A No-Brainer: Obey the M.D. With the Needle or My Conscience?

by Barbara Loe Fisher

http://www.vaccineawakening.blogspot.com/
http://www.nvic.org/

I know and respect a number of enlightened medical doctors working with Moms and Dads as equal partners in making health care decisions for children, which may include making informed vaccination choices that do not necessarily conform with government policy. I also admire responsible, insightful journalists who do their homework and write astute and balanced articles about vaccine safety and informed consent to vaccination. However, these tend to be the exception and not the rule.

As the vaccination debate becomes more contentious and the divide continues to widen between those who worship at the alter of medical science and those who prefer to kneel at a different kind of alter, caught in the middle are ordinary Americans being forced to choose between obeying their conscience and obeying a medical doctor wielding a needle. Some journalists are desperate to be part of the intellectual elite calling the shots (no pun intended) and go to great lengths to characterize those, who place spiritual faith and conscientious beliefs above the doctor's orders, as ignorant. The desire to discredit people refusing to have blind faith in the opinion of a medical school graduate is most intense when it comes to the issue of vaccination.

During the past 26 years that I have studied and written about vaccination and the informed consent principle, I have been fascinated by the lack of knowledge that doctors giving orders and some journalists, who dutifully assist them in persuading others to follow orders, possess about the subject. Lacking knowledge, they often prefer to canonize medical doctors promoting use of multiple vaccines in early childhood and try to marginalize those who do not believe in non-evidence based pronouncements that "Vaccines are safe and effective and the benefits always outweigh the risks."

Despite the attempt by medical doctors heading up federal and state health agencies to persuade people that vaccination is, in fact, the new "sacrament" (brilliantly labeled by that medical heretic, the late great Robert Mendelsohn, M.D.), vaccination is a medical intervention performed on a healthy person that has the inherent ability to result in the injury or death of that healthy person.

There are hard facts to consider when making a vaccine decision:

1) There can be no guarantee that the deliberate introduction of killed or live microorganisms into the body of a healthy person will not compromise the health or cause the death of that person either immediately or in the future;

2) There are very few biological predictors that have been identified by medical science to give advance warning that injury or death may occur from vaccination;

3) There is no guarantee that a vaccine will, indeed, protect a person from contracting or transmitting an infectious disease; and

4) There is an absence of adequate scientific knowledge about the way vaccines singly or in combination act in the human body at the cellular and molecular level, including whether certain genes predispose some individuals to a greater risk than others for suffering vaccine injury or death.

Therefore, vaccination is a medical procedure that could reasonably be termed experimental each time it is performed on an individual, whether that individual is healthy or has an undiagnosed health condition or genetic predisposition that could raise the risk for being harmed by vaccination.

Further, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and drug companies marketing vaccines openly state that the number of human subjects used in pre-licensing studies are too small to detect all vaccine side effects. So mass use of a new vaccine after the federal government licenses it and recommends it is a de facto uncontrolled scientific experiment. In this regard, the ethical principle of informed consent attains even greater moral, medical and legal significance.

Although doctors take offence when their opinions are challenged, they REALLY get mad when an ordinary Mom questions the value of injecting vaccines into her child 48 times in the first six years of life (now, with the CDC's addition an annual influenza shot and more vaccinations to the adolescent vaccine schedule, it is 69 doses of 16 vaccines by age 18). The arrogant, patronizing response by those doctors, who are intent on mindlessly implementing government policy before taking into consideration the potential risks of vaccination for the 1 in 6 highly vaccinated child in America already suffering with immune or brain dysfunction, is to throw the mother and child out of the office.

It can be especially infuriating for the medical school graduate practicing pediatrics to be confronted by a Mom (or Dad) who knows more about the toxic components, potential high risk factors and life altering side effects of vaccines than they are getting paid by parents to know. But that outrage does not compare to the outrage of mothers and fathers being told by legislators doing the bidding of Big Pharma that an elitist group of CDC-appointed M.D.'s and Ph.D's holding a few meetings in Atlanta should be given the power to make state laws forcing children to get every new vaccine that the pharmaceutical industry creates and sells.

And this is where faith and reason comes in: the reconciliation of faith and reason that leads to a conviction which may be guided by prayer but is confirmed by conscience.

The club that medical doctors use to keep the people ignorant and bound to them by a golden chain from birth is fear: fear of microbes; fear of infection; fear of nature. Like primitives drawing menacing creatures on the walls of caves to ward off evil spirits, the men and women with M.D. written after their names get out their needles and poke them into babies to ward off the evil microbes they believe are out to get us. Giving themselves different names - vaccinologists, pediatricians, infectious disease specialists, public health officials - they are convinced they must fight a war with microbes and believe the only way to save humanity is to force everyone to get injected with more and more of those lab-altered microbes over and over and over again.

Then they tell us we must have faith that every time something bad happens after vaccination, it is only a "coincidence."

Let's see. Shall I consult the Merck Manual or the intelligence God gave me? Shall I obey the medical school graduate or my conscience?

