Vaccination is possibly the single most controversial issue in public health. Western medicine has devised a number of key strategies for managing health, and the three most widely used are drugs, surgery and vaccines. Drugs and surgery have thousands of years of historical use, but until around 70 years ago, most drugs were derived from plant-based or natural inorganic compounds.
Vaccines are much newer, being introduced by the likes of Jenner, Pasteur and Koch towards the end of the 18th century. The main idea has always been to trigger the immune system with an attenuated (or similar) form of a given pathogen, usually a virus or bacteria, in the hopes of ‘priming’ the immune system, so it can deal with the ‘real thing’ should it be encountered later. As immunity doesn’t always last indefinitely, there’s also the common use of ‘boosters’.
There are, of course, other ways to prime our immune systems, albeit not usually with the same specificity we can get from vaccines. One method involves allowing a child’s naí¿ve (unchallenged) immune system to be challenged by natural exposure to the environment. Kids locked away in hermetically sealed houses won’t develop the same level of natural immunity as children who regularly play outdoors. This concept was previously dubbed the ‘hygiene hypothesis’, but because we now know that such a crucial part of our immunity is based on the development of a comprehensive range of bacterial and other microorganisms colonizing our gut, it’s more correct to refer to it as the ‘microbiome hypothesis’.
Apart from our skin and external mucous membranes (eyes, nose, mouth) being exposed to the outside environment, the other, very intimate, encounter we have with our surroundings is through our food and water. But here again, our food has become increasingly sterile, with salad vegetables often grown hydroponically (without soil) and treated with bleach, and many foods including preservatives to kill bacteria. The desire to increase the shelf-life of foods while minimizing risks of food-borne disease (poisoning) has brought about the consumption of ever-increasing amounts of largely sterile foods, while municipal drinking water is sterilized by the addition of chlorine.
Adding further insult to injury, children born by caesarean section are not inoculated with their mothers’ bacteria as are those delivered vaginally, while infants who are not breastfed miss out on the complex range of immune factors in breastmilk.
Nutrients and the quality of the foods we consume are another major factor that provides resources for the immune system – the most complex and sophisticated pathogen-managing system known to us – that we too often take for granted. Indeed, poor diets are now the norm, but they won’t make a healthy immune system.
All this added together means that more and more children are failing to acquire the kind of natural immunity we have evolved to develop – making us ever more reliant on vaccines and drugs. When they’re not enough, surgery comes to the rescue – to perhaps remove diseased organs that may have lost their ability to function properly because, over decades, they’ve been over-burdened or under-resourced, or both.
Vaccination is now a huge growth area in healthcare as the drug pipeline becomes increasingly ‘dry’. Vaccine manufacturers often benefit from fast-track licensing by government regulators and, in 29 countries, they’re free of any liability for vaccine-related damage, a responsibility that’s been left to governments instead. These no-fault vaccination programmes are maintained by a small contribution from the price tag of each vaccine – usually less than $1 per vaccine – to a compensation fund. From the time the US National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) was established in 1988, $3.5 billion has been paid out to victims proven to be vaccine-injured. In the UK, although the Pandemrix vaccine has been found by the High Court to cause narcolepsy, the government is appealing the decision, presumably because it fears the precedent it would be setting.
The bottom line is that the public is being misinformed about vaccine safety. When consent is granted for a childhood vaccine, parents are not offered the known, relevant information. We’re consistently told that vaccines are safe and effective, yet the scientific facts and a growing body of evidence from courts and government compensation schemes around the world tell us otherwise. Informed consent should also offer alternatives, such as ways to enhance immunity naturally.
For these reasons, ANH International has launched a petition to put pressure on health authorities and governments to stop claiming that vaccines are safe in the face of an abundance of evidence pointing to their risks, many of which cannot be predicted for any given child receiving the full vaccination schedule. Information known to licensing authorities is not being given to those consenting, and data that demonstrate harm have more than once been concealed by health authorities, as revealed in the film Vaxxed (2016; see page 20).
To find a short link to our petition go to: http://bit.ly/2meSUL7.
Please forward it widely. Thank you.
