Dealing with "Vaccine Refusing Parents?" How About Listening?
By Anne Dachel
Times are difficult for the vaccine defenders. They have to keep trying to convince us that vaccines don't hurt kids because the damage is everywhere.
Here are two old hands at vaccine promotion, Dr. Arthur Caplan and Dr. Paul Offit, in a video interview called, "How to Deal With Vaccine-Refusing Parents." Caplan and Offit are shown discussing what to do about parents who don't vaccinate. It's time to get tough.
A lot of it is the same old, same old. We're told that there is "a mountain of evidence" that shows vaccines don't cause autism. Tens of millions of dollars have been spent on vaccine research, according to Offit. There are vague references to older parents and the environment, but no real concern over what the specific triggers might be. We're told whatever causes autism, happens BEFORE BIRTH. Offit says, "When you have autism, you are born with autism. There is no changing that, and to some people, that is helpful to know."
The idea that a baby is being exposed to dangerous toxins and viruses in vaccines is dismissed. Offit pretends that bacterial exposure through injection is the same as on the surface of our bodies.
"When you are in the womb, you are in a sterile environment. When you enter the birth canal and the world, you are not, and very quickly there are trillions of bacteria on the surface of your body. I'm not trying to sound like Carl Sagan, but you have about 100,000 trillion (1014) bacteria on the surface of your body. You actually have more bacteria on the surface of your body than the number of cells in your body.
"We have a way of carrying bacteria from one place to the next, and to which you make an immune response. Adults typically make as much as 5 g of secretory immunoglobulin A and immunoglobulin G daily to make sure that those bacteria stay at the mucosal surface.
"One single bacterium out of the trillions of bacteria on your mucosal surfaces has between 2000 and 6000 immunologic components. If you add up all of the immunologic components in vaccines that are given in the first few years of life, it comes to about 160. It's literally a drop in the ocean of what you encounter and manage everyday, but you don't see that."
Offit neglects to tell us we're not just talking about bacteria. Vaccines contain a lot of scary manmade ingredients. Those include things like lab-altered viruses and bacteria along with GMO products that humankind has not previously experienced. He doesn't mention that doctors like his wife have no liability for vaccine injury.
Offit made an emotional plea. "I have seen my wife progress through this, and she has gone 180° toward the opposite view. She is far more passionate.She says, 'Let me love your child.Don't put me in a position where I have to practice substandard care. Don't put me in a position where I'm sending your child out into this world that is becoming progressively more dangerous, where they can get pneumococcal disease or varicella and suffer that. Don't put me in that position. It's like coming to me and saying, 'I love my child, but I don't trust car seats.'"
If Offit's wife is so altruistic, I'd like to hear her say, "I'll take full responsibility if your child has any bad reaction to my vaccines." That never happens.
Most of the talk was the tired mantra, vaccines are safe, vaccine save live. Autism wasn't important at all here. It's clear that it's totally acceptable to have mind-boggling numbers of disabled children that we don't see in the adult population. The message is, "So what if we don't know the cause?"
Autism isn't the problem. Exempting parents are.
And if there weren't enough reasons to worry about vaccine side effects, Offit talks about "the next great platform" in the promotion of vaccines: VACCINATING PREGNANT WOMEN. He lauds the use of the whooping cough vaccine in the third trimester.
Offit speculates on the future.
"We could have a meningococcal vaccine in pregnancy to avoid the need for the meningococcal vaccine that is given in the first year of life. I would like to think that down the line, we will have a respiratory syncytial virus vaccine that is given during pregnancy."
There is no end in sight. While our attention today is on childhood vaccines, that will have to be expanded to include prenatal vaccines. I can imagine that side effects, including miscarriages, could be easily dismissed as coincidental. It will be much easier with pregnant moms than it is with children. It's hard to imagine what the future holds.
Anne Dachel is Media Editor for Age of Autism and author of The Big Autism Cover-Up: How and Why the Media Is Lying to the American Public, which goes on sale this Fall from Skyhorse Publishing.
to david m burd, That is interesting information. We have a similar situation here in India currently. There is an area around Gorakhpur in which , for a couple of years , many children are dying of meningitis. This is an area that used to have "Japanese encephalitis" , so the knee jerk reaction of the authorities was to force all children to be vaccinated with two doses of Japanese encephalitis vaccine. Just two problems - This equals two doses of high level vaccine mercury- enough to severely damage a child's immune system- and secondly, the meningitis going around is something else- It is not the "Japanese encephalitis" Therefore, once a child gets sick, he does not recover and the number of deaths has been very high. When is the medical profession going to look at the problem of mercury in vaccines damaging the immune system?
Posted by: Cherry Sperlin Misra | April 24, 2014 at 03:56 PM
Dr. P. has a prominent role in the new pro-vax "documentary" produeced by, literally, high schoolers, The Invisible Threat. They're going to show it to our national legislators on May 1, to get their support for draconian measures to take away vaccine choice. Dr. P. earnestly says that there are holistic doctors out there who refuse to see any child who has been vaccinated. Projection much?
Posted by: cia parker | April 22, 2014 at 10:11 PM
Cia -- thanks for your response to my comment. Like Allies in WWII we are totally on the same team as to fighting the awful catastrophic toxicities of vaccines. Yet, on other related "virus" issues you addressed we are quite at odds, so be it. Cheers! ps: my email is [email protected]
Posted by: david m burd | April 22, 2014 at 08:08 PM
I think the Spanish flu of 1918-9 was caused by natural mutations of the viruses. I think it was the first H1N1 flu, and then the swine flu five years ago was another. The swine flu was not nearly as dangerous as they thought it would be, because everyone's immune systems had some familiarity with the viruses from previous experiences with the flu. Completely new pathogens cause high mortality because no one's immune system has seen anything like them before, and doesn't know how to defend itself against it: if it had met anything similar, it would already have known to some degree how to react to the new threat. Ebola has been devastating in Africa because it is such a completely new pathogen. Like AIDS, probably derived from viruses in apes, consumed as bush meat, or in the case of AIDS, transmitted to thousands through contaminate polio vaccines used in massive vaccination programs.
