It’s been 10 years since I first delved into the topic of vaccination. With hopes of finding definitive answers, I combed through thousands of studies and articles written by a wide spectrum of authors – some heavily pro, some deeply against, and many in between.

Ten years on I’ve learnt a lot, knowing there is always so much more to learn, but I find myself disillusioned with what should be a straight forward, logical topic. I know many others feel the same. I’ve found I can’t enter into the topic of vaccination without being inundated with insults, lies, and hypocrisy (hence the title of this post).

While I’ve seen people on all sides of this debate guilty of it to varying degrees, the majority of it seems to stem from the staunchly pro-vax camp. I’m not talking about the average parent who feels vaccinating is best for their family, more power to you.

I’m talking about the rabid pro-vaccine advocate who believes they have the right to FORCE each and every one of us  to vaccinate. They believe vaccination is a black and white topic, they believe those who disagree with their opinions are the enemy, and they believe you shouldn’t get to choose what is injected into your own or your children’s bodies.

One thing’s for sure, I’m sick of hearing and seeing it; it needs to end. Here's a taste of what I'm talking about:

People use pictures and stories of sick or dead children to expose the reality of the diseases we vaccinate for, but they downplay or dismiss pictures and stories of children who become sick or die due to vaccine injury, calling them ‘scare tactics’.

Baby Ian's reaction to Hep B Vaccine

It's mind boggling that it has to be said: no death or injury, whatever the cause, should ever be callously disregarded. When parents are told by their family GP, “vaccines are perfectly safe, your child will be fine”, only to have their child injured or die as a result of vaccination, the trauma is particularly painful. The trust they invested in the medical profession is destroyed.

The anguish is made worse when medical professionals refuse to even acknowledge the vaccine they administered was the cause. Instead of being comforted in their time of need, these families feel shunned. Imagine being in that position, hearing people disregard your child's injury or death?

Hear this well: our children’s lives aren’t anyone else's to expend as collateral damage for ‘the greater good’. Those who think they are should be utterly ashamed. No one gets to force anything into us or our children, ever.

People herald parents who speak out about their child’s sickness or death due to the diseases we vaccinate for as brave heroes, but they disbelieve and insult parents who speak out about their child’s sickness or death due to vaccine injury, labelling them ‘liars’, ‘scum’, ‘anti-science’, etc. 

Nurse Julie speaking out in the #hearthiswell campaign

The cruelty in this debate is both heartbreaking and enraging. There is much, much worse said to these parents I won’t mention here [1-3]. Grieving parents of sick or dead children no matter the cause, who speak out in the hopes of saving others the misery they had to endure, deserve a listening ear and a shoulder to cry on;  not insults and ostracism. Any human being should inherently understand this, but somehow this debate turns usually decent people into vicious assholes at the flick of a switch.

Hear this well: no one else gets to tell parents what did or did not happen to their child; we didn't witness it, we don’t know their children. Have some respect.

The above two examples are the two that irk me the most, more so because my own son suffered a severe vaccine reaction. But there’s plenty more…

People call parents who choose not to vaccinate due to fear of adverse reaction ‘uneducated’ and ‘irresponsible’, but these same people choose to vaccinate their own children due to fear of adverse reactions to diseases we vaccinate for.

Fear of injury or death is the common denominator driving the decision to vaccinate or not vaccinate, so if one side is deemed ‘irresponsible’ for letting fear for their children’s lives determine their decision, then so must the other. It boils down to: what poses a greater risk to my child, vaccinating or not vaccinating?

There is a wealth of evidence in support for both. For our family, the experience of brain injury our son suffered after vaccination made it abundantly clear vaccines posed a greater risk than the extremely small risk of disease complications he faced [4-22]. I cannot guarantee another family will not suffer the same fate our family did, or worse, because there is so little recognition of vaccine injury [23-26] or research regarding which children are most susceptible to vaccine injury [27].

In contrast, there has been abundant research regarding who is most susceptible to the diseases we currently vaccinate for. We know what makes people more likely to suffer complications of infectious diseases (eg. poor diet, nutritional deficiencies, immune deficiencies, chronic diseases, multiple simultaneous illnesses, excessive stress, not breastfeeding, smoking, alcohol consumption, exposure to toxins and pollutants, obesity, lack of physical activity, unsanitary or overcrowded living conditions, age very young or very old, etc [28-50]).

