CONFORMED CONSENT 

                  The Psychology Behind Immunization

                        by Christine Colebeck

  We are all born into the world and immediately take on roles and responsibilities.  We learn early that Moms cook and nurture, Dads are the strong breadwinners.  Boys play baseball and girls wear dresses.  Most people accept this without question.  What is expected of us is reinforced everywhere we turn.  When boys cry they are told “be a man” insinuating that “real men” don’t cry and you don’t see boys selling Barbie dolls on TV ads.  We are taught unwritten rules right from birth, important rules for safety and health but also the rules of society that we are taught to abide by, under the loving gaze of our parents and by the influence of our peers, through a method called “conditioning.”       

  Then it is off to school, where the real learning begins.  It is here we learn to “conform” to societies standards and to “respect” authority. The questioning of the former is considered disrespectful of the latter.  “Compliance” is the behavior of a person who is motivated by a desire to gain a reward or avoid punishment and the primary focus of education.  Independent thought, is not only not encouraged it is completely discouraged.  Children are trained to have Pavlovian responses to bells, and submit themselves to being herded around like cattle.  This prepares children well for adulthood in society. To be good conforming, law abiding citizens. To become men who provide well for their families or women who nurture and parents that teach their children to conform to society’s standards.  The cycle inevitably repeats itself.   

  This definitely contributes to society running well as a whole but unfortunately we become so accustomed to handing over authority to everyone else we lose the ability to think for ourselves.  We are so discouraged from questioning authority and we fear the repercussions that result from infractions thus we readily comply. 

  Even when the authority or leader is wrong, we follow without question, and if the leader jumped off a cliff, we would blindly follow to our death because even death does not frighten us as much as being “different”.  Of course we deny this outwardly and the denial runs deep because what person would want to admit to being a coward? The one area of our lives that this is proven over and over is immunization.  We all do it and most of us without question. 

  The question is why?  If someone came up to you on the street and asked you to inject your infant with mercury or formaldehyde, what would your response be?  If they asked you to sacrifice your child for the sake of another, what would you say?  But probably every person reading this who is a parent has readily agreed to do both of these things without question and they probably don’t even know why. 

  People have been conditioned for so long that independent thought is a negative act with negative consequences. We have been trained to doubt our own abilities and our own judgment.  We have come to regard doctors and those in authority as “gods” and we expect them to know the answers to the questions that we do not.  Even when the answers they supply are incorrect we rationalize it to be true because it would be too difficult for us to accept that all that we have come to believe may not be so.  Any answer is better than no answer because we have lived our safe predictable lives and clung so dearly to our routines for so long that we have come to fear the unknown.    

  The immunization program is a business for profit like any other.  The goal is to sell the product.  Just like an unethical salesperson will be only too happy to sell you a product of questionable safety that you don’t necessarily need, the pharmaceutical company will not tell you about the obvious and well-known risks associated with their product.  The government saves a lot of money in health care dollars when they can reduce expensive outbreaks.  The pharmaceutical company and the government both have vested interest in this product and like any other item for sale, they are going to promote the positive, while neglecting to disclose the negative.  

   Fear can be utilized as a powerful incentive to make us receptive to the ideas that are being taught. Not surprisingly, fear is the very foundation in which the immunization business is quite successfully built upon.  We are primed to fear disease just as we are conditioned to fear individualism and difference.  We are taught to fear that our children will be stricken with a horrible disease and die and ONLY their products can save us.  What a great business strategy. 

  We believe them because the more credibility the communicator has, the higher the ability of persuasion. We are merely small-minded people of limited intelligence and without the ability to exhibit independent thought.  Who are we to question the big and powerful government (who always have our best interest at heart) and the highly intelligent doctors/gods?  We run out as fast as we can to hold our children down so that the “medical professional” can inject this “miracle” savior into our children because we know that all “good parents” vaccinate their children. 

  We do this blindly with complete trust as most of us do not even know a single ingredient in the vaccine that was injected directly into our child’s body and we never ask because we don’t want to know.    

   Another factor in persuasion is a one-sided argument. This theory has to do with how only hearing one side of an argument can lead to a higher level of persuasion. The government employs this by writing up informational pamphlets about the dreadful diseases that we can be spared from through immunization.  They pass this information out through all health care clinics and doctor’s offices, to ensure that we are all getting the same information everywhere we turn.  People like consistency and predictability. It makes them feel safe.  This “persuasion” is the reason we are not given true informed consent.  They do not want us to make a decision, based on “all” the information. They have already made that decision for us (because we let them).  

  My favorite sales pitch is in the chicken pox vaccine pamphlets.  We are encouraged to use a high-risk vaccine to gain temporary immunity from a low risk disease to save us “time missed from work and money lost on wages to stay home with a sick child.” The part they leave out is that when the “temporary” immunity wears off, the child will be an adult and exposure to a low risk childhood disease may now be fatal.  That sounds ridiculous because it is, yet thousands of parents have used this vaccine and without question. 

  The common cold often killed people at the time vaccinations were invented because living conditions in many places were so appalling. People lived in filthy, cramped, unhygienic conditions with open sewers and often no running water. Nutrition was poor, and many people had weakened lungs after frequent bouts of pneumonia from living in damp moldy houses without heat. Antibiotics had yet to be invented. 

