Hi, everyone! I wanted to get into this subject on thankfulness blog but my husband says that other blog is such a happy place and this would darken it…and so I’m starting this blog and will focus on health, raising children in healthy but easy ways, and somewhere else this journey has unexpectedly led me.
I’ve been learning a lot about a controversial subject lately, and I have this burning desire to bring awareness to this issue because of the injustice surrounding it. Informed Consent is so important to me as a nurse, and there’s only one medical procedure we have done that only gets the benefits told, with the risks hushed, hidden, silenced, censored, and blatantly muzzled. Have you guessed what it is yet? Yes, it’s vaccines.
I started this out from a mostly positive view of vaccines but had a few friends who don’t vaccinate and always wondered about it. I wanted an unbiased view, so I read The Vaccine Book by Dr Sears when I was pregnant with Atticus. I highly recommend it, by the way. The tone of the book was more pro-vaccine than not, but he uses actual data with telling you the ingredients in each vaccine, he goes over each disease–the prevalence–your chance of getting it, and possible complications. I did find the ingredients pretty shocking. Here’s a summary of them from the CDC. I think it should all start here. By taking an honest look at the ingredients and reading package inserts. But let’s just start with ingredients for now. I honestly don’t think most doctors/nurses know the ingredients, and they for sure don’t tell patients about them before giving a vaccine. At least, I never knew about them, and never told my patients. I think it’s reasonable to say that known toxic substances carry at least a small risk, and in the interest of informed consent, patients should be made aware of them by doctors.
What I have found most shocking in this entire search is how little science there actually is around vaccines. My assumption has always been that the science supports the safety of vaccines, that there is a LOT of evidence to that effect, and that it has been thoroughly researched to prove this. I’m not going to start this conversation with the science proving the possible risks of vaccines, because I started with doubts that wanted to be bolstered with facts. My search started with trying to prove the blanket statements that vaccines have been thoroughly tested and that they are quite safe, and I came up with no proof at all. I even reached out to my more vocal pro-vaccine friends to help me with the studies and trials that have convinced them, and was disappointed with what they gave me. I will go into more detail on this in future, but don’t want to go off on rabbit trails right now because I want to keep this as short as possible and it’s already getting long.
This has actually been a humbling journey for me already, and I’ve had to pull back and endure a self-imposed silence on the subject for quite a while. For some time, I thought maybe God didn’t want me to speak about this, because it was hard for me not to yell in my urgency and horror at what I was finding…and I forgot to consider people’s feelings and remain respectful. I almost lost a friendship as a result, and I will always regret that. So I go forward with some misgivings, much prayer, and I say over and over to myself the fact that all of you out there are just like me whether we agree on this subject or not: we have the common ground of loving our children, of wanting ONLY the best for them, of wanting to protect them from all harm and disease and hurt. And that there IS risk. No matter what choice we make. The perhaps small risk of being damaged by a vaccine, or the risk of catching one of these diseases. So which risk is greater? Is there even a way to know? And what about herd immunity and how selfish is it for people to choose not to vaccinate when doing so will expose an entire population to diseases that have been eradicated, like smallpox and polio? I will attempt to answer these questions in blogs to come.
I want to disclaim that I am still keeping an open mind. I have made this decision with deep determination since watching myself get too caught up in this and forgetting to be kind. I think all of us want “antivaxxers” to be wrong. Even antivaxxers want to be wrong. So if you see me saying things that aren’t true, or if you even just have an argument proving me wrong, please do not hesitate to speak. I am listening to speeches by Paul Offit, watching youtube videos by ZDoggMD, and I’m going to read Peter Hotez’s book on the subject as he is a scientist that actually makes vaccines for tropical diseases. I am by all means willing to be wrong in leaning towards the conclusion that vaccines are not safe for a certain population of people.
So for the first shocking fact I learned: vaccines are a liability free product. If you happen to be the “one in a million” that suffers injury or death from a vaccine, you cannot sue the manufacturer. You can sue when a drug goes wrong and harms/kills people (like Merck’s Vioxx that killed over 60,000 people–they make a large amount of childhood vaccines, just so you know), you can sue for any other product in America and it’s a really good thing, in my opinion, because law suits give manufacturers incentive to improve their product. But Ronald Reagan signed The 1986 Childhood Vaccine Injury Act after the DPT vaccine was causing so many lawsuits (why we now have the DTaP instead of the DPT, which is still given to children in Africa and other third world countries) that the pharmaceutical companies weren’t making money anymore and that took all liability away from the companies and placed it on HHS (Health and Human Services), who was also charged with making safer vaccines and proving that they’re doing so with biannual reports (you can look up the 1986 Act very easily and read the whole thing). So now, if you have a case that is so convincing that you think you could win, you must sue the government (HHS) and fight against Department of Justice Lawyers with no discovery (you can’t request hidden information like internal emails, vaccine trials and studies that aren’t public, etc), and the burden of proof is on the injured party. They do not have to prove the vaccine did not cause the injury, you have to prove that it did. For example, Hannah Poling was a case that won. Her father is a neurologist, her mother is a lawyer (who stopped working to work on their case), and they had brain scans her dad had done before the vaccines that proved her healthy brain. Most of us don’t do that with our healthy children, and I’m sure you can imagine how difficult it would be to prove anything for normal people. Under these almost impossible odds, over $4 billion has been paid out to families for injury and death with a $250,000 cap per case. [1]
Since then, the childhood vaccination schedule has increased from 24 doses of 7 vaccines in 1983 to 69 doses of 16 vaccines in 2018. This chart is from 2017, [2] but since then, they’re recommending a 3rd dose of the MMR before college because of the recent mumps outbreaks that have started in college campuses in fully vaccinated students.
I shall leave it at that for now! Next time, I will talk about herd immunity.
Informed Health 