Shortly into my pregnancy with Harrison, Jeremy and I were faced with the beginnings of the decision whether or not to have him receive any vaccinations, like any other parent. The first form of this decision came when I was provided information about receiving the flu shot while Harrison was still in my womb (after all, anything I received, he would receive as well.) It ended up being a very simple decision, and I declined. The package insert on the flu vaccines clearly states that they have never been tested on pregnant or nursing women. Decision made. Here are the package inserts from four variations of the flu vaccine: 1, 2, this particular insert specifically states that the safety and effectiveness has never been tested on pregnant or nursing women and pregnant women who receive it should be added to a particular registry, presumably so that reactions can be tracked since the product hasn't been tested for that demographic before being put on the market: 3, 4.
I don’t remember if the Tdap was offered to me while I was pregnant, but I know that if I had been meeting with an OB in a general hospital setting, it definitely would have been, and I would have turned that down as well. My body was working so hard to grow a tiny human, and I didn’t want anything getting in the way of my body’s natural health. Not to mention that section 8 of the Adacel insert clearly states “It is not known whether Adacel vaccine can cause fetal harm when administered to a pregnant woman or can affect reproduction capacity. Adacel vaccine should be given to a pregnant woman only if clearly needed.” (5) The same goes for BOOSTRIX (6), and both inserts mention a registry to add the names of pregnant receivers to. Putting something unnatural into my body that has not been properly tested for my demographic, and/or has not withstood the test of time, was not and is not something that I am comfortable with.
So anyway, enough about me. What about my newborn baby?
Declining the vitamin K shot at birth was an easy decision- that injection has a black box warning (7), explicitly stating that it has caused "severe reactions, including fatalities." Harrison did, however, receive a few oral doses of vitamin K on a schedule prescribed by our midwives, who continued their in-home care through 6 weeks post-partum. Having that support was instrumental in the confidence we had in Harrison's overall health- vaccines or not. (For what it's worth, we also declined the eye ointment, erythromycin, that is standard for newborns, since it is given to prevent the transmission of an STD from mother to baby and we had no worries about that. We also easily declined the standard Hepatitis B shot since the only ways Hep B can be transmitted are through shared needles or sex.)
Jeremy and I initially decided to wait on making a solid vaccine decision until Harrison was 18 months old. That age was based on my mistaken knowledge that the blood-brain barrier closes right around that time, and so in my mind and in my early thoughts, that meant the vaccine ingredients wouldn’t have access to Harrison’s brain if he received them after he turned 18 months old. In that year and a half of waiting/researching, I found differing information that the blood-brain barrier is closed at birth or that it closes at three years. So admittedly I was mistaken, but thanks to that mistake I was granted more time to search and research and I learned about two tricky ingredients that are in many vaccines- Polysorbate 20 and Polysorbate 80. These ingredients purposefully OPEN the blood-brain barrier and allow for the flow of other ingredients into the brain (8). That was more than enough to give me pause. What were we allowing into the brains of our healthy children?
The CDC has a handy PDF that lists the ingredients in vaccines (9). I was surprised, in perusing that list, to find ingredients like aluminum, MSG, formaldehyde, and monkey kidney cells, to name a few.
I stopped using aluminum to cook with years ago, and stopped using deodorant with aluminum years before that. Aluminum is a known neurotoxin. (10) It builds up in the body and can cause inflammation and can take years and years and years to filter out, if it does at all. (11, also in 10) Inflammation anywhere in the body can lead to an entire host of issues. (12) High levels of aluminum have been found in the brains of Alzheimer's patients. (13) Additionally, it is interesting to note that the FDA has mandated that the highest amount of aluminum allowed in IV bags is 25mcg per liter (14), yet vaccines have anywhere between 125-850mcg of aluminum in one dose. One example is Pediarix (15), one of the options for Dtap, which is given “as early as 6 weeks old.” You can scroll down to line 405 to see that it contains 0.85mg of aluminum, or 850mcg. That said, I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of having even trace amounts of aluminum injected into my baby and giving it full access to his body, including his brain. (16)
MSG is something else I already purposefully avoid in my day-to-day life, so why would I give it access to the bloodstream of my child? MSG is also a known neurotoxin and thankfully it has gotten a bad rap, finally, over the past little while. The glutamate in MSG is an excitotoxin. Here is a study that states “glutamate excitotoxicity has been implicated widely in the pathogenesis of a range of neurological diseases including Alzheimer’s disease and Huntington’s disease.” In this study it was successfully used to kill off stem cell neurons. (17) Here is some information about what can happen in the brain when neurons die: 18.
