Flat-earthers, and Lemmings
by Hilary Butler.

20^th July 2000

Several things happened this week. The first was that the heap of interesting cuttings from the Herald, was just screaming to be written about. The second was that I went to the med library and found something that pushed a few buttons which will form the basis of another article, and the last thing was that I got the last issue of Waves. So, Flat-earthers, and Lemmings relates to the first and third of those things.

Starting with the third….in the interests of clarity the editor receives my "stuff" on a disk which is what I think, how I think, the way I think it. As someone has put it, at times I have the subtlety of a sledgehammer, with a chronic case of feet in the mouth. Usually both, so I can’t extract either. The Editor rants, raves, and tut-tuts down the phone, and promptly swipes out all the cynicism, multiple spelling mistakes and grammatical goofs. But this time, I noticed that more than usual of my cynicism had escaped the delete button. I’m not sure that that’s a good thing, or a bad thing, so if I have offended anyone, I apologise. As I get older, and know more, there are times when I can get very very angry. The problem is, as the Bible says in Ecclesiastes 1:18:

"Because in much wisdom there is much grief, and increasing knowledge results in increasing pain."

I know those who know the Bible well, will tell me that Ecclesiastes was written by Solomon in one of his more cynical moods. Perhaps that’s why I like it. But the verse has a point. By the time you read this, I will have surfed the 46^th year of my life. And as I look back, there are times when I wish I had just gone along like the cows in the paddock, chewed the cud, and made the milk. Certainly would have made for a quieter life. What you don’t know, you usually don’t worry about..

Last year, before our oldest son landed in hospital, I was thinking "Well, I have spent 17 part-time years, writing all this "stuff" and helping mainly people who have VACCINATED their children; we haven’t vaccinated our own – so exactly what have I achieved, apart from dislocating my family, and being accused of being married to the phone. What good has it done me? Sweet nothing. "Maybe its time to chuck it all in".

Until our eldest son landed up in hospital last year. It was pretty close to the bone. And during those hours when I wondered how I was going to react if God decided to take our son, I had a lot of time to think. The first thing I had done four days before, as I always do, when anything goes wrong, was to start taking detailed notes. The reason this has become a habit is that taking notes makes that logical, scientific part of the brain stand back and dispassionately analyse what is going wrong, and throttles the panic. It also means that if something happens which has a bearing of something beforehand I can go back to the exercise book, refer to the day, time, person and incident. The very fact of NOT having to remember enables me to think much more clearly.

It was during this time that I realised that the situations God had put me in over the years had not only honed my ability to think, research and state a case, but that when it came to the CRUNCH time with our son, those skills were the ones I needed to be able to deal with the medical people.

In hospital, I felt so sorry for the other people I saw. They meekly accept everything as if its gospel. And outside new mothers are so blown around by the views of media, the theories put about… all the time. They do as they are told, and sometimes as they find out later – to their cost.

Just this week, there has been a torrent of articles in the paper which must make the average person wonder which way is up. Annette King is doing her thing to try to make Flouridation nationwide. It seems that canonisation by the manufacturers of Flouridation is more important to her than the doctors from Physicians and Scientist for Responsible Genetics who began their response to her in the New Zealand Herald, Wednesday July 19^th, 2000 with

"How long must we battle against pressure to poison our water supplies with sodium flouride?’ then details the some of the high-up scientific opinions against it and ends up with "Must we also have to fight this ridiculous old wives’ tale, too."

Welcome to the real world. Life is what happens while you’re trying to educate everyone as to what should happen. But right opposite this gem of a letter this was a classic from Don Donovan. He’s someone who reads about as dyed in the wool as you could ever hope to meet; who has plenty to say about things he thinks are too ridiculous for words. Like stupid people who take supplements, because as we all know they don’t do one speck of good. The medical profession says so, so it must be the truth. The fact that the doctors are trying to suggest that only they should prescribe them seems to fail to ring any ulterior motive bells.

