Louise Kuo Habakus on the Every Child By Two Press Conference
By Louise Kuo Habakus
Late last night, a dozen of us were online, e-mailing about the ECBT-AAP press conference that we had just learned would take place today. We shared notes, compiled information and put out the word to get parents to NYC by 10:30am. I couldn’t make it but I prepared a statement and my good friend and fellow parent and health practitioner, Lisa Rudley, said she’d try to read it.
It’s Tuesday at 12:40pm and Lisa called. “Louise, it was worse than the AMA seminar we attended.” We had started calling ourselves “Thelma and Louise” after attending that seminar in June, intended for doctors seeking Continuing Ed credit. That seminar was bad. I asked her, could this really have been worse?
“I arrived at the Gramercy Room on the third floor of the Peninsula Hotel, walked up to the first person I saw, stuck out my hand and introduced myself.”
And that’s how Lisa met Paul Offit.
The press conference was many things. But it was mostly horrible. There they were, the panoply of The Vaccine Establishment, all scrubbed and shiny, smiling behind their multi-million dollar industry, government and Hollywood armor. Smug, arrogant and entitled.
The parents and grandparents arrived from all over, Westchester, Long Island, Lancaster, PA, New Jersey and even Arizona, to bear witness and stand firm. Most of them didn’t sleep much the preceding night because they were busy making last minute arrangements to attend. Our parents did not arrive in limos. And some, including Katie Wright and Rita Palma, didn’t get to attend the event at all. They weren’t allowed in the room because they posed a security risk or their attire wasn’t deemed appropriate.
“During the Q&A, I didn’t say a thing, Louise. Not one thing. There was too much to say. How do I break through when their ears and eyes are closed to all that we see and hear? How do I communicate in a sound bite world?”
I could hear the frustration in Lisa’s words and that familiar anger boiled up inside. Lisa talked about courageous parents such as Mary Holland, and reporters from Spectrum Magazine and Insider Edition, who were able to ask the challenging questions we all wanted to ask, demanding Offit and others to address the science, the egregious conflicts of interest, the sheer numbers affected, the words of Dr. Bernadine Healy and others who are breaking ranks with their colleagues to speak out. After Mary and others spoke, the relief felt by Lisa and others was palpable, to finally hear the truth embedded in the questions asked, even though we knew to expect the well-crafted excuses and dismissals and rationales that predictably unfolded.
After Mary’s pointed questioning, there was a perceptible energy shift in the room. ECBT representatives took advantage of Rosalynn Carter’s early departure to reassert control. After parent Kevin Barry asked if the remaining panel members would continue to answer questions for the benefit of both press and parents, Ms. Peet and Dr. Offit happily assented but ECBT’s Amy Pisani swiftly declined, instead directing audience participants to ask their questions individually, away from the raised antennae and poised pen of the reporters. When Kevin proceeded to handout copies of research documentation related to questions that he was unable to put forward, Amy stepped in yet again and chided Kevin, essentially tell him that it was their event on their nickel and to cease and desist.
Another highlight of the press conference is a new quote from Dr. Offit. This morning, he shared with participants and press alike that our children’s immune systems have the capacity to respond to as many as 100,000 vaccines at once, not the mere and oft-quoted 10,000 figure he offered to the press in 2002. He neglected to share, however, the details of this new scientific study upon which his revised estimate is based.
As Lisa stood up to leave, she was surprised by the emotion welling up and she held back tears. Stepping outside, she was immediately greeted by nearly a dozen parents, familiar faces including Rita and Katie and others who were barred from entering the press conference. They were carrying signs and photos and chanting “My Kids My Choice” and “Too Much Too Soon.” They were loud and they would not be denied. It was the perfect antidote to the morning’s messages of repression and denial.
We know too well that this morning’s press conference is not our only battleground. The battle is being fought across the country, with school nurses, doctors, legislators, work colleagues, family, friends and neighbors. Mainstream parents are hearing and talking about our very mainstream message. This is a grass roots movement and it is powerful. In New Jersey and New York, I have been giving lectures on Vaccine Choices for Parents every month since April and the response has been phenomenal. We have four more scheduled in the next two months with many more on the way. We’re bringing parents together to watch Vaccine Nation. We’re forwarding our message far and wide through cyberspace and we won’t stop until the truth is told. Join us. Contact me at [email protected] if you want to get involved or attend one of my talks. Here is the statement I wrote last night for Lisa to read:
The rise in neuro-immune disorders in the past four decades in industrialized countries coincides with the substantial addition of new vaccines to the childhood schedule and with rapidly increasing compliance rates.
Vaccine pre-licensure studies are not designed to detect causation between vaccination and autoimmune diseases or autism. If you don’t look for it, chances are you won’t find it. But don’t say the studies fail to prove a link. Because you never set out to answer the question.
Don’t ask Pharma because they answer to their shareholders first.
Don’t ask paid spokespeople, because you get what you pay for.
And don’t ask the CDC because they just admitted that the database and methodology they used to prove vaccines don’t cause autism were flawed and misleading.
If vaccines did not cause injury and death, there would not have been nearly $2 billion in compensation paid out to families.
Vaccines cause injury and death. Does the government have the right to force all children to be vaccinated if the causal research has not been done?
It’s quite simple. Do the analysis, tell the whole truth, let parents decide.
If you receive money from the vaccine industry, do us a favor and stand down. Your words hold no currency.
Truth has a funny way of prevailing. Each of us will answer to and be judged by the generations to follow.
