Rally Speech by Sandy Mintz (aka Gottstein)
FREEDOM OF CHOICE IS NOT FREE
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Rally Speech, April 23, 2001, Anchorage,
Alaska
by Sandy Mintz
Copyright 2001
Hi everybody! My name is Sandy Mintz and I’ve been
involved in the vaccine safety/choice issue for a long time.
Before I start, I want to
thank everyone who has helped me along the way, particularly those who have
helped me with this rally. And thank
all of you who showed up today.
You know, I don’t know about
you, but I really don’t want to be here. Virtually every person I know and love has been vaccinated. The last thing I want is for there to
be problems with vaccines. So I am
here, not because I want to be, but because I have to be.
Please understand, at the
outset, that I am not against an informed parent choosing to vaccinate his or
her child. What I am against is bad
science being used to justify forcing parents to vaccinate. What I am against is bad science being used
to convince a parent to vaccinate. And
what I am against is a parent, any parent, being forced to do something that
has even a remote chance of harming their child.
What all parents deserve is
good information, untainted by conflict of interest, on the safety of
vaccines. They deserve the right to
choose whether or not to vaccinate their children. And those that choose to vaccinate, after weighing the benefits
and risks, deserve safe vaccines.
Given time constraints, I’m
going to cut to the chase.
Vaccine manufacturers are
behind pretty much everything we have been told about the safety of
vaccines. As Dr. Samuel Katz (who you
will hear more about later), developer of the measles vaccine stated,
“Government doesn’t fund clinical studies of vaccines. Industry does.”
We are letting the fox guard
the henhouse.
It would be like trusting
the propaganda the cigarette companies provide on the safety of cigarettes.
And it only gets worse. Medical journals are supported by drug
company advertising dollars. Vaccine
advisory committee members have financial ties to the vaccine manufacturers and
routinely waive their conflicts of interest.
Even the American Academy of Pediatrics, or AAP, which makes
recommendations to our pediatricians, is not immune (pun intended). I have copies of letters to the AAP on the
table in the back from 3 vaccine manufacturers discussing the almost $1 million
they donated to the AAP during a 5-year period alone!
I’m going to use Dr. Katz as
an example, because he is a very visible figure in the vaccine promotion
world. His bio is on the back table. He has served on immunization committees of
the CDC, World Health Organization and Institute of Medicine. He was chosen as the expert on 60 Minutes
defending the MMR vaccine, even though he developed the vaccine! And he stated in the Congressional
Quarterly Researcher, “I make sure
neither I nor any members of my family have financial interest in vaccine
companies”.
Then how
does Dr. Katz explain the fact that in the year 2000, the FDA noted, “he has
associations with firms that could be affected by the (Vaccines and Related
Biological Products Advisory) committee discussions”?
Unfortunately,
there are many more like him out there, making recommendations while making
money as a result of the recommendations they make.
And it
gets even worse.
In 1986,
after the vaccine manufacturers threatened to pull out of vaccine production
due to all the lawsuits against them, guess what happened? Instead of saying, gee, maybe we should be
concerned, Congress passed a law covering the liability of the vaccine
manufacturers! So now we have
universally mandated vaccines, no liability for the makers of the vaccines, and
the vaccine manufacturers the very suppliers of the information we rely upon to
justify vaccine use. And guess who pays
for the liability coverage? The
vaccinated! There is a surcharge on every dose of vaccine, paid by the
consumer, which goes into a fund to pay compensation to known victims of
vaccination. So far around $1.2 billion
has been paid out.
In spite
of these facts, however, some good has come out of the Compensation Act. Parents of vaccine injured children used to
find it difficult, if not impossible, to get money to care for their
children. Now, more can. Maureen Forceskie, an Anchorage mom, is one
such mom who, thankfully, did. She will
be speaking after I do.
In the
Compensation Bill that Congress passed, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting
System, aka VAERS, was also created.