Don Donovan then goes on to talk about some of the "other" more famous snake-oil "cures", like Dr W.J.P. Kingsley of New York who claimed to have perfected the quickest, easiest, cheapest and most scientific cure for cancer, whereby even "the largest" cases were cured within weeks. Another was Dr Ben-Bye of Indianopolis whose soothing oils would cure any cancer, internal or external. The funniest thing aspect of his article was that it totally escaped his mind that most of the snake-oil cures he talked about were promoted by the "doctors" of the era.

He’s a little slow on the uptake, though. If he sat down and looked through old issues of the Lancet, he would find a doctor advocating injections of sugar to cure tuberculosis, and another advocating a vaccine made from daffodil juice to cure asthma. He certainly never read a quite famous book written years ago, called "Cured to Death" which would have been funny if it hadn’t been so calamitous. The problem is that journalists just jump on the latest bandwagon. They are paid to write X-hundred words, and the quicker the better. If they did some decent investigative journalism they would discover that the medical profession has had the quackery monopoly since the "Hypocritical" oath was used to swear by. Nothing changes, either with mainstream medicine, or the media.

The trick for parents is to work out just what, out of modern medicine is useful, and what is dangerous. Some is obvious, some not so. But the level of information given out about any aspect of medicine is such that working that out can be almost impossible, because just how much of what they say is the truth?

This applies to Immunisation too.

Most readers will be well acquainted with the mantra that doctors only vaccinated against "essential" diseases. It used to be the "big seven", but who knows what that number will be in the future. The message is always that they never vaccinate against anything that isn’t necessary. They wouldn’t do that.

Don’t you believe it!

Going back in history, lets give you some examples. In the newsletter on Influenza, I mentioned Dr J. Anthony Morris, who was more than a little prick in the backside of the medical establishment. As far as he was concerned the flu vaccine was useless, and he’d neither give it to his dog, cat or gold-fish. Leastways, not unless he wanted to kill them.

His search for the truth and justice for wrongful dismissal went all the way to the Senate, where in the course of exposing the fraud and deceit of the then FDA, and vaccine manufacturers, skeletons got into the public records that those in high places would rather have stayed firmly buried.

On page 435 of the Senate Hearing S.3419 held on April 20, 21 and May 3, 4, 1972 is a chart, exactly as below:

VACCINES REFERRED TO AS INEFFECTIVE BY THE DBS DIRECTOR AND THEIR MANUFACTURERS.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Just above a heading WORTHLESS VACCINES on page 346, reads:

"SENATOR PERCY. Doctor, right at the outset of your testimony, you make reference to the General Accounting Office report, that 32 vaccines of no known value, and some possible harm, have continued to be licensed. I have never seen a figure as to what the total dollar value of those vaccines would be. What was the cost of the vaccines which were either of little value or perhaps even harmful, and which were administered to people who felt they were being protected?

Below the heading reads:

SENATORY PERCY. But we are talking about a cost investment of hundreds of milions of dollars, maybe…. We are locking the barn now after the horse has gone out."

I realised that what could have happened in USA, could also have happened here. Some years ago, when I was invited to the Wellington Medical School to give a presentation on the issue of polio, the aspect of "provocation polio" came up. This is where clinical polio in a person is caused by an injection of anything from vaccines, to antibiotics. There was even one case -history I read of paralytic polio following local anaesthesia. The fact is that any injection disturbs the immune system, some more than others, and whereas without the injection, the polio may have just been sub-clinical, and given the person immunity, with the injection the person ends up paralysed or on life support. Like any disease, how you get through it, depends on how focused your immune system is. Divert it in two ways, or make it work unneccesarily hard, and something minor can explode into something major.

Provocation Polio is a well-described phenomenon in the medical literature, most recently in 1998 in India where doctors admitted that the majority of polio was now provocation polio as a result of vaccines, and injections of useless drugs for diarrhoea, using unsterile syringes for financial gain. Don’t splutter, or spill your coffee – I have the proof! Principle number one – never say anything without the proof from the horse’s mouth. Wish some others would live by this, but such is life….

