This unease led me to devote the better part of 1982, the year we moved to Boston, to taking a closer look at the basic immunology we skimmed over lightly in med school. But it wasn’t until the middle to late ‘Eighties, when I began seeing significant numbers of vaccine-injured children, that all the book-learning suddenly became starkly and dreadfully real.

As physicians, we’re trained to look for the specific effects of each particular medicine that we give; so the first adverse effects I could be sure of were relatively minor illnesses that resembled or could be traced to specific vaccines or vaccine components because of signs or symptoms that were similar to the diseases they were directed against, like inflamed, painful parotid glands and swollen retroauricular and sub occipital lymph nodes after the mumps and rubella components of the MMR, and a high fever and white cell count of 32,000 after the DPT, with many immature forms in the blood smear that a pediatrician friend looked at and identified as pertussis.

By the late ‘Eighties, with the DPT and MMR each containing three different components, more and more new vaccines being introduced, and often several being given simultaneously at the same visit, it became increasingly difficult to identify a specific vaccine or component as solely or primarily responsible for any particular complication. But I began to notice that kids recently vaccinated were reacting non-specifically, by being more prone to contracting whatever acute infections were going around their school or neighborhood, and, most noticeably, by developing a more intense and prolonged version of whatever chronic illnesses they were already bothered by, like chronic ear infections, which were ubiquitous at that time.

At first, I thought the MMR might be the main one responsible, until I saw cases from the others, and then eventually the exact same response in the same child to two or more different vaccines. So it was clear that this nonspecific worsening was an adverse effect not of this or that vaccine, but of the vaccination process itself, which was one big reason we all were fooled and never even thought to look for it. At the same time it also became clear that these adverse reactions involved the whole spectrum of chronic diseases commonly seen in pediatric practice, from allergies,eczema, asthma, and diabetes to ADHD, autism, learning disabilities, and everything else in between, and again were difficult to detect because they were typical of the child, not the vaccine, and thus easily dismissed as a hypersensitivity. Nor were vaccines the only cause, with even the unvaccinated somewhat susceptible to them as well.

The causal effect of vaccines was even more elusive because of the simple fact that chronic diseases naturally tend to wax and wane idiosyncratically, according to no obvious or uniform pattern, so that the children had to be completely well and largely symptom-free for a period of at least three or four months. Under these circumstances, they would relapse strongly within a week or two of their next vaccination, whatever it was, so that its causal power could no longer be doubted. But treating them with antibiotics and other pharmaceuticals rarely met that standard. Their symptoms were relieved somewhat, but they were still sick, appearing and functioning below par. In my experience, it was necessary to withhold the drugs and treat them successfully with herbs, acupuncture, or homeopathic medicines. Then and only then, the exact same pattern was repeated, consistently enough to be the rule, rather than the exception: the disease would reappear in a big way, no matter which vaccine was given, what disease it happened to be, and how severely they suffered from it.
From one story to the next, I learned to expect that any child who got well for a period of months from asthma, eczema, ear infections, allergies, ADHD, autism, or any other chronic complaint would relapse strongly and predictably within one or two weeks of their next shots, whatever they were. I saw hundreds of kids with a wide variety of complaints that were made worse by their vaccinations in exactly the same pattern, removing any suggestion that they were merely aberrations or idiosyncrasies of rare, hypersensitive individuals.

It was at this point that my months of study really paid off. My primary focus had been on acute viral and bacterial infections with fever, which unleashed a massive outpouring of the immune system, requiring several different mechanisms acting in concert, until the foreign micro- organism is expelled from the body, leaving behind an encrypted memory of it that prevents reinfection in the future. This mighty process is of course exactly what vaccination is meant to replace, and is thus easily forgotten for that reason, while its all-important result cannot be achieved by antibody synthesis acting independently of all the rest. Most vaccines do in fact succeed in reducing the incidence of many such diseases, by provokingantibody synthesis over long periods of time; but to achieve that, the targeted virus or bacterium, or at least the information it contains, far from being expelled, must remain active in the body for as many years as possible.

