OK, SO THE MEDIA OVER THE LAST FEW WEEKS HAS RAN A FEW NON
VAX TURNED VAXER STORIES THAT JUST GET CRAZIER AND CRAZIER!!!!! WHAT ARE
THEY DEFLECTING FROM???
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2015/02/adult_measles_vaccination_child_of_california_new_age_parents_joins_the.2.html
A
few weeks ago, I was afraid to leave my home. When I did, I carried
hand sanitizer in my pocket. Scared of touching anything, I felt like
Leonardo DiCaprio playing the obsessive-compulsive Howard Hughes in The
Aviator, brutally scrubbing my hands free of germs.
As an
unvaccinated adult living through a measles outbreak, I was terrified.
Growing up, I never received the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine. I
can’t recall receiving any of the other recommended shots, including a
tetanus shot.
I was a child of the so-called anti-vaccination
movement, born in the San Francisco Bay Area, a place that’s now being
scrutinized for its relatively high percentage of children who are not
vaccinated.
Some 300 child care centers in the Bay Area have a
measles vaccination rate of 92 percent or less, falling below the ideal
rate for containing an outbreak, or as experts call it, maintaining herd
immunity.
Attending school in the 1980s, I submitted paperwork opting out of immunization for religious reasons.
If
you asked me back then why I wasn’t vaccinated, I doubt I could have
provided more of an answer than that: for religious reasons.
My
parents belonged to a loosely organized New Age movement that encouraged
living a natural life; the guiding vision was of a return to Eden.
Anything modern, especially in terms of medicine, was not exactly
encouraged. Growing up in this world of contradictions and restrictions
felt a lot like being a kid on Peanuts where all the adults talked in
wah-wah static.
But what was I to do as a child—literally looking up to the nonconformist adults around me?
I assumed what I heard the adults say was right, and I feared whatever they shunned.
Vaccines are filled with bad things, like monkey pus.
Your body is a temple, and nothing unnatural should enter it.
If you eat right, you won’t get sick.
It’s a conspiracy, and the vaccines will just make you sicker.
These
are all theories I recall hearing from my childhood, not necessarily
from my parents, but from those around us. My mother’s choice not to
vaccinate me was entirely accepted, and even encouraged, within our
social circles. Many of my friends were home-schooled, and their parents
didn’t vaccinate them, either. (I was also home-schooled for two
years.) The spiritual leaders my parents followed, as well as the many
naturopathic doctors we befriended, discouraged immunization. And while
my mother to this day can’t exactly remember the details, rumors of
vaccinations linked to autism and other calamities were widely
circulated as fact. In my pristine corner of the world, Western medicine
was a derogatory term, a practice used only as a last resort.
Back then, just the idea of an injection of monkey pus kept me up at night.
No one ever alerted my mom to the possibility that, vaccine-free, I could make others ill.
My
parents did entertain some aspects of Western medicine. I had a
pediatrician whom I saw regularly. Even so, my mom’s first response to
an earache was a drop of tea tree oil on a cotton puff, then homeopathy,
followed up by the acupuncturist. In my house, apple cider vinegar and
brown rice cured just about anything.
Both of my parents had
received shots at certain points in their lives. In fact, one of my
fears about vaccinations stemmed from a relic on my father’s arm, a
smallpox vaccine scar. At that time, we thought by keeping me
unvaccinated, we were actually making me stronger.
Those “conscientious objections,” as my mother later described them, returned for their reckoning this winter.
The
person who told me it was time for my shot was my mother. She texted:
“Honey, I think you should get a measles shot. Ask your Doctor??”
My
mother—who three decades earlier had sent me off to school with
paperwork requesting a religious waiver from vaccines—was now telling me
to join the herd.
I didn’t reply right away. Instead, I showed the text to my boyfriend. “Well, I guess I should get vaccinated,” I said.
He just looked at me. “What? You aren’t vaccinated?” he asked.
The
following day, while I was on a train departing Penn Station, without
missing a beat of that maternal sixth sense, my mom texted me again:
“Padmananda, they have found an outbreak of measles at Penn Station. Go
get Vaccinated.”
Here’s the thing: When my mom uses my full first
name, it’s serious. I was on a train and had just left a station where
someone infected had passed through. I freaked out.
Should I be wearing a mask right now? What train was the person with measles on? Should I just cover my head and stop breathing?