I made the comment to the doctors that poliomyelitis, as a clinical entity was vary rare prior to the compulsory vaccination law around 1874. I said that my gut said that there was a link, because up until that time polio had floated around happily giving everyone natural immunity with just the very odd, amazingly rare clinical presentation. After 1874, there was an explosion in paralysis, and all the things so emotional shown in old news reels. And more people got paralytic polio with the use of the toxin anti-toxin diphtheria horse serum in the 1890’s. Indeed there were several non-medical journals of the era written by heretical doctors, stating these things, because their esteemed peer review journals refused to print their concerns. Then, as now, the sacred cow was inviolate. I pondered the point that a large proportion of paralytic polio just might have come from the love affairs doctors had at that time, and still seem to have, for syringes. The early ones shown in the Lancet looked like a new form of medieval torture chamber equipment.

I also pointed out that the medical profession’s love affair with routine tonsillectomies was also a factor. At the time, around 1910’ish, doctors decided that these things which now seemed to get so pussy, were obviously no used, so should be whipped out. And while we’re at it, why not take them out before they became a problem. In America, by the 1950’s, every year, 2.2 million babies were born. Guess what. 2 million tonsils were also removed. What a wonderful industry this was too. But what they didn’t realise was that anyone without tonsils had a 600% greater chance of getting paralytic polio, because the tonsils are the primary defence of the body against polio virus.

The doctors could not comprehend that the transition from natural immunity to clinical disease could have been precipitated by the actions of their medical ancestor, and instead argued that the real problem was that good sanitation worked against becoming immune early in life – and also grudgingly conceded that once doctors got behind formula, the glass bottle, and rubber teats, protection from breastfeeding which had been proven by Sabin to be the bridge between contact with the virus and natural immunity in the first two years of life, was right out the window. A bit of an eruption occurred at this point, because I accused doctors of still failing to give women detailed information about the immunological benefits to babies of breastmilk, at which point the only woman paediatrician got very upset at me, and said that was a mother’s choice, just like abortion. I looked her square in the face and asked if she had children, and her answer was "Yes" I then raised my eyebrows and "Who you bottlefed, right?" She instantly got up and left. I think the unspoken implications got through loud and clear.

At that point I put up two graphs. The first was the rise in tonsillectomies paralleling the rise in polio in developed country, and the other was an incomplete graph which showed clearly that many of the New Zealand summer outbreaks happened in specific years when mass vaccination campaigns occurred.

One doctor said "But that doesn’t explain this spike, this spike and this spike. We didn’t use vaccines then." I had nothing to say, because at the time, I knew no better.

But along the way, I talked to various people, and was given a pointer by a real old-timer who said "Well actually they did. Now I don’t know what they were but my Dad used to get stuff from a place called the Vaccine Station."

Now, just where do you start to find proof of the existence of such a place? A clue came from Joan Donley, who said she thought she’d seen something of that sort in the Appendices to Parliamentary Journals.

I spent days working backwards through years, and years, and years…. I came across lots of interesting stuff, like old anti-"Quack" laws outlawing purveyors of snake-oil type remedies, as Don Donovan called them. I was getting pretty near the end of my tether when I struck gold on Page H-31 in Director General of Health’s report to the Appendices to Parliamentary Journal for 1912. It seemed that there was such a thing as the Vaccine Station. It had an entry along the lines that business was better than the previous year – but when I looked to find out the "previous year" it was not printed. Or the next year for that matter. Someone must have figured that was a bad move.

The chart in the Journal was a financial statement with lots of meaningless pounds shillings and pence junk of no interest to anyone. But what should interest you is the list of vaccines provided by the Vaccine Station:

Vaccines:

