Renew America
by Cynthia Janak
February 9, 2011
I have not written in over a year due to my own experience with a doctor (which I now call snake oil salesmen) who prescribed an antibiotic, I believe inappropriately, without reading my chart or talking to me first. This happened when I was in the hospital for a brief time in the beginning of December of 2009. Within 6 hours I started to experience swelling and extreme pain in my left hand making it difficult to use a fork or anything. The doctor dismissed this swelling as I must have hit my hand. In two months after leaving the hospital the swelling and pain came back with a vengeance and affected my feet, hands and other parts of my body. This was not a good time.
During the last year because of this I have researched and read many scientific papers and studies to ascertain why this could have happened to me. What I found was amazing and informative and a topic of future articles. So, I changed my diet to a degree and in time the swelling and pain subsided for the most part. It has also brought me closer to the debate about autism, HPV vaccine injuries, other diseases and their causes.
Now that I am back from my forced hiatus I am going to rebut an article posted on Bloomberg, February 7, 2011, by Amity Shlaes. The title is “Parents who don’t vaccinate children make us sick.” I thought this article was funny in a sad way because crucial information was left out and the comments she made. Let me start.
In the beginning she talks about parents and how we are hardwired to respect their decisions with child rearing. Here is the first quote. “We gave them a job to do, so we should let them do it.” Unfortunately, her article is anything but what she states here.
I believe that she fails to understand that children do not come with an owner’s manual so as parents it is our responsibility to use our own experiences and research via inquiry or reading books, articles, etc. to determine what is best for our own children. Those parents should be commended for doing just that and taking responsibility.
Shlaes admonishes this group of concerned educated parents as being “treacherous.” This is what she said, “The treacherous group is those parents, predominately those of some financial means, who refuse to vaccinate their children.”
She also believes that “poor parents are more sensible” and touts this statistic as proof “report that 91.2 percent of Medicaid children receive the measles-mumps rubella vaccine.” These parents usually are more concerned with putting food on the table and a roof over their children’s head. They do not have the luxury of being able to do the research or buy the books to become informed on this issue. They have to rely upon the opinions of doctors (snake oil salesmen) and the media.
What is really going on here is that “those parents, predominately those of some financial means” took an extra step to do their own research. I believe they wanted to find out for themselves if there was any truth to the debate over Autism and vaccination. The truth is that this educated, “treacherous” group of parents either does not vaccinate or limit the vaccines their children receive with a modified vaccination schedule.
Let us examine why this might be happening. Could it be that they found the research that references aluminum is a neurotoxin and has the potential to cause brain damage or neurodevelopment disorders? Do you think they heard, at some point in time, Bill Gates reference vaccines and reduce population growth in the same sentence? Another reason could be that they know a family whose baby was developing normally and when that baby received a vaccination regressed and was diagnosed as Autistic? We do not know their reasons because these questions were never asked by Ms. Shlaes.
Every day we listen to individuals with PhD’s, MD’s, and other consonants behind their names because they are educated. Why are we not allowed to listen to other educated individuals who do not have the education designation after their name? Instead, this class of educated individuals is berated, called names and other designations by the media and pharmaceutical companies (who stand to make a profit). Interesting.
