For the first time, Sandra Davis deigned to look at Mark. “Just what exactly do you expect such an observational study to find?”
“Perhaps nothing. Perhaps something. Be it as it may, a plethora of anecdotes instilled in me a reasonable doubt. And given the stakes involved, I want us to get to the bottom of it, once and for all. Repeated requests for such a study have been made for many many years.”
“And what are those things you fancy you may find?” the woman persisted. She crossed her legs, and her eyes focused on him.
“That the vaccinated have significantly higher rates of ADHD, processing disorders, learning disabilities, and neurological disorders such as autism.”
“Ah, the old chestnut: autism.”
“Fancy that,” Dr. Mark shot back. “Fancy the possibility vaccines are a contributing factor. Fancy the possibility that aluminum nanoparticles slowly accumulate in the brain, resulting in its permanent state of inflammation in those predisposed and are repeatedly injected with this neurotoxin metal at critical brain developmental stages.”
He gave Sandra a mocking glance. “Bluetongue-infected sheep were administered aluminum-based vaccine prior. Oh, yes.” He was nodding his head. “Farmers in Spain have been reporting that some vaccinated sheep were going off on their own, disoriented. They compulsively bit and tore wool of other sheep and manifested a repetitive behavior. Does any of this ring a bell at all?”
“Anything else?” she asked crisply.
“As a matter of fact, yes. I suspect such a study will find that the vaccinated have higher rates of autoimmune disorders.” And higher rates of asthma, and allergies, and eczema, and arthritis.
She snorted in derision.
Dr. Mark looked at her. “A barrage of immune-stimulating agents injected into an immature immune system—what can go wrong?” He inspected his fingernails. “Not a cheerful possibility to entertain in light of the spread of Candida auris, a drug-resistant fungus that poses a deadly threat to people with a weakened immune system.”
Sandra Davis stared at some point on the far wall.
“It is all about the right of the individual to make an informed choice,” Dr. Mark said.
She was back. “I think not. Not when your choice can directly impact the life of another: be it a pregnant woman, a child with leukemia, or an infant who is too young to be vaccinated. With community immunity, you protect them from possible severe complications and even death.”
“You refer to the concept where if enough people are vaccinated—at least in the case of attenuated vaccines—it reduces, or eliminates, the pathogen’s chain of transmission, hence the chance of the microbe reaching the truly vulnerable are vanishingly small.” The much-vaunted vaccine-induced herd immunity. Something about it did not add up. Such as the waning of immunity after a number of years. At any rate, an acellular vaccine such as for the whooping cough did not break the chain of transmission of a microbe but only spared the individual from the nastier expressions of the disease. And might’ve shed and infect unsuspecting others while at it.
Sandra Davis inclined her head. “We can argue about the number of people left unharmed, but the principle holds irrespective of the numbers. Even one life you snuff out or seriously injure through your choice is one too many.”
“Yes, provided vaccination does not pose a risk of serious harm or death. But we know this is not the case. The possibility of death or severe injury from these drugs, rare as it may be, is beyond dispute, as is attested by the compensation paid out by the government each year and the possible adverse effects listed in the printed inserts that come with the vaccines. You are surely not suggesting a parent will play Russian roulette and risk the health or life of their child, by vaccinating him, for the sake of a hypothetical vulnerable other. In a free society, you cannot potentially sacrifice the health of one child on the altar of potentially preserving the health of another. Where there is a risk, there has to be a choice.”
Davis brushed aside what he’d said. She jiggled her foot caught in her own thoughts. “Granted, true community immunity has not been achieved, yet. Which is why we push not only to make vaccination compulsory for children, but to have cradle to grave, repeated vaccination for all, children and adults alike.”
Dr. Mark visibly winced at that, recalling recent reports of pharma lobbyists frequenting the corridors of power, knocking on doors, shaking hands, making new friends. They were there to hand out copy-pasted bills the people in their home office drafted and to marshal support for new kind of vaccine legislation. Germany, Italy, California, New South Wales…it was a global campaign. This woman may nominally have worked for some government agency or another, but in fact, she was just a pharma-whore.
Sandra Davis released a long-suffering sigh. “Even if that proposed study of yours would have uncovered some adverse effects among a significant number of vaccinated people, this on its own does not mean that, overall, a national vaccination program is a net deficit.”
“For once, I concur,” said Dr. Mark, he glanced at the commissioner and Aratta and found them studying him and Sandra Davis.
The woman narrowed her eyes, leery. “I want to be clear about what I am saying here. The unvaccinated child in an otherwise heavily vaccinated area benefits from community immunity and in some cases may appear to have done better than his peers. The people who chose not to be vaccinated are getting the benefits of the people who are. To compare the pros and cons need to consider a situation where no one is vaccinated or everyone is.” Sandra Davis plowed on, “To give you a sense of what I am talking about, close to three hundred thousand people die each year from pertussis in the developing world.”
