For the past couple of weeks there have been numerous headlines in Australian media calling for “vaccine refusers” to lose certain public services and for unvaccinated children to be shunned by society, daycare, etc. There is even a campaign called “No jab, no play” (see links to stories below). This barrage of media coverage shows what you can do if you have big money behind  you.

There have been articles in virtually every major Australian publication condemning the “uninformed, careless” parents who are choosing not to vaccinate. Medical and public health authorities have called for some drastic measures to stop them. (See links to stories below.)

It would appear there is a national campaign to frighten and shame those who have dared to choose their own path. In this backdrop comes news of a new documentary: Jabbed: Love, Fear and Vaccines.

While the trailer at least acknowledges that vaccines do cause harm, the intent of the trailer is clear: frighten the public into vaccinating. 1) Frighten the public with the message that danger lives amongst us in our interconnected world, then blame outbreaks of infectious diseases on rising rates of vaccine refusal (despite the evidence that most outbreaks of measles, mumps, pertussis are occurring in fully vaccinated populations and authorities have admitted vaccine failure is to blame, not rising rates of vaccine refusal). 2) Acknowledge that vaccines do harm some people but reassure viewers that those injuries are rare – despite there being not a single large controlled clinical study to prove that. (How about just one comparing the health outcomes of vaccinated and unvaccinated children?)

Unsurprisingly, the sources of funding for this project are primarily Australian government agencies. We guess if they don’t like parents choosing their own paths, they just use taxpayer money to shame and manipulate them.

Perhaps it is time for leadership to recognize that parents are refusing vaccines because of legitimate safety concerns which  are well documented in the scientific literature (see our Catalogue of Science) and no amount of government funded or pharmaceutical funded media pieces are going to change that.

How can you help? Go online on every article covering this new film and the vaccine issue and post about The Greater Good. Explain that Jabbed was paid for by the Australian government, not an independent group free of conflicts of interest be they financial or ideological. If you don’t live in Australia, stay tuned, this film is coming to the US and Europe soon.

It is clear from the 24 news stories with links below that the way to make an impact on an issue is to have the big money of the government or the pharmaceutical industry behind you. Unfortunately, we don’t. But imagine how much more impact The Greater Good could have if we had the  sponsorship they do. We could run a coordinated media campaign, run ads, translate into foreign languages, and much, much more.

If you would like to help us continue to get the word out, please consider supporting us with a donation. All contributions go to supporting our work and our campaigns to spread the word. Thanks for your support!

Here is a link to the first article we’ve seen on the new film Jabbed: Injection of Truth Into Debate

Following are the media pieces we saw in Australia in recent weeks:

Dr. Paul Offit, leading vaccine mandate proponent, Merck consultant, rota virus vaccine developer, and head of infectious diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia recently penned a piece, Ending religious exemption to medical neglect in Pennsylvania.1 While Dr. Offit horrifies parents with stories of all sorts of child neglect and abuse, if you have been paying attention to what Dr. Offit has been saying for years, it is easy to see where he is heading – religious exemptions to vaccines.

You see, if you withhold what Dr. Offit deems “life saving” treatment from your child you are an abuser. The beauty of this situation is that Dr. Offit and his friends all get to decide what treatments qualify as life saving and acceptable. If they don’t like your choice, they can report you. So if you decide to get a second opinion and remove your child from a doctor’s care, that doctor can accuse you of medical neglect or abuse and report you to CPS as just happened in Sacramento, CA recently where a child was removed from parents because they wanted a second opinion.2 If you decide you don’t want to use toxic chemotherapy and radiation treatments for your child’s cancer, they can force you to or take your child away – watch Cut, Poison, Burn for an illuminating perspective on this scenario.

Or if you decide you don’t want to vaccinate your child and they contract an infectious disease, you could be charged with medical neglect. Never mind US Federal law recognizes vaccines injure and kill some children. Never mind there is science documenting a whole spectrum of injury after vaccines ranging from autoimmune disease to brain inflammation to neurological impairment and death. Never mind that you did your research and decided the risk of the disease was better than the risk of the vaccine. If you don’t vaccinate and your child then becomes ill, you could be charged with child medical abuse or neglect and have your kids taken away because Dr. Offit and Co. decided it was so.