Acne Vaccine (mixed)
Acne Bacillus Vaccine
Coley’s Fluid
Coli Bacillus Vaccine
Combined Vaccines for colds
Cararrhalis Microccocus Vaccine (their spelling)
Dipth. Anti Sera
Friedlanders Bacillus Vaccine
Gonococcus Vaccine
Influenza Bacillus Vaccine
Meningococcus Anti Serum
Plague (Haffkines Prophylactic
Pituitary extract (Valporole)
Pneumococcus Vaccine
Staphylococcus Vaccine (mixed)
Staphylococcus Vaccine (aureus)
Staphylococcus Vaccine (Polyvalent)
Streptococcus Anti Sera (Polyvalent)
Streptococcus Anti-Sera (puerperal Fever)
Streptococcus Anti Sera (Pyogenes)
Streptococcus Anti Sera (Rheumatic Fever)
Streptococcus Anti Sera (Erysipelas)
New Tuberculin, T.R. (Koch)
New Tuberculin, T.R. (Azoules)
New Tuberculin T.R. (Koch), (Luciuc and Bruning)
Tuberculin for Von Piquet’s reaction
Tuberculin (Old), Human (Koch)
Tuberculin (Old), Bovine (Koch)
Tubercle Emulsion (Lucius and Bruning)
Tubercle Vaccine 0.0005 mgm.
Tubercle Vaccine 0.0001 mgm.
Normal Horse Serum.
Tuybercle, Moist, for opsonic estimation.
Staphylococcus Albus Vaccine.
Tubercle for conjunctival test.
Typhoid Bacillus Vaccine.
Tetanus Anti Serum.

Even more spoiled for choice – even the Americans didn’t have a vaccine for Acne! Wow, can you imagine how many teenagers would plead for one of those? Well, where is it now? Profits revealed that they made a third more than the previous year.

And I’m sure the Quack’s law never touched this list. The law of the "captive market" principle particularly applies to vaccines. And as always, public compliance is based on fear. But "medical success" of any pharmaceutical product supplied by doctors can also be based on placebo value. Take this little gem:

Because doctors pushed formula so well by reassuring mothers that this was the best way since God didn’t give you a glass fronted tit so you don’t know if your little darling has enough "input" as they still graciously call it, they created another problem. They had to deal with all these poor women waddling around their wards (with compulsory episiotomies), and breasts the size of a Friesian’s udder that had just come in to milk. And a bellow of equivalent ear shattering proportions. As a dairy herd tester for two years, I became well-acquainted with the verbal responses of engorged Friesian cows. It was known that in animals, oestrogens stopped the pituitary from releasing the hormones that triggered milk production, so doctors figured that the logical solution to the problem they had created was to give hormones to the women to suppress the milk. And the tablets worked. For many years, so it seemed.

It was "self-evident", you know , so logical – so scientific – just like its self-evident that MMR never causes autism. But some doctors got concerned, because stilboestrol could also cause serious illness and blood clots. Admittedly it was rare, but it happened a bit too often for their liking, and, in keeping with the patronising medicine of the time, they kept that little fact well away from the very people they gave stilboestrol to. Even so, they decided they better do a little controlled trial where one half of women who bottlefed their babies, were given Stilboestrol, and the other half were given a look-alike placebo tablet with nothing in it. The conclusions were finally published in the British Medical Journal1968, No 4: page 578, and upset a lot of people. The fact was, it didn’t matter what you gave the mothers. Both stopped lactation equally as effectively. It was, the saying goes, all between the ears.

The Senate records make clear that the 32 vaccines listed were useless. But did the people receiving them know that. Doubt it. And what about the New Zealand list? And could it also possibly apply to vaccines now? Could their principal value be that people who receive them no longer go hysterical worrying about the disease? Stress crashes out the immune system. Ask anyone what the statistics for cancer are with Type A high flyer businessmen. And heart-attacks. And after divorce or death in the family.

The Health Department loves to tell you how everyone who isn’t vaccinated will get X disease. Well, I’ve never been vaccinated against whooping cough, and I’ve never had it. I didn’t even get it when the kids got it. I talked to my Dad about that, and he wrote to me about when they were in New Zealand during the 1919 epidemic:

"Mother could rise to serious occasions, without fuss, and with good command. She took in cholera victims into the house during a plague in China. Then in New Zealand, on the Island of Kawau, during 1919 flu epidemic, she nursed the whole population of the island in the hotel with the help of the kitchen maid. Men upstairs, women downstairs. I do not know how many people were involved, but mother and the maid were the only two who did not catch the flu. In Auckland large numbers of people were dying daily. Nobody died on Kawau Island."