For me and a lot of parents who have watched our once healthy children suffer life-altering vaccine reactions, it is no-brainer. I will stand up for the human right to use the intellect, heart and soul God gave me, pray for guidance, and obey my conscience when it comes to using a pharmaceutical product that could kill or injure me or my children. No government official or medical doctor has the moral authority to take my life or the life of my children to prop up a one-size-fits- all government policy that does not acknowledge biodiversity within the human species or respect individual human life.


"Two weeks ago, a Northern Virginia-based group called the National Vaccine Information Center launched a campaign calling for "broad exemptions for medical, religious and conscientious belief reasons." According to Barbara Loe Fisher, the group's co-founder, "forcing vaccination is a violation of human rights.".....Fisher said her older son had a bad reaction to a childhood vaccine, and "I was very afraid that I would have another child this would happen to," though her pediatrician recommended the girl be immunized. "I prayed about whether God wanted me to do what this physician wanted me to do," she recalled. After a three-hour meeting, she said, her Lutheran pastor signed a statement in support of her exemption. "He said he didn't have to agree with me but that I had a sincere religious belief." School officials accepted it, she said. Although she is aware that some parents might manufacture religious objections, Fisher said she doesn't recommend it. "If you are going to take a religious exemption, you have to have a sincere belief and be true to the spirit and intent of religious exemption," she said. Maryland officials say they are watching immunization trends. Ed Hirshhorn, chief of the state's Vaccines for Children program, said that although he thinks the religious exemption requirement is "too easy," officials are reluctant to seek stronger requirements in the absence of an outbreak of disease or dramatic increase in parental refusal. "You're always opening Pandora's box," he said." - Sandra Boodman, Washington Post (June 10, 2008) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/06/AR2008060603770pf.html

"It wasn't the boy I had a problem with. It was his mother. We had met a few months earlier, when I gave her 14-year-old son a diagnosis of mild asthma. I didn't mind her tough questions, but her tone of voice put me on edge. She seemed suspicious, almost angry. Still, in the end I decided she was just a smart, assertive parent, and I let it go..... This time, she was more confrontational. She complained she had been "forced" to bring in her son for a physical because his school needed a doctor's clearance before he could play sports.... bit my tongue and tried to tell her why I thought they belonged here. Yes, he was probably very healthy. But an annual checkup could help him learn to take charge of his own health as he grew up, and it would give me a chance to encourage healthy choices and to get a good sense of his emotional health during these challenging years. Finally, I pointed out, he was due for a tetanus booster....She was unimpressed. "I don't believe in preventive care," she said. "I'll treat him for tetanus if he needs it." The rest of the visit went more smoothly, mainly because Mom left the room so I could examine her son.....I thought about our conversation on the tetanus booster, when the mother said she didn't believe in preventive care. I'm a pediatrician - prevention is in my DNA. If I accepted her view, I'd be compromising my conscience and my professional ethics. I couldn't do that. I wrote a letter addressed to my patient's mother and sent by certified mail. I kept it brief: "Sometimes, a patient or family and doctor aren't compatible. ... Therefore, I will be dismissing you from my practice." - Rahul K. Parikh, M.D., New York Times (June 10, 2008)
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/10/health/views/10case.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

"I have four children and never vaccinated any of them," East Stroudsburg resident Susan Spannagel said. "I come from a holistic family. My father was a chiropractor and my family always had a natural approach to health." Parents have a choice regarding vaccinations and many are now speaking up on the subject. By the age of 6, most children have been injected with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's recommendation of 48 doses of 14 different vaccines, not including optional immunizations. With that number of shots, parents are taking a critical-thinking approach to vaccinations and making themselves aware of the pros and the cons.....The National Vaccination Information Center is another organization dedicated to vaccination issues. The nonprofit was founded in 1982 by Jeff Schwartz, Barbara Loe Fisher and Kathi William who are parents of vaccine-injured children. "We are parents whose kids were injured in the early '80s by the DTP vaccine. My son was injured at 2½ years old and was left with ADD and multiple learning disabilities," co- founder and president of NVIC Barbara Loe Fisher said. "We aren't necessarily anti-vaccination but are instead pro-education," Fisher said. Although Fisher said she feels that we have come a long way in public awareness, there is room for improvement. "My son had the vaccination and changed from a happy, high- functioning child to a sick child that regressed and no longer knew his alphabet or numbers. He became frustrated easily and was emotionally fragile. He stopped just short of autism," Fisher said. "I watch this now and it is happening in greater frequency. There is enough evidence now that vaccines can cause death or injuries." Holistic Family Healthcare in Hackettstown, N.J., is one of a few facilities in the region that provides natural medicine. "I am a primary care provider that allows my patients to not vaccinate. I do not offer vaccinations in my office," said Elaine Hardy, a family nurse practitioner and owner of the facility. "I think it needs to be a parent's choice, an informed choice. I am not against vaccinations at all. I am into doing it in a safe and controlled manner though." - Melanie Van Derveer, Pocono Record ( June 2, 2008)
http://www.poconorecord.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080602/NEWS/806020315