Re: Re: trying to get seperate mmr

[Guest guest]

Here's a newsletter that's a good read from NVIC:

Vaccine Facts & Choice: Drawing the Lines

by Barbara Loe Fisher

w ww.vaccineawakening.blogspot.com

www.NVIC.org

www.Stand UpBeCounted.org

As the battle lines are being drawn between

those who want to force all children to use 69 doses of 16 vaccines and those

who are defending the right of parents to exercise voluntary, informed consent

to vaccination, it is coming down to a matter of whose message do you trust.

Should government health officials, pediatricians and vaccine manufacturers,

who have been denying vaccine risks for three decades, be trusted to be defacto

lawmakers and force vaccination on everyone or should Americans be allowed to

become informed about vaccination and legally make voluntary vaccine choices?

Tonight, July 17, Louise Kao Habakus will be speaking about " Vaccination:

Building a Case for Education and Choice " at the Atlantis Ballroom, Tom's

River Holiday Inn in Tom's River, NJ at 7.pm.. The mother of two children,

Louise is standing up for the right to know and the freedom to decide. The

presentation is free but to reserve a seat, send e-mail to

terrymillsvactalk@...

As more parents report that their young girls are suffering disabling reactions

to GARDASIL (see a video clip of the WUSA-TV coverage), doctors determined to

coverup HPV vaccine risks are giving out inaccurate information (see video

clip of a FOX News story ) while public health officials defending vaccine

safety write books and parents want more information and choices.

All Americans deserve the right to be fully informed about the risks associated

with any pharmaceutical products or medical procedure and be allowed to make a

voluntary decision about taking that risk with their own life or the life of

their child. The right to informed consent to medical risk taking is a human

right.

__________________________________________

" Bell says 2 weeks after her 12

year old daughter Brittany was injected with the HPV vaccine, " she was walking

through my house and collapsed. She told me, she couldn't feel her leg. "

Today, this once athletic girl has a hard time getting around and often loses

her balance. Vega of Nevada got the shot at school and became

temporarily paralyzed. Venice of Florida passed out and had a seizure

after her Gardasil shot. " I don't think this should have been fast-tracked by

the FDA, " says Barbara Loe Fisher with the National Vaccine Information

Center. She says Merck, the manufacturer of the drug managed to get Gardasil

approved and to market, after studying the side-effects in just 12- hundred

girls. What was their incentive? " It certainly is money because the bottom line

for their stock holders is a profit, " she says. She claims Merck has taken in

an estimated 1.5 billion dollars world-wide from

Gardasil sales, all for a vaccine she says may do more harm than good. She

says doctors share in the blame. " I think pediatricians need to pay more

attention to the patient that's sitting in front of them, rather than thinking

they need to implement government policy or promote a new vaccine that a drug

company rep has come in and promoted to them. " The debate over the HPV vaccine

rages on in Virginia after it became the first state in the country to mandate

the vaccine for sixth grade girls, albeit with an opt-out provision. Those

requirements have been delayed for at least one year to allow more time to

study the vaccine's effects on young girls. " - Yamada, WUSA-TV9 (July 7,

2008) http://www.wusa9.com/rss/local_articl e.aspx?storyid=73698

" It remains to be seen whether the new book will answer all queries. " You are

going to continue to see parents doing their own research and coming up with a

lot of questions, " said Barbara Loe Fisher, a frequent critic of vaccines and

co-founder of the National Vaccine Information Center, a nonprofit, parent-led

organization that seeks to change the mass vaccination process to allow more

opt-out flexibility regarding immunizations. She said she looks forward to

reading the book but wonders if it will address the issue now being raised

about the effect on children's health of recent expansion in the recommended

vaccine schedule. " I've seen the number of vaccines double and the number of

doses triple, " Fisher said. " No matter what is published in that book, it is

still an outstanding question until health authorities give us the answer as to

why so many highly vaccinated children are so sick. " - J. Landers,

American Medical News (July 7, 2008)

http://www.ama- assn.org/amednews/2008/07/07/hlsa0707.htm

Gardasil Controversy: Are the HPV Vaccine's

Side Effects a Legitimate Concern?

produced by Ben ky

Fox News

July 11, 2008

TO VIEW VIDEO CLIP: http://www.foxnews.com/video2/video08.html?

maven_referralObject=2233990 & maven_referralPlayli

stId= & sRevUrl=http://www.foxnews.com/health/index.ht ml

__________________________________________

Could HPV Vaccine Be Dangerous To Girls?

by Yamada

WUSA-TV9 (Washington, D.C.)