I wonder why his mother, and the maid didn’t get the flu. Could it be that they didn’t have time to get sick? Could it be that they didn’t assume they would get it? There is a book on the History of Poliomyelitis written by JR Paul, which details what happened once the media starting creating hysteria about poliomyelitis, and publishing long lists of symptoms and how panic stricken people believed they had it, when they didn’t. There were "pseudo-epidemics" where people came in the droves with all the symptoms, but they could find absolutely no cause. He discusses this interesting side-effect of the times, one which I think still operates today. "If you don’t get your child immunised against X, your child could die… everyone who isn’t vaccinated is at risk." Not once during this time, did doctors think to look at how perhaps through their use of syringes, tonsillectomy industry, and acting as sales reps for formula manufacturers that they just might have contributed to the problem.

In my research looking at the early studies on diphtheria, there were trials done in English hospitals. I lost count of the times when the authors referred to staff members who never have antibodies, but who never got sick, and others who HAD antibodies (!) and came down with the disease. So what is "immunity?"

The "experts" would say that its lack of antibodies, and if you haven’t got "them" you will get "it". I have a feeling it’s a WHOLE lot more complicated than that.

Perhaps for readers who want to check out whether all your unimmunised ancestors died of immunable diseases, you could find your family history. Find out just what your ancestors died of. You might be in for a surprise to find out that most of those surviving iatrogenic (doctor induced) diseases such as puerperal fever, lived to quite respectable ages. Come to think of it, maybe you don’t need to because if your ancestors had all died from immunable diseases, you wouldn’t be here anyway. Neither would your grand-parents and great-grandparents. And the world wouldn’t have been successfully over-populated before the "Big 7" became the focus.

In the meantime there is a big "problem" - which hopefully will soon be solved. The public in general has never seen the huge numbers of vaccine skeletons in the annals of medical history. Most refuse to believe the skeletons of now unless it happens to their children, because the medical people have persuaded the masses that stories telling the other side, are the rantings of the ignorant and deluded. Why is there such summary dismissal of anything that smacks of honesty, reality etc?

There are very interesting related problems coming out from the Gisborne Cancer enquiry. When the story of misread cancer smears initially hit the fan, and woman started to clamour for justice, several doctors were very annoyed when it appeared to them that the Government had capitulated to public hysteria. How could they possibly waste money and even consider having Dr Bottrill’s slides re-read???. Worse still, in Australia! One of those ostriches was Dr Andrew Tie who commented in a Royal College of Pathologists Newsletter last year that the Health Funding Authority was going for "overkill" by doing a review. He also said that he "was surprised by the number of people who seem to have swallowed the media noise and jumped to the conclusion Dr Bottrill was incompetent." My collection of articles on the Gisborne fiasco is so high now, that the impact of all excuses on me has become somewhat nauseous. The reality is that Dr Bottrill was able to continue in practice for 10 years too many for one reason, and one reason only.

Because his peers surrounded his competence with a protective net of silence, and refused to act when asked. We never criticise a colleague. They are one of us. If we stay silent, then if I do something wrong, they too will stay silent and protect me. And so on.

And this is the real problem. It is at its worst within the Immunisation circles. Professor Campbell Murdoch who is, as far as I know, stil Professor and Chariman of Family Medicine in Al Ain, was once a public critic of vaccines. It would appear that he has since been re-converted back to "the truth", and is working hard to ensure universal coverage in the United Arab emirates. But in the New Zealand Family Physician, 1995; 22:4:pg 136 he wrote this:

"It is a brave or a foolish medical person who dares to question the wisdom of this wonderful scientific advance, for to do so is to challenge one of the sacred cows of modern medicine. The process is a truly brilliant idea. The body is presented with either a live or a killed virus by injection or in the case of the oral poliovirus by mouth, and the resulting infection stimulates the immune system to protect the person against the real disease such as polio, diphtheria, whooping cough etc. It is almost too good to be true, and has been espoused uncritically by the medical profession. Any other artificially produced therapeutic agent would be assumed to have some side effects, but immunisation has been elevated to a position in therapeutics which cannot be challenged. Any doctor who dares to suggest that there might possibly be a dark side to this wonderful miracle is pilloried by the medical establishment and subjected to threats and ridicule."