That’s
when I realized I hardly knew anything about vaccines, nor did I have a
very good reason as to why I never got them. All of it was totally
inexplicable, a faint memory made up of a chorus of voices telling me to
fear something I didn’t even understand.
Once I got off the train
and returned home, I vigorously washed my hands and then went off to
Google-search answers. Among other things, I learned that hand-washing
and applying globs of hand sanitizer did not protect me against an
airborne disease.
By the following afternoon, my boyfriend had
sent me two texts, one with a link to CVS clinic locations followed by
another: “Not to alarm you but you should go as soon as you are able,”
with a link to a news story that quoted Anthony Fauci, director of the
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, referring to
“certain communities in California” where “herd immunity doesn’t work
very well.”
My home state was now in the center of this latest
debate over vaccines, starring as the villain. Back then, vaccinations
seemed like a personal choice. I never thought of how my parents’
decision might have an effect on the rest of society. I had certainly
never heard of herd immunity. So with this new perspective and an order
from my own mother, I turned myself in.
Walking the few blocks
from my work to the clinic, I was still nervous and even felt
ridiculous. An adult about to get a shot I should have received years
ago. What if it hurt? What if the doctor glared at me like I really had
been on the run, finally coming forward to declare: Yes, I’m one of
those kids raised by parents who lived in that small pocket of the world
where hippies really do exist. I’m ready to surrender.
I signed in at the clinic. “I’m here to get the measles vaccine,” I said, waiting for a look of shock from the nurse. None
came. Instead, she pulled out a small box. It was the MMR vaccine.
“We’ve been going through these like water,” she said. “We have one
left.”
And with a single prick, I was leaving my Bay Area bubble behind for good.
That night, I called my mom to let her know it was done. I was immunized. I asked her why she had opted out for me before.
I
was on a health thing. No one got them for their children then. It was
very open in California back then. I believed it was harmful.
While
plenty of people back in the 1980s suggested to us that I could get
sick from a vaccine, no one ever alerted my mom to the possibility that,
vaccine-free, I could make others ill.
What happened to change your mind? I asked.
She
told me she had been watching a medical report on ABC News that
explained that the claims linking vaccines to autism were untrue. My
mother had become open to the possibility that fears about the vaccine
were unfounded. She was willing to listen to the other side of the
debate.
We had both left behind the culture that told us vaccines
were bad. Between my years on the East Coast and my mother’s move back
to her home state of New Mexico, we had picked up a new normal, along
with new experts, even ones whose names ended with “M.D.”
The evening after getting my shot, I felt relieved.
I would no longer have to wash my hands or hold my breath in fear. And I certainly wouldn’t be afraid of monkey pus anymore.
*****
THEN THERE IS THIS ONE!!!!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-i-changed-my-mind-about-vaccinating-my-children/2015/02/06/8ccd3076-abd6-11e4-9c91-e9d2f9fde644_story.html
I was frightened of vaccines back when I was pregnant with my daughter 12 years ago.
I
lived in the San Francisco bay area at the time, and if you’ve ever
lived in the Bay Area, you know there are ways of thinking there that
aren’t questioned like they would be elsewhere — especially those
related to motherhood and children. The home-birth collective I was part
of held an “immunization panel,” inviting parents to ask questions of
practitioners on both sides of the debate. When I look back on it, I’m
not sure how much range of perspective the panel included. But I really
thought I had done my homework on vaccination. I read everything I could
get my hands on, talked about it with our midwives, discussed it with
fellow pregnant friends. And I came to believe that my daughter’s immune
system should have a chance to build up on its own, without being
bombarded with viruses and chemicals.
Before she was born, I spoke
with her pediatrician about a delayed and partial vaccine schedule. And
that is what we followed. For her first year of life, my daughter
wasn’t vaccinated. I breast-fed her to help strengthen her immunity. I
kept her out of day care so she wouldn’t be exposed to all of those
germs. I steered her away from anyone coughing at the grocery store. I
believed that I could keep her safe.
And when she turned 1, a
magical number I’d decided was when her immune system would be strong
enough, I took her to get her first shot. On her immunization record, it
says that shot was for Hib, which prevents meningitis and pneumonia,
among other diseases. A month later she got her first polio shot, and
five months after that she got her first dose of DTaP, except I asked
for the version that did not contain the P for pertussis. My
understanding was that she was past the point when whooping cough could
shut down her airways; I was more terrified of what I’d heard was in
that part of the vaccine and how it could permanently damage her body. I
can’t remember anymore what scared me so.
