Did everyone listening to the Insight immunisation documentary (podcast URL) on Sunday 19th June, put on their "thinking" cap? How many listeners do you think, just "believed" all the comments made by the paediatricians or doctors? After all, they went to medical school, so they must know everything?
I've decided to upload the podcast, in case it mysteriously disappears: MP3 streaming file.
Where I have something to say, I will mentioned the "time" on the podcast in this format: 1.52 (Tim Blackmore) To me, this documentary was astonishing. Firstly, because Phillipa Tolley's background research was palpably absent. But then, to know that she plainly didn't know much..., a person would have to "know" a long term history of vaccination, and immunable diseases in New Zealand. A real investigative journalist would have asked much more searching questions.
There were comments by an Infectious Diseases Specialist, Tim Blackmore, that measles is a terrible disease (1.52) which caused chronic lung disease, blindness and deafness. In all the NZ literature for decades, such emotive language has not been used before. Perhaps if Tim Blackmore had seen measles in the days when parents actually knew how to look after their children, he'd have a different picture of it. His description, "measles is breathtakingly contagious" is ... breathtaking. He said, "You only have to walk past the room of somebody with measles in it, so it can spread literally like wildfire.... the only thing that protects us from infections like measles is people vaccinated under the age of 40 or so."
How droll. So is this some insinuation that everyone over the age of 40 is a liability? And if not, why not? If so, why isn't it headlines?
And, Blackmore intones, if measles gets into a University hostel, hospital or school, it's "literally a bush-fire".
It was 23 years ago, when our children got measles for the second time - both times courtesy of vaccinated children. The first time our youngest got measles, I asked for him to be seen outside in the practice garden and not wait in the waiting room. No can do..... The only concession to my “refusal to potentially infect the waiting room” was that when it came our time, we were ushered into the doctor’s room, but got filthy looks as if we were queue jumping.... I berated the doctor for stupidity in having us in there at all.., but I might have well have been Lady Gaga, except she gets more “respect” these days than a parent who doesn’t want to be in a waiting/consulting room with any infectious disease, let alone measles.
It's plain commonsense isn't it, to someone brought up at a time when "coughs and sneezes spread diseases"?
A mother rang me the other day, after talking to Dr Belski at the Auckland Regional Public Health Service. She had just been informed that measles was THE MOST dangerous of all diseases. (I started to giggle.) He then informed her that it was SO DANGEROUS that any room a child with measles had been in, was contagious for at least 8 hours after that infectious child had left.
Well, duh! What Dr Belski and Dr Blackmore studiously ignore, is the fact that the medical literature from the 80's made it quite plain that the BEST places to catch measles was NOT schools. It was doctor's surgeries and hospitals.
Yet for decades, the medical profession has insisted that parents take their sick kids... where? !!!
When our younger son got measles the second time, (1988), I refused to go to what is now Starship, particularly in the day-time. Only when we were threatened with our child’s removal by CYPS did we go there at all - at 11.00 p.m. at night when we knew there would be very few patients or other people around...
Why were we threatened with CYPS? Because our doctor refused to consider measles "for a second time", therefore our son must have... meningitis. Which it plainly couldn't have been, since he had no meningitis symptoms we could see. (I could almost see the lip curl as if to say, "What would you as a parent KNOW about signs of meningitis"? ) And we were right. He flunked all the meningitis tests. It was measles. Again.
With whooping cough (1989), we refused to take our children to the doctor, and had a telephone appointment providing the required kiddy vocals in a recording, with the younger one obligingly providing a live back-ground display. And yes, our children got whooping cough from fully vaccinated children of the ages of 6 and 8.
With Mumps (1994), we provided the requisite photos of puffy neck etc.
With chickenpox (1992), we provided the requisite very detailed close-up photos of fluid-filled vesicles.
We had made it our business to know everything about all these diseases, including what the medical profession does in the way of "treatment" and all the treatments they know nothing about. We were... well prepared.
Every time we refused to allow our children to sit in surgeries, and go into consulting rooms, we'd get the "look" - the rolling eyes, and the tongue clicks. It seemed that we were the only ones who cared whether we spread infection or not.
Imagine our surprise, when SWINE FLU became an issue in 2009, ..... suddenly doctors and nurses actually considered the fact that doctors surgeries and hospitals might be the biggest and best spreading places for infectious diseases!
How come, now there are measles cases in Auckland, that measles is being portrayed by Dr Belski as something akin to Ebola on speed?
We have a raft of old medical articles from the 80’s stating that doctors' waiting rooms and hospitals were the premier method of measles spread in the community ... even WORSE than schools!!!Back in those days, when kids got sick, they stayed home from school.
And guess what else? Up until the 1950's, common sense policies dictated that “infection” hospitals were separate from the hospitals dealing with “non-infectious” problems. And every GP used to have a policy of "house visiting" potentially infectious patients, rather than subjecting other people in waiting or consultation rooms, to potential infections.
With the abandonment of commonsense infection control, medical people applied ZERO commonsense in terms of exposure in medical facilities...., yet now, at a time when New Zealand has it’s highest ever vaccination rate for measles, they are suddenly deciding that infectious diseases which they quite happily spread in the community for 50 plus years, are now “oh so dangerous, and so easily spread”.
