My response to Mothering's Vaccine Debate article

Thank you, Mothering, for running the Vaccine Debate article. I am a parent who chooses not to vaccinate. As a nurse with a BSN who practiced in hospitals for 8 years before having children, I never once questioned vaccinations. I even consented to the flu shot when I was three months pregnant, after asking the nurse giving it if she was sure it was safe. She simply shrugged.

My life changed when my daughter was born at 35 weeks. She had her first Hepatitis B shot in the neonatal intensive care unit at MUSC in Charleston, SC. Looking back, I still do not understand why you would vaccinate a child whose immune system is already under attack from pneumonia and respiratory distress, at less than ten days old. Once we got home to Hilton Head, I questioned her pediatrician as to why I should vaccinate her on schedule, because the guidelines at the time (2004) said that premature infants should be vaccinated according to their gestational age, not when they were actually born. He convinced me to stay on schedule, and being a health care provider, I never questioned him.

Elle reacted to her two month shots with high pitched screaming that lasted for more than 24 hours. I just thought it was an extreme expression of her already frustrating colic. Then after her four month shots, she stopped breathing during a nap. I went in to check on her because the room was a little too quiet, and she was blue around the lips and nose, and her chest wasn't moving. It took me 1-2 minutes of rubbing her sternum to get her to breathe, and about an hour for her to come around and be fully coherent.


What would have happened if I had not gone in there? Would she have been chalked up to SIDS and filed away along with all of the other SIDS babies who actually had vaccine reactions? Her apnea had stopped at three months. Would it have been attributed to that- an additional apnea episode? The interesting thing was that when I told our pediatrician what had happened, he left out the Hib/Hep B and Polio vaccinations at her six month visit, without explaining why. When I got her records from his office months later, our conversation about her ALTE (apparent life threatening event) had been struck from the record. Then when I researched the two vaccines that had been left out, I discovered that the ones she had been given at two and four months had been hot lots (lots with abnormally high reaction rates), and several healthy babies had died from the same shots.

The only reason I began to question vaccines at all was that it was time for Elle to have the MMR. We lived in south Louisiana post-Katrina, and she kept getting these strange rashes, which my new pediatrician attributed to the debris in the area. It was evident that she was reacting to the MMR, after I learned that the body can detoxify itself through the skin. It was during this period that I got Elle's medical records and researched each shot in the VAERS database.

Our second baby, Justin, came when Elle was 20 months old. I was still new to the vaccine debate, so I weighed each one and decided to give him the DTaP at six months, and see how it went. Elle had contracted a mild form of pertussis when she was nine months old, even though she had been vaccinated three times with the DTaP. My previous pediatrician had insisted that if there wasn't a "whoop", it wasn't pertussis, and called it bronchitis and pneumonia. She had both before, but never that severe, and had never coughed and been up all night gagging on mucus for three weeks straight. I found out later that the diagnostic criteria for pertussis changes after a child has been vaccinated, i.e. her illness would have been diagnosed as pertussis in an unvaccinated child.

Giving Justin the vaccine was a mistake. He was a healthy, exclusively breastfed, bubbly baby who was developing right on schedule, until he had the shot. After the shot he would get ear infection after ear infection. The only reason I knew that wasn't normal is because Elle had only had two ear infections in her short life, and he hadn't had any up until that point. His bowel habits were questionable before the shot, and afterward I didn't see much of a change in his constipation- little did I know that the damage was being done on the inside. His gut was developing holes that allowed foreign food proteins to pass into his bloodstream.

His development slowed to a stop, but didn’t regress. Every time he had wheat, the light in his eyes would go out. Justin wasn't interested in solids until about eight months, and whenever he had wheat he would react with strange staring episodes. He couldn't crawl, so he did the army move where he dragged his body around with his arms. When he finally did pull up to standing at 13 months, he couldn't bear weight on his left leg. That was the leg the vaccine and three doses of antibiotic went into to treat his ear infections. He finally walked at 17 months (or I should say he ran!).

I nursed Justin until he was two and nine months. In the small space of two years we had spent a few thousand dollars on allergy testing, second opinions, alternative healthcare, some of which didn't work, homeopathy, speech therapy, hair testing, and blood testing, on and on. After he stopped nursing I found that the mucus in his stool had stopped. Apparently my own gut was damaged as well, so that he was getting some foreign proteins through my breast milk.

We had blood work done by a DAN! doctor, which showed that he has a genetic mutation that impairs the way his body processes B12. This leads to impairment in the methylation-sulfation pathway, which is the way the body detoxifies its cells. He will need B12 indefinitely. Justin is now a healthy little boy, thanks to a gluten free diet, homeopathy, probiotics, supplements to heal his gut, and speech therapy.

My experience has left me with many, many questions. Where are the long-term, cohort studies of vaccine safety, done over 20, 30, and 40 years? Where are the studies on the biochemical effect of vaccines on our bodies? How can we simply write off all of the current autoimmune diseases without investigating their link to vaccination? Is it really that far-fetched to say that injecting bacteria and viruses directly into the bloodstream, which contain their own DNA and RNA, could alter a human's DNA?

