AutismOne
Annual Conference
Chicago, Illinois
May 30, 2004
Oral Presentation by Jock Doubleday
"Into the Labyrinth:
Discovering the Truth about Vaccination"
(with updated links and
information)
A FRIEND ASKED ME RECENTLY if I was nervous to speak in
front of parents and professionals about vaccination.
I said, "Why would I be nervous to speak in front of
parents and professionals about vaccination?"
He said, "Because you were an English major. All you
did in college was write poetry and analyze stories."
A Greek hero named Theseus went to slay a deadly monster
living in the center of a labyrinth built by the king of Crete. The monster,
known as the Minotaur, had been eating youths and maidens sacrificed by the
Athenians in return for peace.
Theseus would have none of this. He sailed to Crete to slay
the Minotaur. There he met the King's daughter Ariadne. Ariadne promptly fell
in love with Theseus, though he was the sworn enemy of her father.
To increase her new love's chance of escaping the labyrinth
with his life, Ariadne gave Theseus a long thread to unravel as he negotiated
the maze.
Theseus accepted the gift, entered the labyrinth,
encountered the monster, killed it, followed Ariadne's thread back out to
safety, and all was well.
Theseus ended up marrying Ariadne's sister. But don't feel
sorry for Ariadne. She married the god Dionysus.
In 1978, I went to Oberlin College. Biology was my first
major, then philosophy. After my sophomore year, disappointed by what I called
"the institutionalization of learning" (large class sizes and the
virtual absence of the teacher-student relationship), I took five years off and
hitchhiked around the country and undertook my own education.
I read books. In particular I remember Robert Pirsig's Zen
and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Joseph Chilton Pearce's Crack in the Cosmic Egg, Loren Eiseley's The Immense
Journey, and Lewis
Thomas's The Lives of a Cell.
These books lived on the outer edges of academia but had
profound things to say about our culture and the world. Written by powerful
storytellers, the books encouraged in me a growing love for story and inspired
me to go back to school at S.U.N.Y. Purchase to get my degree in literature.
Three years later, in 1990, I came upon Joseph Pearce's
book, Magical Child, which argued that the natural capacity of children is immense and
kaleidoscopic, but that most children's development is thwarted by cultural
practices. I read Magical Child again two years later and a third time in 1997.
I remember it was the night before Thanksgiving. I was in
the throes of a very strong visceral reaction to the story told by Pearce, a
story told originally by the story's characters themselves: hospital insiders
and frightened mothers. That night I lay in bed unable to sleep because the
images from Pearce's book kept spinning around in my head. Women and babies are
being treated how by institutional medicine?
I decided to investigate. I didn't want to take Pearce's
story on faith. So over the next year, I perused medical journals and talked to
obstetricians and perinatal nurses and doulas and midwives and parents and read
key books in the field. And then I began to write articles on what science had
to say about childbirth.
A friend suggested I start a nonprofit. A year later, the
501(c)3 California nonprofit corporation Natural Woman, Natural Man was born.
http://www.SpontaneousCreation.org
Two years later, near the turn of the millennium, I was
living in Nevada City, California and writing a book -- what I thought of as a
"science-backed ode to nature."
I had been an occasional guest on KVMR (the local radio
station), speaking on breastfeeding and natural childbirth. I wanted to
continue speaking on these subjects, and the station was all for that. But they
said, "First we want you to talk about vaccination." I said, "I
don't know anything about vaccination. Can I just do my childbirth talks?"
And they said, "We want something on vaccination."
The first thought that went through my mind, after spending
years researching childbirth, was, "Now I have to spend years researching
vaccines, too?"
But I decided to do some cursory internet research, and I
found some very odd things. As someone who believed, as most Westerners do,
that vaccination has done great good, I was baffled by evidence to the
contrary. So I bought some books written by independent researchers. . . .
The great majority of the books had been recently
published. All of the books were heavily documented. And all of the books drew
conclusions based on raw, unaltered data on disease incidence and mortality
acquired in several different countries over the last two centuries.
None of the books made any connection between the practice
of vaccination and an improvement in human health. More fundamentally, none of
the books made any connection between the practice of vaccination and science.
How could that be? Isn't vaccination scientific?
Any guesses on how many long-term controlled studies have
been performed for all vaccines for all diseases in all countries in the world
since vaccination was invented in 1796?