July 7, 2008

TO VIEW VIDEO CLIP:

http://www.wusa9.com/rss/local_articl e.aspx?storyid=73698

VIENNA, Va. (WUSA) -- Two years ago it was hailed as

a potential life-saver. Tonight there are new questions about the safety of an

HPV vaccine that millions women and girls have already been innoculated with.

Some of those girls are as young as 9 years old.

" My doctor told me it was a good idea, friends told me it was a good idea, "

says Brigitte , a 23 year old woman who says she had been thinking

about getting the HPV vaccine. She and others say they were encouraged by the

medical community and television commercials and ads, promoting Gardasil as

the most effective way to prevent cervical cancer. " They make you feel like

young kids should get it as well as a good mom would do that to protect her

child, " says Ruth Ghobadi, mother of a 15 year old girl. She questions the

safety of vaccinations and has chosen not to vaccinate her daughter.

Others have and are now regretting it. Bell says 2 weeks after her 12

year old daughter Brittany was injected with the HPV vaccine, " she was walking

through my house and collapsed. She told me, she couldn't feel her leg. " Today,

this once athletic girl has a hard time getting around and often loses her

balance. Vega of Nevada got the shot at school and became temporarily

paralyzed. Venice of Florida passed out and had a seizure after her

Gardasil shot.

" I don't think this should have been fast-tracked by the FDA, " says Barbara Loe

Fisher with the National Vaccine Information Center. She says Merck, the

manufacturer of the drug managed to get Gardasil approved and to market, after

studying the side-effects in just 12-hundred girls. What was their incentive?

" It certainly is money because the bottom line for their stock holders is a

profit, " she says. She claims Merck has taken in an estimated 1.5 billion

dollars world- wide from Gardasil sales, all for a vaccine she says may do more

harm than good. She says doctors share in the blame. " I think pediatricians

need to pay more attention to the patient that's sitting in front of them,

rather than thinking they need to implement government policy or promote a new

vaccine that a drug company rep has come in and promoted to them. "

The debate over the HPV vaccine rages on in Virginia after it became the first

state in the country to mandate the vaccine for sixth grade girls, albeit with

an opt-out provision. Those requirements have been delayed for at least one

year to allow more time to study the vaccine's effects on young girls.

Despite the FDA's own documents that show more than 78 hundred people have

experienced problems with Gardasil, Merck and the CDC maintain that Gardasil

is safe and effective. They say there is no link to deaths and that illnesses

reported after the vaccination may not be the result of the shot.

For more information on Gardasil and potential dangers, click here.

Written by Yamada

9NEWS NOW

New book aims to provide vaccine answers: AMNews Interviews Myers, M.D.

by J. Landers

American Medical News

July 7, 2008

http:// www.ama- assn.org/amednews/2008/07/07/hlsa0707.htm

Washington -- Vaccines have long been considered one

of public health's greatest and most life-saving achievements, yet they

continue to spark controversy. In recent weeks, protesters in Washington, D.C.,

claimed that childhood vaccines are unsafe, while in Albany, N.Y., others

rallied against a mandatory vaccine bill in that state.

Parents attempting to do the right thing for their children are often caught in

the cross fire.

Now along comes a new book, Do Vaccines Cause That?! A Guide for Evaluating

Vaccine Safety Concerns. It summarizes the research findings on vaccines and

presents a method for analyzing that research. The book is by Myers, MD,

a pediatrician and executive director of the nonprofit National Network for

Immunization Information, based at the University of Texas Medical Branch in

Galveston, and NNii science writer Diego Pineda. NNii provides information

about vaccines on its Web site (www.immunizationinfo.org). Affiliates include

the AMA, the Infectious Diseases Society of America, the American Academy of

Pediatrics and the American Academy of Family Physicians, which support its

work. NNii does not accept pharmaceutical company funding, Dr. Myers said.

