Vaccines and GMOs have more in common than many people realize. Both the biotech and the pharmaceutical industry use the same arguments to get you to accept their products. If you are against GMOs or vaccines, then you must be anti-science!
Nothing could be further from the truth. It is the people who research vaccines and GMOs who turn against them. In today’s busy world, most people don’t feel that they have the time to research every product. A desire for convenience and a touch of apathy motivates people to trust the government to guarantee the safety of our products. The same people who claim that they don’t trust their government paradoxically trust the FDA, the USDA, and the CDC. What most people don’t know is that the same studies that the regulators use to verify product safety are funded by industry. Those who stand to benefit the most from product approval are the same ones doing studies that verify safety for vaccines and GMOs.
An Informed Opinion Leads to a Predictable Point of View
That old adage, “When we know better we do better,” holds true for both vaccines and GMOs, and some of us know better than others. More often than not, it is the highly educated who refuse vaccines and buy organic. The political elite is no exception.
While Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both espouse the benefits of GMOs, neither Hillary nor President Obama actually eat them. The White House doesn’t serve GMOs, and this elitism is not limited to Democrats. Both George Bush and Mitt Romney have strong ties to Monsanto, and both also only eat organic foods. If GMOs are not good enough for them, then why would they be good enough for you and your family?
It is the Highly Educated Who Refuse Vaccines
When it comes to vaccines, the situation is markedly similar. In Germany, a safer vaccine was offered to the politicians, soldiers, and civil servants than the rest of the population. Amid fears of a swine flu epidemic, the German government ordered the Pandemrix vaccine for the German public and the Celvapan vaccine for government officials and the military. Both vaccines vaccinated for the same disease; one was simply safer than the other.
Barry Loudermilk (R-GA) revealed that most of his children are not vaccinated.
I believe it’s the parents’ decision whether to immunize or not. And so I’m looking at my wife — most of our children, we didn’t immunize. They’re healthy. Of course, home schooling, we didn’t have to get the mandatory immunization.
The higher someone’s formal education and the more informed someone is about vaccines, the more likely they are to refuse them. Many former pharmaceutical employees refuse to vaccinate their children.
An education, whether formal or informal, changes you forever. When it comes to vaccines or GMOs, a little knowledge can go a long way. It is the same people who have read the vaccine warning labels and the people who learn about vaccine ingredients who invariably refuse them for their children. The more you know about GMOs, the less likely you are to eat them as well.
If knowledge is power, ignorance is powerlessness. It is ignorant to believe that we don’t need to know what is in our food because we are too scared of science. It is just as ignorant to believe that vaccines simultaneously work so incredibly well, and yet so phenomenally badly that everyone must have them. As GMO activists struggle to educate the world about what is in their unlabeled food, anti-vaxxers struggle to educate others about what is in vaccines.
The Same Struggle by Different Names
The struggles against GMOs and vaccines are intrinsically linked, and yet what happens more often than not, is that these activists fight against billion dollar companies alone, when the fight is essentially the same and the industries that oppose them are essentially the same people as well.
GMO activists want GMOs labeled for the same reason that anti-vaxxers oppose mandatory vaccines. They all want control over what is to be put in their bodies, or the bodies of their children. Admittedly, in vaccines, the struggle over labels is slightly different. Instead of having vaccines labeled (though some of the labeling is intentionally ambiguous) there is a push to get others to read the ingredients, and to read the warning labels. Most people refuse to even discuss what’s in a vaccine or the known risks involved in vaccination. One of the many known risks to vaccination is death. Dying from a vaccine or being permanently disabled is far more likely than dying or being disabled from the disease that the vaccine is supposed to prevent. This may sound hard to believe, but this is easily verifiable. Mortality statistics for all diseases are easily found by searching the Internet. For instance, measles hasn’t killed anyone in the U.S. in decades, but the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System admits to 329 deaths from the vaccine, and almost 7,000 serious adverse reactions. (Numbers for adverse reactions are most likely low due to underreporting.) The question becomes what’s worse, the disease or the vaccine? To those who know how to do the research, the answer is obvious.
Both of These Industries Want You To Trust Their Products and Not To Do Your Own Research
The majority of those opposed to vaccines and GMOs are highly educated. These people are not anti-science, they embrace the pro-precautionary principle. A good definition and description of the precautionary principle quoted from Mindfully.org follows:
When an activity raises threats of harm to the environment or human health, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically.
Key elements of the principle include taking precaution in the face of scientific uncertainty; exploring alternatives to possibly harmful actions; placing the burden of proof on proponents of an activity rather than on victims or potential victims of the activity; and using democratic processes to carry out and enforce the principle – including the public right to informed consent.
…Sometimes if we wait for proof it is too late. Scientific standards for demonstrating cause and effect are very high. For example, smoking was strongly suspected of causing lung cancer long before the link was demonstrated conclusively that is, to the satisfaction of scientific standards of cause and effect. By then, many smokers had died of lung cancer. But many other people had already quit smoking because of the growing evidence that smoking was linked to lung cancer. These people were wisely exercising precaution despite some scientific uncertainty.
