December 10, 2022

It’s Not Hesitancy, It’s Thoughtful Consideration

Why every parent needs to think more about childhood vaccines

hes·i·tant

/ˈhezədənt/

adjective

tentative, unsure, or slow in acting or speaking.

The concern about “vaccine hesitancy” is everywhere: it’s populating mainstream media headlines and it’s all over Facebook, Instagram, and other social sites.

One popular “tweetiatrician” sarcastically thanked public health agencies for making his job that much more difficult, as today’s parents, concerned that the COVID-19 vaccines are not safe, are more reluctant than ever to follow his advice about childhood vaccines.

Vaccine Safety Concerns

Indeed, a new study in Pediatrics found that during the pandemic, there was a 72% increase in the percentage of parents who agreed that vaccines were associated with illness or death (from 18.3% to 31.5%).

The study also found that the percentage of parents who agreed that vaccines caused harmful side effects increased by 6 percentage points: from 26.7% to 32.8%.

A recent article quoted the authors of the study insisting that “Pediatricians should therefore ask hesitant parents about their particular concerns and be prepared to address safety concerns.”

Yes! They absolutely should.

I see the rise in parents’ awareness of vaccine safety concerns, vaccine injuries, and death caused by vaccines.

Pediatricians rely on vaccines for their bread and butter. They have a professional obligation to be knowledgeable enough to discuss every vaccine ingredient, every vaccine safety concern, every vaccine counterindication, and every vaccine safety concern with parents.

I Wish I’d Known Better
I am a lawyer. My husband is a doctor. Our son was damaged by vaccines.

If only.

If only we had hesitated.

If only we’d asked more questions.

If only we hadn’t let our pediatrician scare us into following his orders and bully us into ignoring the fact that our son was less able to speak, less able to make eye contact, and more rigid about routine after every single doctor visit.

Hannah Poling’s Parents Also Didn’t Hesitate
Hannah Poling’s parents went through almost the same thing. Only their daughter will need care 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for the rest of her life. Dr. John Poling is a neurologist. His wife is a nurse and a lawyer.

The Polings were compensated to the tune of over $1.5 million, as reported by CBS News, after a no-fault court (paid for by taxpayer money) determined that her severe autism was the result of vaccines.

Isn’t Thoughtful Consideration Always Good?
Doctors in the past always understood that parents know their children best.

When something goes wrong, it’s the parent—not the doctor—who is left picking up the pieces.

So when it comes to medical interventions, it seems doctors should embrace parents thoughtfully considering the risks and benefits of any treatment.

But in today’s world, in blatant opposition to the medical profession’s ethical guidelines, many pediatricians will “fire” parents who don’t follow the CDC’s recommended schedule.

Fewer Vaccines Means Fewer Vaccine-Injured Children
As the parent of a vaccine-injured child, I am cheering over the news that more parents are taking vaccine safety more seriously.

When parents agree to doing fewer vaccines—or no vaccines at all—there are fewer vaccine injuries.

What about infectious diseases, though?

No one wants contagious diseases to come roaring back.

And we’ve been told—relentlessly—that if parents say, “No, thank you,” to vaccines, or even if they space them out and follow a less aggressive schedule, we’re all going to die from the measles. Or polio. Or chickenpox.

Some Points to Consider:
1. Rubella has been eradicated from the United States, according to the CDC. Their announcement, made on March 21, 2005, has since been scrubbed from the internet (but is available via the Wayback Machine). Since this disease does is no longer considered a major health threat in America, and has not been for nearly twenty years, vaccinating against rubella is no longer necessary.

2. The mumps portion of the MMR vaccine is ineffective. Two industry insiders came forward to blow the whistle on Merck, the company that makes the MMR vaccine. These senior scientists alleged that Merck knowingly promoted and continue to promote a vaccine that does not work. This lawsuit with Merck has been dragged out for years. As one journalist put it in 2014, Merck has a lot of explaining to do. But by now everyone, even the bought media, knows that the mumps portion of the MMR vaccine is ineffective. Since the mumps vaccine does not work, saying, “No, thank you,” to getting it is a science-forward, evidence-based decision.