In short, it finally dawned on me that, quite the opposite of the acute illnesses it’s designed to prevent, vaccination is by definition a chronic phenomenon, which means that the immunity it provides can never be more than a poor imitation of the real thing. It is therefore dangerously misleading if not the exact opposite of the truth to claim that vaccines protect us from or render us immune to acute diseases if in fact they drive the invading organisms or toxic derivatives of them deep into our vital organs and cause us to harbor them chronically if not permanently instead.

The broad spectrum of chronic illnesses that my clinical experience showed them to be implicated in making worse thus suggested the hypothesis that all vaccines were contributing in a big way to the enormous and ever-increasing burden of chronic disease afflicting our society, not as rare aberrations or side effects, but as something built into their design, an as yet unidentified feature of the vaccination process itself.

Gripped by the urgency of that realization, and unnerved by our obstinate inability and unwillingness to see it or take it seriously, I began combing through the scientific literature, and uncovered a substantial body of reputable, published research along the same lines, but likewise ignored by most practicing physicians, and contradicting what they are solemnly taught, fondly believe, and seldom question or doubt. I should add that the articles I found, like the clinical evidence just mentioned, are cited in my books, Vaccines: a Reappraisal, from 2016, and Conscientious Objector: Why I Became a Homeopath, from last year.

One study showed that the infant mortality rate (IMR) of 33 developed countries was directly proportional to the doses of individual vaccines and vaccine components required of infants in their first year of life. Another showed a similarly proportional effect on deaths and hospitalizations from the number of vaccines and vaccine components given simultaneously sat the same visit. A third compared the doctor and ER visits and hospitalizations of children receiving all the vaccines on the CDC’s recommended list with those receiving a smaller number, and found the “under-vaccinated” group much less in need of them.

But by far the most arresting statistic was provided by the large group of studies that showed children who came down with and recovered from measles, mumps, chickenpox, influenza, and other acute illnesses with fever were much less likely to develop chronic autoimmune diseases and various forms of cancer later in life, to an extent once directly proportional to the number of such infections recovered from.

The promise of good health revealed by these findings is so easy to redeem and so certain to benefit as to warrant general rejoicing, and immediately raises the question why the general public and indeed most doctors are completely unaware of it. One obvious reason is our almost universal and quasi-religious faith in vaccines as one of the greatest achievements of modern medicine, even though if not precisely because the research just cited is telling us loud and clear that vaccinating is not the way to develop a healthy immune system, and that we’re much better off learning how to be sick than vaccinating everybody against everything just because Big Pharma has the technology to pull it off.

In sum, the anecdotal evidence of my clinical experience led me to discover this confirmatory research, to formulate the hypothesis that seemed to follow from it, and, most important of all, to suggest exactly the sort of experiments that will be required to validate or refute it, to establish its truth or falsity as conclusively as possible. That is because it is no longer about this or that vaccine, but about the nature of the vaccination process in general. Nor is it about its effect on autism or any other disease, but simply its tendency to kill and maim in so many different ways. So what remains to be done is to compare the health and illness profile of large populations of both vaccinated and unvaccinated, precisely what the CDC and the vaccine manufacturers have so far declined to do. The obvious starting-point would be to compare the all-cause morbidity and mortality of two groups, those fully vaccinated according to the recommended CDC schedule and those not vaccinated at all.

The beauty of that study lies in its completeness, which guarantees that its results will be essentially conclusive, and therefore of exceptional and enduring value, no matter which side of the question they favor. For if it turns out that the vaccinated group prove to be less subject to death and serious disease, and thus actually healthier, than their unvaccinated counterparts, or even if the two groups are not significantly different, then all the nay-sayers like me will need to pipe down, surely a blessing to all concerned. But if, as I suspect, the unvaccinated prove to be significantly healthier, we will all need to look at vaccines in a different way. Vaccines will no longer be mandatory; Big Pharma will cease to dominate the CDC, the FDA, the NIH, and the medical profession; and they will again be made liable for the deaths and serious harm that the vaccines cause, just as every other industry must be.

It truly boggles my mind that the scientific and political leaders of our country, which claims to be second to none in its devotion to science, has never seen fit to conduct or even expressed the slightest interest in conducting such a study, at once so simple in design and so conclusive in its impact, whatever the result. So, to conclude, the punch line if not the whole point of all this is that the anecdotal evidence of hearing and taking seriously my patients’ stories was the missing link that pointed out not only what needs to be studied, but the urgency of doing so.