For the Duration: A Reflection
By Dan Burns
Dreams die hard. As a new Warrior Dad, early in the epidemic, I battled for Ben’s recovery, hoped my 4-year-old-son would join the mainstream soon. Bernie Rimland’s fiery voice, igniting dark facts, blazed up like a whirlwind, lighting our journey. Just beyond the horizon, truth would prevail; the bell curve on the autism incidence graph would trickle down to nothing. Ben, voiceless since his regression, would speak again. Soon.
Decades later, Ben is 27 and still mostly mute. Kindergarten classrooms in Kaufman County, Dallas, Austin, and Gun Barrel City overflow with damaged kids. Moving deeper, I see that the battle is not just about truth and facts. Vaccine promoters, the old warriors, have armies anchored in tectonic plates where hope and money, faith and values, collide with ours. They, too, are dreamers.
Consider John F. Kennedy’s Vaccine Assistance Act, a mass immunization program to safeguard the health of the nation’s youth, improve the vitality of the population, and build a great country by making vaccines available to families that could not afford them (1). And Jimmy Carter’s Childhood Immunization Initiative, launched to eradicate childhood afflictions, prevent mental retardation, protect children from disabilities caused by preventable disease, and reign in the spiraling cost of health care (2). Or Clinton’s Vaccines for Children’s Program and Comprehensive Child Immunization Act, promoted to lower vaccine prices, extend public clinic hours, and shield families that would be bankrupted by illnesses that could be prevented with a cheap, simple shot (3). And now the Affordable Care Act, aimed at reducing health care costs in part with free vaccines and funding for programs to promote them (4).
Ten years, twenty years. The journey continues. Mountains arise. We scale them. Infectious diseases dwindle, replaced by chronic illness. Some vaccines fail, are bolstered by more vaccines. Thirty years, forty years? The horizon recedes, yet the dream beckons still. Promoters study their incidence graphs and plan more shots. And we study ours.
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End Notes:
1) Elena Conis, Vaccine Nation: America’s Changing Relationship with Immunization, pp. 34-38.
2) Conis, pp. 93-100.
3) Conis, pp. 168-174.
4) Conis, p. 252.
Dan E. Burns, Ph.D., is the father of a 27-year-old son on the autism spectrum and the author of Saving Ben: A Father’s Story of Autism. Dr. Burns is a Contributing Editor to Age of Autism and serves on the Executive Leadership Team of Health Choice, advocating for vaccine-injured children and their parents. Through his dba, Appleseed Ventures, Dan empowers parents to organize communities where their adult children on the autism spectrum can live, work, play, and heal.
Apple/cedar rust summer was brought on by UN-usual weather pattern.
Posted by: Benedetta | December 17, 2014 at 09:36 AM
John said: "The "tailors" (the manufacturers) make up the invisible products which may in small part do what they say but are neither as effective or as safe as they pretend"
This summer has been a wet one here in the US, and on the cool side. The wet weather continued on into the fall. The whole of the United States have had constant strong sweeps coming out of Canada - not regular weather.
Anytime you have unusual weahter in nature something happens. 8 years ago an usual wet and extreme hot mid summer brought on something I had never seen before. Sure this diseae had been there all the time - by evidence of galls on the cedar trees but for the first time - and never before seen those gall burst open in huge masses of orange jelly almost covering the cedar trees. The apple trees develop a solid coating of orange/rust colored dust and died. I have never seen it ever that bad: Although it has always been there.
So this year for the first time ever - the flu shot - they got the wrong strain. Sure they did???? I had a professor that spent the entire lecture stop and wonder and marvel how they could choose the right vaccine. See; she knew enough of her subject to know that was impossible - but had faith that the God Doctors and God Scientist working for the NIH cold do it.
Hmmmmm; I have often wondered if most years - most people are not going to get many is any colds, or flus. So what happens in a year when there is a lot -- and we get to hear - Oh, we just messed up one time and got the wrong flu strain.
,
Posted by: Benedetta | December 17, 2014 at 09:32 AM
The politicians decree the objectives and define the markets. JFK decreed that the US would fly to the moon, and just possibly it did. JFK did not have to engage in any of the science or technology, he just decreed that it should happen. Immense patronage followed. Of course, the tail can wag the dog too (and oddly in A Midsummer Night's Dream the man in the moon has a dog). I don't know whether there was an industry telling him that this was what it/he needed to do, or whether it was just concern that the Russians would get there first. It was, of course, the tailors that proposed the invisible suit to the emperor, and he wouldn't have thought of it on his own.
Vaccines are perhaps a similar project but as we are seeing they are escaping the audit once again.
Posted by: John Stone | December 17, 2014 at 05:37 AM
Yes, John. We must have our wars, and bury our casualties. In secret.
Posted by: Dan Burns | December 17, 2014 at 05:16 AM
Dan
This is an important observation - we blame all sorts of people for what has happened but maybe the very worst thing is the way that this has been generated by politicians engaged in magical thinking. Vaccines are the emperor's new clothes in so many respects: you can banish disease - like hell! The "tailors" (the manufacturers) make up the invisible products which may in small part do what they say but are neither as effective or as safe as they pretend, and there is whole army of people ready to deny that their is a problem, pouring scorn at anyone who speaks up like the little boy, pronouncing the obvious. But the whole thing perhaps begins with the vanity of politicians.
I remember a relative reporting a middle ranking British politician saying to him that if you want to do good it is not effective to deal in individual cases: you could actually say that this is a Maoist comment (while the lady perhaps placed some value on her own individual reality she was paying scant regard to that of ordinary citizens). Shakespeare ironised this (Much Ado About Nothing, Henry V) when it is commented that most of the people who have died in battle do not have any name (and may therefore, as far as the great ones are concerned, just as well have never existed).
Posted by: John Stone | December 17, 2014 at 03:27 AM
So well said, thank you for writing.
Posted by: Twyla | December 16, 2014 at 11:57 AM
Thank you, Dan. For all you do, and to the price you've paid.
Silent eyes applaud you, and all the parents who are just doing their best to love their children.
Thank you. It doesn't go unnoticed.
Posted by: Zed | December 16, 2014 at 09:53 AM
That is quite a collection of presidents telling us their dreams of what the blessing of vaccinations will bring.
Note: President Carter said end mental retardation.
Tom Insel told us at the end of the first decade of this century that vaccines did not end that little problem -- that by the way is actually rising.
And so old guards bound to tectonic plates of old ideas vaccinate away.
This by the way -- is wonderful wording and thought Dan.
I suppose the history of all of this will just be a little blurp about how over vaccinating did not work and nothing about how stubborn, hateful, forceful, unreasonable to the point of insanity over vaccinating was. That is if anyone is left that can read. And there sure won't be much thought on the huge population that was over vaccinated.
Just will read like the history of the Applachians is all - stories of unreasonable killings, drug smuggeling Deliverance. Only there will be no place to migrate to.
Posted by: Benedetta | December 16, 2014 at 09:49 AM