Morality, Ethics and Vaccine Policies

SINCLAIR LEWIS, author of “It Can’t Happen Here”, wrote “Once upon a time In America there was a scholar who conducted a one-man revolution and won it”.  There are a million individuals in revolution against the rampant corporatocracy that is warping America today.

Mind you, these sentiments come from one who is staunchly entrenched in the camp that acknowledges that artificial immunization can “work”.  Nevertheless, I persist.

The American value system of self-reliance, self-determination, and self-governance has been perverted by those with serious financial conflicts of interest who present the position that vaccination, due to its protective effects for “others” against infectious diseases, present an opportunity for the otherwise relatively powerless to contribute to the “greater good” of reduced pain and suffering from infectious diseases.  The risk of serious adverse events from vaccines, they claim, is minimal, and the cost, they presume, is so vastly outweighed by the benefits of vaccination that the risk of any cost is “worth it”.

In the tradition of American ideals, one can see that there are few problems with this perspective.  And remember, this is coming from a self-identified idealistic liberal, who tests right down the middle on both social and economic political issues (by nature, not by choice):

The “isms” Inherent to “The Greater Good”

The date is 2022. Anti-vaccination sentiment has swept the country, and an increasingly empowered Health and Human Services arm, the Vaccination Enforcement Division, is now a well-oiled machine. Wearing a white-buttoned down short-sleeve shirt, and a VED badge, a VO (Vaccination Officer) knocks on your door.  Behind him are two more sinister-looking chaps in military-like regalia, wearing guns.

“Yes?” you say. “Can I help you?”

“Ma’am, I’m from the VED, from the government, and we’re here to inform you that we’re very sorry to say that your child’s brain must be sacrificed to secure the health of your fellow Americans.  He’s a part of a rare group of children who just so happen to respond to vaccines in a way that will forever alter his brain functioning. But rest assured, it’s for the greater good.  It’s for all Americans.”

“What do you mean, how can this be?” you say, in shock, in horror.

“Well, we understand your reaction, Ma’am, but that’s just the way it has to be.  It’s really genetic, but we don’t really know the extent of the damage that will occur, but we’re required by law to provide you with this information pamphlet that explains everything.  If you could just sign here…”

“Hell no! I’m not signing anything!” would (and should) be your reaction.

This scenario is adapted from one described to me by my friend, IPAK Advisory Board Member, and life-long card-carrying truth warrior autism Dad, Josh Mazer.  It’s gripping because it reveals a few facts about vaccine risk.  The first is that mass vaccination programs ignore individual, identifiable risk.  Individuals who can be identified as being at risk of serious adverse events, and death, could, in principle be identified. And yet the majority believe that the risk is acceptable, and that affording these individuals equal protection is not worth the effort.  They are the expendables.

Second, it reveals the location of where pro-mandate individuals would like to seat power: in the state’s hands. Individual choice, individual liberties play no role. So a few kids get hurt, maimed, or killed. Who cares? They mean nothing in the greater scheme of things.  It was genetic anyway.

These are “isms”.  You minorities, stay down. Keep quiet. No school for you.

In America, in 2017.

Anti-reality Propaganda

Wait, that’s offensive.  You can’t call a kid with autism “maimed” or “damaged”.  It’s not PC!

If you’re thinking that, you’ve been duped. Those with serious conflicts of interest are bent on hiding the truth to perpetuate their profits.  They have even gone so far as to try to  “normalize” autism, representing it as something we must all embrace – and how dare you say that kids with autism are less than perfect?  They are, after all, human just like you, and me.  We must embrace autism, the saying goes.

Yes, they are human.  Yes, we love them.  No, we need not embrace autism. And no, kids with autism are not “perfect”.  They are perfectly lovable, but vaccine-induced encephalopathy-mediated autism is real. It doesn’t happen to everyone, and therein lays the “ism” of the vaccine paradigm.

The differences that do exist between neurotypicals and autistics are certainly not fodder for the basis of judgement. But they are due to failure of astrocytes to uptake glutamate, causing microglial cells to become chronically activated (gliosis), leading to the destruction of dendrites and neural precursor cells, and to “differences” that include a biased excitatory/inhibitory ratio, and a dearth of complex synaptic architectures capable of satiating nervous impulses from the organs of perception and stronger long-distance connectivities between brain regions that are usually not in direct communication. This can lead to repetitive behaviors, the inability to process language input and output, the inability to recognize human faces, severe inflammation in the head and the stomach, head-banging, self-injury, poor social skills and unusal decisions such as elopement often leading to death. Mortality among autistics is high, with few living past the age of 40. It is diagnosed using the Diagnostic Manual of Psychiatric Disorders.

