About Vaccinations

Written Feb 18, 2009:

Okay, I have to say something about this. This is just insane.

Last week there was a lawsuit where 3 of the 5500 claims were tried in the matter of whether vaccines had caused their child’s Autism. Specifically the MMR vaccine. The Special Court ruling was NOT in their favor. They said there was not enough evidence linking vaccinations and autism to warrant a ruling in their favor. Of course, if they did rule in the favor of the 3 families it would have been a very damaging precedent, the consequences of which would be very expensive and very far-reaching.

The media has been all over this like a duck on a june bug. What they haven’t been focusing on is this small but very significant fact: the “Special Masters” (as opposed to judges being as this was tried in the special court set up specifically to hear vaccine injury cases) specified that they could not rule that the vaccines caused the child’s autism, but that’s not to say that the ingredients in vaccines did not (such as thimerosal, which is mercury) . The media promplty threw that bit of info out after the initial coverage and hasn’t seen fit to bring it up again.

So now when you turn on the news, whether it’s local or national, there is an abundance of doctors, nurses, parents of fully vaccinated children all angrily bashing the parents who choose not to vaccinate of putting all of society at risk of horrible outbreaks of deadly diseases.

Just today, on my local news, there was extensive coverage of a pertussis “outbreak” in a neighboring county. Both of the children who had it were unvaccinated. How this poses a threat to those children who are fully vaccinated is still a mystery to me. Pertussis is a highly contagious bacterial infection which does not offer complete immunity even if you contract and fight off the infection with your own antibodies, recurrence of the infection is possible. Contrary to popular belief, however, the vaccine schedule for DTaP does not offer complete immunity, either. It is formulated to give a child immunity through roughly the age of 10, when they are most likely to be more able to recover fully. Since Dec. 2008, it is now recommended that all adults and children ages 11 – 64 receive a booster shot to continue their immunity and lower the risk of infecting newborns who have not yet received the full schedule of DTaP.

DTaP stands for: Diptheria, Tetanus, and a-cellular Pertussis. The original DPT vaccine contained a whole-cell version of Pertussis and it was blamed for many cases of brain injuries. The negative publicity caused a huge backlash and was actually the cause of the US government establishing the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act. Then it was changed to only contain the a-cellular version and to be given in several small doses to protect during childhood rather than throughout life as the whole-cell version was supposed to. Just a little background for you!

I actually have nothing against the DTaP vaccine. Two of my children have been partially immunized with it, and I will continue to proceed further with it at my own pace. I think it makes sense for us living on a farm to be fully vaccinated against Tetanus, and the research that I have done on the Diptheria and Pertussis aspects of that vaccine have not shown to be significant enough in risk to outweigh the benefits.

The other one covered extensively in the news lately is the 5 cases of meningitis in Minnesota. This is caused by the Haemophilus influenzae type b bacteria. The bacteria attacks the fluid around the brain and can cause severe brain damage and deafness, as well as death. The funny thing I’ve learned about this vaccine is that if you wait or delay getting it until after your child is 5 years old, they won’t give it to you. It’s only meant for children and infants under the age of 5. Also, they recommend getting doses at 2 mo., 4 mo., 6 mo., and 15-18 mo. What they don’t tell you when you go to the Dr. office is that these are the requirements for your child in order to go to state licensed day care or Head Start.

So here’s the thing about the “outbreak” in MN. 5 children contracted the hib infection. 3 of them were unvaccinated by their parents’ choice. One of those children died. 1 child was fully vaccinated but had in immune deficiency disorder. The 5th child was vaccinated, but being as it was too young to have received the full schedule, was considered to be “not fully vaccinated”. Okay, what I want to know here is this: if a child does not have immunity until it has received the full schedule (which would be between the ages of 15 and 18 months) why is it necessary to give shots at those younger intervals? Why not just wait until 15 months and receive the full dose and be done with it?

