If It's *NOT* About the Money, Then Why Did This Happen?

I’ve been advocating for vaccine safety and safe vaccines for over twenty years now.

It all started when a labor and delivery nurse came at my newborn with a needle and told me, in a commanding voice, that our tiny little frog-like baby needed “her” hepatitis B vaccine.

My husband and I were both 29 years old. I’d just been through a grueling labor and delivery, and every cell in my body wanted to protect the tiny baby in my arms.

A graduate student at Emory University, I knew a little about hepatitis B.

I knew it was sexually transmitted; spread via tainted blood, semen, and saliva; and that it could be passed to the baby from the mama if the mama were hep B positive.

I also knew that my husband and I had been monogamous for three years and we’d both been recently tested for STDs. We had none.

In other words, I didn’t have hep B.

My husband didn’t either.

No one who would come in contact with the baby was infected with this virus. And my baby would not be sharing body fluids with anyone with this disease.

So I gently told the nurse that we preferred to wait, and that we’d talk to our daughter’s pediatrician about it.

The nurse narrowed her eyes in anger, her whole demeanor towards me turning hostile.

Because I told her I wanted to talk to the pediatrician before injecting my baby girl with a vaccine to protect her against a sexually transmitted disease that she had zero—zero—chance of catching.

Medical professionals and researchers insist that our current childhood vaccine schedule is grounded in science and administered for the best interests of America’s children.

In the same breath, they tell us that the vaccine schedule the CDC recommends and each state then requires (for school inclusion) has nothing to do with maximizing profits and everything to do with maximizing health.

They contend that pediatricians make “little to no money” on the administration of vaccines. In fact, they say, doctors “suffer” financial losses when they give vaccines. At the same time, routine immunizations have prevented at least 1.1 million deaths and saved the United States $540 billion.

M’okay. And I’ve got a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn.

Never mind that America is one of the most vaccinated countries in the world and we also have one of the highest infant mortality rates, if not the highest, of any country in the industrialized world.

Never mind that we know that the more vaccines we give in the first year of life, the more likely a baby is to die of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome and other causes.

Never mind that my articles on vaccine safety, including this one and this one, are so censored by Google and other search engines that you literally cannot find them except if you type in the exact titles, despite the fact that these articles are search engine optimized and have been read by hundreds of thousands of people.

Never mind that American children are suffering from so many chronic diseases that 40 percent of our children have at least one chronic health problem and nearly 30 percent of America’s teens are taking prescription medications, according to research from 2015 (I suspect the number is even higher now).

Forget all of that. America’s aggressive childhood vaccination schedule and the poor health outcomes among our children is absolutely, definitely, beyond a shadow of a doubt, just a coincidence. Correlation does not equal causation.

For argument’s sake, let’s say you’re right. Unfortunate coincidence and nothing else. But if our over-bloated, over-zealous, liability-free childhood vaccination schedule really has nothing to do with doctors needing to buy second homes in Mexico and Big Pharma’s big greed, why did this happen when Trump announced that he was nominating RFK, Jr. to direct the Department of Health and Human Services?