Part 1: It is time to have an honest discussion about ALL vaccines

I want to start this post by saying I have lived most of my life being a pretty fierce defender of vaccines.  My education and training made it clear that vaccines are the answer to stable public health.  I would hear stories of people choosing to not vaccinate their kids and I would eyeroll, call them crunchy granola and uninformed, and regurgitate some nonsense I saw on television about the “Disneyland measles outbreak” and go on my way.  I received a few vaccines as a kid (in 1977 we did not have the vaccine schedule we do now).  I had my MMR booster before college.  And man was I SICK.  I had a mumps like reaction to that vaccine.  Felt like dog crap for a week.  Did I TRULY need that booster?  Or was it just a money maker for pharma?  I complied with the requirements to get Hep B vaccinated prior to working in healthcare.  Even though the unit I worked on was 99% hep C, and I can count on 1 hand the number of patients I cared for with hep B.  I had a positive varicella titer from having chicken pox when I was 8, so I did not get that vaccine.  I had a TDAP booster in 2008.  I got a flu shot twice, once in 2011, and again in 2013 when I was mandated to get one or lose my job.  Both times I had the flu shot, I did not catch influenza, but I was sicker all winter with other crud.  I had some respiratory crud in 2013 that took me out for a week.  On top of multiple other annoying head colds that fall/winter/spring.  I spent Christmas 2011 with the GI bug, followed by 3-4 head colds that winter/spring.  The years I did NOT get a flu vaccine, I was not as sick with other viruses.  I had maybe 1 or 2 colds the entire year.  I also did not catch influenza except for TWICE.  In my 45 years of life I had 2 flu shots, and influenza 2 times.

My stance on vaccines changed around 2012. That was when the flu shot mandate talks began at the University affiliated hospital I worked at.  This was also in the decade after the landmark paper was posted in the Lancet by Dr. Andrew Wakefield. Dr. Wakefield correlated the MMR vaccine to increased incidence in autism.  It was a huge revelation that led to parents questioning the narrative about the necessity of these vaccines, and how they were scheduled to be given to kids.  It wasn’t that the vaccine itself was bad, it was the thimerosol and the mercury IN the vaccines.  And when we gave kids SO MANY vaccines at the same time, it increased their risk for neurological impairment from those vaccine additives.  In 2014, we adjusted the childhood vaccine schedule and kids now get upwards of 68 vaccines.  Compared to the 10 or less we got when I was a kid.  Dr. Wakefield discussed separating up the MMR vaccine into 3 different vaccines, and waiting until age 36 months to give them in separate doses to prevent neurological damage.

Big pharma was not going to have any of that.  They retracted his paper, stripped Dr. Wakefield of his credentials, called him a quack and a fake scientist (gee, sound familiar to what we are living right now?), and stated his paper was fraud.  The Lancet published a huge apology for publishing his paper.  Sweep it under the carpet.  And we went back to the same old same old, vaccinating kids on a schedule that is guaranteed to make physicians and pharma big bucks.  But at what cost?

Here is the cover page of Dr. Wakefield’s study:

It is impossible to find the entire article. It has been wiped from the record, aside from this photo above.

Here is an article from 2012 when they pulled the Lancet article, which CLEARLY states that Wakefield was not anti-vaccine, he was advocating for single vaccination not the MMR combined, and the refute paper here does not give any other reason for why autism is happening, only that it is definitely NOT vaccines, and that it is “genetic and environmental, and we must find the reason”.  Well then.  No bombshell findings to say that Wakefield was wrong, just a “no he is wrong and we don’t know why autism happens”.  OK then.  12 years this paper stood.  You can google plenty of anti-Wakefield propaganda online.  It is eerily similar to what you see about covid vaccines today.  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2831678/

A good friend loaned me this book:

Here is the evolution of the childhood vaccine schedule

And the evolution of the adult vaccine schedule

Here is the listings for how much mercury is in each vaccine:

And here is the current vaccine schedule of how much mercury and thimerosal is in the doses we give kids on the vaccine schedule:

And finally, the possibility of flu shots and Alzheimer’s disease: (this is really impactful because we flu shot every single adult over age 65 each year, and multiple other medications have been blamed for Alzheimer’s, when in reality it is a cumulative effect of numerous things.  The flu shot is right up there in causative agents.). The previous guideline of flu shots til age 60 is long gone, we now flu vax every adult until they die.

If you read this book, he has over 300 citations in the back of the book for where he gets the data for this book.  It is not an opinion piece.  It is heavily heavily cited with credible government documentation and studies done. I highly recommend this book.  I purchased it for myself after reading it on loan.  It was worth adding to my library.

Was Dr. Wakefield really off his rocker or was he on to something?  Tomorrow’s post digs further into this.