Vaccines can cause brain damage. Most people are completely unaware of this, but that is exactly how The Merck Manual, the largest-selling medical textbook, defines an adverse reaction to a vaccine:
Encephalitis is inflammation of the brain that occurs when a virus directly infects the brain or when a virus or something else triggers inflammation . . . Encephalitis can occur in the following ways: A virus directly infects the brain. A virus that caused an infection in the past becomes reactivated and directly damages the brain. A virus or vaccine triggers a reaction that makes the immune system attack brain tissue (an autoimmune reaction) [emphasis added].1
An adverse vaccine reaction that causes brain damage (encephalitis) is the same thing as a complication from an infectious disease. Any pediatrician, doctor, or state or federal public health official who tells you that vaccines are completely safe, that adverse reactions to vaccines don’t exist, or that vaccine-induced injuries are so rare that they virtually never occur is either ignorant or is committing scientific fraud. Is it worse to have your child vaccinated by a doctor who does not know the possible adverse reactions, or to be lied to by a doctor or government bureaucrat who does know the terrible damage vaccines can cause?
This is no trivial matter. Every day, uninformed physicians administer vaccines to vast numbers of children and adults with little thought about the possibility of adverse reactions. When an adverse reaction occurs—in the form of brain inflammation, convulsions, or another injury—the typical first step is to blame someone else. Doctors and the government accuse parents of child abuse (i.e., shaken baby syndrome) or bad luck (i.e., defective genes) and accuse teenagers of bad behavior (i.e., using illicit drugs). Medical professionals do not step up and ask whether they hold any responsibility for causing an adverse reaction to a vaccine.
The Merck Manual further defines the symptoms of encephalitis: “Symptoms of encephalitis include fever, headache, personality changes or confusion, seizures, paralysis or numbness, sleepiness that can progress to coma and death.” Many tens of thousands of parents whose children were diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder reported that their kids were progressing normally until they received one or many vaccines, after which they had fevers, headaches, seizures, personality changes, and were never the same again. The symptoms reported by parents are the same symptoms of encephalitis that are defined in The Merck Manual. Health authorities in charge of defending and expanding universal immunization programs label these same symptoms “a coincidence.”2
When my five-week-old daughter, Lyla, died hours after receiving her hepatitis B vaccine, the New York medical examiner was more concerned about examining our apartment for evidence of child abuse than about the possibility that a vaccine caused her death. The medical examiner initially told us, our pediatrician, and an investigating pathologist that Lyla’s brain was so swollen that it led to her death. After consulting with Merck (the manufacturer of Lyla’s hepatitis B vaccine), the medical examiner left me, a devastated father who just lost his precious firstborn child to an avoidable vaccine-induced death, with these parting words: “We’ve changed our minds; her brain was not swollen. Vaccines do a lot of good things for people, Mr. Belkin.” Former New York Times journalist Melody Petersen, who covered the pharmaceutical industry in her book Our Daily Meds, reports that doctors who fill out death certificates are instructed to call a ‘therapeutic misadventure’ a natural death.3
Vaccine-caused diseases and deaths are an unacknowledged epidemic. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), state public health departments, Bill Gates, and doctors incessantly repeat the mantra calling for more vaccines to eliminate “vaccine-preventable disease.” However, my daughter experienced the opposite effect—the prophylactic treatment that was supposed to prevent a disease instead caused severe harm. The medical term for this outcome is iatrogenesis, the “inadvertent and preventable induction of disease or complications by the medical treatment or procedures of a physician or surgeon.”4 To put this in real world terms, you walk in to a doctor’s office in perfect health and you walk out with a lifelong neurological disability, or you even die, from prescribed vaccines. That is what happened to my daughter. Through immunization programs, modern medicine is creating the epidemic of neurological damage that it takes credit for preventing.
