Manufactured consent

The primary “public health alert” in the US is a so-called public good that focuses on vaccinations. Big Pharma is the largest advertiser today, the number-one lobbyist in Washington D.C., and donates twice what oil and gas give to our politicians—four times as much as defense and aeronautic contractors. Payoffs drive policies. Government mandated vaccinations are an appalling example of manufactured “choice” and maternal degradation.

In his speech on corruption within the CDC’s vaccine division, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. identified the vaccination crusade as “the most misogynist movement that I have seen in my lifetime. It is a movement that is anti-mother and it is anti-woman” (“Unchecked Power,” Pathways to Family Wellness, 47, 2015, 14). The philosophical and practical implications of mandating “choice” effectively strip parents of our right and responsibility to care for our children.

Eradication of health freedom

Parens patriae is a little-known doctrine that, according to the CDC, the state has the right to assert authority over child welfare. Compulsory vaccination both reinforces institutionalized sexism and represents a totalizing eradication of the individual freedoms that supposedly defines US democracy.

“It lays bare the reality that we do not have health freedom in this country” (Louise Kuo Habakus. “Every Last One: How to Force Total Vaccine Compliance by Controlling the Conversation and Eliminating Choice,” Wise Traditions. Volume 16 Number 2 Summer 2015, 57): 53-59).

State governments defy international codes of ethics, such as the Nuremberg Code and UNESCO’s Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights, that prohibit coercive medical procedures of any kind, including vaccination. The US national “Well-Child Program” penalizes pediatricians who do not fulfill their annual quota of vaccinated clients. The British government gives physicians financial incentives to maintain high vaccination administration, including monetary bonuses given for vaccine rates higher than 70 to 90 percent.

Several years prior to Governor Brown signing SB277 that mandated all vaccinations for all children attending public school in California, Professor William Wagner, JD of ParentalRights.org wrote:

To evaluate state action that has an impact on parental decisions, the state replaces self-evident, unalienable standards with its own morally relative, utilitarian assessments. [P]arents are told that questions regarding vaccination laws are public policy matters for the government to decide. … When the government eliminates a self-evident moral element from the law, it removes any moral reference point with which to measure whether laws are right or wrong, good or bad, just or unjust. …Replacing the sacred parental right to responsibly determine a child’s medical treatment with dictatorial government mandates inevitably erodes a country’s essential foundations. …The government is supposed to protect parents’ freedoms, not seize them” (“God, Government, and Parental Rights,” Vaccine Epidemic: How Corporate Greed, Biased Science, and Coercive Government Threaten our Human Rights, Our Health, and Our Children, Center for Personal Rights, New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2011: 55-57).

Targeting America’s most vulnerable

The poorest sectors of society (disproportionately black, single mothers) are severely punished if they do not conform. Consequences for those who attempt to exercise their health care freedom of choice through non-compliance include:

• • reduced or denied Women Infant Children (WIC) vouchers;
  • litigation;
  • refused admittance to public school for even partially vaccinated (let alone fully unvaccinated) children; and
  • now increasingly, court-ordered vaccination of children against parents’ will.

In divorce court, my colleague unexpectedly discovered that she would be accused of being a negligent mother and would lose custody of her daughter if she opted out of vaccinations. Ironically, being a “decent American citizen” meant going against everything she had learned from numerous scientific studies about vaccine-reactions—she vaccinated her daughter.

All economic classes are subject to being ostracized by their peers who have internalized pharmaceutical fear-tactics. Mothers who question these strategies do not constitute a flight from the democratic process, but rather encourage educated decisions.

Once you become aware…

Consider:

• • The term “immunization” inaccurately implies that the vaccinated individual is immune.

• • The childhood vaccine program is arguably more dangerous than it used to be. Many, many more are given (see below). And there is the synergistic effect of all the other toxic chemicals and heavy metals that today’s children are exposed to in the air, water, and their food.

• • Adjuvants (preservatives added to vaccines to stimulate an immune response without which the vaccines would not work) are more damaging to the child’s body than the disease against which the vaccination is being injected. Dangers include chemicals intended to cross the blood-brain barrier (BBB) (all of which are tested, proven and explicitly labeled as hazardous, toxic, carcinogenic, causing genetic mutations, and/or reversing neurological growth).

