Healthy Blog

A chilling, consistent pattern exists in stories:
“My child was normal, happy, and healthy. He was walking, learning to talk and interacting with his siblings. He was normal in every way…until his one-year well-baby check up. The doctor said it was time for his next round of shots. Unquestioning, the shots were given. Within weeks, he was autistic.”

The reports vary slightly in content and timing, but the descriptions of thousands of children who suddenly regress into the isolated world of autism are eerily the same.

What is dogma?
Webster’s defines dogma as “a doctrine; a positive arrogant assertion of opinion” and medical dogmas certainly abound. Many have existed for decades simply because a claim of effectiveness was made and never disputed. Over time, the allegations were melded into medical jargon, presumed to be facts.

An early example of dogma in the vaccine industry occurred in 1913 when Dr. Simon Flexnor held out that polio was a disease caused by a virus entering the body through the nose and mouth. He postulated that paralysis arose when the virus traveled directly from the sinuses to the brain and the spinal cord. Flexnor’s assertions about the mode of paralysis were never reproduced and it is now known that polio is a gastrointestinal virus, not a respiratory virus.

Difficulties in developing a vaccine occurred because he propagated a dogma that the polio virus would only grow in neurological tissue, a culture media that was associated with life-threatening encephalitis in experimental animals.(1) No one attempted to use other types of tissue cultures to grow polioviruses. His solo paper remained unquestioned dogma for 25 years until Dr. John Enders found, serendipitously, that the virus would indeed grow in a variety of different tissues. When Enders’ revolutionary discovery was published in Science, January 28, 1949, the entire virology community immediately accepted the new findings. The polio vaccine was produced within five years. A scientific claim passed off as dogma vanished when challenged by scientific fact.

Present day vaccine dogma is promoted by The Institute of Medicine (IOM), a group of ostensibly impartial physicians, scientists and researchers. After reviewing the industry-funded research papers concluding there is no connection between vaccines and autism, the IOM similarly concludes there is no connection between vaccines and autism. How could they come to any other conclusion?

The phrase, “temporal association does not prove causality” means that even though two events occur at the same time, one event does not cause the other.” The IOM supports the dogma purported by the American Academy of Pediatrics: Since autism occurs chronologically around the same time as the first year vaccinations, angry parents need something to blame.

Parents blame the vaccine, but medical officials blame the defective child, a position supported by the government at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC.) The following statement was published in the CDC’s publication on infection diseases, referred to as The Pink Book:
“There is no distinct syndrome from vaccine administration, and therefore, many temporally associated adverse events probably represent background illness rather than illness caused by the vaccine….the [vaccine] may stimulate or precipitate inevitable symptoms of underlying CNS disorder, such as seizures, infantile spasms, epilepsy or SIDS. By chance alone, some of these cases will seem to be temporally related to [the vaccine].”(2)

Current investigations are searching for a genetic cause for autism.(3) The identification of corrupt genes will give ammunition to public health and medical officials who are quick to point an incriminating finger at defective parents.

Safety assumptions
The classic example of unquestioned dogma is the long held notion that the sun rotated around the earth. In 1530, Copernicus challenged the assumption with evidence that the earth rotated on its axis once daily and traveled around the sun once yearly. A fantastic concept for the times, the new information was considered heresy. Copernicus was imprisoned, subjected to a trial by Holy Inquisitioners, and forced to withdraw his evidence to save his own life.

Similarly, parents are forced into vaccination decisions by modern day medical inquisitioners. Threats include expulsion from the medical practice and calls to children’s protective services with accusations of medical neglect. Parents are told vaccines are safe and necessary for keeping children healthy. But are they really safe?

Vaccination is a medical treatment, and, like dogmas, assumptions regarding the effectiveness of medical practices abound. A report published by The Government Accounting Office (GAO) in 1978 concluded that “only 10 to 20 percent of all procedures currently used in medical practice have been shown to be efficacious by controlled trials.”(4) In other words, up to 90 percent of accepted medical practices are assumed to be effective without proof. Vaccination falls into this category.

Contrary to repeated claims by the government and the pharmaceutical industry, vaccines have never been proven to be safe by the gold standard of medical research: The double-blind, placebo controlled investigation. In a placebo-controlled study, the safety of a medication is determined by comparing it to a neutral substance, such as a sugar pill. In vaccine safety trials, a new vaccine is not compared to an inert compound such as a shot of sterile water. Instead, the “placebo” is another vaccine. If the number of side effects caused by the experimental vaccine is found to be the same as the number of reactions caused by the placebo-vaccine, manufacturers declare the new vaccine to be “as safe as placebo.”

Another trick used by investigators to promote the safety of vaccines is to discount any part of the study’s data that suggests a problem. The following excerpt from a clinical trial demonstrates how a placebo-vaccine is used and the elimination of negative data. The study was designed to determine the safety of Comvax