THE VACCINE HOLOCAUST
If you doubt the existence of adverse reactions to vaccines, you must first examine with your own eyes the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS), which is available and searchable online at www.medalerts.org. As of November 17, 2010, VAERS listed 352,650 reports of vaccine adverse events.5 Former Food and Drug Administration (FDA) commissioner David Kessler wrote in the journal of the American Medical Association that “only about 1% of serious adverse events are reported to the FDA.”6
Using that FDA commissioner’s own estimate, there have been 35.2 million adverse reactions since the inception of VAERS in 1990, the vast majority of which were never acknowledged by doctors or public health officials. Regulators pull drugs such as Vioxx, Rezulin and Lotronex from the market after a few hundred or one thousand adverse reaction reports. Yet vaccines remain on the market, with hundreds of thousands of adverse reaction reports. The double standard is clear.
The following two recent VAERS reports, offered verbatim, are representative of thousands of others.
VAERS ID: 393346
Vaccinated: 2010-06-11
On 11 June 2010 the subject received 2nd dose of INFANRIX HEXA (intramuscular, unknown injection site), 2nd dose of ROTARIX (oral), 2nd dose of PREVENAR (intramuscular, unknown injection site). Lot numbers were not provided. On 12 June 2010, 23 hours after vaccination with INFANRIX HEXA, PREVENAR and ROTARIX, the subject experienced seizures. The healthcare professional considered the event was disabling. The subject was treated with EPILIM. At the time of reporting the event was unresolved. One month later, the subject was still having seizures. He was referred to a neurologist. The healthcare professional considered the event was possibly related to vaccination with INFANRIX HEXA, ROTARIX and PREVENAR.
VAERS ID: 391797
Vaccinated: 2010-06-19
A 6-month-old male subject who was vaccinated with ENGERIX B pediatric (GlaxoSmithKline). On 19 June 2010, the subject received 3rd dose of ENGERIX B pediatric (0,5 ml, intramuscular, unknown injection site). Lot number not provided. On 19 June 2010, within hours of vaccination with ENGERIX B pediatric, the subject experienced high fever, 10 episodes of diarrhea and vomiting. 7 hours after vaccination, the subject was taken to emergency unit with severe dehydration and he experienced convulsion. At 19:35, the baby experienced cardiac arrest. The subject was treated with STESOLID, cardiopulmonary resuscitation and electrolytes. The subject died on 19 June 2010 at 20:18, cause of death was not reported. It was unknown whether an autopsy was performed.7
The CDC’s Vaccine Safety Datalink dismisses seizures after vaccination without mentioning the difference between simple febrile seizures (70%-75% of seizures, transient, not caused by encephalitis), complex febrile seizures (20%-25% of seizures, prolonged, multiple seizures), and symptomatic febrile seizures (5% of seizures, neurological abnormality or acute illness).8
While The Merck Manual acknowledges that febrile seizures “occur after certain vaccinations such as measles, mumps, and rubella,”9 vaccination proponents claim that seizures are not associated with learning disabilities or death. The second VAERS report cited above suggests otherwise. The CDC’s Vaccine Safety Datalink mentions cases like those described in the VAERS reports above and says, “Febrile seizures can occur after vaccination.” Febrile seizures “often result in a visit to an emergency room and can be very frightening for parents” and “cannot be prevented . . . . [C]hildren who have febrile seizures after receiving an MMR vaccine are no more likely to have epilepsy or learning or developmental problems than children who have febrile seizures that are not associated with a vaccine.”10 This is a roundabout way of saying exactly what The Merck Manual declares—adverse reactions to vaccines are the same thing as complications from an infectious disease. Let me paraphrase what it seems the CDC, with its contorted and deceptive syntax, is admitting: Seizures after vaccination—that may lead to permanent developmental problems—are no different than seizures from a nebulous other source. Clearly, the CDC needs to revise this information on the Vaccine Safety Datalink—it is too self-incriminating. People might decode it and realize the truth—that vaccines can cause (and have caused) permanent neurological damage to children. The CDC is in denial about the holocaust of vaccine adverse reactions being inflicted on America’s children and adults. All of the CDC’s published material appears to be carefully designed so that you—the prospective parent or patient—have complete faith in vaccines’ safety and efficacy. Anyone who carefully studies VAERS cases can see that the CDC’s vaccine safety proclamations reek of blatant propaganda.