Why are parents being written off as uneducated by pediatricians? Just because I am a mother, does not mean that I don’t have a degree, or that I never had a career, or that I don’t understand statistics. I understand what a statistically significant study is. Dr. Wakefield’s study on the MMR, although eye opening, did not have a large enough sample to be statistically significant. However, the Generation Rescue study of 9000 vaccinated versus unvaccinated children did have a large enough sample, and showed that vaccinated boys have much, much higher rates of autism.

Of course I am concerned about diseases like polio. My great-aunt was disabled for life due to polio. However at this time I am more concerned about the explosion of the vaccine schedule. We don't know enough about vaccines and their effect on the human body at a cellular level, to say that they are unequivocally safe. My experience says that they are not.

How is it safe to give mercury to pregnant women, in the flu shot, if it is not safe for a pregnant woman to eat tuna (and other fish which contain mercury)? Does giving women mercury during pregnancy predispose their babies to vaccine reactions? Does giving a woman the MMR during pregnancy predispose her baby to react to it when he gets it at 15 months?

There are no studies to date that address whether it is safe to give multiple vaccinations at once. It is similar to what I experienced working as a nurse in adult medicine, there were no studies that proved that taking more than four medications at once was safe, or even advisable. Many of my patients were on more than 15 medications a day. The absence of evidence-based practice in both settings is glaring.

Why then are we allowing pediatricians to practice medicine in a vacuum of evidence-based medicine? Where is the science? Would pediatricians practice evidence-based medicine even after being presented with the science? Or would they continue to browbeat parents who do not vaccinate, as many of the doctors did in the article?

Is autism the result of three generations of bodily harm done by vaccines? If 70 percent of the immune system is in the intestine, and many of the supposed consequences of vaccines are immune-related, then doesn't it make sense that vaccinations would play a part in autism, which is a consequence of a leaky gut?

Is it the bacteria and viruses themselves or the additives doing the damage? Is it really mercury and aluminum, or is it the measles virus, or pertussis bacteria (which both have an affinity for the gut), doing the damage? How do we know if we don’t do any studies?

Why is the NIH spending money on doing frivolous studies like “broccoli prevents cancer later in life”, instead of studying the effects of vaccines on children? What are we afraid of finding out? What is really wrong with questioning the current vaccine schedule? Who exactly is going to care for all of the autistic children when their parents are no longer here? How high can we expect autism rates to go?

Why can’t we look at the example that other countries have set with their vaccine schedule? France suspended the Hepatitis B shot indefinitely due to side effects. Japan does not vaccinate any children younger than two, due to side effects from the DTaP. Is the CDC performing its civic duty?

The physicians in the article spend a lot of time talking about the “herd”, and unvaccinated children as a threat to the health of the populace. In my experience, the herd is not that healthy. When my daughter was three and my son was 18 months, she was in preschool and he was not. During flu and cold season, the preschool kids were on repeated rounds of antibiotics.

During this time Justin got sick, and my pediatrician was in the habit of doing nasal cultures. His culture grew out Hib. My doctor said that he was pleased that Justin hadn’t gotten the vaccine, because his vaccinated kids were growing out a more virulent strain of Hib. He said that the most likely source of his infection was the preschool kids whose immunity was suppressed.

Is this any way to have a healthy “herd”? Doesn’t overuse of antibiotics set us up for antibiotic resistance? Are we doing the same thing with the current vaccine schedule? Vaccinating against a few strains of a virus or bacteria seems to be making the strains that we don’t vaccinate against stronger, just like antibiotic resistance. Why aren’t we studying vaccine resistance like we are studying MRSA and VRE, which are both antibiotic resistant bacteria?

There are other pathways to health. Pediatricians don’t have a monopoly on health, because they have vaccines. I can’t believe that there are doctors out there who tell mothers that breastfeeding isn’t protective in the first six months of life, to scare them into vaccinating. That is contrary to all of the science and common sense. Mothers transfer their immunities to their babies through breast milk. If antibody levels really do signal immunity, then breast milk has everything a baby needs during that period.

Regardless of my opinions, browbeating and condescension on the part of physicians is no way to win a parent's trust, especially when many parents feel that they are the only advocates for their defenseless infants. Physicians have forgotten that medicine is a consumer driven business. Ignoring parents’ concerns drives patients away, erodes trust, and leaves children unprotected and without health care.

I do not feel that I am an irresponsible parent. I am taking what I feel is the safest course of action for my children right now. I do not feel that my children are a threat to the “herd”, in fact I think that they are healthier, their diet is better, they get more exercise, and they are sicker much less than most of the pediatric population. I feel that refusing to investigate the causes of repeated infections, over-treating with antibiotics, and ignoring the implications of food allergies and intolerances on overall health is irresponsible. Yet this is the way pediatric medicine is practiced today.

I also feel that it is short sighted for pediatricians to argue that vaccines are unequivocally safe. In light of the autism epidemic, which has been proven not to be genetic, the answer seems to point to the quadrupled vaccine schedule. Parents are the ones that deal with the consequences of vaccine reactions- the costs of therapies not always covered by insurance, sleepless nights, lives forever changed by even a single shot.

When is someone going to listen to what our vaccine injured children are telling us? We hear it as parents. We’re just waiting for the medical profession to catch up.