My Vaccine Story – What You Should Know That I Didn’t

So after all this summer’s scandal about Robert De Niro, the TriBeCa Film Festival and the movie “VAXXED: From Cover Up to Catastrophe” being bounced from its lineup, then bounced in Houston’s WorldFest and THEN on to make a big splash in other venues including AutismOne, with De Niro making his own documentary about the controversy, I wanted to share with you how I got to my position on vaccines. I believe that for many children, vaccines can have unintended and harmful side effects that simply outweigh their benefits and that the CDC is hiding information from you. (The CDC’s manipulation of study data back and subsequent cover up for the last MMR-vaccine study is the subject of the documentary, “Vaxxed.”)

I didn’t have a child with an obvious vaccine injury event and I’ve read almost nothing that Jenny McCarthy has personally written.

It came about a different way for me.

When I was 36, I became pregnant with my first child, Amelia. It was my second pregnancy. My first one spontaneously miscarried a few years earlier, shortly after getting married and having my stroke.

This time, I knew in my baby was meant to be, for many reasons: the “coincidental” way I found my amazing OB, the leagues of testing that actually determined the cause of my stroke allowing me to safely journey my pregnancy, the way I “knew” I was pregnant immediately following the act – all of those felt like signs from God to me.

She WAS meant to be.

When I wasn’t visiting my team of doctors (3 to be exact: a perinatologist OB, an endocrinologist and a blood doctor), or working, I was reading baby and parenting books. You name it, I owned it, like 3 or 4 of the “What to Expect” series, “The Happiest Baby on the Block,” “The Baby Whisperer.” If I didn’t own it, I borrowed it, if I couldn’t borrow it, I went to Barnes & Noble and read relevant parts I’d been encouraged to read.

I did other types of learning too. I had stacks of baby magazines that every place I went gave out free. At a friend’s house, I watched a live birth video over & over, forward & backward, in slow motion, all for the entertainment of my friends who already had kids, but it settled my nerves about the frightening prospect of delivery considerably. My OB had a THICK file on me, and I asked her questions every visit, even when I went in weekly for those last two months. What little left I didn’t know, I googled.

So by the time I had Amelia, I was pretty well versed and had all my answers lined up – except one. You see, I had a cat, and knew that I couldn’t change cat litter (toxic for pregnancies), so I also assumed it would not be good to let my brand, spanking new baby’s delicate system, with its not-yet-fully-developed immune system, breathe in cat hairs or dust.

But for some reason, I was asked if I would like to give my new baby the Hepatitis B vaccine on the day of her  birth. Now, HepB is only transmittable in a few ways: sexual transmission, sharing needles/syringes/drug injection equipment, or from a mother to the baby, during birth. Since I knew I didn’t have HepB and she required no surgery or events that would expose her to this virus, for me, it made no sense to give her this vaccine. I could see there being a “maybe” if my newborn needed heart surgery but even then, all the staff was required to be vaccinated, so that too seemed more or less illogical.

Besides, if I was going to protect my baby from inhaling cat hair, it was only logical to keep her away from unnecessary medications, right? So at that time, I declined.

Back then, you could do that, with no fuss. Now, you could lose your baby in some hospitals.

You should know that the CDC now recommends (pressures?) new parents to give their baby the vaccine for what is largely an STD within a day or two of birth, and certainly before leaving the hospital.

My mind reeled when I was told of this recommendation. At the time, I knew nothing about adjuvants, thimerosal, MTHFR gene mutations, etc., but I certainly thought that if I’m protecting my baby from inhaling dust mites, no way in hell was I going to inject her with anything. Her immune system was still developing, so it made no sense that unnatural immunity to anything would work. Honestly, I had my hands full with a new baby, worrying over the results of her Karotype blood test, and trying not to have a stroke, that I gave it little thought and postponed the vaccine for several months. I made the same choice a few years later for my second baby, and gave no further thought to vaccines in those first few years, which we more or less did on schedule at that time.

A few years later, I had heard somewhere that you should always jot down the lot number for the vaccine you baby gets for VAERS just in case something happened…whatever that meant. I still hadn’t realized that I was signing my complicity because every time they got a vaccine, I had to initial some forms. I should have read them, but with 2 screaming little ones, your hands are kind of full.

Think about it: the only time you need to “sign” permission at a doctor’s office is for how to share your medical information or when you are at serious risk, like giving a thumbs up for anesthesia before surgery. Instead, I wrote those numbers down and didn’t give it much more thought than that. I trusted my doctors – they know best, right? After all, I could have had a serious stroke during my first pregnancy, before my blood clotting disorder had been diagnosed. Medical science had protected my safety – isn’t that what it’s supposed to do? I did notice that any time I made them write down lot numbers, the staff seemed pissed off like I was wasting their time.