3. There are benefits—yes benefits—to getting certain childhood illnesses. At least eight different peer-reviewed studies have shown that women who gets mumps in childhood are less likely to get ovarian cancer as adults. In addition, a Japanese study found that getting measles and mumps as a child was protective against dying from heart disease in adulthood. Humans also benefit from fevers. This might be a hard sell but it’s true: We absolutely don’t want any child to die from an infectious disease, but we need to remember that getting sick is not actually a bad thing.

4. Hepatitis B is a sexually transmitted disease. Tetanus is non-infectious (usually acquired via animal feces or contaminated soil). Human Papilloma Virus is also sexually transmitted. Any parent who hesitates and chooses not to do the hepatitis B vaccine, the HPV vaccine, or tetanus vaccines puts no one but their own child at risk.

So Many Legitimate Reasons to Hesitate About Vaccines
Like so many parents, I didn’t hesitate or push back. In the beginning, I did almost no research. I had no idea how many vaccines my children would receive, or what ingredients these vaccines contained. My husband and I were completely unaware of the risk of adverse events or that a vaccine adverse events reporting system even existed. (Total compensation paid over the life of the program is approximately $4.9 billion, according to HRSA.)

But when we did finally start expressing concerns, our son’s pediatricians were rude, condescending, and dismissive.

Worse Now Than When My Son Was Injured
It’s even worse today than it was when my son was born. The CDC has added more vaccines to the recommended childhood vaccination schedule, without removing any. What’s more, now obstetricians, pediatricians, and other medical doctors are pushing hard to get pregnant women, babies as young as six months of age, and young people vaccinated against COVID-19, despite a growing body of very convincing scientific data that shows that these COVID-19 vaccines are not safe.

Vaccines are tested on a vaccine-by-vaccine basis. But we have no high-quality data, or any placebo-controlled trials, that show giving so many vaccines so soon to America’s children is safe. We know that vaccines have unintended consequences, both positive and negative. However, we have no idea how mRNA vaccines may interact with more traditional vaccine technology.

We do know that America’s children are suffering from more autoimmune conditions, brain and neurological damage, and chronic diseases than ever before.

But when parents ask what caused their child’s __________ (eczema, type 1 juvenile diabetes, learning disabilities, sensory processing disorders), they are told by their doctors that, “nobody knows.”

When parents then ask, “Is it possible that vaccines played a role?,” their doctors reply, “Absolutely not.”

Hooray for Hesitancy!
If we had been vaccine-hesitant parents, our son would not have had to go through twelve different pediatricians, over ten years of behavioral therapy, eight years of tutors, three years of speech therapy, visits to naturopaths, extensive testing for heavy metals and allergies, and many sessions of neuro-feedback.

He would not have needed an IEP (Individual Education Plan), with the requisite meetings where I was accompanied by a paid psychologist whose presence was necessary to ensure that the schools provided the legally required accommodations that they tried hard not to provide.

If we’d hesitated about vaccines (and acetaminophen and antibiotics), my son’s brain and his immune system would not have been damaged.

Pediatricians are expressing their frustration over parents with vaccine safety concerns. Big Pharmaceutical companies are spending Big Money to broadcast fear-forward messages over the transom in order to get more parents to vaccinate.

Meanwhile, that sound that you hear in the background? That’s me—and every other parent of a vaccine-injured child—celebrating the fact that more parents are waking up.

About the Author:
Nicole Johnson, Esq., is an attorney licensed in Georgia, Missouri, and Alabama. A children’s health advocate, she is also the co-director the Georgia Coalition for Vaccine Choice. Support independent journalism, vaccine choice, and medical freedom by becoming a paid subscriber to Vibrant Life.