How would you feel if your healthy child died, or had a serious reaction to Gardasil? What would you expect to happen in terms of your concerns, and your “need-to-know”? How would you go about finding closure? What are the obstacles along this way?
PROBLEM NUMBER ONE: You.
How could that be?
Because one of the reasons you had Gardasil given to your child, (or any vaccine in the first place) was because you trusted your doctor, or the Ministry of Health’s information, that ‘this’ was in your child’s best interests. Maybe your daughter “made that decision” herself,… but … was it an informed decision, or was it the product of peer pressure?
You might not have done any independent research on the topic, because you might have assumed that were there any down sides, you would have been told about it, so any “down sides” didn’t exist.
Or….
You might have taken a cursory look on internet, and decided that all these mothers screaming about their Gardasil-damaged daughters were paranoid, neurotic and just looking for any excuse to explain away their child’s problems. After all, that’s what the medical associations are saying, and they wouldn’t tell lies would they?
Until it happened to your child...
Still trusting your doctor and thinking things will be different for you, you walk into the doctor’s surgery with your child expecting to be seriously listen to, handed a solution to a vaccine problem, (after all, doctors know how to fix everything don’t they?) and then for the doctor … to report the reaction to the Dunedin’s Center for Adverse Reactions Monitorring
Imagine your horror when you hear the first denial: “No, it can’t be anything to do with Gardasil, because we’ve been told there have been no serious reactions or deaths from Gardasil anywhere in the world” It doesn’t occur to you, that for the last two years, thousands of parents in the European Union, USA, UK, Canada, New Zealand and Australia have been told exactly the same thing. After all, you can’t admit to the first reaction, because then you’d have to admit to more, and “more” might become a flood.
You don’t know that in the medical literature there are a few case reports of diverse “events” after Gardasil, like anaphylaxis, lipotrophy, immune thrombocytopenia, pancreatitis… etc. But there are only a few reports, because most reactions do not, and will not get reported, because doctors won’t report something they administered, or it’s reaction, which they’ve been told can’t happen, so they believe it didn’t happen.
Your doctor refuses to listen to you, has no solution, and refuses to report your daughter’s reactionto CARM.
Worse, after two more visits, you are being looked at as parents, as if you have Munchausens; your child is “making it all up”, and really … the whole family has psychiatric problems! You soon realise your doctor’s surgery is a very dangerous place to be, and you are being treated like a pariah.
You go on line and do a serious google search and discover lots of articles all over the world, which intimately describe what you are experiencing right here in New Zealand. Let’s just take a few items from just one country, to give you a feel for what I mean:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/article6860078.ece
You realise that you fell right into an age old trap of believing that all doctors always have your best interests at heart and are always honest. (Some are, but you have to work out who is honest and who is not.)
What you have not realised is that vaccination is a sacred-cow dogma, which must be defended at all costs, no matter what. Probably you still don’t realise that, because you think that the problem is ONLY with Gardasil, because you don’t know all the other children who have had serious problems with other vaccines.
In what the medical profession would call the “War against disease”, vaccines are the magic bullets fired at the enemy by doctors, who in this battle, are the “soldiers”. A soldier is just that. A soldier. Who is told what he need to know, on a “need-to-know” basis and that is all.
A soldier does as his superior commander specifies. Further, his work contract, and professional mandate is based on policy from above, which is to vaccinate everyone as often as possible, without question as to need, safety or necessity. To decide to allow fully informed choices and let parents say no, is to be in breach of that contract, and will result, at the very least, in censure from above, if not termination of that contract.
“But”, you will say… “we have right of choice in New Zealand!”
Really? Oh yes, I forgot. That’s the theory.
But the practice is somewhat different. Most New Zealand provaccine parents are provaccine, because everyone else does it, and they assume that those glossy pamphlets and the immunisation handbook (if they even know it exists) tells them everything they need to know.
It doesn’t occur to most parents that vaccination is a hugely complex issue, involving understanding disease, immunology, toxicology etc, which just a few doctors spend many years specialising in, only to discover that science can’t explain far more than what it can explain. But they don’t tell you that. If the medical profession allows a few people to spend many years, trying to understand just a tiny bit of what they do know, and at the same time, gasping at what they don’t, .. why do parents think a glossy pamphlet will be enough for them to make an "informed choice"?
Ah yes. The old mechanic analogy, which medical people are so fond of spouting. You take your car to a mechanic and trust them to fix it, and you don’t question them. Right?
Except that the mechanic can keep on going replacing parts, ad nauseum, until your car is fixed, and you don’t pay until they get it right. It’s not quite that easy with the body is it? So your child is now feeling whacked and run over by a road roller after Gardasil, so what spare part will the doctor order? For a start the doctor just mightn’t have a clue which “part” of the body Gardasil has smacked around. He might not even have a clue what is in the vaccine for a start. After all, he too trusted the “specialists” up high, and took their word for it. And this is the “expert” you were trusting.
Ironically most doctors have no idea they are “contracted soldiers”, because they have gone through such a thorough conditioning process that they don’t realise that there is a whole world of medical information in their own literature, which they haven’t been told about, and neither have they thought to find for themselves, because … you don’t look for something you don’t think exists.
This is the first problem that you as a parent have to grapple with.
The fact is that the trust you laid in the hands of the doctor is misplaced, because YOU are the one who is living with the consequences now, not him.
Where to now?
continued in Part Two.