can be traced back to the ancient Chinese and Egyptians more than 4,000 years ago, to ancient Greece and Rome, to the North and South American Indians and, finally, in the intuitive hands of D.D. Palmer, refined and developed into the art and science of chiropractic. And if you look closely, you find there is a big difference between the safety and efficacy record of the practice of spinal manipulation compared to the safety and efficacy record of the practice of vaccination.
When D.D. Palmer pioneered the concept that nerve interference promotes sickness and disease, preventing the body from properly functioning or participating in the natural healing process – which it has the innate ability to do from birth – he laid down the gauntlet to the medical men of his day, challenging their belief that the germ theory of disease is the only one that counts.
When DD suggested that the tools used by medical men to prevent and treat illness, that is vaccines, drugs and surgery, were causing nerve interference and making people sick, he further enraged the medical profession.
And when he dared to proclaim that chiropractors can remove nerve interference – which causes disease or loss of harmony in the body – by manually adjusting the spine in order to allow the body to heal and maintain wellness, he was labeled a charlatan, charged with practicing medicine without a license, and thrown in jail.
DD Palmer was one of the first revolutionaries in the fight for freedom of choice in health care, persecuted by the operators of the unholy profit-making alliance that has developed between allopathic medicine, the pharmaceutical industry, and government during the past two centuries, as I have said, the same alliance that has tried to shut down the work that Kathi and I do at the National Vaccine Information Center.
And when BJ Palmer, the great articulator of the philosophy of chiropractic continued his father’s historic challenge to allopathic medicine’s stranglehold on health care, he promoted such revolutionary ideas as:
QUOTE “Medical men have searched the world for remedies, desiring an antidote. Chiropractors find the cause in the person ailing.”
And one of my favorites, “In the future, chiropractic will be valued for its preventive qualities as much as for relieving and adjusting the cause of ailments.”
But it was BJ Palmer’s articulation of the spiritual component of health and healing that I believe lies at the center of the truth that people from all walks of life around the world are instinctively beginning to embrace and that is that there lies in every person an innate intelligence, given to all things by our Creator, and that the key to health and wellness is to acknowledge, respect and tap into the power and wisdom of the innate rather than deny, suppress and destroy it with manmade drugs and vaccines.
When BJ Palmer said QUOTE “We rejoice in the power to be a channel for the expression of the divine purpose,” he articulated in one sentence what I perceive is the essence of the philosophy of chiropractic. It is a profound but refreshingly humble concept, a key, I believe, to why your vision of wellness is ultimately destined to be embraced by the people while the efforts of many scientists and public health officials to replace the divine purpose with their own, will ultimately fail.
BJ Palmer said QUOTE “Conditions change and our attitude towards them has changed but principles remain the same.”
The philosophy of chiropractic and the principles which support it have withstood the political challenge by organized medicine. I believe over time medical science itself will accept those principles as biologically sound. The greater challenge for chiropractic today, just as it is the challenge for the vaccine informed consent movement is whether we can hold fast to our principles even as the politics of the day put pressure on us to compromise those principles.
In 1910, DD Palmer said QUOTE “Compulsory vaccination is an outrage and a gross interference with the liberty of the people in a land of freedom”
He was right. But how we go about winning our freedom will have everything to do with whether we or not we succeed.
At this point, I want to talk about some of the social, political and ethical issues surrounding mass, mandatory vaccination that need to be understood so that we can go about winning our freedom in a way that will maximize our chance for success. Almost all of these issues revolve around the argument forwarded by pro-mandatory vaccination proponents that society must balance the rights, individual autonomy and well being of individuals with what they have defined as “the greater good” of the community. The argument being made is that all individuals must share equally in the risk taking in order to protect the community at large.
However, the as yet largely unidentified genetic and other biological factors involved in increasing an individual’s risk for vaccine injury and death means that vaccine risks are not being shared equally by all. Therefore, a counter argument can be made that forced vaccination and the achievement of a 100 percent vaccination rate is a de facto selection and sacrifice of the genetically vulnerable whether that genetic selection is being applied to newborn babies, children heading to school or to men and women serving in the armed forces.
And we can rightly ask: what is patriotic, moral or good about a government policy which does that?
A closer examination of the greater good argument used to suggest that parents should be altruistically willing to risk their children’s lives on the alter of one-size-fits-all national vaccine policy, can be traced back to utilitarianism. This politically and economically based philosophical rationale created by a 19th century British lawyer was used by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1905 to justify mandatory vaccination and then used by the Court again in 1927 to justify the state-ordered sterilization of a mentally retarded girl. Utilitarianism, which maintains that an action is ethical if it results in the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people and so the well being of a minority of individuals can be sacrificed for the well being of the majority. In 1947 at the Doctor’s Trial at Nuremberg, this pseudo-ethic was finally discredited as inherently immoral - but not before it had been used to kill and maim hundreds of thousands in medical experiments, including vaccine experiments, during World War II.