• • We can analyze the safety of each of numerous ingredients (adjuvants) in each vaccine. For example, mercury can be labeled as “removed,” when in fact “trace” amounts remain. The following statistics represent this “trace”:

– Amount of mercury in liquid waste considered toxic by EPA: 200 ppb;
– Amount of mercury in large predator fish: 700 ppb;
– Amount of mercury in “thimersosal-free” vaccines: 2000 ppb;
– Amount of mercury in some single-dose and some infant flu shots: 25,000 ppb;
– Amount of mercury in multi-dose flu vaccines, given to pregnant women: 50,000 ppb;
– Amount of mercury that kills human neuroblastoma cells: 0.5 ppb;
– Increase in fetal deaths associated with mercury in the swine flu shot given to pregnant women: 4250 percent.

• • Just five years ago it was policy never to vaccinate a pregnant woman. Now, because this population is a growth area for the pharmaceutical industry, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are targeting pregnant women. Pregnant women are now encouraged to receive five and sometimes more vaccines that contain aluminum, mercury, formaldehyde, MSG, polysorbate, and additional additives. 2009-2010 was a pandemic year during which two influenza vaccines were administered to numerous pregnant women with an accompanying huge spike in fetal deaths.

• • Vaccinating infants (before the age of two) and combination vaccines like the MMRII (measles, mumps, rubella) “three-in-one” live virus vaccine containing the synergistically neurotoxic glutamate) administered in one doctor’s visit are primary factors leading to vaccine injuries and fatalities. Newborns, babies, and children receive up to 10 vaccines per visit.

• • From January 2014 to December 2015, there were 77,087 reports of adverse reactions to the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS), 17,203 ER visits, and 529 deaths. The CDC admits that underreporting is one of the main limitations of VAERS. Vaccine casualties consistently lead to damage of the nervous, respiratory, immune, and digestive systems. Neurological damage includes: motor function deficits, learning disabilities, allergies, ADHD, impaired immune function, auto-immune disease, anaphylactic shock, and encephalopathy. Every year many thousands of people living in the US have a serious adverse effect from a vaccine. At the same time, the number of state mandated shots is increasing. The FDA and CDC have yet to conduct studies that are independent from the pharmaceutical industry.

• • 54% of children in the US suffer from autoimmune disease or neuro-developmental disability which science links to the ingredients in vaccines.

• • Over 270 vaccines are currently in development for adults and children.

• • The 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act protects pharmaceutical manufacturers and those who administer vaccines from financial or legal liability for vaccine injuries and death, thereby securing infinite consumers for the vaccine market and eliminating “the most important consumer protection for safer vaccination” (Kuo Habakus 58).

• • The worldwide pharmaceutical market exceeds $1 trillion and is massively profitable. The top 11 drug firms made over $711 billion in the last decade (a 62% increase).  The global vaccine market, which tallied $10 billion in 2005 revenues, exceeded $41 billion last year.

CDC “recommended” (increasingly required) vaccine schedule:

By 15 months of age:
1983: 11 doses of 4 vaccines
2016: 35 doses of 14 vaccines

By sixth birthday:
1983: 22 doses of 7 vaccines
2016: 48 doses of 14 vaccines

By eighteenth birthday:
1983: 23 doses of 8 vaccines
2016: 70 doses of 16 vaccines

Connecting the dots

In his video, Nature, Nurture, and the Biology of Love: The Biology of Conscious Parenting, epigeneticist and developmental biologist Bruce Lipton PhD urges us to remember: “[Y]ou are personally responsible for everything in your life, once you become aware that you are personally responsible for everything in your life. One cannot be “guilty” or be “blamed” for being a poor parent unless one was already aware of the above-described information and disregarded it. Once you become aware of this information, you can begin to apply it to reprogram your behavior” (The Biology of Belief, New York: Hay House, 2005, 147).

Choices to defend our bodies and those of our children encourage cooperation and enable women to relearn how to trust our self-knowledge.

Cara Judea Alhadeff, PhD is Visiting Professor of Gender and Critical Pedagogy at UC Santa Cruz. She is a scholar, visual artist, and Iyengar yoga teacher. Alhadeff’s transdisciplinary book, Viscous Expectations: Justice, Vulnerability, The Ob-scene (Penn State University Press, 2014) explores vulnerability as a strategy for social justice. She has published essays in philosophy, art, sexuality, social ecology, medical ethics, and ethnic studies’ journals and international anthologies. As co-founder of “Occupy Education, Pregnancy, Parenting” and co-organizer for the Bay Area’s First International Birth Justice Fair, Alhadeff has collaboratively protested infrastructural racism and sexism in education, health care, and housing. Her analog photographs have been publicly defended by Freedom of Speech organizations such as the Electronic Freedom Foundation, artsave/People for the American Way, and the ACLU. Cara lives with her son, Zazu, in New Hampshire. See her writing, photography, videos, and body consciousness work on CaraJudea.com and CaraJudea.com/yoga.