“One of the fatal flaws of human consciousness is the desire to believe in an authority that knows right from wrong and good from bad.” – David
What do you think of vaccines? Are they good or are they bad? I read articles proclaiming vaccines as the great evil destroying our children’s health, and others claiming the exact opposite. The writers of these articles are not crackpots and nut jobs, but well respected researchers into public health. How can such intelligent people have such diverse viewpoints?
Unfortunately intellectual intelligence has little to do with common sense or emotional intelligence. Common sense requires being able to see things from the big picture and not the personal picture. Our system of education demands specialization – learning more and more about less and less. We train for “experts” in our culture, not wisdom. We want people who know everything about tiny focused areas of knowledge, not people who see how everything connects to everything else and affects everything else.
I think this stems from our hilarious belief that if we understand something completely enough, we can control it. This makes as much sense as walking out onto a busy freeway and thinking you are safe just because you are an automotive engineer and completely understand cars. Anyone with experience of a 12 step tradition is well familiar with the phrase “our knowledge avails us not.”
My belief and experience says that this is where the argument about vaccines comes from. Experts in tiny specialized areas of knowledge argue with each other because their viewpoints differ due to the differences in their specializations. They argue from their expert knowledge because they have no wisdom.
If you are a public health worker going into disease ridden areas of Africa where the incidence of say polio is one child in five, then vaccines that drop the incidence down to one child in a thousand is a miracle. If you are a community health worker in an upper class area of America where the incidence of polio is one child in ten thousand and every case of polio is being caused by administration of the polio vaccine, then the vaccine looks like a bad thing. Because of their fundamentally different reference points – Africa versus America – they will see the same vaccine completely different.
Here is what I see – vaccines save many lives from needless suffering, and they also create needless suffering for many others. The real problem is we want absolutes in a world made of variety. We want the illusion of safety in a world full of risks. There is no 100% safe anything in the world.
What makes the whole issue so confusing is that the risks are unknown for any given individual. We are all different and our susceptibility to any given substance is hugely different from the person sitting next to us. We don’t know if something will cause us a problem or not, and not knowing drives us crazy. Since we can’t know, we slip into psychological defense mechanisms to deny the unknown risks. It is our only way to manage the anxiety unknown risk creates in us. We use denial, illusion, belief in authority, and a host of other mechanisms to create the feeling of ease we need.
I am not much help because my message is to strip away the illusions and confront the anxiety head on. “Life is uncertain, deal with it,” is the message I promote, because embracing “what is” gives us the maximum ability to adapt to reality in the most effective manner for us. My stance is that there are no right answers, only answers that work for us in the moment. For any choice or answer to be “right,” everyone would have to have the exact same needs, wants, and circumstances. I do not see that being the case.
The reality is we are all different. More importantly for this subject, our immune systems are all different. For example, when the flu is going around at work, does everyone get it? No, only a portion of the people get it. We make up stories about why one person got the bug and another did not, but the reality is everyone in the office got equally exposed, but only a few people actually got sick. In fact, this is the essence of the vaccination theory: you can make people immune to various bugs by changing their immune system with a vaccine.
The real question is not whether vaccines work. The question is how well do they work and at what risk? With every vaccination there is the reality that a certain number of people will react negatively. Differences in their immune systems will cause them to develop horrible consequences to the vaccine such as autism, paralysis, and even death.
For instance, all the cases of polio reported in this country over the last 20 years have been caused by the polio vaccine. There have been no natural cases of polio in this country for many years. Yet we got to this state of affairs because of the use of polio vaccinations back when I was a kid. So those people who contracted polio from the vaccine basically rolled the dice and lost.
Here is where the hard choices have to be made. We have to assess the risks compared to the consequences. We need to know how common are the negative consequences to be able to make a reasonable assessment. How bad are the consequences? What are the consequences of not getting vaccinated?