Dr. Offit discusses a situation where hundreds of unvaccinated people contracted measles and some died but fails to acknowledge the deaths and disabilities caused by measles vaccines. Nor does he mention all the outbreaks of measles in fully vaccinated populations. But that doesn’t matter. In Dr. Offit’s world, he gets to make the rules and then gets someone else to enforce them. He doesn’t have to live every day with a child damaged by a vaccine and his employers don’t have to pay anything for the harm they caused. Your child can be sacrificed all in the name of the greater good.

Unsurprisingly, Dr. Offit’s story has been picked up by several other corporate media outlets whereas a new piece of research, “Neurologic adverse events following vaccination”, has received total media silence. Go figure.

In another example of media hype and spin, The Australian newspaper in Australia ran this headline: “No jab, no play campaign reveals vaccination refusals high as babies die”.

From the title, one would think several babies had died recently but that is not the case. The story mentions several infant deaths – one from 2009, one from 2011, and one from 2012. While these infant’s deaths are tragic, given that they occurred in the past, one wonders whether this is truly news or rather a thinly veiled attack on those who question the safety of vaccines and vaccine schedules and an attempt to demonize them.

While this story attempts to place blame on non-vaccinators for these deaths, on whom does the author place blame when babies die after vaccines? The author also does not say whether the baby who died at 9 weeks had just received her 2 month shots, and whether the 4 week or 6 week old had received hep b at birth.

Also noteworthy is the claim that these areas of high “vaccine refusers” are alleged to have had higher rates of whooping cough outbreaks in recent years in contrast to the situation in the US where 40,000 cases have been seen in recent years, mostly in fully vaccinated people.

Of course addressing the complexity of the situation including infant death after vaccination, vaccine failure and long term health outcomes of vaccinated compared to unvaccinated children doesn’t serve the purpose of turning friend on friend and demonizing those who have educated themselves and chosen their own path in keeping the families well.

No one wants babies to die from infectious diseases or vaccinations but when journalists emphasize one over the other and in the process downplay the seriousness of vaccine injury and parental concerns over vaccines, they only serve to alienate more people, not make vaccine programs any safer.

Spinning the news may seem to serve their purpose of frightening parents in the short term but in the long run, more and more parents read these kinds of stories, lose faith in the mainstream media, and inform themselves through other means.

Read the story here.

For the past couple of months headlines decrying the measles outbreak of 1,000 cases in Britain have been plastered across the globe: from Britain to the US, to Viet Nam, Australia, and the Middle East. It has been so widely covered it surely must make one stop and consider whether this is not coordinated. (Bear in mind that 453 pedestrians died in Britain in 2011.1) Surely 1,000 cases of measles in a country of 60 million aren’t so important that they warrant global coverage, are they?

Or is it perhaps more the opportunity for the marketing machine of big pharma and global health to kick into action and shout from the roof tops that folks must be vaccinated. Perhaps it is also an opportunity to remind the public that research published by British gastroenterologist suggesting he had identified a new form of bowel disease in children with regressive autism after MMR was allegedly fraudulent. Several newspapers in Australia in the past few days even ran stories with the same title: “UK Measles Outbreak Linked to Vaccine Scare”.23 One does wonder.

After all, the jury is literally still out. Dr. Wakefield is suing the British Medical Journal (BMJ), the BMJ editor Fiona Godlee, and journalist Brian Deer for defamation and the suit should come up very soon. In addition, just last year Dr. Wakefield’s boss and supervisor on the study in question was fully exonerated of any and all wrong doing by the British High Court. In fact, the judge rebuked the British General Medical Council for their horrific handling of the case. The implication: this was a which hunt, not about truth.4

Not only will Dr. Wakefield see his day in court but it has been recently announced that a new vaccine is being developed to treat one of the symptoms of autism, namely bowel disease. So to be clear, Dr. Wakefield was crucified for daring to say he might have discovered a new type of bowel disease in children that seemed to sometimes follow MMR vaccination (according to the parents), and now vaccine makers have developed a vaccine to treat this bowel disease.5 Remember how health authorities and corporate media have reassured the public for years Wakefield’s findings were wrong – there is no such thing as inflammatory bowel disease. Oh the irony!

