VACCINE HESITANT PARENTS AREN’T “CRACKPOTS”

BY PAUL THOMAS, M.D. AND JENNIFER MARGULIS, PH.D.  INDIANA JOURNAL

In an article in, the New York Post labeled vaccine-hesitant parents as “crackpots,” a sentiment that was then echoed on Good Morning America. The idea goes like this: parents who choose to delay, space out, or forego some vaccines are uneducated, selfish, misinformed, and—most importantly—putting other people’s children…

at risk. Journalists and the doctors they interview are baffled: How could any parent not want to do every vaccine on the schedule? How could parents be so ignorant? So misled?
But the vast majority of parents who turn away from vaccines do so after following the doctor’s orders to vaccinate at birth, 2 months, 4 months, 6 months, 12 months, and 15 months and watching their baby get sicker and sicker.
Their baby’s reaction to a round of vaccines—high-pitched screaming, a fever of over 104 that lasts for hours, lethargy, loss of appetite—scares them. But since no one wants to leave a child vulnerable to infectious disease, these families usually ignore the reactions and continue to vaccinate. It isn’t until a diagnosis of regressive autism, unusually severe allergies, or Type 1 juvenile diabetes comes in that the parents step back and say, ‘Whoa, what happened? What did we do to make my child this sick?’

This happened four times in four years in my own practice—four babies born healthy followed my recommendations for vaccines (and everything else) and ended up with severe brain dysfunction by age three. These families did not have any known genetic risk factors for autism. I was baffled. And concerned. It took that much damage for me to start reading past the media headlines and doing my own exhaustive research into what we know and what we don’t about the safety of our current vaccine schedule.

I made evidence-based, scientific changes to the current CDC’s recommended vaccine schedule so that I could keep the children in my practice safe from infectious diseases and keep their brains and bodies healthy. According to the mainstream narrative, that makes me a “crackpot.”

But my clinical results are astounding. In my pediatric practice, we have had no new cases of autism in the children whose parents have adopted what I call a “vaccine-friendly plan”: a slower, more European-style vaccine schedule that does not include the birth and infant series of the hepatitis B vaccine, spaces out aluminum-containing shots, and delays the measles mumps and rubella vaccine until age three.

I also help parents understand the importance of exclusive breastfeeding (which hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific articles have shown to be a key component of lasting good health and immunity), why it is essential to avoid pediatric Tylenol (which can cause liver damage and immune dysfunction and can make it much harder for infants to detoxify), and why we must reduce our children’s cumulative toxic load as much as possible.

This issue is not black and white.
As we explain in our new book, The Vaccine-Friendly Plan, it’s not that all vaccines are bad or all vaccines are good. But sometimes—for some small children—too many vaccines at once can overwhelm their developing immune and neurological systems.
Indeed, there is good evidence to suggest that vaccines have become a component of the toxic overload our children are facing.

ake this toxic overload (which includes exposure to pesticides, herbicides, flame retardants, plasticizers, acetaminophen, arsenic, aspartame, and neurotoxins like mercury, lead, and aluminum) and combine it with nutrient deficiencies stemming from our high-sugar SAD (Standard American Diet), lack of exercise, too much stress, and a compromised microbiome and the result is the neurological and immune damage we are seeing among America’s children today.

We realize this is an inconvenient truth. We realize our medical colleagues and the media would rather pretend it wasn’t happening. But we simply cannot continue to insist that the current vaccine schedule is safe and should be unquestioningly followed when we have a growing body of scientific evidence, clinical data from doctors like me, and parents’ firsthand experience proving otherwise.
We give vaccines in our office every day. Questioning the safety of the current CDC vaccine schedule does not make us anti-vaccine.  And it certainly doesn’t make us crackpots.

Paul Thomas, M.D., is a Dartmouth-trained pediatrician with over 13,000 children in his integrative pediatric practice in Portland, Oregon. Jennifer Margulis, Ph.D., is a Cornell-trained award-winning science journalist based in Ashland, Oregon. They are the co-authors of The Vaccine-Friendly Plan: Dr. Paul’s Safe and Effective Approach to Immunity and Health, From Pregnancy Through Your Child’s Teen Years