Calling it “not a pathology” has prevented meaningful research on the safety and efficacy of treatments designed to reduce the severity of the most distressing symptoms. Autism is medical. Autism is environmental. And autism genetic risk is ill-defined and diffuse.

Steve Silberman claimed that he had read vast amounts of scientific literature and that it led him to realize that people with autism fall into various “tribes”, a spectrum of humanity that is ancient…. and I’m here to tell you he does not comprehend the literature  Neurotribes is wrong.  The scientific literature does not support that autism is ancient, nor even that the genetic variation that contributes to autism is ancient.  The ancient, common variations in the population that have nothing to do with autism risk contribute to overall heritability of traits like personality, sociability, and communication skill.  The evidence of heritability of autism risk is real, but it’s concordance, not direct heritability.

The realities being denied include

(1) “Normal” ancient variation is confounded with variation in autism risk, and appears to be contributing to autism risk, when in reality, it contributes to heritability of brain traits.  The real Neurotribes message should be that kids with autism are (surprisingly) a lot like their parents, and would be more like their parents if they were not subjected to an increasingly toxic environment.

(2) Autism is by far much more an environmental condition than a genetic condition.  While hundreds of genes appear to contribute to autism, no gene is responsible for more than 1% of cases of autism.  Most of that genetic variation confers environmental susceptibility to toxins (of many kinds).  Take away the environmental susceptibility genetic variation, take away the common variants that contribute to overall heritability of brain traits, and you have 1-2% of ASD risk being “genetic”, with very, very different genes contributing that risk to any particular individuals.  Even 10 mutations at “ASD” gene loci confers only a 20% risk of ASD mutations (See Pinto et al.’s study for this fact).

“The Greater Good” Maxim Does not Have a Moral Basis

Those who gut-shame people into vaccinating their kids for the “greater good” do not have the legitimate authority to determine that some kids must be condemned to injury or death.  Why not?  Well, this is at large part because they do not also take responsibility for those damages.  Society has turned its back on the largest sector of the vaccine-injured by denying that vaccines cause autism.

But it’s also true that they do not have the legitimate authority to determine that it’s ok for some kids to be harmed or killed – because NO ONE has that authority.  I can’t decide what’s right for my neighbor’s child in a manner that leads to their death, or injury, and I have no role in decision-making about the risks my neighbors might find acceptable or unacceptable.  If I choose to vaccinate my children (as I did), that’s my decision to make. I may also choose to space them out to avoid neurotoxicity (as I did, without issue, in three states).  If my neighbor asks me my opinion on any matter, well, that is still not granting me authority.

The same applies in government. In a representative government, when vaccine mandates are voted in, or when the rights to religious or philosophical exemptions from mandates are voted out, the majority is overstepping its authority and profoundly and directly stripping a potentially identifiable minority from its right to protection from harm.  In America, the majority is supposed to safeguard the rights and liberties of any minority.  And since risk of vaccine injury clearly has a genetic basis, the majority should never doom those individuals to harm for a supposed “greater good”.

Parents do not make decisions on vaccination willy-nilly, on the basis of hearing a lot of “scary” things on the internet.  Many base their decision on family experiences of adverse reactions, say, either to the parent, or to an older sibling.  Many stop vaccinating a child due to adverse reactions experience by the child in question.  Many are much, much better informed on vaccine risk and the poor state of vaccine safety science than their doctors. Mandates without exemptions strip these individuals – who likely include those at higher risk of vaccine injury, for the reasons I have outlined – of the rights to choose health care options, of the rights to not participate in an uncontrolled clinical trial (post-market surveillance is, under any definition, clinical study), and the penalties imposed often involve access to public education, and thus the parents and their children are stripped of their rights to access free public education.

Most who espouse the “greater good” position are also ill-informed. “Acceptable risk” is undefined for vaccines due to the abject lack of credible vaccine safety science.   Studies are NOT randomized prospective trials; the entire schedule has not been tested against placebo; not all vaccines have been individually tested to see if they increase autism risk; and when placebos are used, they are usually not saline: they are usually adjuvants, like aluminum hydroxide.  It is NOT reassuring that the death rates in the control group are equal to those in the vaccinated group, as is the case of Gardasil, the HPV vaccine.  The relevant death rates comparison to make would be to a true control group: the unvaccinated.  Comparisons of vaccines to their past versions, or the vaccine schedule vs. the vaccine schedule + 1 are also insufficient to reveal the actual risks to health outcomes.

These are the wrong types of scientific studies to “know” vaccination risk.  Smoking risk cannot be assessed by only comparing “twelve packs a week” to “eleven packs a week”.  Car seat efficacy cannot be assessed by comparing “60 mph crash tests” to “55 mph crash tests”. The risks to individuals and thus to the entire population must be conducted with the proper science, which by my assessment, has not been done.