Out of the Doctor’s Trial at Nuremberg came the Nuremberg Code, which gave birth to the informed consent ethic, of which Yale law professor, physician and ethicist Jay Katz has said “if not explicitly, then at least implicitly commanded that the protection of the advancement of science bow to a higher principle: protection of individual inviolability. The rights of individuals to thoroughgoing self-determination and autonomy must come first. Scientific advances may be impeded, perhaps even become impossible at times, but this is a price worth paying.” Katz also has said that the judges of the Nuremberg Tribunal, overwhelmed by what they had learned about the exploitation of a minority of individuals by the majority in power, “envisioned a world in which free women and men, after careful explanation, could make their own good or bad decisions, but not decisions unknowingly imposed on them by the authority of the state, science or medicine.”
Today, a modernized and dressed up version of utilitarianism known as the “tragedy of the commons,” is being used to justify forced vaccination and the suspension of the informed consent rights of individuals. The tragedy of the commons, which is a philosophical rationale developed in 1968 by an American biologist to justify state-enforced population control, maintains that traditional western moral values and monotheistic religious beliefs must be discarded in order to subject the happiness or well being of individual human beings to the well-being of the earth’s biosystem. For those elitists who have appropriated for themselves the power to force other people to take vaccine risks without their informed consent, the argument that individuals who choose not to get vaccinated are selfish, unpatriotic and dangerous because they contribute to causing a “tragedy of the commons” is a powerful message. And that message is translating because its moral center is being accepted as fact and not questioned by anyone.
It was only when I began to study the philosophical and political motivations for the greater good argument being used by those seeking to eliminate informed consent to vaccination that I began to understand why we are now experiencing a strong, systematic attack on the religious exemption to vaccination. The greater good or tragedy of the commons argument, which defines moral truth and ethical behavior in biological, statistical, and economic terms, is fatally compromised by religious beliefs which define moral truth and ethical behavior in spiritual terms as a matter of individual conscience guided by a higher authority. What we have here is the centuries-old power struggle between those who believe that science, math and the human intellect can quantify moral truth and should define and dictate ethical behavior, and those who believe that moral truth and ethical behavior is defined and dictated to individuals by a higher authority through scripture, spiritual revelation and free exercise of conscience. The viability of the greater good or tragedy of the commons argument, which depends on belief in and obedience to a social structure and system of ethics created by man, is threatened by those individuals who choose to obey their conscience and the guidance they receive from God rather than obey a secular law that conflicts with their conscientiously and deeply held spiritual beliefs.
This is why there are suggestions by public health officials and other defenders of forced vaccination that the religious exemption be eliminated in states such as Arkansas, Wyoming and New York where personal religious beliefs opposing vaccination has been upheld in challenge cases at the state high court level. Mandatory vaccination proponents want religious exemption language to be replaced with a parental choice or philosophical belief exemption. Parental choice or philosophical belief language is devoid of any spiritual reference or acknowledgement of a higher authority and, of course, the greater legal threat to that language change is that the free exercise of religion is protected under the U.S. Constitution and parental or personal choice is not.
Interestingly, if it is eventually revealed that mass vaccination policies have resulted in a compomising of the long term biological integrity of significant segments within the human population or have pressured infectious microorganisms to evolve into more virulent forms, then those who use the greater good and tragedy of the commons argument to force vaccination have violated their own moral premise. Perhaps it is fear of that possibility that makes them so devoted to the coincidence argument and unwilling to do meaningful research into the biological mechanisms of vaccine injury and death. The truth you don’t know, whether scientific or moral, is the truth you don’t have to face.
What are we left with, then, as we continue to engage in the debate about the science, policy and ethics of mass vaccination at this critical moment in our history, when the threat of bioterrorism is being used by industry to lobby Congress for elimination of all liability for vaccine-induced injury and death and as scores of new vaccines are being developed for mass use, including an AIDS vaccine and the highly reactive smallpox vaccine? How are we going to respond to government’s use of technology to tag, track and monitor the vaccination status and health care choices of everyone as medical privacy, informed consent protections and civil liberties are threatened by new federal regulations and the passage of new state public health emergency laws that allow government officials to use the state militia to arrest, quarantine and forcibly vaccinate citizens without their informed consent?
Well, first we have to keep in mind that we are up against not just a national, but an international global public health infrastructure that is being created and funded by industry and government, with the assistance of allopathic medical organizations as well private individuals and foundations, such as Bill Gates, which are also tied to industry and government. At the financial and philosophical heart of this global empire is a plan to electronically tag with an ID number and track every man, woman and child in the world in order to force mass use of multiple vaccines, including smallpox, anthrax, AIDS, TB, malaria and many other vaccines.
As we all know, especially since 911, disease control has been increasingly defined as a matter of national and international security. In 1999, the Centers for Disease Control commissioned the drafting of model state legislation which would give broad new powers to public health officials. They knew that since the writing of the US Constitution, public health laws, including vaccine laws, have been under state control. So the CDC knew they had to go to each state to get the law passed. Known as the Model State Health Emergency Powers Act, this draft legislation would make it easy for public health officials to persuade Governors to declare a public health emergency and use the state militia, if necessary to arrest, quarantine and forcibly vaccinate citizens while those who make vaccines or enforce use of them would be exempt from liability for any vaccine injuries or deaths which occur. This draft legislation was immediately released post-September 11, 2001 and passed by nearly half the states by November 2002.