I don’t remember if the Tdap was offered to me while I was pregnant, but I know that if I had been meeting with an OB in a general hospital setting, it definitely would have been, and I would have turned that down as well. My body was working so hard to grow a tiny human, and I didn’t want anything getting in the way of my body’s natural health. Not to mention that section 8 of the Adacel insert clearly states “It is not known whether Adacel vaccine can cause fetal harm when administered to a pregnant woman or can affect reproduction capacity. Adacel vaccine should be given to a pregnant woman only if clearly needed.” (5) The same goes for BOOSTRIX (6), and both inserts mention a registry to add the names of pregnant receivers to. Putting something unnatural into my body that has not been properly tested for my demographic, and/or has not withstood the test of time, was not and is not something that I am comfortable with.
So anyway, enough about me. What about my newborn baby?
Declining the vitamin K shot at birth was an easy decision- that injection has a black box warning (7), explicitly stating that it has caused "severe reactions, including fatalities." Harrison did, however, receive a few oral doses of vitamin K on a schedule prescribed by our midwives, who continued their in-home care through 6 weeks post-partum. Having that support was instrumental in the confidence we had in Harrison's overall health- vaccines or not. (For what it's worth, we also declined the eye ointment, erythromycin, that is standard for newborns, since it is given to prevent the transmission of an STD from mother to baby and we had no worries about that. We also easily declined the standard Hepatitis B shot since the only ways Hep B can be transmitted are through shared needles or sex.)
Jeremy and I initially decided to wait on making a solid vaccine decision until Harrison was 18 months old. That age was based on my mistaken knowledge that the blood-brain barrier closes right around that time, and so in my mind and in my early thoughts, that meant the vaccine ingredients wouldn’t have access to Harrison’s brain if he received them after he turned 18 months old. In that year and a half of waiting/researching, I found differing information that the blood-brain barrier is closed at birth or that it closes at three years. So admittedly I was mistaken, but thanks to that mistake I was granted more time to search and research and I learned about two tricky ingredients that are in many vaccines- Polysorbate 20 and Polysorbate 80. These ingredients purposefully OPEN the blood-brain barrier and allow for the flow of other ingredients into the brain (8). That was more than enough to give me pause. What were we allowing into the brains of our healthy children?
The CDC has a handy PDF that lists the ingredients in vaccines (9). I was surprised, in perusing that list, to find ingredients like aluminum, MSG, formaldehyde, and monkey kidney cells, to name a few.
I stopped using aluminum to cook with years ago, and stopped using deodorant with aluminum years before that. Aluminum is a known neurotoxin. (10) It builds up in the body and can cause inflammation and can take years and years and years to filter out, if it does at all. (11, also in 10) Inflammation anywhere in the body can lead to an entire host of issues. (12) High levels of aluminum have been found in the brains of Alzheimer's patients. (13) Additionally, it is interesting to note that the FDA has mandated that the highest amount of aluminum allowed in IV bags is 25mcg per liter (14), yet vaccines have anywhere between 125-850mcg of aluminum in one dose. One example is Pediarix (15), one of the options for Dtap, which is given “as early as 6 weeks old.” You can scroll down to line 405 to see that it contains 0.85mg of aluminum, or 850mcg. That said, I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of having even trace amounts of aluminum injected into my baby and giving it full access to his body, including his brain. (16)
MSG is something else I already purposefully avoid in my day-to-day life, so why would I give it access to the bloodstream of my child? MSG is also a known neurotoxin and thankfully it has gotten a bad rap, finally, over the past little while. The glutamate in MSG is an excitotoxin. Here is a study that states “glutamate excitotoxicity has been implicated widely in the pathogenesis of a range of neurological diseases including Alzheimer’s disease and Huntington’s disease.” In this study it was successfully used to kill off stem cell neurons. (17) Here is some information about what can happen in the brain when neurons die: 18.