My attitude toward
vaccines began to shift when I got sick with shingles and my
then-3-year-old daughter kept wanting to touch the fiery blisters on my
arm, chest and back. She could get chickenpox from those blisters, and I
couldn’t imagine caring for a sick child while I myself was so
miserable. So I took a cab across Jerusalem, where we were living,
picked up a dose of chickenpox vaccine and took my daughter to an
American doctor to administer it. He warned that it would take two weeks
to build up her immunity and that she would need a second dose at some
point for the vaccine to be even more effective. I felt some
disappointment that I wasn’t holding out for her to get chickenpox
naturally, but I was also relieved.
We left our life abroad
abruptly and unexpectedly three months later, when we learned that our
second daughter, who had been growing inside me for 21 weeks, had a
life-threatening congenital defect. Our baby girl was born back in the
Bay Area and was immediately hooked up to machines that helped her
breathe and tubes that administered medicine and fed her my breast milk.
Hoping for her survival, I approached the doctors with questions about
vaccines. I was concerned about protecting my fragile daughter from
viruses such as pneumonia that could kill her, but I also worried about
harming her with more medicine than she could handle. The doctors
explained that her well-being would need to be assessed day by day,
sometimes hour by hour, and that it would be clear when she was ready to
be vaccinated. Ultimately, none of it mattered. After 58 days in the
NICU, I held my daughter as she took her last breaths and her spirit let
go of her body.
After our baby died, we moved to the Midwest, and
our new pediatrician was a heavy pusher of vaccination. “You can go
blind from measles,” she explained. At first it irritated me, and I
clung to my beliefs about not wanting to bombard my healthy 5-year-old
with preservative-packed shots, many targeting diseases that didn’t even
exist anymore, at least not in the United States.
But I realized I
could no longer explain to the pediatrician or to other moms why
vaccines were so dangerous. My fear of immunizations was dissolving, and
I no longer felt the way I had when my first daughter was born.
When
we made our decisions about vaccines the first time, it was all
abstract. My child couldn’t die from measles, I told myself. My mom had
had measles, and she was just fine. I hadn’t yet spent those weeks in
the NICU, praying over my child that the fluid in her lungs wouldn’t
become full-blown pneumonia. I hadn’t seen all of the other sick babies
around her. I hadn’t heard from other bereaved parents about all the
ways babies can die.
After all that, I could no longer take my
child’s health — or my ability to protect it — for granted. And so I
gradually let myself trust our new pediatrician and the vaccines she
encouraged. My only holdout was the flu shot. I still believed that for
my healthy daughter, and for our healthy family, the flu wasn’t a
danger. We all took our vitamin D and fish oil, and ate well and washed
our hands. The viruses our daughter got about once a year, whether the
flu or something else, meant a lot of movies while she lay on the couch
drinking Gatorade and sucking on popsicles; those viruses would
strengthen her body to protect her from worse things.
It wasn’t
until I read Eula Biss’s January 2013 essay on vaccinations in Harper’s
magazine that I understood, for the first time, how herd immunity works.
“Any given vaccine can fail to produce immunity in an individual, and
some vaccines, like the influenza vaccine, often fail to produce
immunity,” Biss wrote. “But when enough people are given even a
relatively ineffective vaccine, viruses have trouble moving from host to
host and cease to spread, sparing both the unvaccinated and those in
whom vaccination has not produced immunity.”
I was reminded of a
voice — my own voice from years before, when my first daughter was a
baby — saying, “She’s safe even without her shots because everyone
around her is vaccinated.” I actually said that, several times, to
several people. Friends said the same thing to me about their
unvaccinated children. We had that luxury — we could count on herd
immunity to protect our children.
I can’t say exactly why the idea
of protecting others hadn’t hit me before — I have always considered
myself a sensitive and empathetic person. But I hadn’t thought about old
people, those who could die even from the flu. I hadn’t thought about
pregnant women and their babies. I hadn’t thought about children like my
second daughter, who are too sick to be vaccinated but who need more
than anyone to be protected from illness.
My son came to us
through adoption, and there is so much we don’t know about his
biological family’s health history. He is almost 2 years old, and he has
had almost all of his shots according to schedule. The only one I
requested delaying, because he was born early and weighed less than four
pounds, is Hep B, but he had that shot within his first year.
