Forbidden discussion: Childhood vaccinations

[Ray Gillenwater]

Aug 8, 2023 edit: Consolidating links and resources here, for easy access. Thanks to those that contributed:

Books:

1. Turtles All the Way Down: Vaccine Science and Myth
2. The Vaccine Friendly Plan
3. The Vaccine Book
4. Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak
   

Online resources:

1. SciBook: analysis of published information from the sources; vaccinations and infections
2. Vaccine guide
3. How "scientists" communicate to the media to shape the public narrative
4. $10k if you can find a credible large US-based post-marketing study showing that any US vaccine is safe
5. Relative Incidence of Office Visits and Cumulative Rates of Billed Diagnoses Along the Axis of Vaccination
   
6. Breakthrough Study Shows Unvaccinated Children Are Healthier
7. Robert F. Kennedy Jr Recounts the Time He Caught Dr. Paul Offit in a Lie About Childhood Vaccines
8. If vaccines don't cause autism, then how do you explain all this evidence?
9. Fmr. NIH Director Dr. Bernadine Healy on Why Public Health Agencies Won't Investigate if Vaccines Are Harmful to Certain Children
10. VACCINE SAFETY DEBATE
11. Paul Offit is trying to gaslight you. Here are the facts.
12. Childhood Vaccines and Autism
13. Aluminum adjuvants
14. W.H.O admits vaccines are not safe
15. Neonatal, Infant, and Under Age Five Vaccine Doses Routinely Given in Developed Nations and Their Association With Mortality Rates
16. What are the risks and benefits of each vaccine?
17. Vaccine Safety Conference Session 16 Dr. Christopher Exley
    

Rebuttals:

1. "Turtles All the Way Down” repeats anti-vaccine misinformation
2. My Conversation with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
3. The Grand Debunk of the antivaxxer book “Turtles All the Way Down”
   

*Note, if any of the sources/links are flawed, please let me know. The rebuttals don't appear to be in good faith, but I am linking them anyways. I'd like to see more evidence in favor of the "childhood vaccines are safe and effective" argument. Please post relevant links.

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My conclusions after a few dozen hours of research. My mind remains open if I'm wrong about any of this. Feedback welcomed:

I have enough information to make a recommendation to my wife and I believe the following statements are true:

-Childhood vaccines are not adequately safety tested.

-Their side effects are not thoroughly tracked.

-Some don't solve real problems for children, e.g. Hepatitis B.

-For the vaccines that are intended to solve real problems for children, there is no way to make an accurate risk/benefit assessment.

-There have been no legitimate efforts from the federal government or the pharmaceutical companies to determine if vaccinated children have better or worse long-term health outcomes than unvaccinated children.

-The incentives that exist make it so that none of this is likely to change.

Am I wrong about any of this?

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My original post:

I'm curious if any of you have put any effort into performing a risk/reward assessment of each CDC recommended childhood vaccine. I've performed fewer than 10 hours of research and here are my placeholder conclusions, which I'm open to changing if I've gotten any of the details wrong or am missing an important part of the equation:

1. C19 - Most dangerous "vaccine" in the history of VAERs. Healthy infants/toddlers don't die of C19.
2. Hep B - No risk of exposure in childhood.
3. Rotavirus - Seems like a non-issue for babies that are breastfeeding and aren't immunocompromised.
4. Polio - No risk of exposure.
5. Diptheria - No US deaths in 30+ years.
6. Tetanus - No exposure risk at this stage of life.
7. Pertussis - If it were a standalone vaccine, I'd strongly consider it. Seems like a better course of action would be to get a PCR test if baby has a cough and treat immediately with antibiotics if it's a Pertussis diagnosis.
8. Pneumococcus - Polysorbate 80 makes it a bad idea since I have Crohn's (and in general). The infection can also be treated with antibiotics if caught early.
9. MMR - Low risk of catching. Vaccine has a weak safety profile.
10. Chickenpox - Not severe for kids.
11. Hep A - 1% of infants have seizures when exposed to vaccine. Mild disease. Worth considering as an adult.
12. Hib - The actHIB brand seems to be low risk and worthwhile, assuming the predominant strain is covered by the vaccine. More research needed.
13. Flu - No convincing evidence that it works in infants. Death is rare. Treatable. Usually mild. Vaccine causes flu like symptoms.

I don't want to inject aluminum, formaldehyde, or any foreign substance into my daughter unless it's to reliably mitigate a legitimate, quantifiable risk. Hib is the only one that tentatively meets those criteria.

What am I failing to consider, if anything?

[VNV]

Hep B is a lifestyle vaccine, so agreed.

My son got Pertussis when he was, I forget, 8-10 years old. It was really uncomfortable. If I recall correctly, there was a lingering pneumonia, but he recovered completely.

Thank you for the other observations. I always thought that it’s better to let the kid get bigger before you start hammering him with these insults, regardless of which you choose. However , if you delay “too much” or are inconsistent , many peds. will drop you. Most expect obedience.

[Subby]

Re Polio:

Are you assessing the oral or injectable vaccine? Off the top of my head I recall that one interdicts transmission but comes with a risk of catching polio and the other prevents symptoms but not transmission. And with the increase in immigrant population it looks like it's circulating a bit more.

What's the schedule like in the US? for example the HiB shot here in Aus comes with hep b, diptheria and tetanus at the same time. Can you get individual shots or are they all bundled together?

