Let me begin with a disclaimer. I give vaccinations in my office. I mean I personally administer them, not a nurse, me. I believe that vaccinations are useful at times.State Bill 277, the mandatory vaccination law bringing California into line with Mississippi and West Virginia has passed. I really don’t like it. I really don’t like the word mandatory, when it comes to health care. That is because it means someone else has taken upon themselves to decide what is good for you. They know that it really is for the best.The huge problem with that attitude is that it has proven wrong and is proven wrong every day in medicine. They absolutely do not know.Do you remember Fen-Phen, Vioxx, Bextra, DES or thalidomide? They were all common drugs that killed people. How about Seldane, the first antihistamine that didn’t make people sleepy? It caused fatal heart arrhythmias.These medication worked well for most people. The problem is that rare bad reactions do happen and if enough people use a treatment, some of them will die from the treatment.Bringing this back to immunizations, unanticipated and rare, but devastatingly bad responses to vaccinations do occur. One example is the paralytic disease Guillaine Barre that has been associated with influenza and hepatitis vaccines. The newest example of an unforeseen bad effect from a vaccination is the HPV vaccine for venereal warts. The government of Denmark has asked the EU to investigate adverse reactions in the 87 million europeans who have received the vaccine.Why?Some unusual and debilitating nervous disorders might be caused by this vaccine.One is a chronic pain condition. The other is a disorder that throws a monkey wrench into a body’s heart and blood pressure regulation system (POTS). I know of a young man with this disorder, who has gone from competing for a spot on the Olympic team to collapsing after he tries to exercise. His case is not related to the HPV vaccine but it demonstrates just how disabling this syndrome is and how bad the consequences can be from using a vaccine that authorities proclaim as perfectly safe.
Other unanticipated, but significant consequences of vaccinations occur. One example is the vulnerability of infant to measles now because their mother’s breast milk can’t protect them. That was not true in the past when mothers were immune to measles because of their own exposure to the disease. Another example is the massive increase in the painful, sometimes disablingly so, disease called shingles among the elderly. Before the chicken pox vaccine, only a tiny percentage ever suffered from shingles. Now, the CDC estimates that 30-50% of elderly Americans will get the disease. Of course the solution is now to immunize old folks as well as little ones. Vaccine manufacturers are crying all the way to the bank.
The bottom line is quite simple – Mandatory is a bad word. When we don’t understand the consequences but we do know that some people will inevitably suffer badly from problems we don’t yet know about, how can we insist that they must receive a treatment? If the disease were one spreading rapidly, killing or disabling thousands or millions, making an intervention mandatory might make sense. That is nothing at all like the situation we are in. The current push for mandatory vaccinations is at best thoughtlessly misguided.
The arrogant overconfidence and naïveté driving this push to take away our right to think for ourselves is dangerous.