He also says on pg 138:

"the attitudes of public health specialists and paediatricians to immunisation indicates that there will be little progress from them in this area. For most of these doctors, belief in the beneficence of immunisation is absolute and to question this has become the professional equivalent of mortal sin. Thus any opposition is dismissed as myth as Begg and Nicoll have shown in demolishing Kyles’s theory without attempting to refute it scientifically. In the same way adverse reactions are denied and opponents are classified as cranks. The worry about this is the science implies refuting the status quo and that, if there were to be any future problem with immunisation, it would never be detected, at least by these groups."

He also slams the "other side as well, saying that"

"the inability of the anti-immunisation lobby to prosecute or critically review scientific research is abysmal."

Which of course, is the standard argument against anyone who dares open their mouth about vaccines, along with other pearls of wisdom over the years such as being "high-school drop-outs", from the "flower-power" era, having "vaccine munchausen’s syndrome", to the latest old one – being the equivalent of "flat earthers", which I thought really funny, because the flat earthers were………THE MAINSTREAM of the time.

It is also a truism that the "flat earthers" never made a jack bean of difference in the world. They were the equivalent of those who just go with the flow. Only dead fish flow with the current.

The fact is that the people on this earth who make a difference are quite "unreasonable". According to the dead fish, that is.

Right now, I’m sitting at a computer writing this. I can download it, put it on a disk, and flick it on to Internet if I want. So lots of other "unreasonable" people can read it. Courtesy of whom? Sure not the flat earthers. Here’s a Hilary version of a very little known story. If you want the boring raw facts, read a history book:

Once upon a time Hertz discovered the type of radiation we now call radio waves (in 1886) but all his mates laughed, and spluttered, "But what use is that?" He thought that too actually, so after discussing it with every man and his dog, dumped it in the cranial rubbish tin. But along came a nosy little "round-earther" called Marconi. He was sick of the slow way in which messages crawled across the world, and was adamant that this could be marvellous. After all, impatience at status quo, and laziness are the spark from which come inventions. Marconi thought that maybe these emanations could even form the basis of world wide communications.

He took his ideas to the esteemed flat earth experts, revered throughout the world as the oracles of all wisdom, and said "How about if I shoot these things upwards. Do you think they might just curve round and come back?" Well, after the oracles had picked themselves up off the floor having wet their pant with laughter, they pointed out the plainly obvious, so logical question "See anything out there boyo? Plain as the ears on your head that from here to the stars is a straight line of nothing". Then they trotted off home for a clean set of bloomers.

Marconi thought about it, and decided that for no particular reason that he could put his finger on, these experts were just plain straight wrong, and set up an experiment to see if he could send radio waves across the Atlantic.

The "experts" near spewed when he succeeded, because what neither group knew, was that in the upper atmosphere there is a layer which bounces back radio waves. We now live with radio, television, internet, telephones, cellular phones – those things which for some people make "life" what it is today. (And to others like me, a very mixed blessing)

Did these essentials of the day come courtesy of a flat-earther? Not likely. Marconi had the guts to swim against the current. He ignored the advice of the day, and was so unreasonable that he stood behind his own irrational, stupid illogical beliefs. And he was right.

So. WE…… who want the right not to vaccinate our children if we so chose are considered by the real flat-earthers of the day to be "flat earthers"?. Well, history might just be the judge of that one. The problem is that in the science world today, as Professor Murdoch said, it is just not done to question sacred cows. This is one of those issues where, according to Dr Mendelsohn, doctors won’t relinquish one sacred cow, until they have a worse one to replace it with. With the proviso that they also don’t have to admit that it was bunk. Their explanation will be that they have something "better" …. "more efficient"… maybe if we’re lucky they will try to sell it to parents by saying its "safer". Which is what they’ve said since they were first around, but never mind.