All suspected adverse vaccine reactions are required to be reported to
VAERS. From mid 1990 to mid 2000,
around 150,000 adverse reactions were reported, many of them serious, many of
them deaths. That’s a lot of adverse
reactions. But it’s probably only a
small fraction of what is actually happening.
Former
FDA commissioner David Kessler has said that it is thought 1% of serious drug
reactions are reported to the FDA. A
vaccine manufacturer testified that in their experience, a passive system
(which is what VAERS is) results in around 2%.
I don’t know what percent of actual vaccine associated adverse reactions
are reported. I do know that parents
are being told by their doctors that even deaths within hours are not related,
and are being discouraged from filing reports.
Although reporting is required, there is a great deal of resistance to
doing so. Consequently it may well be
that only 1-2% of serious adverse vaccine associated reactions are reported to
VAERS.
Moreover,
there is no good reason why 100% of all possible adverse vaccine reactions
shouldn’t get reported.
To give
you an idea why anything less than 100% is a problem, let me share with you
some of what I have discovered or uncovered, as the case may be, in my
investigation of the VAERS database, which I now have on my computer.
First, it turns out that
the database does not contain a field to record the date a person died. Thankfully, the time between vaccination and
death can usually, through considerable effort, be pieced together anyway. It takes reading the reported text to find
out, though. Why has such critical
information been made difficult, at times even impossible, to obtain?
Second, this initial
examination has revealed some startling statistics. To simplify things a bit, I looked at just
one year, 1998. Here is some of what I
found:
Among
people vaccinated in the U.S. in January of 1998, just one month, 332 people
reported an adverse reaction that began within 2 days of receiving one or more
vaccines. In 22 % of those cases, it
was recorded that it was unknown whether or not the person had even recovered!
Why was
there no follow up? Does anyone from
the CDC or FDA monitoring this data even look at it? Do they even care? Why
collect all this information and yet allow it to be incomplete?
Making
matters worse, because we don’t know what percent of adverse vaccine reactions
get reported, we don’t know if it was a few hundred, a few thousand, or many
thousands of January vaccinees who reacted within 2 days.
40% of
those January vaccinees also made a visit to the ER. But because unknown portions of adverse
reactions get reported, we don’t know if those people represent hundreds or
thousands of people who went to the ER after having a serious reaction within 2
days of vaccination.
At least
81 U.S. infant deaths were reported to have occurred in 1998, most of them
occurring within days, 43% by the day following vaccination. Not only that: 62% had died by the 3rd
day, and 73% by the 6th! But
we still don’t know whether those 81 reported infant deaths mean that hundreds
or thousands died. Wouldn’t that be a
good thing to know?
We must
demand answers to these and other important questions concerning our
children’s health. And perhaps we
should question whether our children should be routinely vaccinated, at least
until we get and are satisfied with those answers.
So I’m
sorry, I am really sorry, but there is definitely evidence against the
vaccines. And in spite of how difficult it is to get such information
published, there is plenty in the literature to worry anyone who is paying
attention. In addition, VAERS is a gold
mine. Mind you, it merely
documents an association between vaccination and an event, but it is evidence,
nonetheless.
Just
think of it - in most cases when an adverse event occurs shortly after taking a
drug, the drug is considered the most likely cause. Phenylpropanolamine, or PPA, (which is
found in over the counter cold
medicine), was recently banned for over the counter use by the FDA, because
strokes were associated with it. This
is what should happen when a drug maims or kills.
Yet
thousands of children die, many thousands more are injured, often within hours
of receiving a vaccine, and the vaccine is automatically said to be
unrelated. “It is only a coincidence”,
they will tell us. They tell us this
without even knowing what is happening, how many it is happening to, or
how long after vaccination it happened.
When a
child dies within hours or days of vaccination, the vaccination should be the
first thing suspected, not automatically rejected. And don’t kid yourself - calling a death SIDS does not mean the
death was not related to the vaccine.