I've definitely though about childhood immunisations a lot more over the past year. I've got my first on the way and I'll be definitely picking and choosing as much as possible. Despite living in Australia, it's still legal for the moment to not inject a little Boy for a cervical cancer vaccine. Might get him excluded from childcare but I was planning to keep him out as much as possible anyway.

[HailMary]

I'd consider changing risk of polio exposure to low, not no. I'd consider there are things worse than death. Serious life-changing complications from preventable infectious diseases, and could you live with yourself and could your wife live with you, should your baby girl be in the % of unlucky ones. I'd consider how treatable these infections are. For example, there are concerns about emerging strains of pertussis that are antibiotic resistant. I'd consider that the risk of measles is not low. It's highly contagious and with more and more people opting out of the MMR, there have been outbreaks in population pockets. I'd consider that your child may not be exposed to the chicken pox virus naturally as a child in a sea of vaccinated peers. Some people have pox parties in order to force a childhood infection (preferred over getting the virus for the first time as an adult). I'd consider that you will hit a "give us your vaccination records" barrier to entry somewhere along the line, depending on what institution you are wanting to join, where you live and what exemptions are allowed. I'd consider that your baby girl will be exposed to all kinds of objectionable substances via air, food, water and this can drive some people crazy and sometimes cause them to become insufferable to friends and family. I'd consider whether my MD might fire us and if so, would there be viable alternatives in the area where I live? Lastly, I always find it helpful to ask myself if I'm wrong, and if so, what parts might be wrong. Can I move forward on a decision not being certain? Is my decision being unduly influenced by group-think or what I prefer to be true? What would it look like if down the line if I came to regret the decision? What would it look like if my daughter did not agree with my decision, and she suffered for it. Good luck sorting it all out and congrats on your daughter.

[CommanderFun]

One of the things that strikes me about vaccinating babies isn't even what's in the shots, it's the fact that they're been administered in the first place might do some kind of long term harm. An infant's brain is still forming in ways that as they grow up they will really not be able to consciously even recall. It's probably picking up a lot of mannerisms and personality traits just from being around its parents, for example. What if those parents dropping them off into the hands of some unfamiliar stranger who stabs a bunch of needles into them has some kind of weird psychological effect that we can't even really notice immediately? They might not consciously remember it happening, but maybe that trauma can mess with their brains for the rest of their lives.

[Nicholas Laureys]

Ray a fun experiment you could do vs. spending a bunch of time researching the efficacy of various vaccines on the pediatric schedule yourself is to:

Go to a few interviews with pediatrician's offices (which I assume you have done / already plan to do anyway) and feign hesitancy to ALL of the vaccines to see how the doctors react. Tell them you've done a bit of research and want to be convinced why ALL of them should, in fact, be administered, vs. picking & choosing a la carte, or even refusing them all. And see whether the docs would even admit you to their practice under such conditions, how/why they try to convince you to stick to the standard, unaltered vaccine schedule. (LOL will they want you to sign a disclaimer that they are not responsible if your child contracts easily vaccine-preventable diseases? And if so, will they sigh a disclaimer for the inverse, that they accept responsibility for any potential future adverse events caused by the shots they are reccommending?) They will demonstrate themselves to be at least as unknowledgeable on the WHY for these vaccines as docs are about (not) prescribing strength training, as opposed to LSD cardio, and will prove their vaccine enthusiasm to be fully based on the status quo and their finances. And don't get me started on out-of-hospital births and the chopping of Johnsons. It's so sad how easily we for so long simply blindly trusted these medical "experts," vs. informing ourselves and questioning the status quo (at least before 2020).

[Chiaki Nitya]

Jesus, that's how many vaccines kids are getting these days? When I was a kid I think we were only supposed to get like 3 or 4, then again I if I was a baby I wouldn't remember anyway. But that seems like a shit ton of vaccines.

[Yngvi]

Because Ray doesn't have enough to think about already; the DDT-Polio connection:
Reddit - Dive into anything

More recent outbreaks of polio are the exact same strain as the vaccines; the outbreaks were likely caused by the vaccine itself.
Zerohedge

[Subby]

Because Ray doesn't have enough to think about already; the DDT-Polio connection:
Reddit - Dive into anything

More recent outbreaks of polio are the exact same strain as the vaccines; the outbreaks were likely caused by the vaccine itself.
Zerohedge

Does DDT usage and polio correlate in other countries or just the US? I'm not 100% sure that it does, it follows the similar trend of Autism and MMR, it's a US only phenomenon.

[francesco.decaro]

Hey Ray, I don't know if this could be helpful but I'm reading this book called Dissolving Illusions which goes through the history of disease and health over the past couple centuries with a skeptical look over vaccines. It seems to be researched pretty well.
Amazon.com

I'll leave this quote from the book:

"Preventable medical error is well documented all throughout the world and is the third leading cause of death in the United States (225,000 deaths per year*), with similar numbers wherever the same medical paradigms are implemented.
Yet every time an unvaccinated person enters their office, zealously pro-vaccine doctors arrogantly overlook the truth that a person’s risk of dying or being maimed from accepted medical practice they offer, is far, far higher than any possible death or maiming from a supposedly vaccine-preventable disease."

*Barbara Starfield, MD, MPH, “Is US Health Really the Best in the World?” Journal of the American Medical Association, vol. 284, no. 4, July 26, 2000, pp. 483–485.