Tag Archives | Vaccinations

Anti-Vax Parents May Join ‘Dubious’ Church

via Herald Sun 101

AN anti-vaccination group is encouraging parents to circumvent the NSW government’s crackdown on unvaccinated children by joining a “dubious” religious organisation.

The Australian Anti-Vaccination Network (AVN) is telling supporters to join the Church of Conscious Living to get their children into preschool.

“The tenets of this church absolutely oppose forced medication including vaccination,” the AVN says on its website.

It’s promoting the church as an option for parents who don’t want “to join the Church of Christian Science in order to get their children into preschool or childcare”.

NSW Opposition Leader John Robertson has questioned the credentials of the church.

“The credentials of the Church of Conscious Living as a genuine religious organisation are completely dubious – yet its members will be able to use it to gain an exemption,” he said.

Unvaccinated children will be banned from childcare and childcare centre operators will face fines of $4,000 if inspectors discover they are caring for children who don’t have proof of vaccination, under new state laws.

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Anti-Vaccine Book For Kids Extols The Virtues Of Measles

Via Salon, the new hot genre of children’s books. No word on whether “vaccine vampire” young adult versions are on the way:

Measles is responsible for thousands of tragic (and preventable) deaths each year. Which is perhaps why so many reviewers are panning a new book by Stephanie Messenger, an Australian author and anti-vaccine activist. According to the author’s page, “Melanie’s Marvelous Measles” was written to:

Educate children on the benefits of having measles and how you can heal from them naturally and successfully. Often today, we are being bombarded with messages from vested interests to fear all diseases in order for someone to sell some potion or vaccine, when, in fact, history shows that in industrialized countries, these diseases are quite benign and, according to natural health sources, beneficial to the body.

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Congress Holds An Anti-Vaccination Hearing

The anti-vaccine movement has friends in powerful places in the form of congressional Republicans, Steven Salzberg reveals via Forbes:

I was in my car yesterday listening to C-SPAN, when to my stunned surprise I heard Congressman Dan Burton launch into a diatribe on how mercury in vaccines causes autism. The hearing was held just a few days ago by the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Congressman Burton used this hearing to rehash a series of some of the most thoroughly discredited anti-vaccine positions of the past decade.

To make matters worse, the House committee invited Mark Blaxill to testify. Blaxill is a well-known anti-vaccine activist whose organization, SafeMinds, seems to revolve around the bogus claim that mercury in vaccines causes autism. His organization urges parents not to vaccinate their children, and giving him such a prominent platform only serves to spread misinformation among parents of young children.

The committee called on scientists Alan Guttmacher from the NIH and Colleen Boyle from the CDC to testify, but in fact the committee just wanted to bully the scientists.

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UK Website Ordered to Remove Controversial Claims About MMR Vaccine

Photo: Centers for Disease Control Public Health Image Library (PD)

Via BBC News:

The owners of the website babyjabs.co.uk have been ordered by the British Advertising Standards Authority to retract from the site controversial statements positing a connection between autism and the childhood MMR vaccine:

Babyjabs.co.uk said the three-in-one jab may be causing “up to 10%” of autism in children in the UK.

But the Advertising Standards Authority ruled the claim was misleading and must not appear again, after getting a complaint.

The website was also told not to repeat other claims it made about MMR.

These included the suggestion that “most experts now agree the large rise (in autism) has been caused partly by increased diagnosis, but also by a real increase in the number of children with autism”.

Another claim said the vaccine-strain measles virus had been found in the gut and brain of some autistic children, which supports many parents’ belief that the MMR vaccine caused autism in their children.

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Catholic School Girls Denied HPV Vaccine By Canadian Bishops

A vaccine to help prevent cervical cancer could send the wrong message, Catholic leaders in Calgary decided. Via TIME Newsfeed:

The female students in Calgary’s Catholic school system will be receiving one less shot than their public school counterparts. In 2008, a group of bishops led by Bishop Frederick Henry deemed that providing the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination — which guards girls against the four strands of HPV most associated with cervical cancer — to fifth and ninth-grade girls could be viewed as a compromise of Catholic teaching, because HPV is a sexually transmitted virus.

