Vaccinations
My mother did not have her children routinely vaccinated. (We did get the polio vaccine at school because she didn't know about it, and we were also forced to have smallpox vaccinations when we went to live in Mexico for a while in the early 1960s.)
I asked her once why she had not had any of her children vaccinated. She said that her father, a chiropractor (and possibly, I found out recently, also an MD; he is listed as such in a graduation program from a school where he had received an advanced degree), had studied the data when it first came out, and had strongly recommended against her vaccinating any of her own children.
In retrospect, he was quite forward-thinking and insightful, especially in light of the data that has since come out on the many ill side-effects of vaccinations, ranging from mild dyslexia through ADD, autism, and even death, including sudden infant death symdrome (SIDS). And in light of the data that shows that many vacccination campaigns did NOT wipe out the disease they were said to be attacking. Many diseases were already on the decline when vaccinations were introduced, and they were also on the decline in countries where vaccinations were not done, or were not done as massively as they were done in the US.
I cannot tell you whether to vaccinate your child or not. Having one's children vaccinated is a decision that one must make for oneself. However, you owe it to yourself and to your children to DO THE RESEARCH before you allow ANY vaccinations to be done to your child.
Even Doctors Won't Vaccinate Their Children
It might be revealing to know that many years ago, I carried on a public debate with a doctor in a CompuServe forum, in which I argued against vaccinations and he argued for them. He was reduced to using ad hominem attacks against me (that is, he started attacking me rather than my facts) because he could not present facts that contradicted mine. Furthermore, during the debate, I received a private email message from another doctor who was following the discussion with some interest. On the promise that I would never reveal his name, he told me some very interesting pieces of information.
- He had once been a member of the national AMA board.
- The members of that board had decided that they would present a united front about vaccinations, in terms of recommending them, despite the fact that they all knew the sometimes horrific potential harm.
- Here is the most telling part: NOT ONE of those doctors would have his or her own children vaccinated. That very fact alone should send a chill down your back.
What About Public School?
If you are concerned about public schools telling you that your child MUST be vaccinated or else he or she cannot attend school, know that you can sign a waiver saying that vaccinations are against your beliefs. Then the schools must accept your child.
Warning: Some People Will be Against You
If you decide that you do not want to take the risk of vaccinating your child, you will catch a lot of flack--I certainly did, from doctors and other parents. They universally were not interested in my reasons, but instead wanted to attack me and make me feel guilty about "endangering" my child by not having her vaccinated. Others cite that old chestnut, "herd immunity," and say that, by not vaccinating my own child, I am endangering other children. Again, a fallacy.
The Spiritual Aspect of Vaccinations
Many years ago, again on CompuServe, I was corresponding with a woman whose two sons were on Ritalin for severe ADD problems that she attributed to bad effects from vaccinations. She was also a teacher, specializing in teaching autistic children. She had an entire classroom of autistic children, and told me that this was true across the United States--that there were entire classrooms filled with autistic children.
I started wondering about this--what has happened that autism, which was once so rare, is now so common that we have enough children across the nation to fill entire classrooms with them? What has changed?
The information I received intuitively and in a dream is this: Vaccinations are based in certain beliefs about reality and the body, beliefs that are the natural culmination of over 2,000 years of religious teachings that say that the body is evil, bad, a thorn, a punishment. When we vaccinate our children, we are saying that we believe that the body cannot be trusted to heal itself; that, contrary to hundreds of thousands of years of human existence without vaccinations, the body does not have the ability to throw off disease, and it is at the mercy of any illness-causing bacteria or virus that chooses to come along. In short, it is a dangerous world and we are at its mercy.
The soul of the child does not come in all at once. Part of the process of human development is the soul aligning with the physical body it is creating, integrating with its functions, including the functions that make the jump from spirit to flesh and back. This is a delicate process and takes some time to complete.
When we vaccinate, and especially when we vaccinate certain children with certain temperaments, our beliefs about the dangerousness of the world and the helplessness of the body is communicated to the incoming spirit, which sometimes reacts with fear and withdraws, just a child touching a hot stove withdraws. Only with the spirit, it slows or even stops the process of integrating with the physical body. In a sense, what we have vaccinated our children against is a full participation in life.
Thr truth is, the body has a huge and marvelous capacity for self-healing. We of course need to support it, not only with vitamins and minerals, rest, the proper and healthy foods, herbs, and the proper exercise for our bodies, but also with positive thoughts and trust in the marvelous capabilities of our immune systems. It would take too long to go into detail about what I believe we can do to help support the healing work of our physical selves, so I will leave it at that for now.
Resources and Further Reading
For more information, I recommend any one of the following books, which are all packed with data and citations from studies, and the following Web pages:
- What Every Parent Should Know About Childhood Immunization by Jamie Murphy and Carol White. (Earth Healing Products; 192 pages.)
- What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Children's Vaccinations by Stephanie Cave and Deborah Mitchell. (Warner Books, September 2001; 315 pages.)
- Vaccinations: A Thoughtful Parent's Guide: How to Make Safe, Sensible Decisions about the Risks, Benefits, and Alternatives by Aviva Jill Romm. (Inner Traditions Intl Ltd, August 15, 2001; 288 pages.)
- A Shot in the Dark: Why the P in the DPT Vaccination May Be Hazardous to Your Child's Health by Harris L. Coulter and Barbara Loe Fisher. (Avery Penguin Putnam, May 1991; 246 pages.)
- Web site: http://www.mercola.com (In particular, read his article on how it can come about that millions of people have bought into the vaccination myth: http://www.mercola.com/2001/aug/15/perception.htm.)
- The link between polio and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS): http://www.sonic.net/cnds/polio.html
- More on polio and CFS: http://www.meao-cfs.on.ca/illnesses/ppolio_article.shtml
- Update, 2005: I recently discovered this article about the links between the mercury in all vaccinations and autism.
- And for those of you who just can't get enough data: http://www.pnc.com.au/~cafmr/rec_mats.html
Topics for a Future Essay
Later, perhaps, I will write an essay talking about
- the lifespan myth (our life expectancy has not doubled, as some say by using faulty statistics, but only increased a few years)
- antibiotics and tuberculosis (we had almost wiped out tuberculosis before antibiotics were introduced; now, there are strains that resist even the most powerful antibiotics)
- Louis Pasteur and his ongoing argument with his colleague, Antoine Bechamp, about whether we were at the mercy of germs (Louis's position) or whether we would only get sick if our bodies were weakened (Bechamp's position). Bechamp likened our bodies to ground that could nurture or reject the "seed" of ill health. Claude Bernard, another French physician of the time, also said the same thing. Louis, on his deathbed, is said to have said that Bernard was correct, crying out that "The seed is nothing; the ground is all." (For more, see http://www.sumeria.net/bechamp/bechamp.html, http://www.whale.to/v/pasteur.html.) As Dr. Palmer once said, "If the germ theory of disease were correct, there would be no one living to believe it" (http://chiropracticresearch.org/NEWS_disease.htm).
- And other health-related issues, as well as citing some books to read (Deepak Chopra, and the relationship between health and Emotional Intelligence). I may also go into detail about how acquired immune problems are passed on genetically to our children.