 When Jenner gave birth to the vaccination industry, smallpox vaccine probably caused the deaths of more people than the disease itself, back in the good old days when the “cure” often killed you.  Those were and still are considered “acceptable losses” in the war against disease. 

  The smallpox vaccine was not an option, people who refused it were beaten and most people did not resist “authority.”  When sanitation and lifestyle improved the smallpox epidemics disappeared coincidentally at that same time.  Naturally the vaccine manufacturers took full credit and were already busy pumping out a plethora of new vaccines.        

  Immunization is one of the few medical procedures that I am aware of that can be forced on healthy people by law.  Immunization even over-rules many constitutional rights but we rarely talk about that side of immunization.  You will never be told that vaccines are for “your” good. Instead you are told that, “vaccination is for the greater good.”  Of course we deny all this too because we deny everything that makes us feel threatened and unsafe. 

  We refuse to believe that this could happen in our lifetime. That we have somehow learned from those days of old and evolved into more intelligent people but as soon as the “gods” tell us there is a threat of disease we will run as fast as we can to get in line for the “cure” even if it is a 20 year old vaccine that we know can kill us.  We will do this because we fear straying from society’s accepted norm. Over time we have been successfully “primed” and “conditioned” into accepting vaccines and convinced that we “need” them.  We have been encouraged to ignore common sense in lieu of science.  We have been successfully “framed.”  

  Framing is the way a decision is presented to reinforce that it appears to represent a potential for loss or gain.  This is used to influence how we construct a decision.  They obviously present immunization as a gain “for the greater good.” The PR machines pump out the proposed positive benefits of vaccinating. They capitalize on our fear by making it appear likely that we will suffer negative consequences from being “unprotected” by their product.   All endorsed by “experts”-the credible communicators for the higher ability persuasion. No thought is given to the fact these “experts” are employed by the businesses that benefit the most from our compliance.  We hold “experts” up to superhuman standards and fully believe that their recommendations will not be influenced by money. 

  Then the unthinkable happens and a child suffers an adverse reaction to any of those toxic chemicals that were not advertised on the one sided sales pitch.  When this results in brain injury or death, our family and our world are shattered.  We turn to the “doctors/gods” first and seek miracles only to be shunned away and told harshly that their “bread and butter” vaccine did not cause the injury to the child.   

  The pharmaceutical company denies liability the same way a car dealership would try to deny that faulty brakes on your car caused the crash.  The government, who conveniently makes the laws, makes sure they preserve “the greater good” and you are left with no legal avenues for recourse.  They throw out favorable statistics at the parents to “prove” that vaccines are safe.  The parents naturally doubt themselves as they have been taught their entire lives to do in the face of authority. 

  No one will accept responsibility and the blame ultimately falls on the parent…the mother who took the child to the doctor for the lethal injection “the protector” and nurturer of the child failed somehow to fulfill their role.  The guilt of the parent is overwhelming.  The “gods’” PR machines capitalize on this guilt because the blame must be deflected from “the almighty vaccine” ….as negative publicity is bad for business. A parent who is blamed becomes defensive and therefore not offensive hence does not pose a threat. 

 Science does not try to fight the powerful emotions of parents because they realize they would never win.  Instead they cleverly manipulate us to deny our own emotions or as they call it “logic”. They claim that since emotions cannot be proven scientifically, therefore they must be “invalid”. We are taught that these invalid emotions have negative consequences because they hinder scientific progress.  There is no room for conscience and science to fit into the same world and, therefore, the conscience must go.  Such an example can be seen in human cloning.  The scientists really wanted to experiment with this but our emotions got in the way.  The same way our emotions hinder vaccine “progress.” 

     Scientists view death as a chance to experiment and gain knowledge.  To everyone else, death is a loss evoking strong emotions.  As much as our fear annoys them it also benefits them as they use it against us for their own purposes.  They play on our fears so that we will agree to let them experiment on us. They tell us “Vaccines will save more lives than they cost and therefore the ends justifies the means.”  The reality is, they do not fully understand how the immune system functions and we are trading in relatively harmless diseases for chronic health problems and long-term disabilities.      

  Information is withheld from parents at all costs.  Knowledge is power and independent thought must be discouraged to protect the product.  The parents read the product pamphlets that once looked so appealing and realize too late that they are merely carefully written sales pitches and are missing vital words like “safe” and “guarantee.” 

The grief that engulfs a parent with this type of loss has horrendous psychological implications.  It has been said that the worst thing that can happen to a parent is to suffer the death of a child.  That is not exactly true.  The worst thing that can happen to a parent is to have a child die from a “socially unacceptable” cause of death. Society reinforces the authority’s rejection of vaccine causality because no one wants to believe that a vaccine they rely so heavily upon for protection has the potential to kill our most valuable resource.  The parents are left isolated in their grief, their theories dismissed by science as emotional and irrational.    

  Unfortunately many parents pay a high price to learn the hard lesson that ignorance is not necessarily bliss.  It is vital that parents educate themselves, ask questions and demand answers. The pharmaceutical business will continue to put children’s lives at risk with bad science for the sake of financial profit as long as parents keep giving their conformed consent.