For what is SIDS, after all, but an infant death of unknown causes? Is no one curious as to the cause? Again, they will say, “but that is when SIDS
occurs”. Yes, that is when SIDS occurs
among the vaccinated. But what was the
SIDS rate prior to vaccines, prior to smallpox vaccine, prior to DPT? We don’t have that information. So we don’t really know what would be
happening were our children not being vaccinated at all.
In fact,
if your doctor tells you some new or unusual symptom or disease is not related
to vaccination, don’t believe him or her, because they CANNOT KNOW THAT and in
fact are required, by federal law, to report it. Not reporting these things just perpetuates the myth that there
is no evidence.
Which
brings us to the poor quality of the research.
The Institute of Medicine, or IOM, which was mandated by Congress in
1986 to review the safety of the childhood vaccines, reported that it was
“handicapped” by the lack of good research.
Handicapped! How ironic is it
that they used that term? In spite of
being handicapped, however, they found “evidence was consistent with” or
“indicates a causal relation” in a number of cases, including between
encephalopathy and the pertussis component of the DPT vaccine. That’s brain inflammation. Brain inflammation in developing infant
brains. Imagine what that could be
doing to our kids.
The
“experts”, by the way, denied there was a connection right up until the IOM
report was published. Dr. James Cherry
wrote an editorial, which appeared in the Journal of the American Medical
Association about one year prior to the IOM report. It was entitled, “'Pertussis vaccine encephalopathy': it is time to recognize it
as the myth that it is.” Shortly after
it was published, however, JAMA issued a “correction” – it seems Cherry had
failed to disclose his financial ties to the industry…
Always
remember who’s paying for the research.
There are
many ways to skew research results. One
way is to compare the wrong groups. How
do you do it in the case of vaccinations?
By only comparing the vaccinated to other vaccinated children. You use either the less recently vaccinated,
or those receiving another vaccine, and then call them “unvaccinated”.
Any study
which finds no adverse effects from vaccination, which does not use never vaccinated
subjects as controls, is meaningless, and, in fact, has no control.
Any
vaccination whatsoever is intervention.
A control group represents those who are not receiving whatever
intervention is being studied. When you
are studying the effects of vaccination, the only legitimate, meaningful
control group is the NEVER vaccinated.
End of story.
Okay, so
all research which finds few to no effects attributable to vaccination should
be questioned to see if there is conflict of interest or no legitimate control
group. But is there any research
actually supporting the notion that we should be concerned? Yes, and such research is plentiful, in
spite of the obstacles against it ever getting published. The following are
some of the issues being addressed:
A new
form of autism, called regressive autism, is rising at an explosive rate. In some places the incidence of autism is 1
out of 150 children or more. This autism,
unlike the older one, occurs in previously normally developing children who
lose their skills, often shortly after the MMR vaccine. This is not a question of improved
diagnosis. You would not, could not,
have missed these children – many of whom bang their heads, scream through the
night, exhibiting all sorts of heartbreaking and frightening symptoms.
The rate
of behavioral disorders among children has skyrocketed, now thought by some to
be around 1 out of 6. When I was
growing up, I don’t remember any children in my classroom who could not control
themselves. Now such children are
commonplace. Remember that pretty much
established brain inflammation problem?
Minimal to major inflammation could be causing all sorts of problems in
children’s developing brains.
Autoimmune
disorders and other forms of chronic disease like asthma have also risen
dramatically. It is now thought by many
that there is a benefit to getting these childhood diseases, which may prime
the immune system against chronic diseases.
Remember recent news that our children need exposure to germs or they
are more likely to have asthma? It is
similarly thought that experiencing these infectious diseases of childhood
boosts the developing immune system of children. There is also reason to
believe that vaccines themselves may suppress the immune system, thereby
contributing to chronic disease.