People proclaim vaccine injury is extremely rare and not reason enough to avoid vaccination, but they promote extremely rare complications from the diseases we vaccinate for as a reason to vaccinate. 



The fact that vaccine injury is grossly under-reported is ignored [51], along with the fact that doctors often refuse to acknowledge vaccine injury, never mind report it [23-26]. Vaccine injury is often missed or passed off as coincidental by parents and GP’s. When concerned parents ring their doctors office to report their child has a high-pitched, prolonged cry indicating encephalitis – a brain injury that can result in chronic seizures, mental retardation, and death [52-54] - they are told this reaction is normal!

It might be such a common vaccine reaction that today’s medical staff now consider an encephalitic cry ‘normal’, but the reality is encephalitis is a serious, life threatening reaction, often resulting in permanent neurological impairments. I shudder to think how many children whose parents were told their child’s reaction was, “normal and nothing to worry about”, went on to suffer neurological and developmental disorders.

If only these children had been medically tested and treated for encephalitis, just maybe the severity of permanent injury could have been reduced. If only more research was done to determine which children are more susceptible to vaccine injury, maybe the vaccine injury could have been completely avoided altogether.

People claim that there is ‘abundant’ evidence to show that  ‘vaccines are safe’, but they ignore the fact that the vaccine schedule in its entirety, or vaccines in their various combinations, have NEVER been tested for safety [55], nor has there ever been a safety study comparing unvaccinated children with vaccinated children.

The only survey of unvaccinated children with vaccinated children was done by Generation Rescue in 2007 which found that, “vaccinated boys had a 155% greater chance of having a neurological disorder like ADHD or autism than unvaccinated boys”. [56]

People claim to have done ‘extensive scientific research’ on vaccination, but they go on to state the only study linking vaccines to autism was, “that one fraudulent Wakefield study”, and they only share information from biased websites. 

There have been numerous studies since Wakefield associating vaccines with autism, but you won’t find them on websites whose sole purpose is to promote vaccination [57-77]. We can’t claim to know everything on  a topic by only reading material from one sided sources, in fact we can never claim to know everything on any topic. If there’s one thing I’ve learnt about the vaccination debate it’s that there’s always more to learn and nothing is written in stone. Always be ready to change your mind and be proven wrong.

People promote heavily flawed research funded by pharmaceutical companies, and organisations that have been exposed by their own employees for manipulating data [79-89], but they call any research showing the harms of vaccination ‘junk science’ authored by ‘quacks’. 

Neuroscientist Russell Blaylock is one example of a study author who has found evidence of harm due to vaccines [59]. Because his research was critical of vaccination he is disregarded by many vaccine advocates without any evidence to justify it at all. Unlike many CDC or pharmaceutical industry study authors you won’t find evidence of fraud or twisting of data in Blaylocks research, but for the sake of keeping their beliefs about vaccination intact people pretend researchers like Blaylock aren’t worth listening to.

People present only research that backs their personal opinion, then ignore all other research presented to them that contradicts their own narrow research, dismissing it as nothing more than ‘cherry picked studies’. 

They think their own ‘cherry picked studies’, however, are all they need to form a scientifically sound opinion. Tossing out contradictory evidence to keep their own beliefs intact.

People dismiss research showing a link between vaccines and injury, claiming, “correlation does not equal causation”, but they go on to claim the correlation between vaccination and disease decline is evidence of causation. 

They ignore the fact that historical records show disease rates were already declining when vaccines were introduced, many by more than 90%, due to improved sanitation, nutrition, housing etc [90]. Instead of acknowledging these time-tested methods of disease reduction, they attribute the decline of disease entirely to vaccination! How can a vaccine that wasn't invented yet be responsible for a 90% decline in disease and mortality?

As for vaccine injury, many vaccine injuries are documented by VAERS, with 83% of those reports coming from doctors and pharmaceutical company employees, not the actual victims [90a]. However, VAERS states these reports are greatly under-reported [90a]. We truly don’t know the real number of serious, debilitating, sometimes fatal vaccine reactions that have occurred. Additionally, because pharmaceutical companies refuse to test their vaccines with a proper control population (a group of individuals who only receive a saline injection and has never been vaccinated, compared with a group who receives a vaccine) it becomes more difficult to conclusively pin down vaccines as a cause of injury.

