Sydney Morning Herald article Mullumbimby antivaxx town
The danger of simply shutting down debate is exemplified in this article where the empiricism is automatically assumed.
I wrote to them (below) but the comment was never published. What was published however, was a bunch of comments supporting their narrative or sufficiently toothless to raise little or no debate. The SMH is a closed shop. Surprise, surprise.
There's more to the vaccination story than is touted in this article or, in fact, in the populist version of its history, which, is vastly misrepresented by the mainstream narrative. To look behind this doesn't by default make someone an idiot or a conspiracy theorist, it merely makes them desirous of information in an effort to make an informed choice, regardless of what is being proclaimed by the majority. As much as correlation doesn't equate to causation, the majority opinion doesn't by default equal factual correctness either - it merely makes it populist and "accepted." And the dismissive language employed (as is the case in this article too) "incontrovertible" to cite one example, is so readily employed to paint anyone who counters the accepted stance on vaccination as dangerous and by default, uninformed - there is usually a caveat that all of these stupid anti-vaxxers (a deliberately pejorative term) have gleaned their information from cursory internet research (sic) and as such, are a hazard not only to themselves but to their kids and society at large. This doesn't even begin to tell the story though and is at best inaccurate.
What is seldom, if ever spoken about, in the mainstream press is the unassailable fact that so many of these so-called anti-vaxxers (I'd go as far as to say - often the majority in many communities) are actually ex-vaxxers - in other words, sane, cogent, rational people who subscribed to the same narrative posited in this article and by the medical establishment that vaccines were the way to go and they were safe. No problem.
That is until their child received a vaccine (or a bunch of them) and suddenly the normally developing child had a serious adverse reaction to the vaccine and regressed developmentally to such a degree that the child was irreversibly altered and incapacitated from that point onward. Simultaneously, the former sane, rational, parents are suddenly portrayed as neurotic nutjobs and the medical establishment does everything in its power to point anywhere but at the vaccines. And yet there are hundreds of thousands of incidents like these occurring annually in the US and other countries. And unless the doctor deigns to list the event as a vaccine-related injury, these cases remain (to use a disingenuous euphemism) anecdotal therefore are not worthy of any valid statistical analysis or status and the whole situation is incorrectly downplayed. The VAERS system (Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System) used to record such injuries/events in the US is acknowledged by its creators and users to be severely flawed and by extension inaccurate to a very high degree. Couple to this the obvious unwillingness of paediatricians to admit their administering of a vaccine has seriously injured a child and it is up to the parents to drive the incident and the potential claim forward. It is scant wonder that there are so many contentious debates over the issues when there are always reputations and a great deal of money at stake. Or is it wrong to say that doctors and pharmaceutical companies are businesses too?
So while we are on the topic of the efficacy and safety of vaccines, what, if not vaccines administered in the most vaccinated population in the world (US) is resulting in a generation of the sickest kids in the history of that country? 1 in 6 children there has a chronic condition of some type related to allergies, learning disabilities, childhood diabetes, ASD and on and on. Why, with the claimed efficacy and safety of vaccines and the extremely high uptake, do we not have a much healthier population of children? If one looks at the verifiable statistics in that country, the vaccine adverse event incidence is much more relatable to an epidemic than any one of the minor childhood conditions against which the vaccines are purportedly protecting the children.
And why are vaccines not subjected to the same rigorous safety trialling as standard drugs? On the one hand, it is claimed that it would be unethical to withhold this medication from children to simply conduct a proper double-blind inert placebo trial (as with all other drugs) as the cohort in question could be prevented from contracting a disease by the administering of a vaccine and yet with this logic, not one single laboratory can thus claim that they can scientifically document the risk profile of that vaccine as it has never been tested other than (in some cases) against cohorts receiving another type of vaccine, the latter vaccine also never having undergone double blind testing. It's a principle based on a pyramid type ersatz safety model than has no foundation in solid science whatsoever.
Why is it such a cardinal sin to question this and request safer vaccines when it is common knowledge that they have never been tested like normal drugs?
And why, when in every other case, the physician would take the word of the parents (and particularly mothers) as to the wellbeing of their child and accept that they connected a specific food or drug to an adverse reaction - except when it comes to vaccines?
These drugs/vaccines are the same ones in Australia as they are in the US where the controversy is even more vocal - they are produced by international manufacturers so the safety issues are universal. Australia doesn't suddenly run new tests when the Merck or the Pfizer or the GSK meds arrive on the doorstep - no, they use them as every other country does assuming the safety and risk profiles are available when, in fact, they are not. And given the fact that the US found it necessary to establish a vaccine injury law and taxpayer driven compensation fund, it too is common knowledge that the incidence of vaccine injury was sufficiently high for this to be a national requirement. That in and of itself should tell the public that there is a problem.
The point I am making here is simply that to dismiss the thousands of parents as delusional, unlucky or hysterical when they report these events, is egregious behaviour on the part of the medical establishment and the community at large. And to say that it's just bad luck that their kid got injured and a degree of collateral damage is bound to occur - that is even more pernicious. It wouldn't be so readily dismissed if it was your child that regressed after vaccination and now has to spend the rest of their life in nappies requiring 24/7 medical support and never becoming a contributing member of society, which is so often the case.
These are not imagined events and they are having a severe impact on the health of the children they are supposed to be protecting - in many instances certainly a more profound and longer lasting adverse effect than any of the innocuous childhood ailments that they may be at risk from.
The other illogical premise whereby the vaccinated cohort of the population cry foul is that unvaccinated kids pose a risk to the vaccinated cohort of the community. How is that possible with effective vaccines? If they work, there should be no risk from unvaccinated children whatsoever. In fact there have been many reported cases where the vaccinated population were infecting themselves with the diseases against which they had been vaccinated.
Make them safer - do proper safety tests, (this can be done to a large degree by utilising the available data in the US government database gauging the health of vaccinated against unvaccinated children without any risk to anyone - it's a matter of comparing medical records - and yet that study has inexplicably never been done) and spread out their scheduling which has been shown repeatedly to be a safer practice.
Take a leaf out of Japan's vaccine policy which has been adapted to do just that, also making vaccines optional rather than forcibly and punitively compulsory and the results there speak for themselves.
Similar comparisons can be done as a case in point with the Mullimbimby unvaccinated cohort versus the local vaccinated cohort. It might be small but it would be very meaningful as a study.
It is not, in my research "incontrovertible" as claimed and the topic needs much deeper scientific debate but the establishment simply closes the door on this when most people (ex-vaxxers and nervous-almost-vaxxers not necessarily just anti-vaxxers) are demanding (as is their right) safer vaccines for all.