Aside from the incredibly scripted headlines circling the globe, there seems to be an abundance of contradictory data and information. There has been a measles outbreak in Turkey and according to an official from the Health Ministry, “Those between one and 19 years of age catching the disease had either not been vaccinated or could not develop immunity despite being vaccinated”, in other words they had either not been vaccinated or they HAD been vaccinated and the vaccine had failed.6

This point is driven home when one reads the honest assessment of the current measles outbreak in Pakistan where over 50% of the children contracting the disease had been fully vaccinated.7 The question that must be burning in everyone’s mind is, how many of the  1,000 cases of measles in Britain were amongst the vaccinated?

So far, the British government has been tight lipped on this point. Now have they revealed how many of the cases are actually confirmed by a lab test.

Perhaps it would not serve the dual purpose of pummeling Dr. Wakefield while scaring everyone into mass hysteria to get their measles shot if this potentially contradictory and rather damning data point were shared widely.

The bottom line is that measles outbreaks have been occurring in vaccinated and unvaccinated populations around the globe and no amount of blaming Dr. Wakefield can cover that up. For a full exploration of the fact that cases of reported measles actually declined after Dr. Wakefield published his paper, check out Dr. Edward Yazbak’s excellent investigation here in which he reveals that cases of measles actually went down after Dr. Wakefield’s paper.

Recently we have discussed the manner in which the mainstream media spins facts, research, dates, omits information, etc. to influence public perception. In this post, we share the experience of a mother whose perspective you are not likely to see on the nightly news.

Isabella Thomas, the mother of two children involved in the Lancet study that has caused such controversy about the MMR vaccine, has released the following statement:

Does the timing of media releases ever seem coordinated to you? Case in point: March 20, 2013, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released new data showing the autism epidemic has reached terrifying levels, affecting 1 in 50 children and 1 in 31 boys between, age 6 and 18.1 Then on March 29th, CDC published a new study in the journal Pediatrics which concluded that vaccines don’t cause autism. The message: Autism continues to rise to alarming levels, we don’t know why, but it has nothing to do with vaccines. Whew. You can relax.2

Or what about the recent news releases about chicken pox. First there was a study published in Pediatrics (yes, same journal as before – go figure) on April 1, 2013 concluding that the chicken pox vaccine not only works in 90% of recipients but lasts for 14 years. This news was followed quickly by “news” on April 11th, that an unvaccinated healthy 15 year old girl had died from chicken pox. The message is very clear: the vaccine works and if you don’t give it to your child, they could die.

The strange thing about the tragic news of this girl’s death is that it happened in 2009.3 There is no mention of the fact that about 14 people die each year from chicken pox or whether they were vaccinated, but this one case from 4 years ago occurred in an unvaccinated person.4 There is no mention of the fact that a sizable portion of the study recipients had disease “break through”, a euphemism for vaccine failure. There is no mention that there have been over 54,000 reports of adverse events after administration of Merck’s Varivax to the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS), including 2500 classified as serious.5 To be clear, this is in no way intended to undermine the tragedy of this girl’s death, we are merely noting its use 4 years after the fact to possibly manipulate the public.

While we are discussing the chicken pox vaccine, we should mention that not everyone thought the study published in Pediatrics was very high quality. Gary Goldman has published research on the connection between rising levels of shingles and the chicken pox vaccine.6 He notes in his critique of this recent study that the chicken pox vaccine may not be as effective as it appears at this point for two reasons. Firstly, there were still large numbers of cases of wild chicken pox circulating from 1995 when the vaccine was first introduced until 2003/2004 meaning that the vaccine recipients were getting “boosters” by being around kids who had wild chicken pox. The other potential confounder is that from 2006 on, a second dose of the vaccine was given to children providing yet another booster. In line with Goldman’s previous published findings, he projects that the effectiveness of the chicken pox will fall to below 70% in the next few years.