Dr. Mark broke into a hard, bitter laugh. “You speak of severely malnourished people, some of whom are so depleted of protein their body cannot even produce the crucial albumin, and fluids leak from blood vessels. Of course, they die of diarrhea and measles and a lot more.” He continued, “Instead of injecting the malnourished with your microbial and metal-chemical brew, they may be better off if you spend that money on latrines, clean running water, food refrigeration, and protein, even powdered protein.”
Sandra Davis flushed. She was not used to being contradicted and did not take well to it. “All right then, let’s consider developed countries. We went down from many thousands of whooping cough fatalities per year in the era before vaccination to a handful.” She held up her hands. “Come to think of it, what you are contemplating here is unethical, and I won’t be a party to this discussion, lest I inadvertently lend it credibility and be complicit.” She stood, anger blazing in her eyes. “I don’t care what you have to say. Vaccines are safe, effective, and save millions of lives.”
“Please. Spare me your recitation of the Vaccine Mantra!”
“Show me research proving vaccines to cause harm!” she snarled.
“Who the hell will conduct such research—and throw his career away?” Now he also was raising his voice. “And who in hell will grant funds for such research—and risk not getting that new Pharma-funded building on campus? So who’s left to do the research? Certainly not those industry-captured regulatory agencies, those cesspools of paralysis and corruption that are the government health agencies.” He shook his head. A large number of members whose committees determine what vaccines are to be on the schedule were found to either own stock of vaccine-makers or to own patents for vaccines under consideration.
Sandra Davis pointed a finger at him. “If you erode the public’s confidence, you will have the blood of countless children on your hands.” And with this, she strode off, the sharp clicks of her heels accentuating her displeasure. She was so done with these people.
Lips thinned with anger, Dr. Mark looked at her retreating figure. He had met so many of her kind. Full of snide and fury, signifying nothing. There was but little substance beneath the aura of authority and veneer of credentialism.
They were silent for a moment, hearing the far-off double door opening and then closing.
“Her statement about mortality rates from whooping cough before the vaccination era was factually correct,” remarked Aratta, “yet utterly disingenuous. You see, in the 1920s, along with many other infectious diseases, the number of fatalities from pertussis has started on a precipitous decline—even as the number of reported cases remained steady. Here is what’s relevant: the large decrease in mortality rates happened before the vaccine and the penicillin were in widespread use.
“Measles carries a similar story,” continued Aratta. “The related mortality rate began to plummet around that time as well. Measles vaccination commenced in 1963 in the United States. In the years immediately preceding it, measles was more of a paper tiger than a tiger, averaging one fatality per half a million people annually.”
“There was a reason why in the fifties we had the children’s picture book Have a Happy Measle, a Merry Mumps, and a Cheery Chickenpox,” laughed Dr. Mark. “And in Great Day in Norway: the Seventeenth of May, the mother tells her son that many kids have measles in town and it will be a good thing if he catch it too and ‘got it over with.’ The child, however, was bummed about the prospect of being sick just before Norway’s Constitution Day.” He sobered. “Anyway, there is a fat chance even those few measles-related fatalities would have been avoided with an increased intake of vitamin A.” Privately, he wondered if that still held true with the new, nastier strains. The vaccine program may have been fast-tracking microbial evolution.
“Be it as it may,” said Aratta, “in the case of measles, the mass vaccination commencing in the sixties may have prevented the relatively few measles-related complications and death cases that occurred—and may have introduced relatively few new ones, as was evident with the pulse of nonbacterial meningitis cases in northeastern Brazil in the heels of mass administration of an MMR vaccine. The mass vaccination in the sixties may have prevented the relatively few measles-related complications and death cases—and possibly, indirectly, made people more vulnerable to lymphoma, skin cancer, and ovary cancers. I cannot be any more definitive, as the reported cause-of-death is often incorrect, notably when there is a push to underplay or overplay the toll of some infections or practices.”
He turned to the commissioner. “Needless to say, history records ubiquitous vaccination as the agent that saved the West from the ravages of whooping cough and measles. But it is not just the trophy the movement got to bring back home. The backbone keeping vaccinism as the accepted orthodoxy hinges on the implied premise that mass vaccination has muzzled, among other diseases, the measles and whooping cough beasts. And that’s what holds these beasts at bay. Once the mass vaccination shield is gone, it’s allegedly back to tens of thousands of fatalities each year in the Western world.”
“That’s the thing,” said Dr. Mark. “At some point, the muzzle was taken off whooping cough. In the United Kingdom, late seventies, pertussis vaccination rates plummeted. During those years, the death rate held at nil levels, utterly unaffected. A more obvious case is that of Sweden, which did not administer pertussis vaccine at all from 1979 to 1996.”
“And?” inquired the commissioner.
“During these years, the number of diagnosed cases gradually increased to a marked degree—whether due to an actual increase of whooping cough cases; whether due to more willingness to test for the bacteria even in people manifesting milder symptoms; or whether due to cases of whooping cough becoming again pronounced and hence not written off as the common cold or nondescript weeks of annoying cough.