It was different back then, as well. A decade ago, no qualified pediatrician would give your child a vaccine when she was sick. Different, but not too different – you were still pressured to come back soon for that vaccine (how many times did I just forget, what with my hands being full), as soon as the antibiotics were done. (Shudder. Vaccines on an antibiotic-filled gut, full of bad bacteria!)

You were still exhorted to keep up, you were still told administer Tylenol for that fever, you were still told the crying was just agony over the injection site.

This was my history until I learned that there were options to heal your child’s autism, that food could affect things, that there were alternative therapies that actually helped people’s kids come back from all kinds of brain injuries, disorders and behavioral problems.

I began to learn that maybe vaccines were not all they were cracked up to be.

Eventually, I wondered if there was a connection between vaccines and my youngest daughter’s autism. She had sensory issues from the beginning, even prenatally, I believe, but I cannot tell you whether or not she was born with autism. In fact one of our trusted therapists, who had an autistic son and her own sensory issues, swore that Zoe did not have autism at the age of two. Did vaccines tip her scales and seriously amp up her toxic burden?

But now, I wonder about my oldest daughter. She was born with a rare form of Down syndrome, Mosaicism. She also has a mutation in her MTHFR gene. She’s had a lot more vaccinations than Zoe and cried for every single one, despite being an angel baby.

Maybe it was “injection site pain.” Who knows?

Then a year ago, I saw something that convinced me I did more harm than good with her vaccinations. I was going through a really hard time and my husband was trying to cheer me up after one of the worst days of my life. He found some videos videos and managed to hook that camcorder to the TV. For the first time, I watched myself with my one week old daughter, Zoe – and Amelia, who was 2 years and 10 months old at the time.

Amelia was as vocal as a 2 year old could possibly be – even with a mouthful of Oreos (don’t judge). It’s kind of a super adorable video but what’s really telling is that you can CLEARLY hear her speak. She has NONE of the speech issues I hear now, none of the speech impediments that have plagued her since she’s started school, maybe even sooner.

And the WHOLE time I’m watching, I’m thinking, “Did I do this to my baby? Did she react to a vaccine and I totally missed it for all these years??”

Having an infant with sensory issues, and possibly autism and all it’s accompanying medical problems, is not easy. I don’t remember a peaceful night’s sleep for her first 5 years, so  I’m sad to say, Amelia took a major back seat. She was, after all, so well-behaved and impossible to ruffle, a good sleeper and never complained, rarely cried. I thought, all good there, so I have to focus on Zoe. (My dear Amelia, I hope you forgive me for that.)

I can’t tell you if I did miss a reaction. She doesn’t have autism, but something along the way went wrong. Even after that, it took until about 2008 before we stopped, postponed or just didn’t have health insurance to vaccinate. And then I got a little wiser. I read everything from every reliable scientist that I could on the issue. I read the coverups, but I avoided Andy Wakefield like the plague. I couldn’t care less about Jenny McCarthy either, but I began to see and hear more of this movement that questioned the safety of vaccines, and talked about parental rights.

I learned that doctors, while having years and years of medical school, actually spend very little time studying the science behind vaccines unless they are specializing in immunology. (Most pediatricians and OBs don’t.) I learned that they learn about vaccines through the pharma reps, who come with a medical background of ..get this..a degree in healthcare marketing and corporate training. You can even get an MBA in that online. Wow.

And over a year ago, William Thompson, the CDC whistleblower, revealed that he, a top scientist at the CDC, and his team, eliminated groups of children from their study to make sure that a link between the MMR vaccine and autism didn’t appear as causal as the original numbers showed. THAT study, my friends, is the one that the CDC and other outlets use to say, “We’ve proven there is no link between vaccines and autism!” (Well that’s interesting. I didn’t know it was so easy to PROVE A NEGATIVE in science. Most studies simply prove what can be known.) From that came the movie, “VaxXed” which tells Thompson’s story as well as the stories of parents whose children have been vaccine injured.

I don’t know if either one of my children have an injury and even if I did, I missed the window and probably wouldn’t file anyway. I recently heard that reported vaccine injuries (that are sent to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System – VAERS) are claimed to be 30,000 a year by the CDC website, but I’ve already seen numbers on JUST Gardasil adverse events reporting alone THIS YEAR that make those incredibly off. I DO know that they have issues detoxing things they are sensitive to, so it makes sense that they might be sensitive to mercury, aluminum, egg, DNA or whatever chemicals are in vaccines. (I just heard a scientist recently discovered glyphosate in vaccines too but I need better confirmation before sharing further.)

The point is you want your baby to be safe. You owe it to her to dig deep and not just blindly trust an organization that made a harmless disease into a brain injury killer (Zika), and that once worked with Phillip Morris to convince the American public that cigarettes were safe even for pregnant women. You can do this. You are the person solely responsible for your child’s health and well-being, despite what the state says. You do not want to join the ranks of the broken hearted parents I know who have severely injured children or the many who have lost their babies within hours of a vaccine. Do your homework and make your decision. Each vaccine is different, and not all of them have the same ingredients or reactions.