After Lyla died, I learned about the risks of vaccinations. Perhaps you, like me, are wondering why the government doesn’t do something about this.
Starting with the hepatitis B vaccine, I investigated the vaccine business and regulatory process. I followed the hepatitis B vaccine through a maze of FDA and CDC advisory committee meetings. I testified before the Congressional Government Reform Committee about my research and my family’s experience,11 and I continue to challenge the qualifications of so-called vaccine industry experts. I am an investment strategist, and therefore I am qualified to analyze and form an opinion of the statistical expertise of those who present themselves as medical statistics “experts.” The following is a summary of my conclusions.
In my opinion, the epidemiologist-statisticians from the CDC and state health departments are pseudoscientists. In my work, I use statistical models to forecast markets, so I am particularly aware of the capabilities and limitations of statistics. In the financial markets, statistical fraud has a cost. If you fake the numbers, you will eventually get caught, fired, and prosecuted (as in the cases of Bernie Madoff, Enron, and others). The medical profession and government agencies like the CDC and the World Health Organization (WHO) seem to operate under a different standard. Estimates of disease prevalence are exaggerated,12 academic medical studies are ghostwritten by pharmaceutical employees,13 and the WHO’s declared global pandemic of H1N1 influenza fizzled out and turned into nothing more than a marketing campaign for flu vaccine manufacturers14—and yet, there is little accountability in the world of medicine for cooking the books or for putting pharmaceutical companies’ profits above the public’s interest.
When public health officials rely on questionable statistics to make blanket statements about the absolute safety and efficacy of vaccines, I am profoundly disturbed on personal and professional levels. Statistics is a world of probabilities, not absolutes. Statisticians make estimates about causation and the likelihood of future events based on mathematical odds, not certainties. It seems that vaccine epidemiology has been reduced to a pseudoscience, and its practitioners have sold out. They have become a de facto marketing department for the CDC and vaccine manufacturers.
I don’t use these words lightly. With the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, I filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for two pieces of information more than ten years ago. We wanted all the safety data the CDC had prior to recommending the hepatitis B vaccine for new babies at birth, and we wanted the statistical model they used to prove its safety. We are still waiting for a response today. Their failure to respond is damning. The implication is that the at-birth hepatitis B vaccine recommendation was made without conducting proper safety studies in babies beforehand. Our babies are their guinea pigs.15
The government’s FOIA refusal is a sad reflection on the dishonesty and incredibility of health officials. With a Wall Street background, I am particularly sensitive to fraud in the form of financial fiction and conflicts of interest. The government and industry have a cozy relationship and the public health arena offers no exception. There is a name for this: the revolving door. Julie Gerberding, the former head of the CDC, resigned from her government-appointed position in January 2009 and was named the president of Merck Vaccines in December 2009. Gerberding began her new job in January 2010, one year after leaving the CDC, which is the minimum amount of time she was legally required to wait before joining an industry that she previously regulated. It is clear that Dr. Gerberding received a professional reward for expanding universal immunization policies and, in effect, pharmaceutical company profits, for marginalizing the plight of victims of adverse reactions to vaccines.16 New Jersey’s former deputy health commissioner, Eddy Bresnitz, was responsible for mandating the flu vaccine for babies and toddlers in the Garden State in 2008. He now oversees adult vaccines at the same New Jersey–based pharmaceutical firm, Merck & Company, Inc.17 Gerberding and Bresnitz are not the only ones to jump from governmental to industry positions.
