If you want to do a google search to find the stories, told by American soldiers, about seeing the Nazi concentration camps in World War II, just search on “bodies stacked like cordwood.” Without exception, every single soldier who saw Dachau or Buchenwald or Ohrdruf or Mauthausen reported that he saw the horror of “bodies stacked like cordwood.” (more…)
March 14, 2010
In my day, we didn’t have vaccine and we didn’t have autism
Does modern medicine cause modern diseases? When I was a child in the 30s and 40s, autism was unknown. It wasn’t because autism existed, but had not yet been diagnosed; it was because no one had the symptoms that are now called autism.
I had every childhood disease known to man: measles, mumps, whooping cough, rubella, chicken pox, influenza, and even scarlet fever. These diseases had no lasting effect on my health. If anything, these childhood diseases made me stronger, as in the old adage: what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
All of my classmates had the same diseases and none of them died or had any after effects. I lived in a small town which did not even have a doctor, but we all managed to survive without any medication at all.
The only vaccine that we had back then was for smallpox, but my mother would not allow me to have the vaccine. I was finally vaccinated for smallpox at the age of 18 because it was required for entry into college. For ten days, I was extremely sick with a mild case of smallpox, caused by the vaccine. I lost ten pounds and looked like “death warmed over,” as people used to say back then.
My mother didn’t believe in vaccines because her mother didn’t believe in vaccines. My children were born before the MMR (Measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine was developed, so they all had measles and chicken pox, although none of the other childhood diseases. They were not as sick as I was when I had measles, which I attribute to better nutrition.
Two of my grandchildren were born before the latest vaccines which are suspected of causing autism; they are perfectly normal, but the last two grandchildren, who had the vaccines, have mild symptoms of autism or ADD or ADHD or whatever. It is clear to me that these new vaccines make a difference in the lives of the children who are vaccinated.
The old childhood diseases have been wiped out almost completely now, but at what cost? Now we have an epidemic of autism. What is America going to be like when these autistic children grow up and can’t function normally? Will autism become the new norm?
Federal laws do not mandate vaccinations; the regulation of vaccines is left to the states, and all 50 states allow exemptions. California permits exemptions based on personal beliefs; most states allow exemptions based on religious beliefs. I don’t think that most parents know of these exemptions.
A recent article in the New York Times has this headline: 3 New Rulings Find No Link to Vaccines and Autism. The article is quoted below:
In a further blow to the antivaccine movement, three judges ruled Friday in three separate cases that thimerosal, a preservative containing mercury, does not cause autism.
[...]
The antivaccine groups also lost the first three cases, which were decided in February 2009 by the same three judges, known as special masters. All three rulings were upheld on their first appeals.
Defenders of vaccines said they were pleased by Friday’s decision, while opponents were dismissive, saying they would never get a fair ruling from the omnibus arrangement.
In the three cases brought against the government, by the parents of Jordan King, Colin R. Dwyer and William Mead, all three special masters used strong language in dismissing the expert evidence from the families’ lawyers.
The master in the King ruling emphasized that it was “not a close case” and “extremely unlikely” that Jordan’s autism was connected to his vaccines. The master in the Dwyer case wrote that many parents “relied upon practitioners and researchers who peddled hope, not opinions grounded in science and medicine.”
Patricia Campbell-Smith, the master in the Mead case, also dismissed two subarguments made by a few opponents of vaccines, saying they “have not shown either that certain children are genetically hypersusceptible to mercury or that certain children are predisposed to have difficulty excreting mercury.”
She also echoed a contention by vaccine defenders that a shot is safer than a tuna sandwich. “A normal fish-eating diet by pregnant mothers” is more likely to deposit mercury in the brain than vaccines are, she wrote.
In a telephone press conference after the rulings, Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the inventor of a rotavirus vaccine from which he receives royalties, praised the decisions, saying: “This hypothesis has already had its day in scientific court, but in America we like to have our day in literal court. Fortunately, we now have these rulings.”
Fears of thimerosal emerged more than a decade ago and have cast a pall over vaccines ever since, even though it has been removed from most of them. The fear has caused some parents to avoid them and made outbreaks of diseases like measles and whooping cough more likely.
Even with this decision, Dr. Offit said, “it’s very hard to unscare people after you’ve scared them.”
The Coalition for Vaccine Safety, a group of organizations that believe vaccines cause autism, dismissed the rulings.
“The deck is stacked against families in vaccine court,” said Rebecca Estepp, of the coalition’s steering committee. “Government attorneys defend a government program using government-funded science before government judges. Where’s the justice in that?” The coalition claims to represent 75,000 families.
Amy Carson, founder of Moms Against Mercury, who has a son with brain damage, called the vaccine court arrangement “like the mice overseeing the cheese.”
The vaccine injury fund and the court overseeing it were created in 1988 after judgments in state court lawsuits over vaccines became so inconsistent and so expensive that vaccine companies started quitting the American market.
The third theory, that measles vaccine causes autism, is still to be ruled on by the special masters. But Lisa Randall, a lawyer with the Immunization Action Coalition, which defends vaccines, said she believed some of the test cases had been “abandoned” by the families that brought them after the 2009 decisions dismissed a variant of the same theory.
Another good article about autism can be found on this web site.