The
problem of cell-culture contamination has long plagued vaccines. For instance, the polio vaccine given in the
late fifties, early sixties, was found to be contaminated by a carcinogenic
monkey virus, SV40. All existing stock
of the vaccine was allowed to be used up, rather than “erode confidence in the
vaccine” by recalling it. Some time after that polio vaccine was introduced,
cancer in children rose. SV40 is also
now showing up in tumors, including cancerous ones.
Vaccine
additives, like thimerosal, a form of mercury, and a known neurotoxin, are
thought to be serious problems.
Until recently, thimerosal was routinely used as a preservative in
vaccines. The symptoms of mercury
toxicity are virtually identical to the symptoms that many of these autistic
children display. Of course the
“experts” say there is no relation between this known neurotoxin and brain or
other damage. All the while they are
warning pregnant and nursing women, and children, to avoid foods containing
high amounts of it.
Nature
abhors a vacuum. Just as antibiotic
overuse has led to drug resistant strains, new vaccine derived strains of
disease are emerging, and can be more serious than the original disease.
There is
evidence that vaccination may cause chromosomal damage.
Although
the so-called experts will argue vociferously against there being a connection
between things like MS and vaccination, vaccines are commonly used to induce or
cause demyelination experimentally. MS
is a form of demyelination.
A study
published in the Lancet provided evidence that measles without rash,
that is, subclinical measles, causes a significant increase in serious adult
disease, including cancer. The
vaccinated often get subclinical cases, i.e., rashless disease. Measles and chickenpox vaccination in
themselves may be a form of rashless illness.
Many parents are comforted by the idea that their children are only
getting mild or symptom free cases of these diseases. But should they be? The
rash is the body’s way of removing the disease. Is vaccination and the suppressed illness it causes going to
predispose our children to serious things like cancer?
A Science
article found that 2 totally harmless herpes simplex viruses recombined in
mice, killing 62% of them. We are
combining all sorts of diseases in these vaccines and in our children without
any evidence that harm will not come of it.
The
epidemiology of these diseases has changed so that high-risk groups, infants
and adults, who normally don’t get these diseases, and for whom they are
considerably more serious, are now more likely to get them. We were originally told, without any
long-term research to support the claim - after all these vaccines had just
been developed - that immunity from the vaccines would be lifelong. Now that it turns out not to be true, we are
being told the solution is to revaccinate.
But repeated vaccination may neither be safe nor work. Is our future to be filled with large,
uncontrollable outbreaks, with infants and adults getting and dying from theses
diseases? Might it not have been better
to get these childhood diseases as children, when they are relatively
benign? Have we made these diseases
vastly more serious because of vaccination?
The truth
is, in developed nations like ours most of these diseases were declining both
in incidence and severity prior to the advent of vaccination. Many of them were considered a normal part
of growing up, some of us never even knowing we had gotten them. We are being manipulated to believe these
diseases are more serious than they really are when death rates in developing
or Third World nations are used as examples, rather than the rates in developed
nations like ours.
And if
these diseases have become more serious than they used to be, because of
changing epidemiology and other adverse factors due to vaccination, then we
should admit it. The solution proposed
for vaccine-caused problems should not, however, be more vaccination!
An
example of a disease which is really not all that serious, but which we are now
required to have our children receive is Hepatitis A. Let me share with you what the textbook “Vaccines” says about
Hepatitis A Virus or HAV. “Infection
with HAV may produce a wide spectrum of outcomes from silent or subclinical
hepatitis at one end, through typical acute hepatitis with jaundice, to
fulminant hepatitis at the other. The
single most important factor in determining the outcome of HAV infection
appears to be age. Whereas greater than
90% of infections acquired before the age of 5 years are silent, the proportion
of infected individuals with symptoms increases steadily, reaching
approximately 25% by 15 years and 90% or above in adults. The duration of illness varies but most
patients feel better, have lost their hepatomegaly, and have nearly normal
liver function test results within 3 weeks.
In the large 1989 Shanghai outbreak, 90% of a subset of 8647
hospitalized patients observed carefully had completely recovered in 4 months
and all had recovered in one year.
