Ask a doctor what she thinks about vaccination and she will tell you that it saves lives. Lots of lives. She’ll probably add that vaccination is one of medicine’s most powerful weapons in the fight against disease. Ask how she knows that it saves lives and she’ll look a bit puzzled for a moment (as though you’ve asked her how she knows that breathing is good for us) and then, clearly wondering if you’re a nutter or just plain old-fashioned stupid, tell you that it has cut mortality rates and helped eradicate killer diseases such as polio and smallpox. She’ll tell you vaccination is completely safe and free of side effects and that anyone who says otherwise is just a mad conspiracy theorist. She’ll tell you all this because it is what she has been told to tell you by the Department of Health, the medical establishment and the drug industry. She hasn’t seen any scientific evidence proving that vaccination is effective and safe but this is only because there isn’t any.
I can hear, and even feel, hordes of apoplectic vaccination supporters reaching for whatever they use instead of pens these days when they feel the need to write a letter to the editor.
The enthusiasm for vaccination, and the disgust for those who question its efficacy, has reached such heights that there is now much talk of compulsory vaccination programmes being introduced. There are doctors (who will make vast amounts of money out of a compulsory vaccination programme) who recommend that all children be vaccinated whether or not their parents approve. Parents who refuse to have their children vaccinated will have them taken away from them. Some GPs are already refusing to look after patients if they don't agree to have their children vaccinated.
I now have no doubt that despite the dangers and inefficiencies known to be associated with it, vaccination will become compulsory. The hazards and inadequacies will be ignored. It will not be the first time.
Compulsory vaccination was introduced in Britain in the mid 19th century and in 1871 Public Vaccinators were appointed.
You will probably not collapse with shock when I tell you that drug companies which make vaccines would not be averse to their products being made compulsory. I understand that. I would like my books to be made compulsory reading.
Senior doctors recently suggested not only that vaccination should be compulsory but that children who were not vaccinated should not be allowed into school. Social workers will be quick (and eager) to take children away from parents who oppose vaccination.
Politicians have been persuaded that vaccinating the population at large helps save money and that if you lie often enough about something then it will eventually become the truth. The theory is that if you vaccinate 1,000,000 children against, say, whooping cough and, as a result, you prevent 1,000 children getting the disease then the country will avoid the cost of 1,000 parents staying at home for a week or so to look after their child. If one child is permanently brain damaged by the vaccine that is bad luck on the child and his or her parents but, as long as the State can avoid financial responsibility by denying that there is any link between vaccination and brain damage, then it is ahead of the game. In reality, the evidence shows that even this cold-blooded, steel-hearted philosophy is faulty. The problem is that vaccines are so ineffective and so dangerous that instead of being an advantage to society as a whole they are a costly disadvantage.
Drug companies make huge amounts of money out of selling vaccines. And the establishment has fiddled the evidence, and denied or suppressed the inconvenient truths, in order to promote the official point of view. In Britain I have been banned from speaking to doctors and debates about vaccination are unknown. Aristotle’s tyrant’s task was to `get rid of men of independent spirit’. And so it is. In our modern world the truth will certainly set no one free.
The global vaccine market reached $21 billion in 2010 and is growing at a rate of 16.5%. The whole business of vaccinating people is so hugely profitable (largely because it is something that doesn't rely on finding a large number of sick people but also because it is something that can be done on a regular basis) that drug companies, having almost saturated the `vaccinating-children' market are moving heavily into adult vaccines. There is, for example, a vaccine planned to prevent atherosclerosis. I suspect that doctors will claim that this will enable people to keep eating a bad diet and yet avoid heart attacks.
Those who promote vaccines often claim that vaccination programmes have reduced illness, prevented millions of deaths and are the main reason why the average life expectation has risen.
