Raising a child is the most beautiful and transformative experience of my life. Not only am I learning to take better care for my son but I’m also learning to take better care for myself. Rather than being critical for how I was raised, like I was in my earlier years, I’m seeing just how much love and care I was given by people who were them selves immersed in the stress and struggle in life. However, the one thing we face as parents today, that my caregivers when I was a child often didn’t is whether to vaccinate or not to vaccinate our children.
From all of the research I have done on this topic and professional peers that I have spoken to, there appears to be a lot of evidence not to vaccinate. To loosely paraphrase Dr. Shiv Chopra, who was deeply involved in with health industry regulations, the science and regulation of vaccines has taken a nosedive over the past decade to say the least. It may be due to the fact that public medicine is a big business and both the facts and the media can become manipulated to serve the bottom line.
One of the main arguments against vaccinating our children is that there are simply too many vaccines given together in one dosage and that these vaccines carry toxic adjuvants like mercury, aluminum, formaldehyde and proteins that would never normally enter directly into our blood stream. So what is the big deal? According to some, this is the reason we are seeing the increasing rates of autism and autoimmune diseases and allergies for a start, not to mention the possibility of brain damage.
The argument for vaccines is that they protect “the herd” from the outbreak of epidemics and that if one child does not receive a vaccine they are jeopardizing the whole population. Of course we are also told that the vaccines will and have protect us from outbreaks of disease. The question I cannot help but ask is why one study suggests that the great majority of children who have contracted whooping cough or pertussis are the ones who were vaccinated? Or why it seems that statistics show that many epidemics that are said to have ended with the use of vaccination declined before the vaccines were even introduced to the population.
It seems that the majority of children, and adults, appear to get away unscathed by vaccination, however a percentage will not. In my practice I have seen people come in that are numb on one side for weeks after vaccination, children who were otherwise peaceful who have not stopped crying for a month after their shots, and elderly people who swear they had not been really sick in their entire lives become seriously ill for weeks after their first flu shot.
When I hear of nurses and others that are required to get “the shot” to keep their jobs I question whether this is an issue of human rights. Of course we all understand the desire to avoid plagues and keep our loved ones healthy, but we need, at the very least, to review all of the research and whether or not the science is solid on vaccines. For most parents I know, the vaccine issue is one of the most stressful and confusing decisions we have to make. We are often afraid of what may happen to our children if we don’t do it, and also of what may happen if we do. It doesn’t help that there are all kinds of opinions and pressure from family, friends and media surrounding this topic who are not fully informed. I hope that long before my own children are raising their offspring this issue will be resolved for good.
Here are a few interesting sites, an interview to check out that each speak to differing sides of this debate:
Against vaccination:
http://www.naturalnews.com/037883_vaccines_infectious_disease_20th_centu...
http://www.naturalnews.com/035466_whooping_cough_vaccines_outbreaks.html
For frequent vaccination:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/story/2012/09/13/whooping-cough-vaccine.html
http://www.historyofvaccines.org/content/articles/top-20-questions-about...
Dr. Mercola interview with Dr. Shiv Chopra:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8uLrDfBDw0
Select Videos:
https://our-common-roots.com/taxonomy/term/151
A Conference With Leading Scientists on Vaccine Safety
http://vaccinesafetyconference.com/videos.html