Getting this information is difficult. Just this last week two of the top virologists at Merck, the maker of the MMR vaccine, confessed to hiding test data that showed the vaccine caused autism. The data we need is controlled and obtained by the companies that make billions of dollars by selling the vaccines. They are hugely motivated to minimize or suppress any information that says their product causes problems.
The vaccine theory is a good one because it is based on how we naturally fight disease – we form antibodies against it. The vaccine is supposed to make you form antibodies against a disease without actually giving you the disease. How do they do that? They may give you a similar but weakened form of the disease, or a killed version that your immune system will still form antibodies to. The problem is a weak or killed version of the disease does not generate a strong response from our immune system. Our system easily knows the vaccine is not really a threat, so no great antibody reaction is needed.
What vaccine designers do is add poisons to the vaccine to trigger a stronger response. These are called adjuvants and include aluminum salts, mercury, foreign proteins, and certain oils. These can trigger neurotoxic responses, which is why so many of the side effects of vaccines seem to be of a nervous system variety. The newer oil based adjuvants are so strong they can hyper-activate the immune system so much that they induce autoimmune diseases. These are poison effects that everyone will have consequences from – that is their point – to produce immune hyper-activation consequences so the body will react strongly enough to the vaccine. Most people can handle it, but a significant number can’t. Are you one of those people? There is no way to know – yet. In the future gene testing may enable us to identify who is at risk and who is not.
In a study just released, it has been found that childhood autism, leukemia, and lymphoma rates jumped each time vaccines that included human fetal cell tissue called WI 38 and the retrovirus HERV were used. The FDA knew these were dangerous and so limited their levels to 10 mg per dose, but measures of vaccines find the typical dose has anywhere from 142 mg to 2000 mg.
So what do you do? First you get informed. Seek out many sources of information in order to balance the biases each source will have. Next, assess your need. For instance, I get a tetanus shot as needed because tetanus is everywhere in the soil here in the valley. I get in the soil when I do projects at home, so I am at risk. On the other hand, I don’t have a uterus so my chances of getting cervical cancer from HPV is small, so I forgo the HPV vaccine. I know that every vaccine will have some level of detrimental effect on my body because of the adjuvants, so I will skip any vaccine I don’t feel is really necessary for my health.
But if I wanted to travel to a part of the world where certain diseases were common, I would get vaccinated because the risk factor is high compared to the inherent risk of getting vaccinated. On the other hand, I make the choice not to go to such areas of the world to avoid both the risk of the disease and the vaccine risk.
A part of my attitude regarding vaccines as they relate to myself is because my immune system is mature and my health good. Being mature greatly reduces my risk factors. In my opinion vaccinating immature immune systems is not only worthless but highly dangerous. Infants don’t even form antibodies, so vaccinating them is pointless, but the adjuvants will damage their nervous system in its most vulnerable time – while it is still forming. For young children in this country most vaccinations are not needed in my opinion as the consequences of contracting such diseases as measles are not significant, but do your own research as risk levels change yearly. But if you are a young woman who might become pregnant and have never had measles, then I would strongly recommend getting vaccinated because the consequences of contracting measles while pregnant are so horrible for the baby, that the risk is simply not worth it.
Some childhood diseases that are minor for children become serious when you get older. So if you do not get the childhood diseases as a child, you might want to get vaccinated once you become a young adult. My son almost died of a measles infection that went into his lungs while he was in Japan – an infection that if he had gotten it while he was young, would have been minor.
If your immune system is weak or you are immuno-compromised, then I would seriously consider avoiding vaccines. Some people are just not good risks for being vaccinated. Current neuro-inflammation or blood-brain barrier compromises also make you a poor risk. It is all about weighing risks.
Life is a risk / reward experience. There are no right answers where you have a guarantee about the outcome. There are no completely safe choices. Every choice has consequences. Accepting that reality guides you to figuring out what choices are best for you and your personal circumstance. This will produce the best chance of desirable outcomes for you. In the end, you roll the dice and live with the outcome.
Take care,
David