Perhaps also worth commenting on is the idea that the chicken pox vaccine is a success because it allegedly lasts 14 years. Given that a real case of chicken pox generally confers life long immunity, shouldn’t that be the benchmark? In particular as if the vaccine does not last life long, it will require repeated vaccination and thus exposure to the potentially dangerous compounds the vaccine contains and perhaps more importantly, it will delay “breakthrough infections” till later in life when they are much more dangerous. Childhood diseases are far more benign when they happen in childhood.

Until another decade passes, we probably won’t know the true effectiveness of the chicken pox vaccine but in the meantime it probably makes sense to take at least some of what the media puts out with a great big pinch of salt.

As always you can check out much of this science on our website here.

I was watching a video and heard a part that made me listen a little closer (4:40-5:20). This mom was talking about her son developing a fever and a rash after the MMR vaccine. I knew my son had something similar happen. That made me think and so I got out his medical records again.

This is from his medical records:

8/5: One year well baby appt. He had 103 fever and the doctor said to hold off on the vaccines for that day. My son had failure to thrive beginning around his 6-month vaccines and he was falling off the chart for no apparent reason. He was obviously not doing well and he was very behind in speech but that wasn’t a concern to the doctor.

8/12: I take him in for his vaccines, because the doc said to wait for his fever to go away, and it had, so I did the “responsible” thing and took him. He got MMR, Hib, and Prevnar.

8/18: Back to the doctor. He wasn’t eating well, he was sleeping a lot and very lethargic, and loose foul smelling bm’s 2-3 times a day, and having fevers. He had an orange color and the lymph nodes in his neck were huge. I swear, I thought my child had cancer because he was sickly and because of the swollen lymph nodes. My husband was deployed to make matters worse. He was assessed with anorexia and gave me a Peds GI consult and told me to log his diet (he was still breastfed but self weaned the next month) and add high calorie solids. Stopped making baby food and started buying it so I could log calories…I know, stupid, I was only 23. He was a great eater when he felt good.

8/25: Took him back yet again. Lymph nodes still swollen, intermittent fevers. Recent fever of 102 for 2 days. He developed a rash, was told it was Roseola. Still had loose stool and was all the time whining and crying. They did blood work. His CBC values were all crazy with Highs and Lows. Nothing further was done, except for some workups and GI tests for the failure to thrive. No cause was ever found.

Pictures at this time showed a sick a little boy. He was almost catatonic at times and his eyes seemed so hollow. He was so tired and sick and so not there. His birthday was August 5th, but we had to put it off until the end of August. The day of his party, I wasn’t even sure if he was well enough. He finally started getting better and looking better and gaining weight after the vaccine assault was over for a couple of years. But he had a hard time learning anything and sensory issues started to develop. He also became hyperactive.

When he started preschool (was vaxed at 4 also), he was having behavior and learning issues that were addressed by putting him on an IEP. My son is 9-yrs old and has PDD-NOS, several learning disabilities that we think are due to dyslexia, sensory processing disorder, mood liability, ADHD, delayed speech, language issues, slow processing, executive functioning problems, memory problems, auditory processing issues, etc, etc. Looking back at pictures and videos, he was such a great little boy! So bright eyed and all smiles. Something happened.

Now, I am SO grateful that he doesn’t have seizures and that he is high functioning and that he didn’t die, even. But I am so angry that my boy’s future and potential was taken! The doctor should have told me that my son was sick and had failure to thrive and shouldn’t have gotten those vaccines!!! His immune system was obviously impaired.

-Emily Bennett

Each month I write about books, DVD’s, organizations, trends, and events that are “on my radar” as they are important, timely and educational – which means they will empower you to think for yourselves, enable you to challenge the received wisdom, and give you ideas of how you might get involved to help create positive change on issues like vaccine safety, health freedom, individual rights, food safety and freedom, truth in science and medicine, and so much more. We hope it will be useful information to you all.