Why? Because most provaccine young mothers won't remember when measles was indeed normal, rarely caused chronic lung disease in healthy children, and mothers knew more about caring for sick children properly. This current fear mongering, worst case scenario talk, is a subtle social marketting campaign to demonise parents who don't vaccinate, by incorrectly portraying measles as "the worst possible disease", to set the groundwork, so that those who disagree with that statement are made to look paraiahs in subsequent discussions in society. After all, these medical people all "know what they are talking about" and what they say sounds so scarey, and they wouldn't tell lies would they?
Pretty medieval tactics, when you think about it.But it gets worse.
When Dr Beltski was asked about vitamin A, he informed said mother that "vitamin A only stops African children going blind". Which is pretty gobsmackingly unbelievably ignorant. Why does a public health doctor have no idea that vitamin A reduces the seriousness of measles, the complications and deaths, all around the world? Why does a public health doctor, not know why vitamin A is so effective? Perhaps he never realised that Starship hospital policy for measles has included vitamin A since at least 2005. Why might that be?
Insight, also highlighted the fact that the medical profession still hasn't got to grips with their inability to effectively and quickly treat whooping cough or tetanus.
We were treated to a nurse in Wellington, Kathy Maloney talking about how most babies with whooping cough came in well before their 6 week vaccine - which means they were probably infected at birth or just afterwards. She talked about how difficult it was to nurse a tiny baby with whooping cough - yet most of you reading this blog will know exactly how to treat a tiny wee baby with whooping cough - because many of you have done that away from the microscope of medical paranoia...., and you know that a properly treated baby will not make it into hospital.
Tim Blackmore's description of Tetanus, as involving 5 months of excrutating pain requiring morphine - is quite accurate - if you're treated by the "usual" hospital protocol. Indeed, that is what the family of a recent case were "threatened" with.
But that time frame can be reduced to two weeks, if you insist that the hospital to do stuff they don't normally do, and supplement that with more behind their backs when they aren't looking. And you can guarantee one thing. They won't be falling over themselves with surprise, or asking serious questions about what you made them do, or learn from what else you might have done - if you actually tell them, that is....
On the one hand, they will be glad to see the back of you, while on other other, mourning the lost opportunity of a "dead unvaccinated person to use as a marketable lesson with which to whip all the other non-vaccinating people".
No docudrama would be complete without Nicki Turner from IMAC intoning about "the coincidental effect" (12.23) - about how "we hear this all the time about something happening to children after vaccines". But of course, "we have big studies which show that there's no association whatsoever with vaccines and what happens afterwards" ..... "So I think if something does happen to a child after a vaccination it's really very hard for us to hang on to the science."
You know what? If "we hear this all the time", isn't it about time you started listening to parents? After all, there is a possibility it might not be coincidence, but so long as doctors write everything which happens after vaccination, off as "coincidence" the blind will continue to lead the blind.
My medic alert lists all the antibiotics which have just about throttled me to death. Can you imagine a nurse's face if I said, "Oh just ignore the medic alert. I mean, we hear this all the time about how antibiotics can cause angio-edema and anaphylaxis, but it's really all just coincidence!" Can you imagine everyone who reacts to bee stings, being told it was coincidence? Yet everything, after vaccines, is always coincidence....
There was Porirua's Outreach vaccination nurse Sandra Hitchins (22.20) talking about how they go to homes, schools, day-care centres, kohanga reo, learning institutions, and how most people just want to vaccinate their children, but their lives get in the way and make it hard: "Every parent wants to do right by the child, and actually, they're just grateful when we turn up and get it completed, and sort out the problem for them."
Which about sums it up really. Not only the assumption by parents, that the system has all the right answers, but that they system can also think for them, and sort out their problems for them. After all, what could be more simple than that?
Except they turn up on my doorstep when it all turns to custard, and the "system" slams the door on their backsides, as they walk out in tears...
Last but not least, was Paul Hutchison's astonishing statement (14.39) saying that New Zealand not having a National Immunisation Register until recently, was "most extraordinary"... to do with apathy, and "an indictment on us all". This had me rolling in the aisles.Perhaps Karen Poutasi, Mike Soljak and John Stevenson (the latter two no longer in New Zealand) will remember a certain meeting with me in Wellington, in 1988, where I was adamant that Michael Soljak's Northland trial of an Immunisation Register, should be made nationwide immediately, and should be extended to include health history, preschool checks, and vaccine reactions as well.
They all agreed it would be a good idea. So what happened, Dr Hutchison? Who exactly was apathetic? And what did I say to you in my written and verbal submissions to Parliament? Yes, one of the "side effects" of vaccination registers, is that nurses like Kathy Maloney (15.21) will use them to make sure they can do "opportunist vaccinations" when a child comes to hospital sick with something else and gets a raft of needles as a side dish! Which is in my opinion, medically unethical, but that's another story...
Finally, I'm not quite sure why medical providers need financial incentives to vaccinate anyone, since last I heard, every vaccine administered to someone in state funded programmes nets a doctor $60.00. Mind you, that doesn't compete with the $150.00 payment the surgery got to change a plaster and make sure that two removed stitches were still okay - so maybe they are hard done by....
