I grew up believing vaccinations were safe – well, almost safe. Once my neck and jaw swelled up and we were pretty sure I had the mumps, except for the weird sore on my mouth. Turns out, I had scratched my smallpox vaccination then re-inoculated myself by scratching my lip. This time the infection had entered my lymph glands rather than my bloodstream. I recovered within a few days.
I’ll never forget the shock I felt when it came time to vaccinate my first child. I held the vaccination form in my hand, reading about the rare but possible outcomes—life threatening illness, crippling disease, death. I wanted to run away. Every instinct in me said, “Protect this baby! Don’t do this!” But the doctor convinced me I had no real choice; after all, vaccination was the law. My child couldn’t go to daycare or to school without his shots.
I’ll never know if my son’s symptoms of pervasive childhood development disorder (autism—a mild-to-moderate case), his ADHD, or his learning disabilities were caused by those shots. He was an infant when his symptoms first appeared.
In later years, when fully inoculated, both of my sons caught whooping cough and passed it on to me. “Must have been a bad batch of vaccine,” the doctors said. But my kids had been vaccinated in Georgia and the outbreak was in Washington State (others caught it, too.) Obviously, it wasn’t the batch. The shot didn’t work.
I believe vaccinations are contaminated. I know the industry has lied to us, covering up the fact that they have used our children as guinea pigs; they don’t even know the efficacy of their vaccinations because many of these illnesses were already on the decline when we started vaccinating for them. I believe the industry is driven by greed and I don’t believe these people have our best interests at heart.
There is no question in my mind that today’s vaccinations are unsafe and that our children are subjected to too many shots. There is no question in my mind that the link between autism and vaccinations is very real, though I do not know if the cause was thimerosal (mercury) which has been removed from many BUT NOT ALL of the childhood vaccinations.
And yet, I can’t seem to let go of that niggling fear that shots are necessary. Do vaccinations work at all? I don’t know. And I don’t know if we have the evidence to prove it one way or the other. I’d love to see a panel discussion with the top minds on this issue, pro and con, to hear a real debate with the strengths and weaknesses of the research revealed.
We were told vaccinations would make us immune to diseases, just as surely as if we had contracted these diseases and recovered. But true immunity is lifelong. Now we come to find all those shots we had as children no longer protect us. Adults are supposed to get booster shots, though many of us don’t. Yet, somehow we aren’t all keeling over with diphtheria, whooping cough, and measles. Why is that?
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