Thanks for being part of our community.    –Leslie Manookian, The Greater Good

April is Autism Awareness Month so autism is the focus of this newsletter.

In the run up to Autism Awareness Month, two very interesting things happened, firstly, CDC announced, with very little fanfare, that the autism rate has increased yet again from the figure of 1 in 88 school children announced in May of 2012 to a whopping 1 in 50 children today or 2% of all American children.1 To be fair, the rate of autism did not jump that much in one year, rather, the data released last May pertain to children who were 8 years old in 2008, whereas the new number of 1 in 50 kids was revealed after a recent national telephone survey of parents. But the bottom line is that autism numbers keep climbing:

1980 1:10,000
1995 1:500
2001 1:250
2004 1:166
2007 1:150
2009 1:110
2012 1:88
2013 1:50

The second very interesting thing that happened, only a week or so after the new autism numbers came to light, was that the Journal of Pediatrics published a study conducted by researchers for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) saying that vaccines don’t cause autism.2 While the timing of all this is interesting, what is also noteworthy is that the story of this CDC report has been carried in literally dozens and dozens of media outlets but when researchers found particles of vaccines and a fatal autoimmune reaction to those particles in young women’s brains who died after their Gardasil shots, the news was picked up by virtually none. Ditto that for pretty much any research identifying a down side to vaccines. Go figure.

So CDC says there is no connection between vaccines and autism, but what exactly did they investigate? The simplest study would have been to compare the rates of autism in kids who were vaccinated with the rate of autism in kids who were not vaccinated. But that is not what they did. Instead, they counted up the number of items in childhood vaccines that are there to stimulate the production of antibodies and tried to determine if there was a change in the rate of autism based on whether the kids got the vaccines according to the CDC schedule or on a more spread out basis. They also looked at whether there was more autism in kids who received more vaccines in a single day. The authors conclusion was that there was no connection between either multiple vaccines given in one day or the entire vaccine schedule given through two years of age.

So what is wrong with the study?

Firstly, vaccines don’t contain only antigens, ingredients designed to provoke an immune response. They contain all other sorts of ingredients like aluminum, formaldehyde, antibiotics, and polysorbate 80 that are known toxins – aluminum is a known neurotoxin and recent research shows it causes not only brain damage but is also linked to cancer.3 To investigate the connection between antigens and autism while excluding from the analysis all the other ingredients vaccines contain is sloppy at best and disingenuous at worst.

Secondly, the data the scientists used was old data from a study that has been called fraudulent. Why? Because the researchers hid the fact that their data showed that kids who received as little as 16 micrograms of exposure to the mercury in thimerosal in utero were 8 times more likely to receive a regressive autism diagnosis.4

Thirdly, the control group was not truly a control group. In scientific research, investigators compare a group of folks who have a condition or problem or receive a drug to folks who don’t have that condition or don’t receive the drug to determine outcomes. So in this study, the investigators should have compared kids who had autism to kids who did not have autism or any of its features. But they didn’t. Instead, 25% of their “control” group had “speech delay or language delay, learning disability, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or attention deficit disorder, or tics, or had an individual education plan” – all known to be features of autism, even if the children did not test for full blown autism.5

Comparing vaccinated kids to other vaccinated kids to determine whether vaccines cause autism is well, nonsense. The simplest and best way to determine if vaccines cause autism is to study kids who are and are not vaccinated and to compare the rates of autism. It is not rocket science. One has to question the desire of these researchers to actually find the truth given that they did not do that simple study. Parents have been clamoring for that study for years and it still has not been done. The only question you need to ask yourself is why not?

Some great articles to read this month:

Incredible article on autism by one of the Thinking Moms: How I gave my son autism 
New research into the dangers of aluminum: Aluminum Adjuvants
NVIC’s new billboard campaign: VACCINATIONS? Know the risks and failures.

Our culture confers a very high status and respect on all doctors and scientists as though they are somehow better or more ethical than the average person. Our culture also tends to assume that doctors are all knowing and always know more than those who aren’t doctors.