Children in Calgary’s Catholic schools were sent home with… a letter… instruct[ing] parents that “Although school-based immunization delivery systems generally result in high numbers of students completing immunization, a school-based approach to vaccination sends a message that early sexual intercourse is allowed.”

HPV Calgary says that by banning the vaccine, the church is literally endangering the lives of thousands of girls.

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A Vaccination Against Social Prejudice

Vaccine InjectionVia ScienceDaily:

Evolutionary psychologists suspect that prejudice is rooted in survival: Our distant ancestors had to avoid outsiders who might have carried disease. Research still shows that when people feel vulnerable to illness, they exhibit more bias toward stigmatized groups. But a new study in Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science suggests there might be a modern way to break that link.

“We thought if we could alleviate concerns about disease, we could also alleviate the prejudice that arises from them,” says Julie Y. Huang of the University of Toronto, about a study she conducted with Alexandra Sedlovskaya of Harvard University; Joshua M. Ackerman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Yale University’s John A. Bargh. The group found that the sense of security derived through measures such as vaccination and hand washing can reduce bias against “out” groups, from immigrants to the obese.

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CIA Held Fake Vaccination Drive To Get Osama’s Children’s DNA

Osama-bin-Ladens-compound-007A-ha! For years I’ve been telling everyone that so-called “vaccinations” are a government scam to harvest our DNA (and render us autistic to boot). The Guardian reports on a beyond-bizarre CIA plot:

The CIA organised a fake vaccination program in the town where it believed Osama bin Laden was hiding in an elaborate attempt to obtain DNA from the fugitive al-Qaida leader’s family. A senior Pakistani doctor was recruited to organize the vaccine drive in Abbottabad, even starting the “project” in a poorer part of town to make it look more authentic.

DNA from any of the Bin Laden children in the compound could be compared with a sample from his sister, who died in Boston in 2010, to provide evidence that the family was present. It is not known exactly how the doctor hoped to get DNA from the vaccinations, although nurses could have been trained to withdraw some blood in the needle after administrating the drug.

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Over 2,000 Vaccinated Babies Dead: The Cost Of Doing Business

3-month check-upNeil Z. Miller writing for Natural News:

Earlier this month (March 2011), Japanese authorities ordered doctors to stop using pneumococcal and Hib vaccines because four children died after receiving the shots. However, the real news was never reported: more than 2,000 babies died in the United States after receiving vaccines for these very same diseases, yet authorities refuse to warn parents and halt production. A safety review is vital to determine whether a recall of the dangerous shots may be necessary to protect additional American babies from disability and death.

According to Paul Offit, media spokesperson for the vaccine industry, “the Japanese Ministry of Health was foolish to suspend the Hib and pneumococcal programs.” Offit thinks the deaths were probably caused by SIDS, or underlying conditions, or another cause – anything except the vaccines. Often, children get sick and die by chance.

William Schaffner, chairman of the department of medicine at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, believes, like Offit, that the deaths are “most likely…a coincidence.” In a twist of irony, it may also be a coincidence that Schaffner receives money from vaccine manufacturers – whose stock prices traded lower after the announcement by Japan – for consulting and speaking about vaccines.

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Doctor Who Linked Autism and Vaccines Is A ‘Fraud,’ Says British Medical Journal

news-graphics-2007-_640547aJenny McCarthy take note: Britain’s leading medical journal has declared that Andrew Wakefield’s discredited 1998 autism study was not merely riddled with errors, but was a case of deliberate, “elaborate fraud.” CNN reports:

A now-retracted British study that linked autism to childhood vaccines was an “elaborate fraud” that has done long-lasting damage to public health, a leading medical publication reported Wednesday.

An investigation published by the British medical journal BMJ concludes the study’s author, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, misrepresented or altered the medical histories of all 12 of the patients whose cases formed the basis of the 1998 study — and that there was “no doubt” Wakefield was responsible.

“It’s one thing to have a bad study, a study full of error, and for the authors then to admit that they made errors,” Fiona Godlee, BMJ’s editor-in-chief, told CNN. “But in this case, we have a very different picture of what seems to be a deliberate attempt to create an impression that there was a link by falsifying the data.”

Britain stripped Wakefield of his medical license in May.

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