Zero studies.
We've had 208 years to perform a long-term controlled study
on vaccination, and we have performed precisely none.
http://www.whale.to/vaccines/studies.html
http://www.whale.to/vaccines/abcnews.html
There is no lack of people to be part of the control group
in such a study. You can find a list of potential candidates on Tim O'Shea's
web site, www.thedoctorwithin.com. These are parents who not only don't
vaccinate, they give out their contact information so you can call them and ask
them how good their unvaccinated family's health is. There are presently 220
listings, for a total of over 800 unvaccinated persons.
www.thedoctorwithin.com (click on chapter titled, "Parents
of Unvaccinated Children")
And this is just on Tim's web site. You can imagine how
many people live in America alone who believe in natural immunity, who avoid
vaccinations, and who would be willing to be part of a group that simply
continues doing what it was doing before.
Now, what exactly is this vaunted thing, the long-term
controlled study? In the case of vaccination, a long-term controlled study is
taking two large groups of people and vaccinating one group and not vaccinating
the other, and then recording disease incidence over a period of several years.
Short-term studies don't give us any useful information about vaccine efficacy,
for reasons that make themselves clear with thought.
Now, why is it that we don't have any long-term
controlled studies on vaccination?
We live in an age of scientific studies. Governments and
private organizations study anything and everything under the sun.
Recently, the National Endowment for the Humanities spent
$25,000 to study why people lie, cheat, and act rudely on Virginia tennis
courts.
The National Institute of Neurological and Communicative
Disorders and Stroke spent $160,000 to study whether or not someone can
"hex" an opponent by drawing an "X" on their chest.
The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism
spent over a million dollars to find out if drunken fish are more aggressive
than sober fish.
The National Science Foundation awarded a grant of $220,971
to researchers to study why women smile more than men. This study was a
follow-up to another study in 1994 on the meaning of smiles in general. The NSF
awarded another grant to study the history of the fax machine.
Everything is being studied all the time. Everything,
that is, except vaccination.
Why is it, do you think, that the pharmaceutical companies,
which fund studies, studies, and more studies, have no interest in funding
long-term studies on vaccination?
I don't know the answer to that question, although many of
the books I've read endeavor to speculate. If you want to learn about conflict
of interest in the vaccine world, I've got some links for you.
http://www.wellbeingjournal.com/profits-vaccines.htm
http://consumerlawpage.com/article/vaccine.shtml
http://www.mercola.com/2000/oct/15/congress_conflicts.htm
http://www.mercola.com/2001/sep/15/vaccines.htm
http://www.cspinet.org/new/200303101.html
Now, even though we don't have any long-term controlled
studies on vaccination, amazingly and thankfully we do have some recourse to
discover if vaccines actually work.
We can look back into human history. Indeed, if you look at
it right, human history can be seen as one big Petri dish. And it's a Petri
dish that's just waiting for the scientific gaze.
The science of looking back into history at the grand sweep
of disease in populations is called epidemiology. What does epidemiological
data tell us about vaccination and its effect on the Petri dish of humanity?
Is vaccination effective or not?
Looking at charts using unaltered government data on
incidence and mortality rates for the great diseases in the United States,
Australia and Great Britain from 1900 to the present, an interesting pattern
emerges.
Time and again, nature takes care of human beings without
any help from vaccination. Nature lays low those whose immune systems are
functioning at below-standard levels, and then disease incidence in the
remaining population declines to virtually zero.
Time and again, incidence of disease in human populations
rises, peaks -- then falls, falls, falls without any intervention from human
medicine. . . .
But interestingly, often a vaccine is introduced near the
end of the disease's decline. What happens to disease incidence after
introduction of the vaccine? The decline keeps going the way it was going, or
sometimes spikes upward for a short time. Either way, vaccination takes
credit for the disease's decline.
Sometimes, as in the case of scarlet fever and typhoid
fever, no vaccine is introduced before the disease declines. But vaccination
still takes credit for the decline.
It's a very neat system that unfortunately leaves out two
centuries of international epidemiological data. For clear graphs of this data,
check out
http://www.vaclib.org/sites/debate/web1.html
Vaccines: Are They Really Safe and Effective? by Neil Z. Miller
http://www.korenpublications.com/
I have talked to many doctors about these raw, unaltered
numbers and the charts based on them. None of them have seen these numbers.
