Jul 19, 2009
Angry Parents and Other Anecdotes
Imagine that you are the mother of two children, the youngest a three-year old boy. Both pregnancies were healthy, the deliveries relatively smooth.
As with your first child, you’ve been totally involved in your three-year old’s life since birth. He’s with you always. You could stare into his eyes for hours. Though he looks very much like his sibling, you could list a hundred ways in which he’s different, unique, one-of-a-kind.
You frequently find yourself saying, “He’s the happiest person I’ve ever known.”
Three days after his third birthday he got round 4 of his DPT. Within minutes of receiving the shot, he began a high-pitched shrieking, like you’ve never heard before. It went on for nearly two hours. He was also running a fever. He was utterly inconsolable.
Eventually, he slept. But when he woke up the next day he was different. He wouldn’t make eye contact. He wasn’t talking. He definitely wasn’t happy.
Thus began his slow slide into what would eventually be diagnosed as autism.
In the days to come you would learn a whole lot about autism, a disease now affecting hundreds of thousands of American kids. But you would also hear, from doctors and other experts, that its cause is still unknown.
For you, the cause could not be more obvious. One day he was healthy; he received a vaccination and soon after he was sick.
Moreover, you felt the change as it happened. You felt the reaction to the shot as if it was happening to you. You know that something in that shot poisoned your son.
But none of the doctors listen to you. Your pediatrician — the one who administered the shot — got so rudely dismissive that you had to find a new doctor for your kids.
So you go online and discover web-linked communities of parents of autistic children who, like you, know that vaccinations, at the very least, contribute to the onset of autism. Surveys of parents of autistic children show that some 60% blame vaccinations for their child’s autism. Yet for all their numbers, and for all the certainty of their convictions and the seriousness of their cause, they have been ignored, dismissed, belittled, condescended to, and berated for undermining the “life-saving science” of childhood vaccinations.
Welcome to the vaccine wars — a multi-front, furiously pitched battle in which the Medical-Industrial-Complex forces millions of parents to dose their children with barely-tested chemical concoctions.
Those in favor of vaccination claim to have Science solidly on their side and paint the anti-vax parents as a bunch of hysterical fools and dangerous luddites.
They say it is indisputable that vaccinations virtually eliminated several childhood diseases; in fact, as the chart below shows, the diseases were all in natural decline long before the vaccinations were started.
This chart shows when vaccinations were started for each disease:
Clearly, each disease was in decline before its vaccine was invented. Through a combination of improved nutrition and public sanitation, along with successful exposure to each disease — from those who contract the disease and heal naturally — American bodies were in the process of developing true immunity. Though vaccines may have helped speed up this natural process, they were not necessary to it.
Vaccinators also claim that Science has proven the safety of every vaccine before it is added to the mandated schedule. You would certainly think that before they shot a cocktail of exotic chemicals and demonstrated toxins into the bloodstream of a baby that the government would have extensively tested it first.
In fact, the US government does little testing. Most is done by the manufacturers. Obviously, no one can run long-term double-blind studies on babies; instead, they do just enough testing on animals and adult volunteers to win approval of their new wonder drug.
Then public health authorities administer the real tests on infants, toddlers, and schoolchildren.
Even the industry’s own tests generate a long list of side effects and contraindications for every vaccine. But adverse reactions from vaccinations are dismissed, ignored, and under-reported by those giving the shots.
Yet, vaccine enthusiasts loudly decry the “lack of science” on the part of the angry parents.
In fact, the parents have done some of the best science: they observed the subject (their child) intensely over a long period of time; they noted precisely when the child’s behavior and health radically changed; they educated themselves; they formed a hypothesis; in lieu of live, double-blind testing, they gathered matching reports from thousands of other parent-scientists.
They know that there are serious dangers to America’s vaccination program. Ignoring their informed experience and dismissing them as anti-science fools is “science” at its worst.
Michael Sky | CommonHealth
Dear Sharpski,
Just read your comment on Salon. You are a very eloquent spokesperson for the truth. Thank you for your work and support.
The Owl
Thanks back at you, for your letters in that conversation.