Poul Thorsen—a Danish contributor to two articles18 that are regularly cited by CDC and Institute of Medicine (IOM) officials, which allegedly prove that vaccines and/or thimerosal do not cause autism—has effectively been disowned by his former employer, the University of Aarhus, in Denmark. Thorsen managed the Danish data supporting those CDC-financed studies. According to a public statement released by the managing director of the University of Arhus on January 10, 2010, “a considerable shortfall in funding at Aarhus University associated with the CDC grant was discovered [I]n March 2009, Dr. Thorsen resigned his faculty position . . . [but] has continued to act in a manner as to create the impression that he still retains a connection to Aarhus University.” The statement concluded, “Aarhus University wishes to confirm that Dr. Poul Thorsen no longer has any connection to Aarhus University and that Aarhus University will not be able to collaborate with Poul Thorsen in the future.”19
HOW VACCINES ARE LICENSED AND MANDATED
Vaccines affect you and your children through a three-step process:
1. Licensure—the FDA says the vaccine is safe and effective;
2. Recommendation—the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) places the vaccine on the U.S. recommended vaccination schedule; and
3. Compulsion—state health departments mandate vaccines for day care and public school admission. Federal funding and the relentless lobbying efforts20 of drug makers powerfully influence state decisions.
Every step of this process is tainted by financial conflicts of interest, scientific fraud, and statistical bias.
Licensure
The FDA must license a vaccine before it can be administered to the general public. A vaccine manufacturer is required to conduct prelicensure safety and efficacy studies. Most people don’t realize several key points about the related vaccine safety science.
First, an industry performs its own studies to justify the licensure and selling of its products. The FDA reviews these studies and often provides important guidance to help facilitate the approval process. The FDA does not conduct independent research on proposed vaccines.
Second, the government uses epidemiological studies to disprove causation between adverse events and vaccines or vaccine ingredients. As Drs. Stott and Wakefield explain in chapter 7, the studies the government uses to report “no association” between vaccines and injuries are flawed, either because “they have been badly designed, or they have not been designed with the right hypothesis in mind in the first place.”
Third, our public health officials do not require randomized controlled studies.21 They say that it is unethical to withhold vaccination from anyone, so they do not uphold a scientific gold standard in order to answer ethically troubling questions, especially regarding vaccine safety. Industries typically use other vaccines as placebos rather than using a truly neutral placebo such as saline solution.22 What better way to prove that your vaccine is safe than to show that it is precisely as safe as another unsafe vaccine? Remember that adverse neurological reactions to vaccines, such as encephalitis and febrile seizures, are no different than encephalitis and febrile seizures caused by disease. Using another vaccine as a placebo is a fail-safe mechanism used to ensure that a test vaccine will be upheld as safe.23 No regulations govern placebo composition, which can influence research outcomes and merit reporting.24 For another stark example, suppose a pharmaceutical company invented a new tranquilizer but discovered that it caused birth defects in the unborn children of pregnant women. Now suppose that company designed an FDA safety study using thalidomide (which is known to cause birth defects) as the placebo, to prove its new product was no less safe than other tranquilizers. Vaccine manufacturers follow this pattern in FDA licensure studies.
Recommendation
After obtaining licensure for an unsafe-as-any-other vaccine, the next step is to get it recommended. This involves getting the stamp of approval from the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). The ACIP is responsible for the federally recommended childhood vaccination schedule. This group tells doctors how many doses of which shots every child in this country should receive. Adult immunization is a new focus for this group. I attended an ACIP meeting and it was truly a farce. A dozen or so doctors from various medical centers around the country sat around a rectangular table and unanimously approved almost every proposal placed before them. Most of the voting members had conflicts of interest.25 Members abstained from voting on specific proposals in which they were involved (typically, the proposals were vaccine studies financed by pharmaceutical companies, which the members or their medical centers managed), but they voted to approve every other proposal on the agenda. It was a classic case of “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.” Vaccine safety was not honestly debated. There were no vaccine safety advocates as voting members. For members of this self-serving committee, the path towards professional advancement is clear: never rock the boat and approve every proposal put in front of you.