However, not all the states passed this model state legislation and because NVIC and other civil liberties and informed consent organizations took action, some states amended the legislation to include informed consent protections in the form of medical, religious and conscientious belief exemptions to forced vaccination and medication. You need to know that Section 304 of the Homeland Security Bill, which we fought so hard last week in the Senate to defeat or at least amend, takes the creation and implementation of state public health laws, especially with regard to vaccination when an imminent state of emergency is declared by federal health officials, and puts it into federal hands. Specifically, the Secretary of Health now has the power to issue a “declaration” after concluding that “an actual or potential bioterrorist incident” or “other potential public health emergency” warrants the administration of “a substance or substances” to “individuals during the effective period of the declaration.” The law provides for no exemptions to orders to vaccinate or medicate citizens and is expected to override state public health and vaccine laws which currently provide exemptions to vaccination. This federal law also does not preclude the use of the military to enforce the administration of vaccines or other substances ordered by the Secretary of DHHS, just as the model state emergency health powers legislation provided for use of the state militia to arrest, quarantine and forcibly vaccinated individuals.
When Congress returns in January, there are indications an attempt will be made by some senators and congressmen to amend the Homeland Security Bill regarding the vaccine manufacturer liability issue. Well, yes, liability is important but informed consent and freedom to say no is more important. But Congress and the media are only comfortable talking about money and very uncomfortable talking about freedom to choose. Nevertheless, we have to continue to remind everyone that when you couple no exemptions with no liability you have a prescription for tyrrany. And in every radio,tv and print interview I do I insist on talking about that fact.
We hope that all of you who are interested in joining with us in getting that message out will sign up for our free daily email news bulletins that keep you informed. Please become a member of NVIC. But beyond that, I hope that ICA and everyone in chiropractic will work closely with us and our smaller sister parent vaccine rights advocacy organizations in participating in a coordinated, long term strategy that will have to be fought on local, state and national information, legislative and judicial levels in order to achieve our mission, which is: the right of every American to freely choose the kind of health care we want for ourselves and our children, including the right to freely choose whether we want to be vaccinated or not.
We, with our crippled army of those who have suffered from the dangers of vaccines, have led this grassroots movement for two decades. You lifted us up in 1993 when we almost gave up and you have stood by us ever since. If it had not been for you, this movement would have surely perished in 1993 and America would not know what it knows today about the dangers of vaccines.
We know our adversary well and we know where we need to go and how we need to get there. The greatest threat to achieving the mission we share with you is to lose our focus, sacrifice our principles and fail to remain united in purpose. If we get the wrong case with the wrong lawyer using the wrong argument in the wrong US Supreme Court at the wrong time in history, we could be set back 100 years in terms of winning our right to informed consent to vaccination. If we split into many groups each articulating a different message in the media to the American public, we will lose to the consistent messages being articulated by the big PR firms hired by big Pharma and big government.
I have always believed that the power of this movement lies in showing the Congress, the courts and the American people the children, the tangible and tragic results of a failed national health policy that has left has left hundreds of thousands of vaccine victims in its wake. I still believe that.
At a 1984 meeting of the Redbook committee of the American Academy of Pediatrics, where we were discussing the framework for the table of compensable events that would become a centerpiece of the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, I said: “A system that will not bend will break.”
Eighteen years later, there is growing evidence that ideology not tempered with restraint and grounded in knowledge; inflexible administration of policy without compassion; refusal to allow informed, voluntary risk taking; dismissal of the significance and suffering of individuals who are casualties of the mass vaccination program, all combine to destroy public confidence in organized medicine and government-led vaccination programs no matter how many laws are passed, advertising dollars are spent, or medical journal articles are written to promote the benefits and minimize the risks of vaccination.
My personal message to those who operate the mass vaccination system is: My son was not expendable. And neither are the sons and daughters of any other mother or father.
These are our children. Look into their eyes. They are the future.
We will not turn back.
We will not be satisfied with the status quo.
And, no matter how hard it gets, we will not surrender.
We are going to win back the future for ourselves and our children. We are going to win the human right to make informed, voluntary decisions about what we are willing to risk our lives and the lives of our children for because what it means to be human doesn’t get more basic than that. We are going to hold industry, government and the medical community accountable for what
they do and do not do. We are going to get the right kind of research done to give us the answers we need so that every child can grow up healthy and strong and no child’s life is considered a necessary sacrifice.
We are going to do all this by taking our love and our commitment and continuing to march forward, armed with the belief that goodness and compassion exists in most human beings when they throw off the chains of ignorance and prejudice and fear, and steadfast in our faith that the truth will shine bright and clear in the end.
This is the legacy we can leave to our children, both those who are vaccine injured and those who are not, a legacy that is as grounded in truth as it is in our abiding love for them.
Thank you.
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