These are all barefaced lies. Life expectancy rose at the start of the 20th century because infants stopped dying at such an awful rate and they stopped dying so rapidly because of better food, cleaner drinking water, better sewage facilities and better living conditions not because of clever drug companies. Average life expectancy figures were dragged down by the fact that vast numbers of new born babies didn’t live more than a month or two. And for those who wonder why there are more old people around today, the answer is simple: there are more old folk around because the population boomed after the Second World War. Today life expectancy is increasing hardly at all and that’s largely due to the fact that far fewer people smoke now than did a decade or two ago. Once again medicine, in all its forms, has had very little to do with the improvement.
They claim, for example, that Edward Jenner, the father of vaccination, enabled doctors to eradicate smallpox. That’s a myth.
Jenner tried out the first smallpox vaccine on his own 10 month old son. Tragically, the boy remained `mentally retarded’ until his death at the age of 21. Jenner refused to have his second child vaccinated. Oddly, the doctors who talk so knowledgeably about Jenner never seem to know any of this. The profession which had originally rejected Jenner’s work as too dangerous embraced it, and ignored the risks, when they saw the profits to be made.
One of the worst smallpox epidemics in Britain hit between 1870 and 1872, nearly two decades after compulsory vaccination was introduced. The people of Leicester refused to have the vaccine and when the next epidemic hit in the 1890s they relied upon a system of quarantine, and good health practices. There was only one death from smallpox in Leicester but in other towns, where the vaccinators had been busy, there were many deaths.
When the international campaign to rid the world of smallpox was at its height the number of cases rose every time there was a large scale vaccination programme. And so the strategy was changed. Mass vaccination programmes were replaced with surveillance, isolation and quarantine.
Everyone knows that vaccination eradicated poliomyelitis, don’t they?
Er, well, actually no. The vaccine killed lots of people and played no part in controlling the disease.
In Tennessee, USA, for example, the number of polio victims the year before vaccination became compulsory was 119. The year after the figure was 386. In North Carolina the number of deaths rose from 78 to 313 after vaccination was introduced. In America as a whole the incidence of polio increased by about 50% after vaccination. Ironically, the death rate had been falling before the vaccine was introduced.
The fact is that the significance of polio dropped because of better sanitation, better housing, cleaner water and more food. It was social developments, rather than medical ones, which increased human resistance to infectious diseases.
And I wonder how many vaccine supporters know that 17 million children who were vaccinated against polio in the 1950s and 1960s are now at greatly increased risk of developing cancer? Early polio vaccine was prepared using monkey kidney tissue which contains a carcinogenic virus, SV40. I bet your doctor didn’t tell you about that. I bet she didn’t mention that the virus can be passed on to the children of those who were given the contaminated vaccine. And it’s no good trying to find out if you had the carcinogenic vaccine because the Department of Health has destroyed all the records.
Well, there’s always the whooping cough vaccine, isn’t there? Surely that helped save thousands of young lives?
No, actually, that’s a myth too. Or, more accurately, a lie. The whooping cough isn’t very efficient and it certainly isn’t safe.
The incidence of the disease was already falling fast when the vaccine was introduced in the 1950s. And the evidence proves that the whooping cough vaccine is neither very efficient nor is it safe. The Government guessed that it causes brain damage in 1 in 100,000 children. But the figure could be 1 in 6,000. No one has the foggiest which report is most accurate. The only certainty is that it does cause brain damage. The British Government has quietly paid out compensation to hundreds of children who were brain damaged by the whooping cough vaccine. I bet your doctor forgot to tell you that.
Still, there’s always the flu vaccine.
Influenza vaccines contain a constantly changing variety of gunk (and their efficacy is severely compromised by the fact that they are inevitably designed to deal with last year’s flu strain). Popular contents include formaldehyde, polyethylene glycol, gelatin and thimerosal. I particularly like the inclusion of thimerosal because that contains mercury and the blessed EU has banned barometers because they contain mercury. So you can’t have a barometer hanging in the hall if it contains mercury but the doctor can jab some of the stuff into your kid’s arm. Great. That makes perfect sense. Toys which contain mercury are banned as though they were made of decomposing uranium so kids get their mercury fix through a syringe.