My
daughter is all caught up on her shots, too — after many doctors’ visits
and trips for frozen yogurt afterward. At her annual physical this past
week, she got some of her boosters and one vaccine that didn’t exist
when I was her age: HPV. A vaccine that can help prevent the only known
cause of cervical cancer? To me, that one is a no-brainer.
And
this year we all got flu shots, including my strong-as-an-ox husband,
because his work takes him to hospitals, nursing homes and other places
where people are vulnerable.
I am not naive about this. I still
read medical journal articles and philosophical pieces about
vaccination, and I ask a lot of questions.
But I have accepted
that I can’t protect my family from everything that is out there (and
everything that is already a part of us). All I can do is my best to
nurture our perfectly imperfect bodies.
*****
SO WHAT ARE THEY TRYING TO DISTRACT PEOPLE FROM??? THEY
ARE WORKING HARD TO SCARE THE HELL OUT OF THE PUBLIC AND TAKE AWAY THE
CHOICE NOT TO VACCINATE!!!! THE FOLLOWING IS JUST A SHORT LIST BECAUSE
THIS IS HAPPENING ACROSS THE UNITED STATES IN ALL 50 STATES!
Illinois: SB1410
http://www.ilga.gov/legislation/BillStatus.asp?DocNum=1410&GAID=13&DocTypeID=SB&LegID=87977&SessionID=88&SpecSess=&Session=&GA=99
Amends
the School Code. Requires the State Board of Education to publish on
its Internet website the exemption from immunization data it receives
from schools. Provide that parents or legal guardians who object to
health, dental, or eye examinations or immunizations on religious
grounds must present to the appropriate local school authority a
Department of Public Health objection form, detailing the grounds for
the objection and signed by the parent or legal guardian, as well as a
religious official attesting to a bona fide religious objection whose
signature must be notarized (instead of presenting a signed statement of
objection detailing the grounds for the objection). Requires the
Department of Public Health to develop and publish a uniform objection
form for this particular use. Provides that if the physical condition of
a child is such that any one or more of the immunizing agents should
not be administered, the child's parent or legal guardian must present
to the appropriate local school authority a statement signed by the
child's regular examining physician, advanced practice nurse, or
physician assistant attesting to that fact. Effective immediately
CALIFORNIA: SB 277
http://sd06.senate.ca.gov/news/2015-02-19-senate-bill-277-introduced-end-california%E2%80%99s-vaccine-exemption-loophole
http://leginfo.ca.gov/pub/15-16/bill/sen/sb_0251-0300/sb_277_bill_20150219_introduced.htm
This bill is from
Dr Richard Pan and
Sen. Ben Allen it ends religious and philosophical exemptions.
According
to Pan: “It is our duty and responsibility to protect all children who
attend schools in California,” said Dr. Richard Pan, a State Senator
representing Sacramento who has been working legislatively to get
vaccination rates up while in the State Assembly. “SB 277 was introduced
because parents are speaking up and letting us know that current laws
are not enough to protect their children. As a pediatrician I have
personally witnessed the suffering caused by diseases that are
preventable, and I am very grateful to all those parents who are
speaking up as a result of the recent measles outbreak.”
WASHINGTON: HB 2009
http://app.leg.wa.gov/billinfo/summary.aspx?bill=2009&year=2015
http://lawfilesext.leg.wa.gov/biennium/2015-16/Pdf/Bills/House%20Bills/2009.pdf
House Bill 2009 (HB2009)
introduced by
Rep. June Robinson, a Democrat from Everett and member of
the House Health Care and Wellness Committee,
House Bill 2009 (HB2009)
would remove philosophical exemptions leaving only medical and religious
exemptions in place.
THEN THERE IS THIS!!!! READ IT BECAUSE THEY MAKE IT CLEAR THEY WANT TO CREATE DEMAND AND FORCE VACCINES!
http://www.hhs.gov/nvpo/national_adult_immunization_plan_final.pdf
CHECK OUT THE FOLLOWING LINKS ON HOW TO EMAIL, WRITE LETTERS, AND FIGHT BACK:
http://www.anh-usa.org/congress-moves-to-step-up-vaccine-enforcement/
http://www.house.gov/representatives/find/
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/prohibit-any-laws-mandating-force-and-requirement-vaccinations-any-kind/HW1B3YKz