The MN dept. of health issued this statement during their news conference: “We had a death from a child who was unvaccinated. We want to encourage parents who have delayed or refused vaccination to reconsider. Hib vaccine not only protects your child, but also protects babies who have not completed their primary series or those who have immune compromise.” *

To me, this just embodies the attitude that fosters anger among those parents who have fully vaccinated their children, taking upon their own families the risk of autism that is now commonly acknowledged as real(though hotly debated, I realize). They seem to believe society as a whole is becoming a riskier place to be because of all of these unvaccinated children running around with their fully vaccinated children. Or that if their child is too young to be fully vaccinated or has an immune deficiency contracts one of these diseases it is solely caused by an unvaccinated child, when in reality it is just as likely to have come from an adult or family member, since adults usually react with less severe symptoms to the same bacteria and may not know they have something like pertussis.

Both of my older kids have received the full vaccine for Hib – in a single dose because they were over 18 mo.

This is just the tip of the iceberg on information available about vaccination, and even though I have been researching this for years now, I am still undecided about some of them, and whether or not there is an actual correlation between the number of vaccinations recommended for infants by the CDC and the exponential growth in the number of autistic children. But something out there is causing this epidemic, and a basic study of genetics will tell you it is impossible for a mutated gene to cause the cases to now be at an alarming rate of 1 in every 150 births, growing at 10-17% annually.

One of the biggest factors for me in deciding to research each and every vaccine before injecting it into my children was the ‘risk factor’ factor. When I went to the hospital to register before having my second child, I received a packet of information to fill out, including sign-off sheets for the erythromycin eye salve and the Hep-b vaccine. Until that point, I’d had no idea they gave any vaccines to infants under 24 hours old. The eye salve is routinely applied to the eyes of infants immediately after birth to prevent the infant from being infected with Gonorrhea or Chlamydia when going through the birth canal (and yet they still give it to babies born via c-section too, just to be safe).

This is what the CDC says about Hep-b: “Hepatitis B is a liver disease caused by the hepatitis B virus (HBV). It ranges in severity from a mild illness, lasting a few weeks (acute), to a serious long-term (chronic) illness that can lead to liver disease or liver cancer.

Transmission: Contact with infectious blood, semen, and other body fluids from having sex with an infected person, sharing contaminated needles to inject drugs, or from an infected mother to her newborn. (hello, not infected here!)

Vaccination: Hepatitis B vaccination is recommended for all infants, older children and adolescents who were not vaccinated previously, and adults at risk for HBV infection.”

I also opted out of the Vitamin K shot, not because I had done any research on it, but because I believed that God gave our newborns everything they needed and that less intervention if possible would be the way I would try to go. I didn’t think about it again until just recently, when doing research for this little speech of mine. Here is what I found:

http://babyreference.com/VitaminKinjectORnot.htm

That’s pretty scary. I don’t know what else to say about it at this point. It could be meaningful research, it could be scare tactics. I don't know enough about it.

Honestly, I saw no reason to go forward with either the eye salve or the hep-b vaccine for my newborns. There was no risk for any of these things, and I had no reason to believe they would be at risk for contracting any of these things in the very near future, so why would I do unnecessary procedures to my tiny little perfect baby?

At that point I realized the gammut of vaccinations and procedures were given through a “one size fits all” mentality. It was up to me to take charge of my children’s health and make informed decisions. My kids are hardly high risk – they don’t go to day care or school of any sort. Yes, we go to church, but that’s hardly a place for exposure to people who live in those high-risk lifestyles. There shouldn’t be this gross lack of distinction between high-risk kids and low-risk kids. Of course, then if they implemented some sort of different schedule for different kids it would quickly expose the truth. If there is no correlation the truth would only benefit everyone across the board. If there is – the lawsuits would be unstoppable!

Well, I may not always get it right, but the best I can do is keep looking for more information and keep praying that God will fill in where I am ignorant. But what I won’t do is sit back and trust either the media or the health care industry to make the right decisions for me.


More info:

* http://children.webmd.com/vaccines/news/20090123/hib-outbreak-kills-unvaccinated-child

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiomersal

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pertussis