Pro Vaccines Quotes

Perhaps there is something within the genetic make-up of specific individuals which predisposes them to accumulate and retain aluminium in their brain, as is similarly suggested for individuals with familial Alzheimer’s disease. The new evidence strongly suggests that aluminium is entering the brain in ASD via pro-inflammatory cells which have become loaded up with aluminium in the blood and/or lymph, much as has been demonstrated for monocytes at injection sites for vaccines including aluminium adjuvants. Perhaps we now have the putative link between vaccination and ASD, the link being the inclusion of an aluminium adjuvant in the vaccine.

Today, however, anti-vaccine activists go out of their way to claim that they are not anti-vaccine; they’re pro-vaccine. They just want vaccines to be safer. This is a much softer, less radical, more tolerable message, allowing them greater access to the media. However, because anti-vaccine activists today define safe as free from side effects such as autism, learning disabilities, attention deficit disorder, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, strokes, heart attacks, and blood clots—conditions that aren’t caused by vaccines—safer vaccines, using their definition, can never be made.

This is where conspiracy theories come in handy. It’s not just that vaccines cause autism; it’s that the medical and pharmaceutical industries are getting rich by destroying everyone’s families. It’s not just that pro-choicers have a different view on the biological status of a fetus; it’s that they’re soldiers sent by Satan to destroy good Christian families. It’s not just that climate change is a hoax; it’s that it’s a hoax created by the Chinese government to slow the U.S. economy and take over the world.37

In the 1980s, Australia had a few home-grown immunisation sceptics, although the great majority of parents immunised their children. In 1996, a film-maker made a supposedly scientific documentary for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). She interviewed people who were both pro- and anti-immunisation in equal numbers, ‘for balance’. She was pregnant with her first child, and concluded the documentary by saying that she had not yet decided whether or not to get her baby immunised. I was one of the doctors interviewed. When the documentary was shown in Australia it generated considerable debate and controversy. Two weeks later I was in Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea, and gave a presentation to the hospital about immunisation. A number of the audience told me they recognised me from the documentary, which had been shown that week on PNG television. They were puzzled as to why anyone would make such a film. Their wards were filled with children with severe tuberculosis, newborns dying from tetanus, and babies with severe rotavirus gastroenteritis, all preventable by immunisation. On their streets were people crippled forever by poliomyelitis. But Papua New Guinea did not have the money or the public health infrastructure to deliver vaccines effectively to its population. Papua New Guineans knew vaccines could prevent the devastating diseases they saw every day, and could not understand why anyone in Australia would dream of not immunising their child. Immunisation scepticism is very much a first-world problem.

In September 2020, a Daily Kos/Civiqs poll reported that over half of the Republicans surveyed believed either partially or mostly in QAnon’s theories . . . at least the theories they were aware of. Because tumble further down the QAnon rabbit hole, and you’ll find Satanic Panic–esque, flagrantly fascist beliefs that not every subscriber even knows about (at least not at first): theories about Jeffrey Epstein co-conspiring with Tom Hanks to molest hordes of minors, Hillary Clinton drinking the blood of children in order to prolong her life, the Rothschilds running a centuries-old ring of Satan worshippers, and beyond. But QAnon quickly grew to encapsulate much more than stereotypical far-right extremists. Take a soft turn to the left, and you’ll find a more outwardly palatable denomination of conspiritualists whose paranoias might be slightly less focused on Hillary Clinton worshipping Satan and more on Big Pharma forcing evil Western medicine on them and their kids. These believers wield a slightly different glossary of loaded terms, some co-opted from feminist politics—like “forced penetration” (which conflates vaccination with sexual assault) and “my body, my choice” (an antivaxx/anti-mask slogan purloined from the pro-choice movement). Because social media algorithms track people’s keywords in order to feed them only what they’re already interested in, a sprawling spiderweb of customized QAnon offshoots was able to form.

In May 2010, Wakefield and Walker-Smith were found guilty and had their medical licenses revoked. Murch was found not guilty. Wakefield is unrepentant. He has since published a book entitled Callous Disregard: Autism and Vaccines: The Truth Behind a Tragedy (2010) with an introduction by actress Jenny McCarthy. (McCarthy denies that she is anti-vaccine. She claims she is pro safe vaccine, yet she seems to think there is no such thing as a safe vaccine.)

Now fast-forward to present-day America. We have no more famines, and we’re constantly feasting on unlimited amounts of inexpensive food that is rich in carbohydrates. But our DNA still lives in the Stone Age, even if we don’t. Our genes haven’t had time to adapt to the Krispy Kreme doughnut generation. So if we eat too much on a regular basis, our cells pump out more and more insulin. As a result, we sock away more and more fat, and voila! We now have an obesity epidemic on our hands and that means a corresponding epidemic of silent inflammation. The very genes that saved us tens of thousands of years ago are now our biggest liability. The same is true of our ability to generate a strong inflammatory response. This was the only way to survive microbial or parasitic invasions. As recently as seventy years ago, we had very few weapons against infectious diseases except a strong inflammatory response to kill such organisms. All we could do was hope and pray that our immune system would protect us against these ravages. Picture the Norman Rockwell painting of the physician wringing his hands over the patient, hoping the fever would break. That’s the way medicine was practiced seventy years ago. Those of us with overactive immune systems had a better chance of survival than those with weaker immune defenses. Thus, we’ve inherited a genetic predisposition for an intense inflammatory response from our ancestors who were the only ones to survive these constant microbial attacks. Today, we are faced with far fewer infectious disease threats. Vaccinations, clean water, and increased sanitation have banished many of these microbes. What’s more, we have a whole arsenal of drugs to take against microbial infections. Unfortunately, we no longer need our genetic propensity for mounting an excessive inflammatory response. Yet, again, we are stuck with this propensity since our genes haven’t had time to evolve. This sets the stage for increased silent inflammation, which gets activated by our diet and lifestyle. Our dramatically increased intake of vegetable oils (rich in the building blocks for pro-inflammatory eicosanoids) and our decreased consumption of fish oil (rich in the building blocks for anti-inflammatory eicosanoids) is one dietary habit that has activated this inflammation. It’s like adding kerosene to the already burning fire of silent inflammation that’s fueled by the obesity epidemic.