A special note to Dr. Offit. Self-promotion and personal enrichment have always invited scrutiny. You actively court the media for personal gain. By all appearances, you have never turned down a Pharma grant, stipend, award, consulting gig or media event to pad your wallet and sell vaccination to the masses. And yet you decline to be interviewed by Sharyl Atkisson of CBS News who has uncovered egregious examples of conflict of interest on your part and on the part of those by whom you are paid? Face your critics, Dr. Offit. America deserves to take its measure of you as a medical professional and a public health servant.
Louise Kuo Habakus is a parent of two vaccine-injured children. She received her Master's and Bachelor's degrees from Stanford University and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, junior year elect. She was a senior corporate executive for fifteen years. In her last position before retiring, she was a Managing Director and ran corporate marketing for Putnam Investments, one of the world's largest investment management firms. Louise received certification in Integrative Nutrition from Columbia Teachers College in 2007. She provides nutrition and wellness counseling to the parents of vaccine-injured children. Louise lectures, researches and writes about vaccination safety, parents' choices and informed consent. She believes that there is no single issue affecting our nation's children that is more important than mandatory vaccination and its myriad societal, political, medical and financial ramifications.
I met you at David Kirby's lecture at NYU in June. I am happy to receive your emails and blogs. That press conference must have been unbelievable. I often wonder if the rate of autism is any different among scientologists, since they do not believe in medications of any kind. I hope to attend one of your lectures soon.
Posted by: Joyce Lieb | August 20, 2008 at 11:41 PM
Hi, Sonja. The legacy we are leaving our children, a massively damaged and compromised environment included, is shameful. While global warming will most certainly affect our children in a most devastating fashion, it is not an intervention squarely targeted at them, in a colossal, multi-generational experiment, without anywhere close to the standards of scientific rigor that we all should have unilaterally required, before we blindly surrendered our most precious children in this sacrificial and tragically unquestioning manner. Unlike global warming, however, there is something we can do right now to end the perpetration of this madness. We can stop over-vaccinating our children with the blind and pathetically naïve hubris of those who so want to believe that a man-made intervention can have a desired result, only that result, and absolutely no other, unintended result that might perhaps be equally or even more devastating than the problem we initially set out to conquer. And so I would, without question, pursue the issue of forced vaccination to protect the health, welfare, biological integrity and best interests of our nation’s children, over any other issue facing them, every single time. If our children continue to become injured and impaired at this same rate, we will have no future worthy of the promise upon which this country is based because we will not be free. And I do not believe that to be hyperbole. America will not be able to compete in the global economy and we will not be able to defend ourselves. Our health care system is already in crisis... barely affordable and wholly inadequate in the face of ever increasing chronic disease. How will we shoulder the extreme financial burden when so many sick and substantially incapacitated children become wards of the state upon turning 18? And how can we deny that there are so many more vaccine-injured children than is ever acknowledged? The sheer numbers of children with asthma, diabetes, severe allergies, anaphylaxis, ADHD, seizure disorders, MS, juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, OCD, speech delays, sensory dysfunction… and more, are staggering and costly beyond our wildest imaginations. Not to mention the social dislocation and personal suffering that occurs within marriages, extended families and school communities that pit special needs kids against the mainstream in a zero sum, no-win budgeting equation. And astonishingly enough, there is no end in sight. To pay for the immense damage caused and exacerbated by vaccination, we will be required to divert funds that should otherwise be going to extremely urgent and worthwhile causes. Global warming included. But let’s not forget that you and I and many of the readers of this blog are on the same side. Because we care about what’s not right. And we’re not taking it anymore. Louise
Posted by: Louise Kuo Habakus | August 07, 2008 at 08:49 AM
"Louise Kuo Habakus ... believes that there is no single issue affecting our nation's children that is more important than mandatory vaccination and its myriad societal, political, medical and financial ramifications."
Unfortunately, there is ... global warming.
Posted by: Sonja Grear | August 06, 2008 at 04:56 PM
Your "don't ask" section about nonexistent vaccine safety studies is the best summary I've read to date. I'd love to see you rewrite this article into a brochure that could be sent to editors, legislators and physicians all across the country.
Posted by: nhokkanen | August 06, 2008 at 02:10 PM
I cannot even imagine how it must have felt to be in that room filled with all those arrogant faces.....evil.
Please know how thankful we are to you for representing us.
Posted by: Carolyn | August 06, 2008 at 09:21 AM
Louise -- Thank you for your wonderful commentary. I am so very proud to be able to call you my friend, too. I would strongly encourage anyone who has not yet heard Louise speak to attend one of her lectures. I have done a lot of research, but even I did not uncover some of her facts, especially about how other countries (like Japan) have responded to vaccine injuries by changing their vaccine schedule to make it safer for children. The revised policy in Japan became "Every Child After Two," and they were rewarded with a dramatically lower infant mortality rate immediately after they implemented this policy.
Hey, JB and/or David K, or anyone else at AOA - My hope is that maybe you can track the annual numbers for SIDS in the USA and see how it correlates with the increased numbers of vaccines now mandated. (There seemed to have been a lot of SIDS cases, especially in four month old infants reported in the US media outlets this past year.) I would also like to see someone write about Japan's lowered infant mortality and that of other countries where they do not vaccinate anywhere near our levels, or have changed to a less aggressive vaccine policy. Thanks.
Posted by: Gayle | August 06, 2008 at 08:44 AM
Amanda Peet may be vaxing, but I guarantee the doctors are not doing to her kid what they did to some of ours. She'll never get the 9 in one day that Hannah got.
Posted by: AnneS | August 06, 2008 at 06:52 AM
Wow,powerful recap.Thanks well done.
Posted by: Richard | August 06, 2008 at 12:40 AM
Thank you so much to Louise and Lisa for filling us in. I so wish I could have been inside to hear Mary Holland ask that question! Really well said, thank you!
Posted by: Katie Wright | August 05, 2008 at 09:27 PM