The fear that transcends logic

The following letter from an obviously sleep-deprived and angry mother has appeared on the FaceBook page of Stop the Australian Vaccination Network. I am reprinting it here because I believe that what we are up against isn't just pharmaceutical shills who are opposing freedom of choice because they are being paid to oppose it (though I know there are plenty of those out there!).

Our biggest problem is that both the government and the medical community have painted parents who don't vaccinate or who vaccinate selectively as 'the enemy'. They are intentionally vilifying the unvaccinated without any evidence that we are the problem. In fact, they are consciously choosing to ignore the medical research proving that the pertussis or whooping cough vaccine is almost completely ineffective against the strain of the disease circulating in Australia today (84% of all whooping cough cases are being caused by bacteria that is not contained in our current vaccine and it is possible that the vaccine itself was responsible for this change in the strain of bacteria which is now responsible for whooping cough).

According to these 'authorities, it is our decisions and our children who are placing the fully-vaccinated yet somehow not protected at risk. This, despite the fact that the majority of those who get these diseases have been fully and appropriately vaccinated against them (as is the case with this woman and her family).

Up until now I have been a silent observer on this page. I live in the heart of avn's kingdom and am surrounded by anti vac people. I am vaccinated as are my children. I did it as I wanted them to be protected from uneccessary and avoidable diseases. It was a no brainer really. In the last three months my children have contracted chicken pox and all four of us had whooping cough with my youngest child aged two suffering the worst. I had the longest and darkest night a few weeks back where myself and the children were sleeping together in my bed so I could watch on them. We were covered with cloth nappies to catch the vomit from the coughing fits that occurred every twenty minutes. Once they had fallen in to an exhausted sleep I wrote an open letter to all people who don't vaccinate and have helped spread this vile disease. I was and still am angry. I had the humiliating telephone call from the local health service as they have to be notified when you contract a communicable disease. We talked at length and there were many tears on my part. I offered to speak out for them as I feel so strongly that so many people are misinforming themselves by looking at websites such as that of the AVN and just picking at the info they feel is relevant and think they are making an educated decision. I was advised that because of my locality I would be ostrisized by many and that I should not be vocal and do this to myself. I even offered to publicly invite people to come see my poor suffering children in the throes of a coughing spasm so they could see what they are exposing themselves and others to. I never thought I could feel so passionate about something like this but I do. My youngest daughter is still whooping away at night. I still panic and have become anxious about my children's health and now it is affecting my own. I'm just a mother. I have no PhDs or science qualifications to my name. I'm not a doctor or health worker but common sense is something I do have. I hope you don't mind my rant on here. I've looked for somewhere else to rant but not brave enough to face the misinformed people on the AVN site. I'm too tired for all that. Too tired of looking after two beautiful children who have become ill so unnecessarily. Too tired as will shortly be having a visit from my mother whose immune system is compromised and panicking on what on earth she could pick up. Too tired to help my neighbour who is undergoing radiation and chemotherapy as heaven forbid what we could be passing on to them. All this because of some misinformed people. So sad. I am prepared to pass on my open letter if anyone wishes to read just for an insight into dealing with whooping cough. Thank you for your time.

Note the answer she received from the Public Health Unit when she contacted them claiming that she would somehow be victimised for having vaccinated her children when the reality is the opposite - it is the unvaccinated who are blamed for disease in the vaccinated - not the other way around. Note also that she does not blame ineffective vaccines for her children's and her own illness. Instead, it is the fault of those around her in the community that her fully-vaccinated children got sick with diseases they were supposed to be - but weren't - protected against.

I wonder if this mother sent her children to school or preschool while they were in the most infectious stages of their illness - before symptoms developed? Did they go shopping, visit friends, relatives or go to the cinema or another public place during this 10 to 14 day period? And if she had - without meaning any harm - how many other children would have been inadvertently exposed to these diseases after coming into contact with her fully vaccinated children? And would these further infections also have been blamed on some unknown, unnamed  unvaccinated child rather than tracing it back to someone who was fully vaccinated and yet, fully unprotected?

This is why fear is such an effective tool for the government and medical community and why they use it so effectively and so constantly. It makes no sense to anyone who thinks about it - how can we possibly blame the unvaccinated for vaccine failure - but it is also obvious that people are thinking with their adrenal glands rather than their brains in these situations. They are making decisions based on fear rather than on logic.

It is time for this to stop. There is a huge amount of evidence that neither the whooping cough nor the chicken pox vaccine are effective. In fact, there is a great deal of evidence that not only won't these vaccines prevent the diseases they are meant to - but that those who are vaccinated and catch the diseases may have worse symptoms than those who are unvaccinated and contract them (the exact opposite of what the medical community claims).

The new strain of pertussis (whooping cough) is far more dangerous than the older strain. It produces much higher levels of pertussis toxin and it is the toxin that determines how bad the symptoms will be. (Newly Emerging Clones of Bordetella pertussis Carrying prn2 and ptxP3 Alleles Implicated in Australian Pertussis Epidemic in 2008–201; The Journal of Infectious Diseases 2012;205:1220–4)

And with chicken pox, not only can the vaccine (which is a live virus shot cultured on the cell line of an aborted human foetus) cause chicken pox in those who are vaccinated, but it can leave vaccinated children open to getting shingles - a potentially disfiguring and much more painful disease - without ever having had a primary chicken pox vaccination infection - something which never happened prior to the introduction of this vaccine.

Healthy, unvaccinated children are no more likely to spread infectious diseases than healthy vaccinated children. And being fully vaccinated - or even being immune (which is a totally different situation altogether) cannot prevent you from carrying and transmitting infectious diseases even if you yourself are not showing the symptoms as Dr Larry Palevsky so clearly demonstrated in his blog.

I feel very sorry for this mother. She and her children are not only victims of pharmaceutical and medical community lies (it is the unvaccinated who gave her fully vaccinated family these diseases - a great big lie) - but her fear of those around her may lead to more decisions based on myths rather than on reality.

Vaccines create antibodies - they do not create immunity. So when a vaccinated person gets a disease they are supposed to have been protected against, the vaccine has failed in its job. The community has not failed - the vaccine has. And if vaccines can't protect individuals - they can't protect at all.