Compulsion
With an ACIP recommendation in hand, the next task as a vaccine promoter is to get a mandate enacted into law at the state level. This is a relatively simple task, but it is time consuming because every state is different and some states have pesky vaccination choice advocates that assert varying degrees of opposition. Epidemiologists in a state’s public health department can reliably produce school mandates that are enacted by state legislative bodies whose members are not educated about vaccine risks, have never read The Merck Manual (or any other medical textbook), and have no idea that adverse reactions to vaccines, such as encephalitis and febrile seizures, exist and are indistinguishable from complications from infectious diseases. It is relatively easy to get the votes. Campaign contributions from Big Pharma grease the skids. There is a customary obeisance to modern vaccine technology as the miracle that has banished the ravages of infectious disease. Legislators pass laws requiring children to receive these vaccines to attend day care and public school. While not required, many private schools follow suit and adopt those mandates as well.
Consider, for a moment, schools’ vaccination mandates from the drug manufacturers’ perspective. Day care and school systems become free vaccine marketing departments. There is no need to train a sales force or to incur other marketing expenses. If you can force your customers to acquire your product, it eliminates all of the messy uncertainty and hassle of a competitive market. Instead of free market competition, their business strategies are built on compulsion. The public school system is an ATM for pharmaceutical companies—who are laughing all the way to the bank.
PATENT CLIFFS AND GOLDEN PARACHUTES
The clout that drug companies wield belies an emerging truth. In the stock market, pharmaceutical companies are no longer the gold-plated, recession-proof investments they once were. The Big Pharma business model has been simple and profitable: Find a natural substance known to have healing properties, invent a synthetic substitute for its active ingredient, give it a clinical name, add toxic additives and preservatives, press it into small white or colorful pills, and charge a price that is thousands of times the cost of production. Most notably, protect yourself from price competition via patent protection. Using this business model, the pharmaceutical industry has turned its stocks into popular, dividend-paying, high-yielding investments.
However, industry analysts understand what the rest of us are coming to realize: Patent protection does not last forever. Pharmaceutical industries now face what is known in the investment world as a “patent cliff” Specifically, they are dreading the near-term expiration of about $140 billion’ worth of patents on many of their key, blockbuster drugs.26 When drugs lose patent protection and face generic competition, prices plummet and profits vanish. The pressure on research departments to invent viable replacement products has mostly drawn a blank. The industry is now experiencing financial pressure that has taken the bloom off stocks and industry prospects. Making drugs is now a cutthroat business. Blogs such as Café Pharma27 offer an insider’s perspective.
PHARMA’S SURVIVAL STRATEGY
The pharmaceutical industry has devised a three-pronged survival strategy:
1. Expand to emerging markets,
2. Increase drug prescription compliance, and
3. Expand the vaccine market.
Expand to Emerging Markets
Drug companies are enthusiastic about growth prospects in countries that have low per capita healthcare spending, such as Brazil, China, and India; however, their ambition to gain big profits from patented blockbuster drugs in emerging markets probably won’t work. Copycat knockoffs of high-priced American goods are endemic in China. The best-case scenario for pharmaceutical companies includes incremental generic drug profits, theft of intellectual property, and state-encouraged competition from national champions in China and India.28 Drug companies seem intent on exporting vaccines. The United States can’t manage to manufacture many products that the world wants to buy anymore, which is proven by the persistent U.S. trade deficit. However, the United States may end up successfully exporting its sky-high rates of autism and chronic childhood disorders. Recently, the drug industry–dominated World Health Organization and Bill Gates’s Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) have stated their intention to extend a U.S.-style childhood vaccination schedule to other countries.29 Health officials and the pharmaceutical industry seem to think that selling the U.S. vaccination schedule globally can help balance U.S. terms of trade, through greater pharmaceutical profits. Foreign governments should be very wary.
Increase Drug Prescription Compliance
Vaccination mandates have worked so well that drug companies intend to extend the “strong recommendation” model to prescription drugs. The push for prescription drug compliance seems ironic, given the data provided in the latest CDC National Center for Health Statistics Data Brief Number 42, which details Americans’ prescription drug use from 2007 to 2008:
• One of every five children and nine out of ten older Americans reported using at least one prescription drug in the month prior to being surveyed.
• 22.4% of kids up to age 11 used at least one prescription drug.
• 29.9% of young people aged 12–19 used at least one prescription drug.