Common side effects of the flu vaccine include fever, tiredness, headache and muscle aches. A list of the slightly less common side effects would scare you to death. (Oh, OK, I’ll scare you to death. How do you fancy brain swelling, facial paralysis, eye muscle damage, kidney disorders and the ultimate side effects: death.) And, of course, the vaccine will, like all vaccines, damage the human body’s immune system which is the thing God gave us to help us fight off infections such as the flu. Moreover, the damned thing doesn’t even work very well. The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention recently estimated that this year’s vaccine is only 23% effective in preventing the flu, and even less effective than this when given to people over the age of 50. My GP is constantly inviting me to queue up and have a nurse inject me with gunk. Someone once asked me if I ever have the flu jab and when I said I didn’t and that, moreover, I have never known any doctor who has one.
The whole vaccination story is one of the great scandals of our time. The entire medical profession (at least the part of it in general practice) has been bribed by the drug industry, working through the government and using taxpayers’ money.
The few doctors who do stand up and say something, and who dare to point out that vaccination programmes are a hazard and do more harm than good, tend to be quickly silenced. They are discredited and scorned and their work is not published.
The truth is that doctors, whether working as hospital consultants, GPs or public health officials, know very little about vaccination. Most simply follow the establishment line, never question what they are told by the drug industry and dismiss all critics of vaccination as dangerous lunatics.
They dismiss the idea of there being side effects as Luddite nonsense. Don’t dare mention autism as a side effect!
Actually, I will just mention autism which is, of course, a disorder which involves brain damage (something known to be caused by vaccines). The vaccine defenders argue that it is a coincidence that the incidence of autism has rocketed as the number of vaccinations being given to children has also rocketed. Well, they would, wouldn’t they? But I wonder how many enthusiastic GPs and health visitors know that the symptoms of autism are exactly the same as the symptoms of the type of brain damage caused by vaccines? And I wonder how many warn their patients that the American Government has accepted that vaccines may cause autism? And is paying compensation to parents whose children have vaccine induced autism.
In Britain, doctors start dumping vaccines into babies who are just a few weeks old. And yet there is no evidence that vaccines are safe in the long-term. No research is done to check this. The establishment puts the onus on the doubters to find the evidence, knowing that is pretty well impossible to do this. In the USA a huge medical practice of paediatricians with 30,000 child patients decided not to vaccinate their patients at all. Guess how many patients with autism they have? If you guessed `none' you guessed right.
In Britain, politicians, doctors, nurses and journalists all enthusiastically insist that vaccines are entirely safe and free from side effects. They are all lying. Lest you assume that is hyperbole let me point out that according to the US Health Department's National Vaccine Injury Compensation Programme, allegedly safe childhood vaccines officially kill or injure well over 2,000 children a year in America. Can you imagine the fuss there would be if a food company marketed a product which killed or injured 2,000 healthy children every single year?
The evidence shows that vaccination programmes have not done the things they are credited with but have done most of the things they are blamed for. The decline in disease, the reduction in infant mortality rates and the increase in average life expectation are all due to improved living conditions. Cleaner water, efficient methods of removing sewage, fresher food, less poverty and less overcrowding are the real reasons why these improvements have taken place. Anyone who doubts this has only to look at graphs showing mortality rates and life expectation rates alongside graphs showing when vaccines were introduced. The graphs show clearly that the improvements took place before vaccines were introduced.
Why don't doctors say anything?
Sadly, that is because the medical profession has been bought. GPs lost their final scrap of integrity on the day when they agreed to take money if they managed to vaccinate enough patients. That sort of conveyor belt, bonus ridden philosophy is better suited to the manufacture of motor car parts than the practise of medicine.
In Britain GPs receive huge bonus payments if they vaccinate enough patients. Every vaccination they give (or authorise) is another nice noise in the cash register. Epidemics produce a bonus.