But I would go further, and say that the whole ethics of medical science today stinks. Most of the most important discoveries which formed the basis of all facets of society today, were discovered by quite "unreasonable" people, who had vision, imagination, an enquiring mind, and the need to find out something, whatever the cost. Those things then became successful because those without a creative imaginative bone in their body, but whose expertise was the love of money used the creative imagination of others to make their fortune. And it would not surprise you to know that the creators of the products which made the money makers’ fortunes usually died paupers.

Real imaginative discoveries could not happen now, because medical training is a brainwashing process of prescribed knowledge, which the students parrot back. And how do I know? I have spent 18 years going up to medical libraries. We have the right to be there. Its our taxes that set them up, and taxes that run them, pay the staff, and subsidise the students. You want to go there? go there. Spend some time sitting and listening to what med students say. Go to the student café, and listen there too. The mental pressure on these kids is such that they only have time to learn one fact, before the next is rammed into them. They parrot back required responses at exams, and never have time to evaluate the worth of what they are learning. The pace of the syllabus sees to that. Now, if you want to do scientific research, you have to be part of an approved institution. And of course, you need money. When scientists apply for funding these days, it is hardly ever on the basis of flying a kite on the basis of a hunch. As David Peat puts it in "Science, Order and Creativity";

"Instead we were all encouraged to focus on getting concrete results that could be used in published papers and to work on problems that were "scientifically acceptable".

On page 23 he says:

"One particularly significant mechanism which the mind employs to defend itself against the inadequacy of its basic ideas is to deny that it is relevant to explore these ideas. Indeed the whole process generally goes further because it is implicitly denied that anything important is being denied! Scientists, for example, may avoid confronting deeper ideas by assuming that each particular difficulty or contradiction can be dealt with through some suitable modification of a commonly accepted theory. Each problem therefore produces a burst of activity in which the scientists seeks a "new idea." But rather than looking for something truly fundamental, scientists often attempt an addition or modification that will simply meet the current problem without seriously disturbing the underlying infrastructure…the whole problem of ending the mind’s defense of its tacitly held ideas and assumption against evidence of their inadequacy cannot be solved within the present climate of scientific research. For within this context, every step that is taken will, from the very outset, be deeply conditioned by the automatic defense of the whole infrastructure".

Or, to put another way. The main criteria laid out by most of today’s funders of medical research is very simple. It goes something like this. "State what your expected result is, and the means by which you will achieve it. You scratch our back, we’ll scratch yours, especially if it is something that will make us bags of money in the future. And if it does, we’ll also look after you when you get a bit beyond it all."

Have a good long hard look at those vaccine and medical researchers of the past, and the people who made decisions today, on what vaccines your babies will be given…offered…. The "names" of the past now sit on esteemed executive position of the Boards of the very people who "fed" them in their research days. And the ones today are only different in that they get in on the act a lot sooner, a lot quicker, and with bigger rewards. You don’t believe me. Well, try this for size

In the Senate on June 15, 2000 Senator Dan Burton detailed facts about the committee that approved the use of the Rotavirus vaccine which showed that the members, including the Chair of the FDA and CDC advisory committees who made the decisions owned stock in the drug companies that made them. Even worse, some individuals on both committees owned the patents for vaccines either under consideration or affected by the decisions of the committee. Would you like some specific examples?

Dr John Modlin – four years on the CDC advisory committee and became Chair in February 1998. He participated in the FDA’s committee, as well as owning considerable stock in Merck, and serving on their Immunisation Advisory Board. He voted yes for the Rotavirus vaccine. Surprised?

Dr Paul Offit, who you will "hear" from again later, is a member of the CDC’s advisory committee who voted on the Rotavirus vaccine. He is paid by the pharmaceutical industry to travel around the country and teach doctors that vaccines are safe. He received a grant from Merck to develop a Rotavirus vaccine, and holds the patent for same. He voted "yes" to adding the rotavirus vaccine to the vaccine schedule. Well, would he vote no?

Dr Patricia Ferrieri and Dr Neal Halsey have similar histories, as does Dr Harry Greenberg, who has bags of shares in Aviron, and Chiron, but at least to the FDA’s credit, he was excluded for the rotavirus discussion because he too holds the patent on the rotashield rotavirus vaccine.

What a pity the CDC didn’t read from the same albeit flawed ethics manual.