• 48.3% of people aged between 20 and 59 used at least one prescription drug.
• 88.4% of Americans aged 60 and over used at least one prescription drug, more than 76% used two or more prescription drugs in the past month, and 37% used five or more.30
This study suggests that Americans are already overmedicated and prospects are poor for increased prescription compliance. It does not mean, however, that the pharmaceutical industry will not try.
The growth of the drug compliance movement is most evident in the recent “deputization” of pharmacists to market and administer flu shots at big-box stores and chain drugstores. The pharmaceutical industry is now commandeering drugstores in the same manner that it captured the public school system. Drugstores appear delighted to have this potential, new revenue source. They are conscripting pharmacists as foot soldiers in the crusade against infectious diseases. The public now faces a marketing onslaught for flu vaccination every time it walks through a drugstore or a grocery store that has a prescription drug department. Medical News Today has reported, “Last year, retail pharmacists were particularly influential in driving vaccinations, administering more than sixteen million vaccines and acting as a source of information for concerned citizens. Cardinal Health offers an array of support services to help retail pharmacy customers earn certification to offer and promote vaccination services to their local community.”31 I expect drug makers to expand the drugstore vaccine promotion with a flood of forthcoming adult vaccines; one example is the herpes zoster (shingles) shot. In the business world, this is called “channel stuffing.”
Expand the Vaccine Market
Big Pharma wants you to believe that you are vaccine deficient. There are currently 145 new vaccines in development.32
Media-stoked public fears of terrorist biological-weapon attacks (e.g., anthrax) following the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and the subsequent overhyped H1N1 “pandemic” have convinced the drug industry that there are huge profits to be made in vaccines. The global vaccine revenues were $22 billion in 2009—an increase of 16 percent since 2008. Industry analysts predict that vaccine revenues will hit $35 billion by 2015.33
Despite tremendous growth, vaccine revenues cannot blunt the entire impact of the $140 billion that will be lost when blockbuster drug patents expire. That won’t stop the vaccine development binge, however. The drug industry sees vaccine development as a golden parachute to take them safely over their patent cliff.
As I previously discussed, the drug industry dominates the regulatory process and can jam new vaccines through the approval process by disguising adverse reactions with bogus placebos. The implications for a major increase in neurological damage are staggering. Having dominated the child vaccine market through school mandates, the vaccine industry is champing at the bit to compel adults to comply with their forthcoming campaign for adult immunization.
Moreover, there are severe quality limitations on vaccines for both adults and children. Some vaccines are ineffective or only protect against a small number of strains of a particular disease.34 Some vaccines lose their supposed protective qualities when disease strains, like influenza, shift.35 Other vaccine-derived antibodies only persist a few years.36 These vaccines are economically attractive to vaccine manufacturers, though, because people will need repeated doses, or boosters. The industry’s repeat-revenue model favors rapidly obsolescing vaccines.
While far more dangerous due to its health implications, this model is reminiscent of the calculated obsolescence business model used by the U.S. automotive industry in the 1960s, which Ralph Nader criticized. The U.S. auto industry deliberately made junky cars that wore out or went out of fashion—a business strategy that ultimately destroyed the U.S. automotive industry because the Japanese and German manufacturers made better cars. According to this business model, just like American cars made in the 1960s and 1970s, ineffective vaccines that are quickly obsolete are preferable to ones that provide lifelong immunity. From the vaccine manufacturer’s perspective, it is essential to keep the customers coming back for more.
Medical sociologist Dr. Donald Light from the School of Public Health at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ)37 recently presented a paper touching on this subject at the American Sociological Association’s annual meeting in Atlanta on August 17, 2010 (session 487), entitled “Pharmaceuticals: A Two-Tiered Market for Producing ‘Lemons’ and Serious Harm.” He argued,
The pharmaceutical market for “lemons,” differs from other markets for lemons in that companies develop and produce the lemons. Evidence in this paper indicates that the production of lemon-drugs with hidden dangers is widespread and results from the systematic exploitation of monopoly rights and the production of partial, biased information about the efficacy and safety of new drugs.
