Listening to Parents

When parents tell me that their kids have been injured or made sick by vaccines, it’s obviously a crucial part of my job to determine as best I can whether and to what extent that attribution is accurate; and certainly there have been times when I’ve had good reasons to believe that it isn’t. But my relationships with my patients are the basis of everything that I undertake on their behalf, and are necessarily built on mutual trust and respect.

By that I don’t mean that I always agree with them, but simply that I believe what they tell me to be the truth as they live it, whether rightly or wrongly, until something happens to convince me otherwise. My experience has been that doctors who question and doubt the official line that vaccines are uniformly safe and effective have come to this position out of their own commitment to honor that assumption, while those who would mandate vaccines for everyone without exception often act entitled to dismiss and override the beliefs and values of patients whom they happen to dislike or disagree with.

CLINICAL PERSPECTIVE

Since I began questioning the practice of routine mass vaccination, many other clinicians have come forward voicing similar doubts and concerns, backed up by good scientific research, but still based on the old-fashioned heresy of trusting our patients and the clinical perspective that is based on it. What is remarkable is that there are so many of us out there, and that our arguments all sound so much alike, because they arise not from theory or speculation, but rather from our shared, cumulative, and hard-won experience in the trenches of everyday medical practice.

The other side of the equation, the larger truth that our job also includes bearing witness to, are the thousands and thousands of narratives from vaccine-injured kids and the parents, relatives, and friends who care for and about them. These are not anti-scientific zealots wedded to a fixed ideological position, but ordinary people whose lives have been turned upside down or ruined by what happened to them, their children, or their friends and loved ones.

To dismiss them on principle, without paying attention to their stories, amounts to saying that they are lying, stupid, or ignorant about what has happened to their own children. Committed relationships, unforgettable experiences, and the common-sense reasoning involved in raising a child provide a better qualification for determining whether a vaccine has played a causal rôle in the problems that follow it than any preformed list of acceptable or proven reactions.

In addition, even intelligent, attentive, and anxious parents can easily miss the vaccine connection when it comes to chronic, auto-immune diseases, which often require months or years to develop, and even then may not become manifest without another booster shot or exposure to another toxic chemical.

THE VACCINE COURT

In 1986, in response to the sadness and outrage of the parents whose children had died or suffered brain damage after being vaccinated, and the loud public outcry on their behalf, Congress passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Compensation Act, the wording of which was populist in tone, outwardly sympathetic to the needs of these devastated families, and promised speedy and efficient relief.

The back-story was that the industry threatened to stop making vaccines altogether unless Congress agreed to exempt them from legal liability for whatever damages resulted from them. Thanks to this maneuver, the promised remedy of easy, swift, and generous remuneration of victims was quickly transformed into its opposite, an adversarial “Vaccine Court” process that was rigged against them by adopting the industry’s minimal safety standards that had created the problem in the first place, in effect guaranteeing that very few claimants ever win significant compensation or relief.

IMPOSSIBLE CRITERIA

As with the industry’s own safety trials, the criteria for determining that adverse events are vaccine-caused are so stringent that in practice they are rarely satisfied:

1.          the exact chronology must be known
2.          the illness or injury must have been linked to a specific vaccine
3.          it must be “biologically plausible,” whatever that means
4.          it must be confirmed by appropriate laboratory testing
5.          it must be shown to recur with subsequent revaccination
6.          a placebo-controlled study must prove that the vaccinated group are more at risk

Chronology is difficult to establish with chronic diseases, which tend to develop insidiously and therefore fall outside of usual time limits.

Restricting adverse events to those already recognized and linked to specific vaccines not only eliminates the possibility of learning anything new, but diverts attention from the real culprit, the cumulative effect of all vaccines, i. e., of the vaccination process itself.

“Biological plausibility” effectively rules out autoimmune diseases, since they have never been satisfactorily explained.

I’m all for laboratory confirmation, and that is precisely what Dr. Wakefield’s elegant biopsy specimens provided, as a result of which his opponents have had to resort to vilifying him personally.

The positive-rechallenge requirement is both impractical and dangerous, since anyone crippled by their shots is likely to fare even worse the next time, while those who die from them are obviously unavailable for further doses.

As for placebo-controlled trials, it is pure hypocrisy to insist on them after the fact, when both the CDC and the industry’s own safety trials excluded them on principle before they were even approved for general use.

THE VACCINE ADVERSE EVENTS REPORTING SYSTEM (VAERS)

VAERS receives an average of 11,500 reports of adverse reactions every year. Massive under-reporting, which the CDC estimates at 10% of the real number, and the FDA puts at 1%, would suggest a more realistic average of 115,000 to 1,150,000 children annually who suffer adverse reactions that their parents believe to have been caused by a vaccine. This is an enormous range and, even the lower figure, is more than enough to discredit the myth that vaccines are remarkably safe, unless you believe that aggrieved parents are either lying or stupid, and that what happened to their children was a coincidence or didn’t really happen at all.

---

This is an excerpt from an upcoming book by Dr. Richard Moskowitz. Moskowitz received his BA from Harvard in 1959 and his MD from New York University in 1963. He had a homebirth practice in the 1970s and has practiced homeopathy since 1974. He currently practices general family medicine in Watertown, Massachusetts. His books include Resonance: The Homeopathic Point of View, Homeopathic Medicines for Pregnancy and Childbirth, and Plain Doctoring. Dr. Moskowitz was one of the first medical doctors to question the safety of vaccinations and wrote many seminal articles on vaccinations in early editions of Mothering magazine.