The authors evaluate the long-running controversy linking vaccines with rising

rates of autism as well as claims suggesting vaccines' possible association

with asthma. The book also delves into the effects of multiple vaccines on a

child's immune system.

Although parents are its intended audience, physicians and others in the health

care field can benefit from reading it, according to former Health and Human

Services Secretary Louis Sullivan, MD, and Katz, MD, chairman emeritus

of pediatrics at Duke University in Durham, N.C. Together they wrote the

book's forward.

" One hopes -- anticipates -- that besides a broad lay audience, health care

personnel at every level will take advantage of this book to augment their own

perspectives so they can discuss vaccines more comfortably and convincingly

with the families for whom they are responsible, " write Dr. Sullivan and Dr.

Katz.

It remains to be seen whether the new book will answer all queries. " You are

going to continue to see parents doing their own research and coming up with a

lot of questions, " said Barbara Loe Fisher, a frequent critic of vaccines and

co-founder of the National Vaccine Information Center, a nonprofit, parent-led

organization that seeks to change the mass vaccination process to allow more

opt-out flexibility regarding immunizations. She said she looks forward to

reading the book but wonders if it will address the issue now being raised

about the effect on children's health of recent expansion in the recommended

vaccine schedule.

" I've seen the number of vaccines double and the number of doses triple, "

Fisher said. " No matter what is published in that book, it is still an

outstanding question until health authorities give us the answer as to why so

many highly vaccinated children are so sick. "

AMNews recently talked to Dr. Myers about the book.

AMNews: Why did you write this?

Dr. Myers: For a couple of reasons. The first, and maybe the most important,

was that readers of our [NNii] Web site asked us to. They liked the essays on

our site and asked us to put them together in a book.

The second was when we went to bookstores to see what was available, we could

only find anti- vaccine materials and advocacy books. But we couldn't find a

book written to help parents sort their way through conflicting information.

It is meant as a tool to help parents understand what they are hearing and how

to evaluate it. We do not advocate. Each section of the book was reviewed by

technical experts and parents. We had a panel of parents read the book and tell

us whether we were clear or not.

One of my favorite anecdotes concerns a parent who acknowledged that the book

was informative but also said it was boring and not the kind of thing a parent

is going to read. So we went back and started over.

We hope it's helpful for parents who want more evidence and also to those who

need help sorting through the evidence.

AMNews: What's in it for physicians?

Dr. Myers: As Dr. Katz and Dr. Sullivan wrote in the forward to the book, we do

review the evidence in some detail. We want to have it all there. They noted

that it's something that health professionals should read also, since it's the

one place where it is compiled.

A number of physicians at meetings said they were anxious to see the book

because they thought it would help them talk to parents.

AMNews: Do physicians and researchers have difficulty communicating clearly to

lay people?

Dr. Myers: We use words in a different way. We included a table of words in the

book and what they mean to vaccine researchers and what they mean in common

English. As we started to compile that table, we kept finding more words.

" Bias " is one of the words. " Plausible " is another. " Significant " to the

scientist means it is probably not due to chance, but it could be. But when a

parent hears the word significant, it means important.

Then there is the phenomenon of the missing information. If it turns out that a

safety concern is caused by the vaccine, like it was with intussusceptions and

[the first] rotavirus vaccine [which was withdrawn in 1999], it doesn't take

very long to prove it. [Two new rotavirus vaccines were licensed in 2006.] But

you can never prove a negative. You have to have lots of studies done by

different people, and it might take years until the scientific community says,

'OK, the weight of the evidence is so compelling we think we can reject this.'

We used a quote from Einstein that Diego found: 'Many experiments will never

prove me right, but one experiment can prove me wrong.'

AMNews: How great is the danger posed by unimmunized children?

Dr. Myers: We have a section in the book called 'community immunity' that

addresses how important it is for children to be immunized to protect

neighbors. It's an important concept for people to understand that when

immunization levels go down, outbreaks can occur.

Attacks of misinformation on vaccine safety can cause that breakthrough. We saw

it with whooping cough in the 1970s and 1980s. And we saw it with measles and

mumps in the United Kingdom just recently.

AMNews:So are the same vaccine safety debates occurring in other countries?