Also of note in that study- the stem cell line used was derived from human embryos. Science is full of moral questions- what should be allowed or acceptable and what should not. It can be tricky, especially as I believe our culture today is so far from any type of conservatism that it seems as though anything goes, and if you disagree you are ostracized. I’m not here to argue about stem cell research. I simply bring it up to lead to the next two vaccine ingredients I found to be questionable- WI-38 (19), MRC-5 (20).
These are cell lines derived from aborted fetal cells.
And there's where I draw a firm line.
I am pro-life and this is something I cannot stand for. The Vatican has hesitantly decided it is okay (21), but the Vatican is not my God. And for the argument that these particular abortions happened so many years ago that it no longer matters? Don’t even get me started on that, and realize that regardless, there are continually more of these cells being developed the same way. Most recently, there is Wal Vax 2, developed in China as a hopeful replacement for the rapidly declining MRC-5. Wal Vax 2 comes from one of nine aborted babies purposefully born alive in the sac and dismembered alive in order to harvest their organs while there was still life in them. (22) That's one case, and you can check out the Canadian Journal of Medical Science, Vol. 30, pg 231-245 if you want to read some gut-wrenching accounts of early gestation human embryos arriving in labs with their hearts still beating. If the future of our world is on the backs of the unborn who aren’t given a chance to live in it, count me out.
Questionable morality aside, no tests have been done on the safety of fragmented DNA being injected into our bodies, and there is plenty of anecdotal information about the negative effects these ingredients have on us. Some hold the argument that since they are the host material for growing the virus or bacteria used to make the vaccine they don't end up in the actual vaccine. This argument is invalid, as stated on the CDC's website. "Vaccines also may contain very small amounts of the culture material used to grow the virus or bacteria used in the vaccine." (23)
Additional culture materials used to grow viruses and bacteria for vaccines, and consequently ending up in the vaccines themselves, include monkey kidney cells, bovine serum, Vero cells (from the African green monkey), chicken eggs, human albumin, insect cells, canine kidney cells, and mouse brains, to name a few. (24) While I'm on the topic, do some research in to the SV40 virus, which is an emerging pathogen that is associated with three different cancers and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Did you know that up to 30 million adults and children in the United States may have been exposed to SV40 from 1955-1963 due to contaminated polio vaccines? These vaccines were grown on kidney cells from rhesus monkeys, and these monkeys are often naturally infected with the SV40 virus. The Institute of Medicine concluded that “the biological evidence is of moderate strength that SV40 exposure from the polio vaccine is related to SV40 infection in humans.” (25) Moderately-strengthned evidence is enough to give me pause and wonder what else could be accidentally passed through vaccines via the culture material they were grown on.
And since I am on the topic of the role that animal ingredients play in vaccines, any hardcore vegans or animal rights activists need to also look up the link between vaccine-making and the blood of horseshoe crabs. One image of the process will chill you to the bone, it’s certainly one I’ve not been able to get out of my mind.
After coming across all of the above information, I had to keep looking. As a resident in California, not vaccinating is a HUGE deal. There are plenty of us who do not, but for that decision, our children are currently denied the right to an education in public or private school. (26) This is abhorrently ridiculous, but not the purpose of this blog post. It was just one more consideration in our research journey.