A case in point. I attended a meeting last week where I was discussing some science that contradicted the Federal government’s stance on some nutritional recommendations. A fellow participant of the meeting replied “well my dad is a doctor and he says, ….” The fact that this man’s father is a doctor does not mean he has necessarily read more than me, does not mean that he has not been influenced by flawed medical research or by a drug sales rep, does not mean that he is the holder of some absolute truth unavailable to the rest of us. Yet that was the message of his son and this is quite common in our culture. Of course, this is not to suggest that doctors know nothing, that they are all corrupt, that they are all arrogant, etc. It is simply to say that our society often seems to forget that doctors and scientists are people, just like the rest of us.

Last week I came across a couple pieces of important information that serve as a healthy reminder of this principle, that people in science and medicine are human, just like you and me. One of them was an article on Medscape called Five More Physicians Indicted in Massive Fraud Case. Reading through the article I learned that 9 physicians had been charged as part of a large operation defrauding Medicare, Medicaid and insurers. The article focuses on the “boss” of the operation but 9 physicians are accused of taking bribes. As is often said, it takes two to tango.

The other item I became aware of is an article in the New England Journal of Medicine called Selective Publication of Antidepressant Trials and Its Influence on Apparent Efficacy.  The authors examined 74 research trials registered with FDA to examine antidepressant drugs. Of those 74 studies, 38 were deemed positive and 37 studies were published. Of the remaining 34 studies deemed negative or questionable , only 3 were published. Interestingly, FDA recognized that all 38 of the positive studies were positive but when it came to the negative or questionable studies, the FDA took a far more lenient or forgiving view and classified many of the negative studies as positive, supporting their official conclusions and policy.

While the authors of the study call this “publication bias”, a less euphemistic term might be corrupt or fraudulent. As more and more research is published condemning both the accuracy and veracity of pharmaceutical paid “scientific” trials, and as this corruption is reported in the media, though often not in the corporate media, the public is awakening to the fact that scientists and doctors are just as human as the rest of us and therefore just as susceptible to wanting to get ahead, wanting to make money, wanting to avoid sticking their neck out, etc.

People are realizing that science is not some independent, absolute truth but the creation of humans, often designed to convey a message they want to convey, to an unwitting public. So when then the CDC wheels out another study claiming no link between vaccines and autism using data from a study condemned as fraudulent for concealing the fact that babies exposed in utero to just 16 micrograms of the mercury in thimerosal are 8 times more likely to receive an autism diagnosis, is it any wonder the public does not believe them?1

As we read this horrifically tragic story, we must ask ourselves, would this happen to a child without an autism diagnosis, would this happen to a child that was blind or deaf? Why is it that the parents of those with the ASD diagnosis are not to be believed when they tell medical professionals that their child’s digestion is not working and that they are in pain? These children have been injured and they deserve compassion and respect.

Patient Safety Awareness Week

Spotlighting Loyola University Medical Center: A Parent’s Perspective

“I need to tell you Alex’s story.” Dorothy Spourdalakis, Alex’s mom spoke professionally with a deliberateness I was not expecting—considering she has been by Alex’s bedside awaiting proper medical care for his gastrointestinal symptoms, for 19 days.

19 days. 456 hours. 27,360 minutes. 1,641,600 seconds.
This is Alex.

 opinions. Apparently that type of care isn’t available to children with an autism disability. We entrust our doctors and healthcare institutions to take care of our children who can’t speak for themselves and can’t advocate for their own safety. Where is the picture of Alex, locked in restraints, covered in a rash on their website?  Please call them and let them know the entire autism community is watching.”
http://www.loyolamedicine.org/Contact Vice President and CNE, Paula Hindel at 708-216-3802 to express your concerns for Alex’s care.Let CEO, Larry M Goldberg know what is happening to voiceless children in Loyola’s healthcare system.  708-216-3215Lisa Joyce Goes is a free-lance essayist, author, Contributing Editor for Age of Autism, and Co-Founder of The Thinking Moms’ Revolution.