Dr. Myers: The same discussion on vaccines causing autism was held in England

and Europe related to the measles vaccine -- that argument has been

discredited now. But as a result, parents became confused and didn't immunize

their children, and they had an outbreak of measles and an epidemic of mumps

which spread to the United States.

Immunity Gap: A Growing Number of Concerned Parents Exempt Children from

Required Shots

As more parents refuse vaccines for their kids,

health officials worry.

by Orr

May 27, 2008

Edutopia.org

The Lucas Education Foundation

http://www.edutopia.org/health-child-vaccinations

...

Late last year, Jessie Griffiths took a notarized

document into the rural New Hampshire school her three-year-old son Cole

attends, stating that, because of religious objections, he was not up-to-date

on his vaccines. Later she admitted, " This is not actually the truth. "

Cole had suffered a series of seizures days after receiving his measles, mumps,

and rubella vaccines that alarmed Griffiths enough for her to stop all future

vaccinations. She could have sought a medical note from her son's doctor, but

she decided it would be easier just to take the religious exemption that every

state except Mississippi and West Virginia allows -- often with no questions

asked.

Across the country, a small but growing number of parents are doing the same

thing. A 2006 survey from the Journal of the American Medical Association

found that the number of parents exempting their children from some or all of

their state's required vaccines, for any stated reason, grew by 6 percent per

year between 1991 and 2004. All anecdotal evidence suggests their ranks have

continued to grow since then.

Certain religious groups, such as the Amish, often choose not to vaccinate, and

other people, like Griffiths's son, suffer serious side effects. But health

officials believe that many of the parents opting out today are doing so out of

fear that the vaccines may contribute to other conditions such as autism, a

link long suspected but repeatedly refuted in scientific research.

It's easy to overlook these thousands of parents who opt out of vaccinations

for hepatitis A and B, polio, chicken pox, whooping cough, and other illnesses

among the millions who vaccinate right on schedule. Indeed, overall

immunization coverage has risen steadily across the United States for many

years.

But Lance Rodewald, who directs the Immunization Services Division at the

federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), says he suspects

there are already areas within the country where large numbers of parents

taking exemptions have caused compliance to fall below 90 percent, a level

generally considered a good measure of " herd immunity. " Abstention is

especially high in the Western states.

Sandy Cano, school nurse at Muir Elementary School, in Santa ,

California, estimates that, because of a high proportion of what she calls

" free-to-be-me parents " in the school district, 5 percent or more of the

children at her school have not received all their mandated vaccinations (all

of them claiming religious exemption). " We try to reassure parents, but

parents do their own research, " Cano says. " School nurses are always worried. "

Worried for good reason, says Rodewald. If parents who opt out of vaccines

assume they are putting no one but their own child at risk, the reality is

more complex. All vaccines have some small failure rate, meaning certain

children who have been immunized against something like measles are still at

risk -- a risk that only rises if they are going to school with other potential

carriers.

" If a vaccine is 95 percent effective, and you have a lunchroom full of 300

kids, that means fifteen of them are susceptible, even if they have all been

vaccinated, " says Rodewald. An increasingly mobile society also means more

people are traveling to and from developing nations, and the risk rises even

more. A 2005 measles outbreak in Indiana began when one young girl who had not

been immunized caught the measles during a trip to an orphanage in Romania.

About thirty people in the community eventually came down with measles.

" I'm concerned when even one kid isn't vaccinated, " says Lovell, school

nurse at Midvale Elementary School, in Madison, Wisconsin. Having read much of

the scientific research, Lovell remains convinced the benefits vaccines provide

to the public health outweigh any risks.

But more and more parents who are skeptical of that research are turning to

groups such as the National Vaccine Information Center, in Vienna, Virginia,

which continues to explore possible hazards of vaccines and educates people to

make their own decisions. The group's cofounder, Barbara Loe Fisher, argues

that our concerns must go beyond the good of the " herd. "

" I believe you cannot separate individual health from public health, " she says.

" We are at a point where one in five children is learning disabled. We cannot

say our public health is being served. "

Orr is a freelance writer based in San Francisco.

This article originally published on 5/27/2008

This article was also published in the June 2008 issue of Edutopia magazine

_______________________________________

Source URL:

http://www.edutopia.org/ health-child-vaccinations