News From the Author

In response to a New York Times article on March 21 and the Times web site’s posted comments, Barbara Loe Fisher of the National Vaccine Information Center reminds Americans that the call to isolate and punish parents who elect not to vaccinate their children is a position that smacks of the worst of human history. In her passionate and well-spoken essay, she writes: “Holocaust survivor Elie Weisel said “When you take an idea or a concept and turn it into an abstraction, that opens the way to take human beings and turn them, also, into abstractions.” Individuals harmed by vaccines are not abstractions. They are human beings who deserve to be spared a lifetime of suffering rather than being thrown under the bus to prop up forced mass vaccination policies that fail to acknowledge biodiversity within the family of man.” Her point is based on  her years of study of vaccine injuries. Many families have autoimmune genetic differences that place them at risk for the 48 vaccines the government now mandates for American children as their entrance ticket to public education. Many children have been injured by vaccines, at a rate higher even than the drug manufacturers predicted, and some of those injuries have been acknowledged in claims before the vaccine injury compensation fund, set up by the government to assist those statistically anticipated injuries.

Yet the Times readers call the parents of those at risk children ‘abusers’ and the Times readers suggest that those children be removed from their parents’ care. Fisher is right to showcase the historic precedents that show the danger of marking those who are different as less valuable. How far can this idea of eliminating those who are different take us to a Hitler-like state where no one is safe from the ‘majority’s’ decision about who deserves to live and who doesn’t? Shame on the New York Times and shame on Americans who write such vitriolic propaganda.

Here’s the link to the blog of a new internet writing friend, Marta Stephens. Very helpful information for writers who aspire to publication or as reminders for some of us who are partway there.

http://www.murderby4.blogspot.com/

Here’s another comment by the infamous Dr. Paul Offit, frequently quoted in vaccine stories, always telling half truths. Here’s the newspaper excerpt:

“Other federal vaccine advisers sought to portray Hannah Poling as an isolated if not unique case.
She is “not a typical autistic child,” said Dr. Paul Offit, chief of infectious diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a longtime government vaccine adviser. “It’s not a precedent-setting case.”

Offit, you will recall was quoted a year ago in the Gardasil vaccine controversy coverage as saying that he didn’t know what all the fuss was about over vaccine injuries, the FDA had approved the safer acellular version  of the DPT vaccine in 1991. What he leaves out, ever so cleverly, is that the government did not require that safer version until 1998. I wrote about this at the time of his deceptive statement.

Now he would have families of vaccine-injured children believe that this approval of the Poling’s claim is not significant. if it wasn’t relevant to other pending claims, why were the records sealed? The whole truth would be nice. And the families of vaccine injured children who have accepted the government’s mandate have the right to the whole truth.

The news of the government’s concession in this first autism case is heartening but let’s get the facts straight. Kevin Conway, a Boston lawyer who handles compensation fund cases, may have been misquoted, but he’s definitely wrong. According to the Associated Press, he said, “It shows to me that the government has conceded that it’s biologically plausible for a vaccine to cause these injuries. They’ve never done it before.”

IN FACT many families have recovered from the vaccine compensation fund since it’s inception in 1988. I handled one of the early cases and won. That story of a mother who was not told that the vaccine caused her son’s injuries until we won her case 25 years later is chronicled in my novel White Lies. This newest case is the first concession that a vaccine could cause injuries that fall within the autism spectrum. Please don’t wipe out 20 years of struggling for truth in vaccinations that quickly. Those pioneers, like Lacy and Jean, in White Lies, and hundreds of other families who had to wait sometimes as long as five years for decisions in their cases, made it possible for this family to win their claim.  Just as this win will help the families who go forward now to ask for help.  And to ask for the truth from the doctors and drug companies.

Without the help of writers who have told the stories of those early families and pushed for over two decades, the media might never have realized the extent of the deceptions from drug manufacturers and the government. The real scandal is that parents have paid a  surcharge to fund these awards and the government has paid less than 30 percent of the claims made despite the fact that the vaccine manufacturers have not paid a dime into the fund, they are granted full immunity for these injuries under the fund.

Ah-hah. This just came through on my vaccine alert.

“Seven months after vaccination, the patient was diagnosed by Dr. Andrew Zimmerman, a leading neurologist at the Kennedy Krieger Children’s Hospital Neurology Clinic, with “regressive encephalopathy (brain disease) with features consistent with autistic spectrum disorder, following normal development.” The girl also met the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) official criteria for autism.

In its written concession, the government said the child had a pre-existing mitochondrial disorder that was “aggravated” by her shots, and which ultimately resulted in an ASD diagnosis.

“The vaccinations received on July 19, 2000, significantly aggravated an underlying mitochondrial disorder,” the concession says, “which predisposed her to deficits in cellular energy metabolism, and manifested as a regressive encephalopathy with features of ASD.”

Well, well, well. Sounds a little like the concession of the government to the link between Agent Orange and birth defects after two decades of deny, deny, deny.