Vaccines: Good Or Bad?, Part 9

There is undisputable evidence that vaccines are the cause of autism. We virtually see no cases of autism in children that have NOT been vaccinated. It’s a far piece from the horse-and-buggies of Lancaster County, Pa., to the cars and freeways of Cook County, Ill.

But thousands of children cared for by Homefirst Health Services in metropolitan Chicago have at least two things in common with thousands of Amish children in rural Lancaster: They have never been vaccinated. And they don’t have autism.

“We have a fairly large practice. We have about 30,000 or 35,000 children that we’ve taken care of over the years, and I don’t think we have a single case of autism in children delivered by us who never received vaccines,” said Dr. Mayer Eisenstein, Homefirst’s medical director who founded the practice in 1973. Homefirst doctors have delivered more than 15,000 babies at home, and thousands of them have never been vaccinated.

The few autistic children Homefirst sees were vaccinated before their families became patients, Eisenstein said. “I can think of two or three autistic children who we’ve delivered their mother’s next baby, and we aren’t really totally taking care of that child — they have special care needs. But they bring the younger children to us. I don’t have a single case that I can think of that wasn’t vaccinated.”

The autism rate in Illinois public schools is 38 per 10,000, according to state Education Department data; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention puts the national rate of autism spectrum disorders at 1 in 166 — 60 per 10,000.

“We do have enough of a sample,” Eisenstein said. “The numbers are too large to not see it. We would absolutely know. We’re all family doctors. If I have a child with autism come in, there’s no communication. It’s frightening. You can’t touch them. It’s not something that anyone would miss.”

No one knows what causes autism, but federal health authorities say it isn’t childhood immunizations. Some parents and a small minority of doctors and scientists, however, assert vaccines are responsible.[1]

When you look at the evidence you see something that has to make you think. Babies that are breast fed, unvaccinated and homeschooled, usually because vaccines are required for public school attendance, there are no cases of autism. If this isn’t literal proof of vaccine induced autism one would be hard pressed to deny it. Several studies have found a risk of asthma from vaccination; others have not. Studies that include never-vaccinated children generally find little or no asthma in that group.

Earlier this year Florida pediatrician Dr. Jeff Bradstreet said there is virtually no autism in home-schooling families who decline to vaccinate for religious reasons — lending credence to Eisenstein’s observations.

“It’s largely non-existent,” said Bradstreet, who treats children with autism from around the country. “It’s an extremely rare event.”

Bradstreet has a son whose autism he attributes to a vaccine reaction at 15 months. His daughter has been home-schooled, he describes himself as a “Christian family physician,” and he knows many of the leaders in the home-school movement.

“There was this whole subculture of folks who went into home-schooling so they would never have to vaccinate their kids,” he said. “There’s this whole cadre who were never vaccinated for religious reasons.”

In that subset, he said, “unless they were massively exposed to mercury through lots of amalgams (mercury dental fillings in the mother) and/or big-time fish eating, I’ve not had a single case.”

Federal health authorities and mainstream medical groups emphatically dismiss any link between autism and vaccines, including the mercury-based preservative thimerosal. Last year a panel of the Institute of Medicine, part of the National Academies, said there is no evidence of such a link, and funding should henceforth go to “promising” research.

Thimerosal, which is 49.6 percent ethyl mercury by weight, was phased out of most U.S. childhood immunizations beginning in 1999, but the CDC recommends flu shots for pregnant women and last year began recommending them for children 6 to 23 months old. Most of those shots contain thimerosal.[2]

We have all been taught or at least told that it was vaccines that eradicated mumps, measles, polio and other diseases. There is strong evidence to debunk that story. One of the most serious myths that I had to unlearn over the decades was the one that my academic (as opposed to clinical) medical professors had taught me about the “fact” that vaccines were entirely safe and entirely effective and were the reasons that measles, mumps, chickenpox and polio had virtually disappeared.

It was only after I had personally heard the many stories from the parents of vaccine-damaged children that I found the time to search the literature and find out more about the dangers and relative ineffectiveness of the vaccines that I once had prescribed. I never was led to believe that there was any reason for skepticism. In retrospect, I regard myself as being fortunate that I had already stopped seeing pediatric patients prior to the era when the various Big Pharma and Big Vaccine corporations (and their lapdog lobbying and trade organizations like the AMA, the AAFP and the AAP) were pushing dozens of new vaccines onto an unsuspecting public.

It wasn’t until the autism epidemic graph was found to be rising in parallel with the vaccine epidemic graph that I understood the obvious correlation between the two phenomena. There was no better answer to the question that the medical profession and Big Pharma consistently glossed over, tried to ignore and then irrationally tried to obfuscate: “what could be causing the astonishing and very sudden rise in the appearance of autism spectrum disordered kids?”

Here is the obvious answer to that question: It was the rapidly increasing numbers and combinations of known-to-be neurotoxic vaccines (as many as 9 antigens at one sitting into 2, 4 and 6 month well-babies!) that were being aggressively formulated, manufactured, aggressively marketed and then cavalierly injected into innocent babies, starting with the Reagan administration ‘s passage of a law that made it illegal for parents to sue vaccine companies or doctors when their little children suffered vaccine-related deaths or injuries from the combinations of vaccines that had never been tested for safety or even long-term effectiveness.[3]

From all that has been discussed concerning vaccines, I would never vaccinate a child today. I have refused the annual flu shot and have not had one since long before the swine flu outbreak back in the 1970’s. My last vaccine was in elementary school in the 1950’s. The government that was placed in charge of making vaccines safe has failed miserably and cannot be trusted. The pharmaceuticals that are entrusted to produce safe products are more concerned about money that the lives of people. We must look out for ourselves.

Stay informed to stay alive!

E-Mail Roger Anghis: roger@buildingthetruth.org

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