Not only do those espousing “the Greater Good” argument not have the moral upper hand based on first principles of ethics.  They are also playing the odds with other people’s children without any idea of the actual risk.

“The Greater Good” Maxim Does Not Generalize

There is one basis of morality in logic, and an ethical morality exists when the same rules imbued by a moral position generalize to all people, everywhere.   The risk of vaccine injury is not abstractly shared by all in the population, and so those who would hope to rely on “The Greater Good” maxim cannot claim that the benefits and risks are equally shared by all.

But what if we applied “The Greater Good” to other issues in society.  Let’s try a few:

(1) Money should be taken from the rich, and given to the poor via a mandate by the state, For The Greater Good, then everyone would have enough money to be able to have food, health care insurance, transportation.  (FAIL.)

(2) Many people are homeless.  For The Greater Good, we should all be required, by mandate, without exemptions, to house, clothe, and feed the homeless in our own homes.  Anyone who resists should be penalized by not having access to their own homes during the period of time when the homeless use their property.  They might also lose access to public education for their children. (FAIL.)

(3) There are too many people dying from starvation in the world.  We should have a mandate, For the Greater Good, that caps the amount of money that any American citizen can spend on their car, and on their transportation, and a Transport Tax should be levied so food can be bought and shipped to those individuals in the world who are starving.  We should shame anyone with a fancy car, or boat, or house, for splurging on themselves while people die from starvation and lack of access to proper medical care.  Anyone who resists should have their license to operate a motor vehicle revoked until they comply. (FAIL.)

If 1-3 were attempted, of course, then anyone who fights to keep their liberties and rights in these settings should be shamed, chastised, and labeled.  They should be coerced into doing the right thing for “The Greater Good”.  They should be written about in the newspaper as “Pro-hunger” and “Pro-homeless” and “Pro-poverty”.  They should be named, and reviled, and referenced as “nut-jobs”. (FAIL, FAIL, FAIL, FAIL.)

One might sympathize with the plight of the homeless, but that does not entitle one to use the law to revoke rights of others to help them.

The “Greater Good” as moral maxim is a fallacy, has no basis in morality.  History has shown us that it has been abused as propaganda by individuals seeking to promote their own power and wealth.  That is precisely the case with current vaccines and vaccine mandates.  By far, most of those promoting vaccine mandates have profit motives, plain and simple.

Even as the Vaccine-Risk Aware army grows each day, due to the injuries inflicted on the population, the coffers of the monied interests behind the immunization via vaccination paradigm grow.  They own Congress (both aisles).  They run the CDC (for now?  We are all waiting on HHS Director Price to move against Rr. Adm. Schuchat for lying to Congress).  They own the media via direct-to-consumer marketing.

And, although Sinclair Lewis called upon rugged American individualism to save America from its dalliance with fascism in the 1930’s, corporatism in which corporations capture regulatory agencies is already alive and well in America in the 2010’s.   We, the people, must re-capture our agencies with laws against seating corporate interests into positions of power in regulatory agencies.  It would not be difficult.   We need an Act of Congress that prohibits individuals in positions of power in regulatory agencies from accepting jobs at companies that conduct business with the US government.  The same Act would prohibit placement of individuals with conflicts of interest from being nominated to positions of power in regulatory agencies.

These agencies must be free to operate in a manner unbiased by profit motives.  Until then, we will continue to try to live in a fascist corporatocracy, in which corporations and government are one and the same entity.   Until then, there is no “free market”: government contracts will continue to go to the same corporations, regardless of the safety or efficacy of their products, and billions will be spent propping up a failed paradigm.  Let’s see how Merck fares if the courts find that yes, they indeed committed fraud against the FDA, Congress, and the American people by putting mumps virus antibodies from rabbits into human serum samples to secure the MMR contract. Yes, this is really alleged to have happened and the legal case is underway.

We cannot, however, afford to wait for that court case. We need to break open the market of artificial immunization, foster and promote innovation and diversification of options with new technologies.  We need to compete on the playing field in which safety is a selling point.  Vaccine safety biomarkers would be a multi-billion dollar market. Let’s see who can identify those who will be harmed by vaccines – and thus protect them.

But we also – and also immediately – need to take care of those who have already paid the price for a failed vaccine paradigm.  We need to award funds to families whose kids have developed ADHD, autism, auto-immune disorders, and other conditions not yet recognized by the vaccine court.  Each individual American citizen who has benefited from protection from infectious diseases needs to carry their share of the burden of vaccine injury.  This is debt we owe that we cannot ever fully repay.

The companies who have worked to hide injuries should be slammed with fines for racketeering, profiteering, and fraud – and those fines should be used to take care of those injured.

That would be both ethical, and moral, by American standards at least.