Often a problem – such as a cluster of cancer cases or global warming – is too large, its causes too diverse, or the effects too long-term to be sorted out with scientific experiments that would prove cause and effect. It’s hard to take these problems into the laboratory. Instead, we have to rely on observations, case studies or predictions based on current knowledge.
According to the precautionary principle, when reasonable scientific evidence of any kind gives us good reason to believe that an activity, technology or substance may be harmful, we should act to prevent harm. If we always wait for scientific certainty, people may suffer and die, and damage to the natural world may be irreversible.
Rather than conduct (or publish) long-term independent studies, both the biotech and the pharmaceutical industries opt to do their own short-term studies. They also both successfully lobby governments for special protection from liability.
In 1986 a law was enacted making it illegal to sue vaccine manufacturers: The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act. This law established a vaccine court, a system that will only compensate families for known vaccine reactions, and then far less than what actual standard liability would pay out. The vaccine court is funded by taxes on vaccines, and so far they have paid out over 3 billion. This court is far from fair or impartial. They pay a maximum of 250,000 dollars for wrongful death from vaccines, and they dismiss 80% of all cases presented to them. Buying the claimant’s silence is a common stipulation to receive any compensation.
A provision was added to the Agriculture Appropriations Bill that serves no purpose other than protecting the biotech industry at the expense of the public’s health. Specifically, HR 933, section 735 is the provision that makes genetically engineered foods immune from liability. This law has been dubbed the Monsanto Protection Act. President Barack Obama signed the bill into law.
If the pharmaceutical and biotech industries thought these products were safe, then why did they lobby the U.S. government for immunity from liability? It stands to reason that they wouldn’t spend millions of dollars lobbying for special protection from lawsuits if the products were safe to begin with.
Industry Funded Pseudoscience
It is difficult to find truly independent research on vaccines. Most vaccine safety studies use all of the toxic ingredients that are found in vaccines for both the control group and the group receiving vaccines – the same adjuvants such as heavy metals, aborted fetal cells, formaldehyde, etc. The only difference between the “placebo” and the vaccine is that the “placebo” doesn’t have the attenuated pathogen, or the “placebo” is an experimental vaccine. Real long-term safety studies that study vaccinated versus unvaccinated or long-term studies that look at the safety of the entire vaccine schedule are never funded by the industry or the U.S. Government. The CDC has blatantly refused to study vaccinated versus unvaccinated because they know what they would find.
There is a similar situation with GMOs. All of the safety studies published by the industry are short-term studies, 90 days or less. The reason for this is that the harmful effects of GMOs typically begin to show up after 90 days. Neither the biotech industry nor the U.S. Government ever published long-term studies. There have been numerous studies conducted in Europe and Russia that reveal kidney damage, liver damage, cancer, and other health problems linked to GMO consumption.
Biotech and the Pharmaceutical Industries Are Separate in Name Only
Monsanto and Pfizer used to be one company, a pharmaceutical company and a biotech company. Pfizer and Monsanto still maintain close ties with both companies staffed by a revolving door of scientists and businessmen that switch back and forth between both companies and regulatory agencies. When you consider how pharmaceutical companies make money (the more sick people are, the more money they make) strong ties to a biotech company should be a major concern to the public.
Many people who are opposed to GMOs are pro-vaccine and vice-versa. These views are far from consistent, and any activist that is against one and for the other is an activist who fails to grasp the issues at hand. If an activist can’t tell what vaccines and GMOs have in common, they could be more of a hindrance than a help to their cause. In an effort to avoid dividing their followers, most anti-GMO and anti-vaccine movements avoid discussing anything they see as unrelated to their cause. This demarcation hurts both movements, as there is strength in numbers. When fighting against the influence and propaganda of companies that are worth billions, a united front would be far more effective. A well known, but often looked over fact, is that many vaccines contain genetically modified ingredients. If you wouldn’t want to ingest GMOs, then why would you want to have them injected into your body or your children’s bodies?
Recommended Reading:
- How To Detoxify and Heal From Vaccinations – For Adults and Children
- Understanding and Detoxifying Genetically Modified Foods
- Doctors Against Vaccines – Hear From Those Who Have Done the Research
- Doctors Against GMOs – Hear From Those Who Have Done the Research
Sources:
- Anti-GMO But Pro-Vaccine – The Sleuth Journal
- White House Will Not Say Where It Gets Its Meat (And I Don’t Blame Them)-Huffington Post
- Why Do Supporters of Genetically Engineered Foods Insist on Organics for Their Own Families? – Mercola
- In Germany, a Better Vaccine for Politicians? – Time
- Barry Loudermilk Says He Didn’t Vaccinate His Children – Huffington Post
- The Precautionary Principle – Mindful.org
- Can Measles Vaccine Cause Injury & Death? – National Vaccine Information Center
- The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 – National Vaccine Information Center
- How the Monsanto Protection Act snuck into law – Salon