I anticipate that vaccine makers will use their monopoly power and influence over the regulatory process to press for more vaccination mandates. Pharma’s business model is compulsion: Take the right of informed consent away from the individual and replace it with the dictatorial requirement to be a captive customer for lemon vaccines and prescription drugs.
VACCINE BUBBLE PSYCHOLOGY
In the investment world, I have lived through several speculative bubbles. Lessons learned from those experiences apply to what I call the “vaccine bubble.” Two key forces create bubbles:
1. Promoters, who typically have a financial interest in creating mass public hysteria. In the case of the housing bubble, this would include the banking, mortgaging, and construction industries.
2. Do-gooder policy makers, who want to wave a magic wand and improve the world through well-intended interventions. These do-gooders are oblivious to the unintended consequences of their involvement, otherwise known as “blowback” in the political and investment worlds.
Osama Bin Laden is one example of blowback. CIA do-gooders funded a mujahideen resistance against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, providing training and weapons. What seemed like a great idea at the time became the most obvious example of blowback on September 11, 2001, when the World Trade Center was attacked. CIA-equipped terrorists, who had initially joined us in fighting our Soviet enemies, evolved into our enemies. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union had collapsed and its central successor, Russia, was no longer our enemy. Few, if any, policy makers anticipated this chain of events when the CIA originally orchestrated the mujahideen resistance. At the time, nearly everyone thought it was a fine idea.
Another glaring example of blowback from well-intentioned policies is the collapse of the U.S. housing market. The well-intentioned efforts of Congress to expand home ownership fostered a subprime mortgage bubble, allowing low-income renters who probably never would have qualified for a normal home loan (with the required 20 percent down payment and verifiable employment and income) to purchase homes. This process encouraged real estate speculation and mortgage-market insanity, which drove up prices to unrealistic levels in many areas of the country (e.g., Miami, Las Vegas, and Southern California). The blowback from this policy error is now obvious to everyone—homeowners who lost their homes, banks that busted, and other grim economic news.
The blowback from the vaccine bubble is a rising epidemic of neurological damage. Approximately one in ninety-one children (1.1 percent of children) in the United States now receives an autism diagnosis.38 This is thirteen times more than the average autism rate (0.08 percent) found in a 1993 survey—before the U.S. childhood vaccination schedule expanded dramatically.39 The latest CDC study shows that 9.5 percent of parents surveyed reported that their child had received a diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).40
This plague of neurological damage is expanding in direct proportion to the greater number of vaccines imposed on an unsuspecting public. The future economic costs to society of medical care and welfare for a neurologically disabled population are staggering.41 Policy makers must consider these costs now—and Americans must hold the corporate perpetrators economically and criminally liable.
Every bubble contains an element of crowd psychology, or a collective conception that shepherds unsuspecting individuals into wholeheartedly participating in an ill-fated popular delusion. Examples of this include buying the NASDAQ at the 5,000 level in early 2000, and buying an unaffordable house in 2007. During a bubble, people are dying to participate. The bigger the bubble, the more powerful the promotional messages encouraging participation.
A similar force is at work regarding vaccination. Television, print, and online publications are constantly quoting CDC and public health officials, who tell everyone how dangerous the flu, measles, chickenpox, meningitis, pertussis, and cervical cancer are. Their messages include exhortations to vaccinate against vaccine-preventable diseases. These health authorities are essentially selling fear and disease.42 It appears that their intention is to whip up mass hysteria and persuade people to wait in line for the latest miracle vaccine against a deadly disease. These unsuspecting people remain unaware that adverse reactions to vaccines exist and are defined in medical textbooks as the same thing as infectious disease complications. We cluck at the bad judgment of those who invested their life savings in overpriced technology stocks when stockbrokers trumpeted a Dow advance to 24,000 (its peak was 14,164), and at others who bought Miami condominiums and Las Vegas ranch houses when mortgage brokers urged them to avoid missing the housing boom. Today, the pharmaceutical industry has convinced the government and the medical profession to do its bidding. Another group of jive-talking promoters, who have a vested personal and financial interest in fanning the flames of mass hysteria, is exploiting the public.