Relapse consisting of renewed symptoms, elevated liver function test
results, and possibly detection of virus in stools has been found in up to 10%
of cases, but recovery is universal.
Hepatitis A never becomes chronic.”
Is that a
vaccine you feel your child should be required to have?
What
about Hepatitis B? Unless an infant is
born to a Hepatitis B positive mother, there is virtually no chance that infant
will get the disease. Why should
infants get a vaccine to protect sexually promiscuous or intravenous drug using
teens and adults? Why should anybody
have to do that?
And then
there’s the chickenpox vaccine, developed mostly to avoid the cost of “work days lost”. Hey, why not let the parents decide? Those that can and want to stay home and care for their not all
that sick kids, how about letting them do so and still be able to attend our
public schools? (After they have
recovered, of course.) That way they
can avoid the not so unlikely prospect of having their children get chickenpox
as adults, when it really can be a problem.
Public
Health will say that these vaccines must be mandatory or these diseases will
spread. But if the vaccines work, anyone
choosing them will be protected. If
they don’t prevent the spread of the disease to the vaccinated, what is the
point? It hardly seems right that those
who don’t want to be vaccinated should be required to be vaccinated, because
vaccines don’t always work.
And to
whatever extent vaccines are being required because the “immune suppressed”
cannot be vaccinated, and are more vulnerable to the adverse effects of
disease, while my heart goes out to such people, they are not more important
than children who are harmed by vaccines.
Nor should the notion that vaccination may in itself be creating immune
suppression be left out of this equation.
Besides
there is documented proof of outbreaks in 100% vaccinated populations. Now, whose fault is that?
I
also consider any notion of "public health" to be suspect, which
sacrifices the individual to some alleged higher goal. Many of us find it
way scarier that the state would sacrifice children to someone's idea of the
common good, than to take our chances with Mother Nature. Who
decides? What's the right number? Who's counting? Even the
wartime draft, of adults, is only used very judiciously and sparingly.
Quite
simply, we need good information, we need a choice, and we need it now. If we had such a choice, the vaccine
manufacturers just might improve their products. Why, on earth, do they need to improve them now, when we are
required to have their vaccines, and they are not accountable for the outcome?
By the
way, remember our old friend Dr. Katz?
He has a niece who chooses not to vaccinate her children, and yet he
considers her a good parent, even though he personally disagrees with her
decision.
What can
you do to help? Please support the
following pieces of legislation, if and when they are introduced:
1)
A law
that would require that all deaths have as part of their death certificate, the
vaccination record of the deceased.
2)
A law
that allows philosophical exemptions to vaccination. Currently there are 15 states that have such laws, while other states
have legislation pending. Most of the rest of the world, by the way, allows
parents to choose.
3)
A law
which requires public health to notify parents in a meaningful way of any
proposed changes to vaccine requirements.
4)
A law
which would prevent DFYS from using vaccination status as the sole determinant
when deciding whether or not to investigate a family.
5)
Other
laws which may come up.
Also,
please consider signing an open, ongoing letter I’ve written to the producers
and sponsors of NBC’s “ER”. Copies of
it, along with instructions for “signing” are on the back table, but can be
easily emailed to anyone interested. There are now well over 500 people across
the country who have “signed” this letter.
Please
consider becoming a part of my educational/political action email group. There are already over 50 signed on. Sign-up sheets are on the back tables, as
well as cards with my email address you may take.
On the
table are current state requirements, as well as tons of handouts. You can also get any and all information by
signing my email list.
We
parents deserve the right to choose what we feel is best for the children we
love, and for whom we are responsible.
No one else will be expected to care for our children if the vaccines or
diseases maim them. No one else’s heart
will be broken like ours if they are killed or otherwise harmed.
We must
stop ignoring what is happening to our children. The Alaska Legislature will only change our laws if we ask them
to. And ask we must. Please join me in this fight. Our children need us.
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