DRAPER'S PAPER ROUTE

Vaccines

by: Adam Carroll Draper

As most of you know, I live with my health coach.  Stefanie has an amazing way of looking at life in general, but she has taken the red pill when it comes to natural medicine.  I just try to keep up.  I am sure that something I say here is going to offend one group or another, so please just bear with me as I ramble back to this point: 

How did it come to be so offensive to allow people to choose what does or does not get injected in their own bodies – or their children’s bodies?

 Pretty much everyone who knows me is aware that I am adamantly libertarian in my political outlook.   From the very beginning of this country (which I love and for which I am not apologetic), we have celebrated a minimal principal of liberty as a central tenet of our law.  That minimal principal of liberty is simply that a person is free to do as he or she pleases until his or her actions harm someone else.  For instance, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ famously held in Schenk vs. the United States that freedom of speech doesn’t include “shouting fire in a crowded theater.” 

 With this in mind, what do we do with people who do not want to get flu shots – or who are adamantly opposed to the state forcing them (or their kids) to get the measles vaccine?   Mayor Bill de Blasio recently required everyone in Brooklyn have the measles vaccine because he said the growing resistance to getting it has caused a measles epidemic there.

 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/09/nyregion/measles-vaccination-williamsburg.html

 Is it that simple?  Ignorant people are infecting the rest of us, so it we must force them to get vaccines?

 Stefanie is one of “those people” opposed to how we currently mass immunize.  She thinks it is unhealthy and it destroys the gut biome – which sounds nasty!  Lots of people agree with her, but the CDC says all those people are misinformed and ignorant of the fact that vaccines are perfectly safes and that there is no credible evidence that they pose any danger to those forced to have them.

 Looking into this, I found an article by Chris Exley, a professor at Keele University in the UK.  He says that he has shown that the aluminum in the MMR (Measles, Mumps, Rubella) vaccine can cause autism in children.  However, his study was so widely ripped by the medical (and pharmaceutical) community that his funding has been cut off at Keele.

 Here is his article: https://www.hippocraticpost.com/infection-disease/aluminium-and-autism/

 I want to make sure that I am adequately sounding the naturalpathic alarm here.  The point Stefanie, Dr. Exley and all these others are making is that there is evidence that the orthodox medical standard regarding mass vaccinations is in error.  But this evidence is being suppressed, or is at very least under overwhelming assault, by the medical and pharmaceutical industries.  Why?  Because there is big money behind forcing everyone to get vaccines.

 In fairness, the notion that vaccines are not safe is held in contempt by the vast majority of published researchers.  Consider this response regarding the MMR vaccine:  Vaccines and Autism: A Tale of Shifting Hypotheses, by Jeffrey S. Gerber and Paul A. Offit.  The authors review twenty different studies performed all over the world and conclude: “These studies, in concert with the biological implausibility that vaccines overwhelm a child’s immune system, have effectively dismissed the notion that vaccines cause autism.”

 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2908388/

 Note, however, the disclaimer in the article:  “Potential conflicts of interest. P.A.O. is a coinventor and patent coholder of the rotavirus vaccine Rotateq and has served on a scientific advisory board to Merck. J.S.G.: no conflicts.”   This is about as glaring as all the disclaimers we see in pharmaceutical ads like, “you may experience bleeding from your eyeballs and occasional episodes of horrific pain on completelyinnocuousinol.”

 OK, to the uninitiated observer (me), this seems like Oz, The Great and Powerful, saying, “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”

 I came home to a particularly agitated wife recently.  Stefanie was listening to a podcast in which one of her holistic gurus was reporting that the latest pneumonia vaccine was rushed to release without being completely studied, which has resulted in several deaths.  I have absolutely no idea if this is true.  But Stefanie is not given to hysteria.  Unlike her husband, she is amazingly level headed.  When she gets agitated, I pay attention.  One of the things that gets her goat is the notion that everyone should get the latest flu vaccine.  My point is that her reaction (which is widely held) is treated with contempt by the medical community at large.  It is as if vaccinations have become sacrosanct.   

 There is a growing body of evidence that flu vaccines are not all that effective.  In fact, a Canadian study showed that the administration of the flu virus in 2008 and 2009 caused an increased risk of contracting the avian flu. 

 https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1000258

 When was the last time you heard a public official insist that parents give their kids vitamins, or say something like “an apple a day keeps the doctor away?”  There is no massive phalanx of lawyers, guns and money to enforce the sanctity of apples.  Yet, there is ample evidence that vitamins work better than the flu vaccine.  Say it ain’t so!

 https://www.bmj.com/content/356/bmj.i6583

 I told you I was going to take the circuitous route to get back to my original point:  How did it come to be so offensive to allow people to choose what does or does not get injected in their own bodies – or their children’s bodies?

 Let me now put this another way, there is a disconnect in our public orthodoxy.  In fact, we have been inoculated to a kind of groupthink.  We have arrived at the point that almost anything said can be turned anathema to the public sensibility.  Everything is weighed on the most sensitive scale, discerning an offense of the most serene insensitivity – except when it is not!  Please don’t mistake this for an attack on progressivism (which I am given to do) as much as it is a calling out.  Those who are concerned about forced vaccinations are no more likely to be conservative than progressive.  Yet, it is Bill de Blasio (the socialist) who is forcing everyone in Brooklyn to get immunized – an act designed to force the orthodox Jewish community to conform to his opposing orthodoxy.  Where is the hue and cry?  Certainly not from the Medical and Pharmaceutical industries.  Who was it that said, “Politics makes strange bedfellows”?

 Ultimately, this is not about political philosophy.  It is an act of force.  It is about power.  The most well-intentioned cause can become the vehicle of tyranny.

 For everyone who feels absolutely justified in forcing vaccinations upon those adamantly opposed to them:  Is being right worth it? Is this attempt at public safety worth societal upheaval?  Who benefits by such upheaval?