None of them have seen the charts based on them. When I email them the graphs,
they say, "These numbers must be wrong."
Doctors who willingly admit that we have no long-term
studies on vaccination are absolutely unyielding on the issue of epidemiology.
And understandably so. They have been taught -- they have
had it drilled into them -- that the history of modern civilization is the
history of the triumph of artificially induced immunity.
So they are put into a corner, and they come out fighting:
"These charts are wrong! The numbers they're based on must be wrong!"
But the numbers are not wrong. These are the only numbers we have.
They are the government numbers -- raw data from many
different governments.
I am still waiting for a doctor to email me "the right
numbers."
So if we have no evidence from epidemiology that vaccines
work, and we have no evidence from long-term studies that vaccines work, we are
left with no evidence that vaccines work.
Independent researcher Dr. Viera Scheibner, in her bold
expose Vaccinations: 100 Years of Orthodox Research Shows that Vaccines
Represent a Medical Assault on the Immune System, sums up the position of
researchers not funded by pharmaceutical companies. She writes:
"There is no evidence whatsoever that vaccines of
any kind . . . are effective in preventing the infectious diseases they are
supposed to prevent."
www.whale.to/m/scheibner9.html
In fact, we didn't need Viera to tell us that vaccines are
ineffective. The vaccination hoax was exposed over 80 years ago. In January of
1923, a doctor named Walter S. Hadwen wrote an article titled, "The Birth
of the Fraud of Vaccination"
http://www.mercola.com/2001/may/5/vaccination_jenner.htm
in which he talks about Edward Jenner's circus artistry in
pawning off on an unwitting public his unsubstantiated claims.
Our story deepens when we discover that Edward Jenner,
inventor of vaccines, and Louis Pasteur, creator of the germ theory of disease,
were the Barnum & Bailey of medicine.
These men weren't true scientists. They were, quite
unfortunately for us, showmen and hucksters.
They were salesmen.
As early as January 26, 1889, in an issue of Scientific
American Supplement magazine,
there was a report titled "Exposure of M. Pasteur's Methods," by Dr.
Lutaud of France. The report tells how many of Pasteur's claims, including his
claim regarding his curing of silk worm disease in France, were fraudulent.
A hundred years later, in 1993, Professor Gerald Geison, a
science historian from Princeton University, made a thorough study of lab
notes that Pasteur had ordered his family not to make public, and which were in fact made
public only after the death of Pasteur's grandson in 1975.
Princeton professor Geison compared these notes with
Pasteur's publications and presented his findings during a congress of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston.
In his presentation, Geison said that Pasteur committed
scientific misconduct, that he violated medical, ethical, and scientific rules
and published fraudulent data.
Contrary to what Pasteur claimed, he never tested his
anti-rabies vaccine on animals before he started experimenting on humans.
Further, the vaccine Pasteur used during his famous "anthrax
experiment" on sheep was -- contrary to his claim -- not his own vaccine.
He stole it from a colleague. According to Geison, money was the primary
motivation for Pasteur's action.
Further, and much to our detriment, Pasteur stole and
misrepresented the ideas of his contemporary, Antoine Bechamp. Bechamp had a
marvelous theory of disease called the "terrain theory." The terrain
theory says that living creatures, including germs, are environment specific --
they do well in some environments and not in others. Bad germs flourish when
the terrain of the body is unhealthy. This indeed is a tautology. Another
tautology is: "Make the body healthy, and you've made your best defense
against disease."
But as we all know, Pasteur invented his own theory: the
"germ theory of disease," upon which modern medicine is based. This
theory says that if you've got a germ, you've got a problem.
Pasteur's solution? Heat them up until they explode.
"Denature" them. Kill them at all costs. Pasteur's theory won out
over Bechamp's theory because of Pasteur's dedication to the marketing of his
ideas. In the Western world today, terrain is ignored and the germ is all.
Pasteur was not the only snake-oil salesman to come down
the pike. Edward Jenner, whom history has come for some reason to regard as a
"great scientist," purchased his Medical Degree from St. Andrew's
College for the equivalent of $75.
After a single experiment with eight-year-old James Phipps,
with no clinical trials or follow-up studies, Jenner received the equivalent of
$150,000 from the British Government.
http://proliberty.com/observer/20020408.htm