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| This one's for you, California. Proudly displayed outside the city hall in Culver City. |
With further research, I learned about the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program that was established in 1986 through the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, passed by Congress. This Act was put in to place when vaccine makers were being sued by parents for vaccine injury and the parents were WINNING these lawsuits. It was established so that vaccine makers have ZERO liability for the vaccines they produce. Zero. In an age where McDonald’s is liable for its scalding hot coffee, or an airline can be sued for an itinerary mixup that was the patron’s fault (27), vaccine makers cannot be touched. That really feels ridiculous, especially combined with the Supreme Court’s agreement that vaccines are “unavoidably unsafe.” (28)
When vaccine injuries occur, the NVICP takes care of legal assessment and determines payouts (29). The money from these payouts comes from the vaccine tax- that is, $0.75 cents per vaccine administered to anyone in the United States goes into a fund to compensate families who have experienced vaccine injury (and then pressed on for years through legal battles to get their due- money that may ease some burdens, but they never get their whole children back.) So did you catch that? It is the consumers of vaccines who compensate for vaccine injury- every time have a vaccine administered, you are paying $0.75 towards that pool of money because vaccine makers have no liability for their product. Having zero liability for a product as widespread as vaccines seems very dangerous to me. There are vaccines out there that have been "fast-tracked," that is to say, they were regarded as safe long before their trial period was over, and so immediately put on the market. Gardasil is one of those vaccines (30), and it is one of the most hotly debated- Japan, France, and India have either withdrawn their recommendation for the
I find the ingredients in vaccines truly troubling, and have seen or read about far too many reactions- however "small" or large they are. My brother recently reacted to doses of MMR and DPT- two vaccines that his school claimed were mandatory (they were not, Pennsylvania has the option of personal, medical, and religious exemptions), and used bullying tactics for weeks to ensure he received both vaccines. Both injection sites got very red, hot, and hard for about three days. He was very fatigued and collapsed on the floor after coming home from school the next day after track practice- his body had become very inflamed overnight as he slept, so when he went to school in the morning my parents had no idea how bad it was. This is my brother who is incredibly physically tough and rarely complains about pain. He was sick on and off for three weeks after those vaccines and slept constantly. Additionally, I have a friend whose first child reacted with eczema almost immediately after the second round of shots (4 months old) and had a fever. After continuing to vaccinate on schedule, food allergies started cropping up at 1.5 years- first to dairy, then to some nuts. Their second child had only one shot- Dtap at 9 months old- and developed a huge welt at the injection site. This family at that point decided to stop vaccinating because they became far more fearful of vaccine reactions than they were of the illnesses the vaccines were meant to prevent.
Every vaccine insert provides a list of potential reactions, check it out next time you're at a well-baby visit, or better yet check it out online before you go. These reactions range from fevers to seizures to anaphylaxis to inconsolable crying to Guillain-Barre syndrome to fainting to headaches to injection site pain and/or swelling to asthma to nausea to joint pain to coming down with the disease the vaccine was created to prevent to Pancreatitis to Vasculitis to arthritis to myalgia to encephalitis, to SIDS (yes, death) and on and on and on- vaccine reactions are real. (Too many references to link to, I just looked up numerous vaccine inserts for typical childhood vaccines and wrote verbatim what was listed under the "adverse reactions" sections. Typically this is section six of the inserts.)
Every vaccine insert provides a list of potential reactions, check it out next time you're at a well-baby visit, or better yet check it out online before you go. These reactions range from fevers to seizures to anaphylaxis to inconsolable crying to Guillain-Barre syndrome to fainting to headaches to injection site pain and/or swelling to asthma to nausea to joint pain to coming down with the disease the vaccine was created to prevent to Pancreatitis to Vasculitis to arthritis to myalgia to encephalitis, to SIDS (yes, death) and on and on and on- vaccine reactions are real. (Too many references to link to, I just looked up numerous vaccine inserts for typical childhood vaccines and wrote verbatim what was listed under the "adverse reactions" sections. Typically this is section six of the inserts.)