Incidentally, institutional portfolio managers (my clients) who resisted the NASDAQ and real estate bubbles lost customers who only wanted portfolio managers who purveyed the popular investment flavor of the month. In other words, there was tremendous institutional pressure to play the game, even though they did not believe in it and knew it would end in tears. There is undoubtedly similar pressure in the medical world for doctors to play along with CDC vaccination recommendations and to make patients into pincushions for pharmaceutical companies, even if they suspect that “something is rotten in Denmark,” as Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet. The overall result is that enormous psychological pressure is placed on people by medical professionals to receive vaccines, either in normal primary-care settings or during emergency-room visits for unrelated injuries or illnesses.43
The aftermath of deviant psychology bubbles is typically a backlash against the bubble promoters. In the old days, the perpetrators would be tarred and feathered, or dispatched. After the NASDAQ bubble, investors’ sentiments toward stockbrokers and bubble cheerleaders soured. As we now know, through endless stories of people losing their homes through foreclosure, the public’s sentiment toward estate brokers, mortgage brokers, politicians, and overpaid “banksters” is vindictive. Victims want retribution.
When the vaccine bubble finally bursts, public sentiment toward government health officials, pharmaceutical companies, and doctors is likely to turn negative in the same way that it did after the collapse of the stock market and real estate bubbles. Today, the vaccine regulatory system is primed to approve and advance all of the vaccines Big Pharma can dream up. The sales pitch is germophobia and protection against diseases you didn’t know you had or could get, such as genital and anal warts—Merck’s latest justification for giving male sixth graders the female-oriented human papillomavirus (HPV) cervical cancer vaccine. In all likelihood, this will end badly (as if VAERS isn’t already disastrous enough). The greedy fearmongers will overstep their boundaries and create a catastrophically dangerous vaccine, like the 1976 swine flu vaccine that caused an estimated five hundred cases of Guillain-Barré-syndrome-induced paralysis and at least twenty-five deaths.44 A similar disaster would ignite today’s vaccine safety controversy and rapidly turn the tide of public ideology against vaccines and vaccination mandates. Fraud always becomes a public issue after a bubble bursts. All of the evidence is currently here before everyone’s eyes, including fudged safety studies, the revolving door of health officials and pharmaceutical executives, denial about the basic scientific definition of neurological damage, and more. The public simply needs to connect the dots.
THE REFUSERS
In the meantime, we must preserve the right to opt out of compulsory vaccination requirements for our children and ourselves. Infectious disease specialists use the term “refuser” pejoratively, to cast aspersions on those who are intelligent, informed, and strong willed enough to “refuse” the corporate and governmental assault on our families’ bodies with their ineffective, unsafe, and toxic vaccines.45 I admire their supposedly pejorative term “refuser” so much that I trademarked it and created a musical band around the concept—The Refusers.46 This is my attempt to raise public awareness about vaccination risks that the pharmaceutical industry and the CDC are foisting on us. I fully support the right of all parents to make informed vaccination choices for their children, whatever their decisions may be. Indeed, the CDC claims that over ninety percent of American children younger than three years of age are now fully vaccinated.47 So be it. After losing a daughter and investigating the so-called science behind our current vaccines, I am a refuser. Medical authorities and uninformed parents want to turn that informed decision around and paint people like me as a menace to society. The VAERS reports show that adverse reactions to vaccines are the real menace to society.
In my opinion, health officials and drug companies intend to abolish that right of refusal; meanwhile, they are causing an epidemic of neurological damage from vaccines and denying responsibility for it. They take credit for preventing neurological damage from disease epidemics. Nevertheless, The Merck Manual and VAERS tell us the truth. Public health officials have betrayed the public they pledged to protect. Postbubble forces will unleash a massive reform and bring the perpetrators of this vaccine bubble and the epidemic of neurological damage to justice. Until then, it is essential that we honor an individual’s choice to refuse a vaccine as a human right.