Vaccine bullying in the media seems to be the new blood sport. OpEd articles written by people without a clue of the long history of health injuries, disability and death caused by vaccines incite fear and loathing against anyone who chooses to make well informed, independent vaccine decisions for their families. Their shrill demand to bring on “mandatory vaccination”, is a testament to the profound ignorance of decades of documentation of vaccine injuries in the medical literature, side effects listed in vaccine monographs, and records of compensation paid to vaccine injury victims in the U.S. and other countries – not to mention vaccine failure. As observed by Larry Solomon in
The Untold Story of Measles,
“Several decades following the vaccine’s introduction, the measles death rate rose, largely because the vaccine made adults, expectant mothers and infants more vulnerable.”
Between 1994-97, tens of thousands of Canadian babies served as guinea pigs to test
PENTA, the first mass administered combination of 5 vaccines in a single shot. Undisclosed to parents prior to injection, PENTA was an unlicensed, experimental vaccine with side effects that included “ear infections, furious blinking, anorexia, head banging, asthma attacks, lethargy, shaking, rapid eye movements, vomiting, somnolence, pallor, ‘ice cold hands and feet while with fever’, hypokinesia, inconsolable screaming and an ‘abnormal gait following vaccination’ where the ‘child hobbled with valgus deformity of the left leg’.”
After three years on the market PENTA was removed from use in 1997 for ‘significant side effects’, including death. This was something Health Canada strongly suspected before the vaccine was introduced. Canadians are still waiting for full disclosure of this experimental vaccine debacle and reckoning of the ‘collateral damage’ suffered by thousands of children.
Prior to the introduction of giving five injections at once to infants in 1992 (diphtheria, pertussis, polio, tetanus, haemophilus influenza type B) anaphylaxis to foods including peanut allergy was very rare. The Toronto Star
reported in 2005 that there were an estimated
40,000 students in this province who could be killed by foods or insect stings. The book by Torontonian Heather Fraser,
The Peanut Allergy Epidemic, What's Causing It and How To Stop It gives a fully referenced account of how the anaphylaxis epidemic came about.
As noted by Dr. Mercola in an
editorial on the concerted media push to eliminate vaccine exemptions,
“What they don't spell out clearly is that the risk of vaccine failure must be weighed in along with the potential risk of harm from the vaccine. That inconvenient truth is cleverly hidden amid inflammatory rhetoric designed to get people to rally against those pesky free-thinkers who have the audacity to do their own risk-benefit analysis.”
This toxic
rant recently published by a Toronto Star affiliate compares non-vaccinating parents to drunk drivers who make the choice to
“unwittingly put others in harm’s way.” In his opinion, everyone should be forced to submit to every government recommended vaccine – no exceptions allowed. He writes,
“No more exemptions—if you don’t get the needle, you can’t go. I also think unvaccinated kids should be kept out of parks-and-rec activities, pediatrician offices, walk-in clinics, and daycare. Living in a civilized society requires certain obligations—you know, like not killing people and not stealing.”
What else can you call this but hate speech aimed at anyone who decides that the risks imposed by vaccines to themselves or their children outweigh the benefits? It targets everyone who has ever watched helplessly as their previously healthy child succumbs to irreversible brain injury following vaccination, or is left with an intractable seizure disorder and learning disabilities, or regresses developmentally after vaccination to eventually be diagnosed on the autism spectrum. Included in the attack are the parents of the child left with devastating lifelong chronic immune system injuries following vaccination as well as the grief stricken parents whose child has died from a vaccine reaction – a reaction that sometimes takes years to snuff out that precious life as happened to Karen Kain’s daughter,
Lorrin.
The narrow mindset of vaccine injury denialists (VID) would celebrate the suspension of the most basic human right to determine what is done to our bodies. Along with this, they would rescind our right to Informed Consent, the foundational medical ethic which gives us the right to decide what drugs and medical procedures we are willing to accept for ourselves and our children. Would it surprise us if they tried to convince law makers to do away with our constitutional guarantees of security of the person and freedom of religion and conscience?
As stated so eloquently by NVIC’s Barbara Loe Fisher in a recent
U.S.A today OpEd opposing mandatory vaccination,
“Vaccines carry two risks: a risk of harm and a risk of failure to prevent disease. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention admit that US pertussis outbreaks are not due to a failure to vaccinate but failure of the vaccine to confer long-lasting immunity…….When doctors cannot predict who will be harmed by a vaccine and cannot guarantee that those who have been vaccinated won't get infected or transmit infection, the ethical principle of informed consent becomes a civil, human and parental right that must be safeguarded in US law. Non-medical vaccine exemptions immunize individuals and the community against unsafe, ineffective vaccines and tyranny."
Parents who decline or refuse vaccines usually have very good reasons for doing so, and no amount of bullying in the media will change their minds.