We all know that there is an ever-growing schedule of childhood vaccines to be given at birth, 2 months, 4 months, 6 months, et cetera until 18 years old. This is actually a huge issue, because the schedule assumes that every child is at the same level of health, the same level of development, and has the same exact capabilities to process each vaccine. This schedule doesn't take into account family history of autoimmune diseases or vaccine reactions, and it doesn't take into account gene mutations that cause the body's detoxification system to function less than optimally. There is plenty of information out there about the MTHFR gene and the havoc vaccines can especially wreak on a person with this gene mutation. Vaccines are not a one size fit all procedure, much as we are told that they are.
Harrison was born in great health and has stayed healthy. He's never taken conventional medicine, and he has had an illness only a small handful of times in his two years of life. The very first time he was sick he was nine months old. It was after a trip to the emergency room to drain an abscess- and I attribute the low grade fever and lethargy he experienced over the course of the next twelve hours to the stress of the ER visit coupled with likely picking up the illness there. Another time he was sick he had chicken pox- caught from his cousins who were visiting from Northern Ireland, and I was ecstatic that he got it so early. It was so mild it didn't even bother him, and he is now almost guaranteed to have lifelong immunity to it. He was also sick just the other weekend, with the highest fever I've ever seen in him- 101.7- and some intestinal distress and lots of fatigue. Breastfeeding and rest got him right back on track after two days. His immune system is perfectly strong enough on its own to fight off illness, and we have a network of care providers we trust implicitly should anything more serious ever come up.
Harrison was born in great health and has stayed healthy. He's never taken conventional medicine, and he has had an illness only a small handful of times in his two years of life. The very first time he was sick he was nine months old. It was after a trip to the emergency room to drain an abscess- and I attribute the low grade fever and lethargy he experienced over the course of the next twelve hours to the stress of the ER visit coupled with likely picking up the illness there. Another time he was sick he had chicken pox- caught from his cousins who were visiting from Northern Ireland, and I was ecstatic that he got it so early. It was so mild it didn't even bother him, and he is now almost guaranteed to have lifelong immunity to it. He was also sick just the other weekend, with the highest fever I've ever seen in him- 101.7- and some intestinal distress and lots of fatigue. Breastfeeding and rest got him right back on track after two days. His immune system is perfectly strong enough on its own to fight off illness, and we have a network of care providers we trust implicitly should anything more serious ever come up.
There are so many more arguments for and against vaccines, and this post could go on and on. If you have any questions about anything I haven't written about above, please ask. My sources and knowledge expand past what I've written above, I have just tried to keep it concise (and yes it's still gone on a bit long). It is worth noting that I could write an entire blog post about why we are NOT fearful of the diseases that vaccines have been made to prevent, and that was obviously one more consideration in this family decision. It is also worth noting that if Harrison (or Jer or I) are sick, we let people know before hanging out with them, much like any decent human should do. We can't get people sick any more than anyone who is fully vaccinated can. If we are sick, of course we can potentially get others sick. If we aren't sick, we aren't spreading disease. On the flip side, the argument could actually be put forth that someone who is recently vaccinated with a live virus vaccine AND someone who has not been vaccinated can be an asymptomatic carrier of the disease- unknowingly spreading it to others. (31)
All of the above information accounts for a few years of research on my part. I intend to continually learn and educate myself about vaccines; making a decision to not vaccinate any member of our family was a large-scale decision, and I want to always be armed with knowledge that supports this decision- for my benefit and for the benefit of those around me. I used to be concerned about telling people my thoughts on vaccination, but as I've learned more and more and have become more solid in this decision that we've made as a family, I've realized that I WANT people to know. And I want questions about it, and productive conversation. I purposefully cited sources only from the CDC, FDA, and scientific papers for this post. I have stated the facts as they are stated on these websites. My sources are linked accordingly throughout this post, but a comprehensive list of the sources is listed below.
1: https://www.fda.gov/downloads/BiologicsBloodVaccines/Vaccines/ApprovedProducts/UCM263239.pdf#page13