I have read convincing evidence of how harmful the use of aspirin to treat victims of the Spanish flu was, and is another example of the wisdom of avoiding pharmaceutical drugs whenever possible.
Homeopathy had a high success rate in treating the Spanish flu, much higher than the clueless allopathic doctors, because it treats based on the symptom picture rather than the individual pathogens, and indicates to the immune system how it would be appropriate to react.
A devastating new flu mutation is possible, but the flu vaccine is always dangerous and usually worthless. Most flu deaths from the Spanish flu were caused by bacterial pneumonia, which could now be treated with antibiotics. It would be better to educate people on ways to prevent flu, and also to treat it when it occurs, with naturopathic, vitamin, and homeopathic therapies (see Randall Neustaedter's The Flu Guide).
Posted by: cia parker | April 22, 2014 at 12:50 PM
Jeanette Bishop & All,
Referring to the fear mongering statement "the next pandemic we are due to have any year now" is the height of terrible irony since we are smack in the middle of an "Autism Spectrum Pandemic + All the Other Chronic Afflictions Pandemic Caused By Vaccines" !!
Irony piled upon irony is the Great Spanish Flu Pandemic of 1918-1919 was clearly CAUSED by the onslaught of hundreds of millions of injected doses of churned-out, hideously toxic, pus-concocted vaccines then injected to all the millions of new military recruits and scores of millions of fear-mongered public.
So, the monstrous medical blunder of 1918-1919 set the stage for today's dogmatic medical mindset that the FLU can destroy the human race. What a crock of horse manure - yet ever emulated by the likes of Paul Offit, and recently shown by the Medical Industry's fabricated 2009 H1N1/Swine flu "pandemic" - yet another pandemic that was truly manmade.
Posted by: david m burd | April 22, 2014 at 07:00 AM
And the next "great platform" for vaccines?
So with all those prenatal vaccines in the pipeline, the agenda now is to make autism something you are born with? I guess that would be so much more convenient than dealing with parental accounts of regressive autism floating around on that devil-of-a-problem internet!
I'm thinking that with what they saw with rhogam injections and autism risk, not that it prevented "regressive autism," that they suspected that recommending prenatal flu would likely keep autism numbers up around the time thimerosal was coming down in the postnatal schedule.
Then they got all this nice legislation set up to prepare for "the next pandemic we were due to have any year now" that protected vaccine makers/administrators from liability unless the plaintive could show "clear evidence of willful misconduct that resulted in death or serious physical injury."
And for some reason, after a redefinition of pandemic, we conveniently get one in '09 and suddenly CDC is recommending two flu vaxes for pregnant women in one flu season, never-mind data showing the flu vax increased risk for autism 8 fold, as we have that convenient legislation. Did they want to experiment just a little bit more for one flu season
to get more data on prenatal vax risks and autism? Oh and then remember to change the DSM diagnostic criteria about three years after the 2010!
Am I reading too much into Offit's as far as I can tell completely false statement: "When you have autism, you are born with autism. There is no changing that, and to some people, that is helpful to know?"
Posted by: Jeannette Bishop | April 22, 2014 at 12:42 AM
If we are subjected to so many bacteria and other microbes without any danger then why on earth do we need to vaccinate?
Posted by: rtp | April 22, 2014 at 12:10 AM
Offit's wife: "Don't put me in a position where I have to practice substandard care." What kind of care does she practice with vaccine-injured children? Or, if she doesn't believe that vaccines cause injury, what kind of care does she practice with autistic children? Does she treat their medical issues? Does she send them to a GI specialist to look for the causes of the intestinal pain? Does she test for and address vitamin deficiencies? Mitochondrial dysfunction? Lyme Disease? Heavy metal toxicity?
Or does she just prescribe ADD/ADHD drugs, Tamiflu, Tylenol, and give them shots?
Posted by: Taximom5 | April 21, 2014 at 11:55 PM
Does anyone believe this old fool?! Paul Offit - What a complete moron! And where are his colleagues to straighten this out? Is the whole medical practice bought? Doesn't anyone care that 1 in 68 has autism? Its really academic misconduct that CHOP and University of Pennsylvania still pull for this conflict of interest and atrocity by injection happening to our children. My 14 year old son wants others to know he was vaccine injured because he doesn't want them to experience what he experienced. Now that is all I need to know.
Posted by: MotherofPossibility | April 21, 2014 at 10:02 PM
Of course he wants to vaccinate pregnant women now. then he can later come out and say "See! I told you so! They are all born with it! The only problem is going to be that they ALL will be "born with it" thanks to the maddest doctor/scientist since Josef Mengele.
Posted by: Haven DeLay | April 21, 2014 at 09:45 PM
And pray tell, Paul Offit, how are these vaccines given in pregnancy going to be studied? For how many years? Please give us specifics. If this were to happen I hate to even think what kind of effects we will see in our children. It is just convenient for Dr. Offit to think children are "born with autism" so he can feel he's not to blame. Of course it's all mind games.
As to the news that yet another celebrity has comeout and said she doesn't vaccinate (Alicia Silverstone), this is going to get funnier. The skeptics now have to broaden their numbers of those that come out that they need to refer to (Kristin, Jenny, Mayim, Alicia...) I bet most of the celebs don't give any or only partially vaccinate. They should all just come out now- hey there's safety in numbers.
Posted by: Mom | April 21, 2014 at 08:43 PM