The Government and the enormous and rich vaccine industry have bought the medical profession, lock stock and syringe barrel. GPs, once members of a proud and distinguished profession have been reduced to snivelling, whining needle-men for the drug industry; hand-maidens to an industry which cares nothing for people but everything for profits. Doctors have lost their way. GPs who jab enough patients gets a thumping great wodge of cash. A GP who is questioning and discerning will be punished. And so the vast majority of GPs do as they are told. Most know nothing about the dangers of the damned vaccines they so happily jab into patients' arms. Question the whole sordid business and these ill-educated propagandists will throw up their hands in horror. Ask them for some evidence that vaccines are safe and effective and they become hysterical. Facts are, as John Adams said, stubborn things. And the facts do not show any value in vaccination.
The number of health problems (varying from autism to severe brain damage) caused by vaccines will soar. The link between vaccinations and illness will continue to be as strenuously denied as was the link between smoking and lung cancer. And for the same reasons.
Most practising doctors and nurses at the sharp end of medicine undoubtedly believe that vaccines have helped wipe out some of the deadliest infectious diseases. Many members of the medical profession would put vaccination high on any list of great medical discoveries.
The mythical power of vaccination programmes has for years constantly been sustained by governments and organisations such as the World Health Organisation announcing that such and such a disease will be eradicated when the relevant vaccination programme has been completed.
Vaccination is widely respected by doctors and others in the health care industry because of the assumption that it is through vaccination that many of the world's most lethal infectious diseases have been eradicated. But there isn't any evidence to show that vaccination programmes have ever been any of any value - either to individuals or to communities. When you study (as I have) the evidence relating to whooping cough, tetanus, diphtheria and other diseases it is clear that the incidence, and number of deaths, were in decline long before the relevant vaccines were introduced. But as the years have gone by the number of vaccines available has increased steadily. Modern American children receive around thirty vaccinations by the time they go to school. A decade or two ago the only vaccines available were against a relatively small number of diseases including smallpox, tuberculosis, polio, cholera, diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough. Today, the number of available vaccines seems to grow almost daily. In the past vaccines were produced against major killer diseases. Today vaccines are produced against diseases such as measles, mumps and chickenpox which have been traditionally regarded as relatively benign inconveniences of childhood.
Does anyone know what happens inside the body when all these different vaccinations are given together? Do different vaccines work with or against one another? What about the risk of interactions? Exactly how does the immune system cope when it is suddenly bombarded with so much foreign material?
Tragically, many doctors seem to know very little about the vaccines they advocate. In my view, if a doctor wants to vaccinate you or a member of your family you should insist that she confirm in writing that the vaccine is both entirely safe and absolutely essential. You may notice her enthusiasm for the vaccine suddenly diminish.
Why are so many people still enthusiastic about vaccination? Well, I suspect that could be because most people simply don't know the truth. The reality is that the truth, regarded as inconvenient, is frequently suppressed. The same thing happens everywhere these days. When I wrote a column for a newspaper in China the editors were at first reluctant to publish a piece I had written criticising vaccination. Eventually, they printed the piece (simply because I refused to provide an alternative). After the column appeared my book publishers in China wrote to tell me that the Chinese Government had informed them that they could no longer publish my work. Other Chinese publishers who had shown great enthusiasm for publishing my books also suddenly changed their minds. That’s what I call real censorship. And actually it isn’t something that just happens in China - it’s a global problem. Not long ago a journalist interviewed me about vaccination. His piece (which contained some of the simple facts in this article) was published on the Express Tribune website in Pakistan but a day or so later it disappeared.
This article will doubtless attract sneers and condemnations from those who profit from the vaccine industry.
And so the myth will be sustained and vaccine damage will continue.
For a much more detailed examination of vaccines and vaccination (with background about specific vaccines) please see Dr Vernon Coleman’s book ‘Anyone who tells you vaccines are safe and effective is lying. Here’s the proof.’ The book is available as an Amazon kindle eBook.