Many people are happy to refute reports of vaccine injury as 'coincidence', but any other report of a drug that someone reacts to is taken much more seriously. Pharmaceutical companies have marketed vaccines so successfully that they seem to be considered by many as untouchable, beyond criticism.

Nobody dares criticize or even hint that vaccines have the ability to cause injury, or they'll be deemed an 'antivaxxer' and an 'enemy of the people' in a very Stalin-esque manner.


People promote the use of vaccination to try to prevent disease despite the risk of adverse reaction, but completely ignore other scientifically proven disease prevention methods that DON'T carry any risk of adverse reaction.

Credit: Shutterstock

These include healthier diets, monitoring and correction of nutritional deficiencies, reducing exposure to toxins and pollutants, reducing stress, reducing poverty, unsanitary living conditions, and overcrowding in homes, higher breastfeeding rates, not smoking, reducing alcohol intake, losing weight if obese, more education about prevention, monitoring, and treatment of illness, and stricter disease testing and quarantining in airports [28-50][91-93].

People claim that an unvaccinated child is a risk to their child, but they ignore the fact that their child is statistically more likely to be infected by themselves or a member of their own immediate family [94]. 

They ignore the fact that most vaccines DON'T stop infection, they only reduce symptoms, making vaccine recipients silent disease carriers [95]. They ignore the fact that their vaccinated child poses a threat to those around them when their child receives live vaccines that can shed and replicate to full strength, causing disease epidemics instead of preventing them [95].

People claim disease epidemics have returned because of low vaccination rates, but they ignore the fact that vaccination rates are at an all time high and have remained stable over the last decade [96-97]. 

US Vaccination Rates

The logic is lost on them, or wilfully ignored. Any increased rates of disease obviously have little to do with the tiny percentage of people who don’t vaccinate, and everything to do with vaccine failure.

People tell us they were vaccinated as children and they’re ‘fine’ as if it’s proof vaccines are safe, but they scoff when someone else says they had a disease we vaccinate for as a child and they’re ‘fine’ too. 

Often people ignore the fact they were likely injected with half the amount of vaccines that children are injected with today; their childhood experience with vaccines is not an appropriate comparison to the vaccine schedule today [98-99]. They also ignore the fact that a lot of us AREN'T ‘fine’. In the US 1 in 6 people now suffer from autoimmune disease [100], 1 in 5 children have a developmental and/or behavioral disability [101], and 1 in 42 boys have autism [102] – all of which are documented as adverse reactions to vaccination . That’s NOT a great definition of ‘fine’.

People claim that children are  no longer exposed to mercury from vaccines, but they ignore the fact that pregnant mothers are now recommended flu shots containing mercury [103], inadvertently exposing fetuses who are the most susceptible to mercury toxicity of any population. 

Additionally, childhood vaccines that are supposed to contain no mercury have tested positive for mercury contamination [104]. They ignore the fact that multiple vaccines containing the neurotoxin aluminium have been added to the childhood schedule, with levels grossly exceeding EPA guidelines [105-106]. Meaning the risk of neurological injury that was once posed by mercury laden vaccines, has now been replaced by aluminium laden vaccines.

I could keep going, it doesn’t end there. Jessica over at the Gianelloni Family blog has written an excellent piece called ‘Dear parents, you are being lied to’ that I also recommend reading:
http://gianelloni.wordpress.com/2014/04/07/dear-parents-you-are-being-lied-to/

Bottom line: don’t take anything at face value. If someone makes a statement about vaccines verify it by researching the studies to prove it, or disprove it – whatever the evidence ends up being. I wish I could say that after years of research I knew all the answers and that I felt at least something in this debate was proven 100%. But sadly the research that desperately needs to be done just hasn’t been done.

Unless we fiercely demand that the required research be done (ie. independent non-vax vs vax studies), it's likely no government agency will ever do it of their own accord. It’s up to us to bring it to the forefront of the media, the public, and our politicians.


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