I really enjoyed reading your article. I have a son that is diagnosed with Infatile Autism though later I discovered it really is Regressive Autism. He has sensory integration disorder, recently I found that many studies of lab rats have pointed to increases in pain threshold’s and other senses due to mercury, in specific thimerosal. I was a young mom who didn’t care why was just dang sure I was going to fix it. As best I can but looking back and feel free to read my hubpages as I go into my personal journey with autism and vaccines as well as anthrax and ptsd and other things; I watched my normal child dive into a viral infection sickness with in the two weeks they say may occur ir rare instances only to find him not talking anymore, falling head first into cement, watching him bang his head over and over not caring if he was bleeding. I have restrained him for up to six hours. No one believed me, I wish I had a Doctor Wakefield to help me because he is now very well adjusted and doing wonderfully and its me that did that. No school, no doctor, no father, no grandparent…just me. I educated myself. So when I was being sent links from a friend about mercury I looked into it…I wanted to do articles supporting both views and found that the view of the CDC side? Nothing I would stand there and support with the lack of information. My son didn’t have a Wakefield and just recently due to his being blasted all over the media and I watched every painful interview the poor man sat through interrupted time and time again; saw that my son may also have been suffereing a bowel disease…that maybe I need his heavy metal levels checked. That I had even recieved all my vaccines but at seventeen when I got unexplainably sick I was found to have been recently infected with the measles wild virus…I was immune as an adult not due to my vaccinations but because later on I got it anyway and didn’t know I had it. So when I am reading and hearing these parents and these doctors in support of wakefield talking of the vaccine strain in 70 out of 86 kids having regressive autism in a study in north carolina…that it was not the wild strain in any of these kids and their intestines had this virus in them…I chose my side. I am a single mother recently divorced, educated when I could and when i could not go to college self educatied. I have borrowed material, I have borrowed computers. I am not of any means to have leisure time I have four kids with two on spectrum. I have an anxiety disorder and multiple health problems. I am single, divorced and about to go public against the Army so I stay up all night more often then not sacrificing sleep to get to the truth. Well done, applause from my side of the spectrum…I would like to just say its about time people like you think for yourself and use your observations of your own life to see where we come from on the issue. About time we think for ourselves and I wonder how much longer other intelligent normally people will finally tell the CDC to shut up and let us think for ourselves.
thank you for posting your comment and telling your story. We appreciate your passing information about research you have found on SANE Vax to Facebook. You are doing well as a single woman with a child. Most of us involved in this issue do not have an education background in it…we just know that what is happening to our children is wrong. We sacrifice our sleep to work on this issue as well. I cannot even imagine being taken on by the army. Please stay in touch and let us know what we can do for you. We will all stand together on this and prevail. SV.
Thank you I really tried to just get him help at first. It wasn’t until my friend from high school was noticing all my advocating for Autism posts on Facebook that I started getting scientific research regarding things like Lyme’s Disease and a bunch of things I couldn’t pronounce. I felt guilty not reading them after awhile because it was obvious that he wanted to share them with me since he sent so many. The first few were hard to understand at first as I hadn’t started back at college and had a refresher of how to read scientific journals and the like. I started to notice though they all were linking together and it was starting to talk about vaccinations and Autism; thimersol and other affiliated data. It got to be overwhelming to me how much evidence he had just sent me that was reliable, scientific, and valid data and not some excerpts from an article in Time magazine or anything. So, I decided I would research both sides of the vaccine debate. I was going to write a series that was pro-vaccines and didn’t support the theory that they contributed to Autism and also a series for the opposite debate. Problem was I couldn’t get full access to any data or peer reviewed article or study done to support the safety of vaccines such as the CDC had been claiming at the time. I think it just started as a friend sending me information I got guilted into reading and had no clue that my son’s entire history with vaccinations had mirrored that of so many other parents watcing their children regress. I even tore apart all my boxes finding every medical file, every chart, every well baby exam, every screening for any program. I compared it all and I was heartbroken to figure out that the possibility of my son’s Autism was environmentally caused and that he had been born normal like everyone else.
Truthfully, I just like to self-educate and it was really frustrating for those three years trying to get people to listen to me and to look at the research and not just blindly accept what the CDC for instance, was telling them. It was even my father that questioned the validity of my arguement as the researcher and doctor that I supported was “debunked” at one time and I was given a hard time how I was now in college and I was surrounded by intellectual people with my field of psychology taught with a scientific basis and I still didn’t believe the “truth”. Turns out what I had been standing by for so long I was able to find studies collaborating it in my school’s research online library…and it has come up many times in the present with the changes in the DSM criteria for the fifth edition. Because of the casual way I ended up finding out about all of it and the research I did extensively in my own spare time; I plan on eventually pursuing my Master’s and further degree’s to work in Autism Research concentrating on environmental factors and influences that are a source of causation.
It started out just a mom that had no one else to rely on…a son that relied on her…and now I have become so educated on the topic I have decided I want to pursue it as a careeer.