Americans are Talking About Vaccines

Americans are Talking About Vaccines

by Barbara Loe Fisher

Published October 7, 2015 | Opinion

And that is because in the 21st century, everybody knows somebody who was healthy, got vaccinated, and was never healthy again.

How many mothers do not witness a child’s vaccine reaction and never understand why their children whose physical, mental and emotional health

suddenly regressed after vaccination? How many of those children are filling the special education classrooms, doctors’ offices, mental health facilities, and prisons in America?

What happened to my healthy son after vaccination in 1980 sent me on a journey to learn more and find out why doctors are not talking about vaccine risks, and why a commercial product that can brain damage and kill people is being mandated. In part, I was driven by disappointment in myself. As a college educated woman, who had come from a family of doctors and nurses, and had worked as a writer at a teaching hospital before I became a mom. Why did I irrationally assume that vaccines were 100% safe and effective? Why had I blindly trusted a doctor instead of examining vaccination with the same due diligence that I had researched nutrition and toxic exposures during pregnancy and had taken prepared childbirth classes to weigh the merits of an epidural versus natural childbirth, and breastfeeding versus bottle-feeding?

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Some of my questions were answered during the two years of research that medical historian Harris Coulter and I conducted when I learned that pertussis vaccine contains lethal pertussis toxin and endotoxin, as well as aluminum and mercury which can make the blood-brain barrier more permeable. That research culminated in the publishing of our 1985 book DPT: A Shot in the Dark. Harris and I were the first to report an association between vaccine-induced brain inflammation and a spectrum of brain dysfunction that doctors give labels like seizures, learning disability, ADHD and autism.

But it would take another 25 years of research and interfacing with politicians and serving on committees with doctors and industry, government and medical trade to answer the rest of my questions. In 1982, when I joined with parents of DPT vaccine injured children and co-founded the non-profit charity that is today known as the National Vaccine Information Center, the number of Americans questioning the safety of vaccines was so tiny it could not even be measured in public opinion polls.

Three decades later, national polls reveal that the majority of parents in America say the number one child health concern they have is about the safety of vaccines. And that is because in the 21st century, everybody knows somebody who was healthy, got vaccinated, and was never healthy again. People are talking about it, especially mothers taking their children to pediatricians… because we are the ones who carry our babies inside us for nine months, and give birth, and feed and nurture them through infancy, and are responsible for their health. We are the ones who usually quit work and stay home and care for them when they are never well anymore.

Mothers are asking their doctors logical questions about vaccination, and when their doctors react to those questions with irrational rage or cold refusal to provide medical care if one or more vaccines are declined, it becomes obvious that there is something very wrong with doctors using threats to push and enforce use of a pharmaceutical product. The militarization of vaccine policy in the United States is eroding the trust that used to exist between the people and their doctors. That broken trust is being replaced by fear.