“This aside, the annual mortality from whooping cough during those years averaged 1 in 13 million, which is to say both nil and at par with the pertussis-related mortality rates in the highly vaccinated countries of the Western world. And just as telling is to note the profile of the three who did die in Sweden due to whooping cough in the 1981–83 period. One had a heart disease with pulmonary hypertension; the second had a precondition of myelomeningocele with a ventriculoperitoneal shunt; the third was a four-week infant, too young to have been given the vaccine anyway.”
“Point taken,” said the commissioner.
“They have this arcade game, Whac-A-Mole.” Aratta’s eyes sparkled with amusement. “Plastic moles pop up at random, and the players use a rubber mallet to whack them down, back into their holes. Whack! And a mole goes down, but two others spring up in its stead elsewhere. Whack! Whack! And those two are gone—only for others to surface or re-surface. The game can keep the players preoccupied and give them a sense of accomplishment and power. This is how the Earth people like it. In the case of microbes, the challenge level keeps going up, which requires bigger mallets and heavier pounding, and they like that part, too. And no matter how many bacteria they whack with antibiotics, anti-bacterial soap, or vaccinations, some other things are likely to pop up—as the microbial ecosystem of course remains. At best, it may prove to be a Quixotic endeavor.”
The commissioner turned to Dr. Mark, “What do you make of this?”
“It is entirely possible vaccines may have upset the existing host-pathogen dynamics and are driving the emergence of hypervirulent strains,” he replied. “After all, we now do have multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis, new strains of pneumococcal infections, and a mutated whooping cough virus that lowers the efficacy of antibodies and increase the suppression of the immune systems.” He’d learned that the new, mutated whooping cough strains produced fewer immunogenic proteins, which meant they were less likely to be targeted by the vaccine and were better at evading the body’s natural immune system. Just wonderful.
He added, “We have to allow that when we vaccinate the vast majority of the population, we alter the entire microbe biome shared by all humans; the mutations spare no one. In the long run, the vaccinated could be putting at risk the non-vaccinated population—well, putting everyone at risk, really—being in effect turbo-charged evolutionary incubators for microbes.” He shrugged. “At least it’s a possibility; I don’t believe the science is really there to draw conclusions, one way or another.”
Aratta and the commissioner got up and accompanied the physician to the exit.
“Good luck with the clinical trial idea,” Aratta said, shaking Dr. Mark’s hand.
They both knew that no large-scale, long-term study comparing the non-vaccinated to the vaccinated would be done. Could allowed to be done. There was always the possibility the skeptics were onto something, and someone will have to admit to hundreds of thousands of parents that their kids were damaged by vaccines. The potential financial and political fallout was simply too high. No one wanted to take the fall, mused Dr. Mark. The stakes were getting ever higher, and the imperative to double down growing ever more pressing. And everyone—from the academic journals to the media to the politicians—was tethered in some way to Big Pharma’s drug money, the one ring to rule them all.
For pharma, the ever-expanding array of vaccines on the schedule was a cash cow. After the financial liability for pediatric vaccines was largely taken off the shoulders of the manufacturers in 1986, revenues exploded. Dr. Mark shuddered. Many additional vaccines were now in the pipeline, waiting to be approved and injected into hundreds of millions of children—and increasingly into adults, as well.
Aratta and the commissioner went out through another door and walked down the corridor.
“I think it is time you see how they play the Whac-A-Mole arcade game with the planet being the playfield,” said Aratta. There was a slight smile at the corners of his mouth. “It is time to move on to the main event.” He held open the door to the large chamber.
Chapter 42
“Doesn’t look like they grow much of their food within the urban areas,” the presiding chair was saying as Aratta and the commissioner entered. All the other commissioners were already in attendance.
“No, Your Grace. They have converte
d vast swath of nature to that end,” replied the deputy director of the Nature Survey Group, sitting on a work stool. He was a balding man in his fifties with a long silvery hair bound in a ponytail.
The seats immediately outside the testimony area held most of the hundred delegates from Earth.
The deputy continued, “We have calculated that if the Earth people had converted about three-quarters of the unpaved urban area to food forests and vegetable gardens, they could have provided all the vegetable, grain, and fruit needs of over one billion of their people.”
“Interesting,” murmured the presiding chair. He turned his attention to the blonde woman. “If you would, High Mistress Hagar, please do continue with what you were saying earlier.”
Hagar bowed her head. She was seated on a stool a few paces away from the deputy. Wearing ankle boots, low-rise tight jeans, and a black stretchy top, she drew appreciative glances from more than one man in the audience.
“Livestock confined to a particular fenced land area will graze the field down to the dirt,” she stated. “Then as the plants use their stored energy to regrow, they are grazed again. And again. This is how continuous grazing kills the grass.
“Another common practice of theirs is just as awful and worse in some ways. I refer to raising livestock in concentrated feedlots. Case in point is the United States. Tens of thousands of square miles of the prairie has gone under the plow to facilitate corn that in turn is utilized as a livestock feed. In fact, the terrain they have commandeered for the cultivation of rice and lettuces, oranges and tomatoes, millet and lentils, apples and potatoes, cauliflowers and broccoli, nuts and onions, spinach and green beans—combined—is but one fifth of the area devoted for the cultivation of corn used to feed livestock.”
The Earth Hearing Page 48