You ARE Making a Difference! Many More Parents Are Refusing Vaccines!!

     

In 2008, 39 percent of parents became educated about vaccinations and refused or delayed vaccines for their children. This compares to just 22 percent in 2003.

The data comes from a telephone survey of the parents of 9,000 toddlers. Many of the parents were worried about whether the vaccines were safe or effective.

WebMD reports:

  • 27 percent said too many shots were recommended
  • 26 percent questioned whether vaccines really worked
  • 25 percent cited worries that vaccines might cause autism
  • 24 percent worried about side effects

Pediatric Academic Societies Meeting Vancouver, Canada May 1-4, 2010 Sources:

WebMD May 5, 2010

USA Today May 5, 2010

Dr. Mercola’s Comments:

The information train is moving full speed ahead, this time enlightening parents about the inherent risks of over-vaccinating their children!

The latest data presented at the Pediatric Academic Societies Meeting this month showed that many parents have MAJOR doubts about the value of childhood vaccinations. Many are questioning whether vaccinations can cause serious health problems and whether so many vaccines are really necessary in order to be healthy.

They simply are not convinced of the safety of vaccines. Most have not been tested adequately and there have been no long-term safety studies done.

It started with the swine flu campaign, when the clearly natural-medicine-prejudiced New York Times reported that,

"The popular Web site Mercola.com is urging parents not to get the flu vaccine …," with the result that the majority of parents are now planning to refuse to let their children get these shots.”

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Now, many more parents are seeking more information about vaccination and this website and the website of the National Vaccine Information Center at NVIC.org continues to play an important role in educating the public about vaccine safety concerns.

Together, we are making a difference! A difference that is likely saving people’s lives and preventing permanent and irreversible health consequences.

Parents’ Concerns are Spot On!

WebMD pointed out parents’ top reasons for delaying or avoiding vaccinations, which ranged from too many shots to concerns about efficacy and side effects, including autism. All of these are entirely reasonable and relevant.

The media would have you believe that those that refuse vaccines are ignorant but when you examine the facts, mothers with college educations and higher incomes are actually LESS likely to vaccinate their children than those with less education.

One 2006 study published in the American Journal of Public Health also found that children whose mothers have less than a high school education are 16 percent more likely to have received vaccinations than toddlers whose mothers have graduated college.

Of course, anyone, regardless of education or income level, is capable of making an educated decision about whether or not to vaccinate their children. But college-educated women are perhaps more likely to have read articles questioning vaccine safety – or at least to have heard about such controversies.

The growing trend of homeschooling, which is increasing at a rate of 7–10 percent a year, is also a sign that more parents may be opposed to the "mandatory" vaccine laws and understand that vaccinations are not the heavily promoted miracle cure-all that will keep their children from getting sick.

Avoiding vaccines is typically not the driving force behind this decision, but it does play a role for those who understand that vaccines carry the risk of serious side effects including brain inflammation. This can lead to various kinds of permanent brain dysfunction, including learning disabilities, ADD/ADHD, chronic seizure disorders, autism, mental retardation and even end in death.

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You Can Browse Through Vaccine Reactions Yourself

The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) is a national surveillance database to which anyone can post. It was established in 1986 under the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, which requires health professionals to report serious health problems, including hospitalizations, injuries and deaths, that occur after the administration of routinely recommended vaccines.

An important aspect of VAERS, however, is that anyone can both read and post vaccine adverse events to this database. So if your doctor discounts your concerns about vaccination (or afterward, if your child regresses or gets ill after a vaccine), you can verify or report them yourself – and people are doing just that in record numbers.

You can access VAERS here, or you can go to Medalarts.org, which provides an easy, powerful search engine for looking up specific reactions or vaccines in the VAERS database.

Medalerts also gives monthly analyses and yearly summaries for VAERS. For example, if you go to the January 2010 summary you can see that 2009 was a record-breaking year for the number of VAERS reports.

With over 70 vaccines included, VAERS is an excellent tool that can help you easily identify which vaccines are associated with the most side effects. It is important to know that only a tiny fraction of the reactions are actually reported, however. Studies have estimated that less than 10 percent, to as little as ONE percent of side effects are ever reported, so the true side effects are easily FAR higher than the statistics show.

Still, the VAERS database shows that, in the past three years, vaccine adverse reaction reports in general have shot through the roof.

Make an Informed Choice and Make Sure You Are Convinced of Vaccine SAFETY

The current vaccination schedule is a one-size-fits-all approach that has never been proven safe. And just about every year, one or more “new” vaccines are added to the already overloaded schedule.

As it stands, children are expected to get 48 doses of 14 vaccines by the time they’re just 6 years old. By age 18, federal public health officials say they should have gotten a total of 69 doses of 16 vaccines from day of birth to age 18.

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This “prescription” is the same for every U.S. child, even though it’s well known that all children are not the same biologically and some children will not be able to survive the currently recommended vaccine schedule without suffering serious harm to their health.

Please realize that the information is there for you to truly make an informed choice but your physician does not have the time or motivation to help you as they have been effectively brainwashed by the drug companies and most just don’t have the time to objectively analyze the data like you do.

Remember it is YOUR family that you are making the choices for. It is crucial that you do independent analysis of the data out there and make your own decision about the safety and see if the risks outweigh the benefits.

Life is full of risks. When you fly on a plane you choose to fly because you believe the risk of crashing is low enough to warrant the benefit of arriving someplace far away very quickly.

While the risk for some vaccines may be low, what many find when they examine this more carefully is that the benefit for many vaccines is virtually nonexistent, so why accept ANY risk??

Too Many Unanswered Questions

The FDA has assumed that there is no difference in giving a child one vaccine to giving them five, 10 or 14 all at once. They have simply chosen to ignore the fact that giving multiple vaccines at one time is, in fact, very different from giving just one.

Meanwhile, vaccine failures are becoming more apparent. Earlier this year, for instance, more than 1,000 people came down with the mumps, and almost all of them had been vaccinated! This begs the question of how effective the vaccine schedule really is, considering the MMR vaccine apparently does not always work as advertised.

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In this case, not only did these vaccinated individuals catch the mumps, but they also were spreading it, which means they were carriers. Vaccine manufacturers and profiteers often say that unvaccinated people carry disease, using it as a scare tactic. But vaccinated people can also be disease carriers, so this argument just does not hold up.

Then there was the revelation that Rotarix, another childhood vaccine for a disease that is mild in most U.S. children, was contaminated with DNA from a pig virus! This information came out after it had already been given to about 1 million U.S. children along with 30 million worldwide.

So to the public health officials who are scratching their heads, wondering why more parents are expressing doubt about a vaccine schedule that:

* Has never been tested for long-term safety * Causes serious and sometimes fatal reactions in some children * Is often ineffective

And for parents who are looking for the truth about vaccinations, you can continue your journey by searching this site and also visiting credible, reliable resources like the National Vaccine Information Center. I applaud you for taking the time to get educated and decide what’s best for the health and future welfare of your children.

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May 27, 2010