Its people like this who make life and death decisions relating to your children and maybe even yourself. They can look forward to the ultimate gold-watch reward by their masters once they retire from research. While this situation continues, do you really think that there will ever be funding for the really important things to parents, such as serious vaccine reactions, MMR causing autism, long term consequences of the immune system being permanently skewed? You can bet your jockey underwear that the answer is NO, with the echoes still heard in the next decade.

Which means it is up to those of us who have very genuinely held concerns, who believe the whole medical profession is in need of radical overhaul from top to bottom, to continue to speak out. So, I’m sorry if I sound cynical in the newsletter sometimes, but just occasionally, when my imagination gets out of control, I have this vision of all these myopic vaccine pushers really stuffing things up even more badly than now, if it could actually be any worse. As things stand now they deny the existence of the few lemmings going over the cliff from "co-incidental" vaccine reactions and "imaginary" immune system skewing. But my fear is that their cleverness will really catch up with them big time, and I see multitudinous hordes of vaccinated people who, by believing them hurtle themselves like lemmings, over the cliff into deep kimchee country.

And I don’t want my family to be among the carnage. And for me, the present publicly available history of medicine, (to those who care to read it) is such that it does not inspire confidence. I don’t believe that today’s advocates of mass vaccination have any understanding of any issues relevant to parents for that matter.

Take this classic sequence from the Senate hearing on April 6^th this year about MMR and autism. Professor O’Leary from Ireland was confirming that his evidence proved that Dr Andrew Wakefield was right. Our friendly Dr Paul Offit showed his true colours with this response:

"He cannot have found something that suggests a link between autism and vaccines, because of the possible consequences of such a finding."

Consequences to what? Paul Offit’s cushy job flying around the world teaching doctors vaccines are safe? …… Paul Offit’s pharmaceutical shares?…….. Paul Offit’s professional reputation? Paul Offit’s self-esteem? ……… Paul Offit’s……… vaccine patent?

What is worse, he, and most others representing the pharmaceutical companies which keep their families well heeled, have no knowledge or interest in the hundreds of vaccine disasters previously written up in their own skeleton ridden history books. If you showed them, they either wouldn’t believe it, or they would laugh and say "But that was then…. We know everything now."

As to the New Zealand experts, I wonder how many could name ONE of the vaccines listed in this article which were not only useless, but callously, commercially sold worldwide to trusting deluded people solely for the purpose of monetary gain. Immunisation was truly a miracle. An inspiration. The modern, eation of an infinitely lucrative industry in which every person in the world, no matter their pennies in the pockets, is a "valued" customer. As an industry it sure beats dunking people in the sea. What’s more, it spawns another one – how to fix the messes that the first one created.

Those who advocate this sacred cow have forgotten that whoever ignores the lessons of history is made to pay somewhere, somehow, sometime – and as Florida jury members proved to the cigarette manufacturers, sometimes it costs - BIGTIME.

It could be that in years to come, vaccine companies will wish they were cigarette makers, because the costs to vaccine companies will make the cost to the ciggie-boys look like chickenfeed. Because whereas smoking is voluntary, vaccines are virtually mandatory.

The bit that is so hard to take is that the doctor-based organisations who so successfully got behind Rothmans et al by freely advocating cigarettes as the cure for most respiratory ailments got off scot-free. And I guarantee you that all the doctors that jabbed the babies will get off scot-free too. Who will pay? The tax-payers, again. Why? Because as far as the medical profession, or the cigarette companies are concerned:

It’s always some-one else’s fault.

But herein is where I do have my faith. In this confusing user-pays world, where the people I can trust grows smaller by the day, I have to believe there is justice somewhere. God says "Vengeance is mine." I know most people don’t believe in God. That’s their problem. But if they are wrong, I hope they are in for a rude awakening one day. They just might have to account for everything they have ever done. I’d like to be there. To hear the answers they give.

Somehow though, I doubt that God would let me. My motives are highly dubious, and what’s worse if I’m like I am now it would be too hard to keep my big mouth shut.

 [Vaccination]  [Hilary Butler]