On the 6^th of October at 11:45 AM, the AVN sent a letter to 4 public health officials who had been critical of our up-coming VaxXed tour of Queensland.  These 4 individuals had suggested that the VaxXed screenings should be banned or boycotted and that no venue should allow us to show this documentary or members of the public be permitted to watch it.

The four were:

Mr Cameron Dick, Health Minister for QLD
Dr Michael Gannon, President of the Australian Medical Association (AMA)
Dr Bill Boyd, President of the QLD AMA
And Dr Jeannette Young, Chief Medical Officer of QLD

Dr Gannon responded via a proxy, Mr Simon Tatz. Part one of our answer to Dr Gannon was published on the blog yesterday at this link. The final part of our response, which is a long one and covers the myth of measles deaths in the developing world and the role that measles vaccines supposedly played in reducing them, will be published here tomorrow.

As of yet, Dr Gannon is the only person who has responded to our invitation. Again, we would like to request that you to write to all 4 individuals and urge them to attend a VaxXed screening and sit on the Q & A panel. If you do or have written, could you please forward your letter to [email protected] and also forward any responses you receive to the same email address? We would be grateful if you would.

And now for Part 2 of Dr Gannon’s response.

 

Sadly, because they’ve been reduced from our sight, people get lazy in forgetting the carnage they can cause. I would encourage people to look at the science. No one who has seen a loved one maimed by polio, no one who has seen a child in an intensive care unit with measles, no one who’s seen someone killed by HIV meningitis questions the wisdom of the national immunisation program. Luckily, for some people, they’ve never seen these diseases, but vaccination, both childhood and adult, represents one of the most important weapons we have in terms of preventing disease.”

It is impossible in today’s Australia to ‘get lazy’ about vaccination. The government, the media and health authorities are very good at making sure nobody will ever forget when vaccines are due. And whilst it is true that 100 years ago and more, many children died of these diseases, these deaths were becoming a thing of the past well before the introduction of vaccines meant to prevent them.

As for seeing a child in intensive care with measles, deaths or serious morbidity from measles were a thing of the past well before the vaccine was introduced. But today, we have intensive care wards filled with children and adults whose conditions are caused by chronic conditions rather than infectious diseases. Many of these conditions are the result of vaccine injuries. Parents whose children have suffered or died from vaccines consider it to be hurtful in the extreme that their children are not considered worthy of the same respect as those few unfortunate families whose children have suffered or died from disease. 

Lastly, I believe you might have been referring to HiB meningitis – not HIV meningitis?

It is important to stress that vaccines are safe. Prior to being included on the Immunisation Schedule in Australia, new vaccines are carefully examined. Routine monitoring of vaccine safety also continues over time.

The TGA [Therapeutic Goods Administration] which is charged with licensing all therapeutic goods, receives no government funding to do this and hasn’t done so since the late 1990s. They operate under a policy called Cost Recovery where they are totally dependent on the manufacturers whose products they are meant to regulate. If they don’t license these products, they will not have the funding to continue operating. They do not ‘carefully examine’ any drugs or vaccines. These examinations are paid for, designed and carried out, for the most part, by the companies applying for licensure. Results which are negative are not published; independent oversight simply does not take place because our health department doesn’t pay for such studies and, as we saw with Vioxx, Relenza and a host of other products, post-licensure reaction reports, after tens of thousands have died and hundreds of thousands have been injured, are the way in which ‘routine monitoring’ is carried out.

Parents should be assured that the health of their children is an extremely important consideration for the scientific and medical experts that are involved in the implementation and delivery of the immunisation program in Australia.

This assurance is welcome, but how can we feel that our children are important if the health authorities will not even sit down and talk to us? If they will not listen to our concerns? If they will not join us in pushing for truly independent studies? If they won’t help us to urge the government to do the fully vaccinated vs fully unvaccinated studies that we have been requesting for so long?

The only way in which you will finally convince parents that vaccines are safe and effective for their children is to do an independent, transparently produced and conducted comparison between the health of the fully vaccinated vs the fully unvaccinated. If the AMA will join with the AVN in pushing for such a study and the results show what you obviously believe they will, then parents will flock to have their children vaccinated.

Routine infant and child immunisation is a proven, cost effective, public health measure that reduces the spread of communicable disease. It provides protection for the individual, as well as the wider community.

These statements are often heard, but never backed up by evidence. According to Australian government data, it is impossible to show that vaccines were involved in any way in the decline in either mortality or morbidity from infectious diseases over the last 100 years. Today’s generation of children is the sickest on record with over 50% of them being treated for at least one chronic condition; 25% being asthmatic; and a large number suffering from behavioural issues and/or learning difficulties. Childhood cancer is skyrocketing as are conditions like epilepsy and anaphylaxis. All these conditions have strong links to the administration of vaccines.

Platitudes about public health ring false when families are dealing with the reality of children who are constantly sick. These same parents witnessed their children’s conditions worsen after every vaccine; after every course of antibiotics. They have heard their doctors tell them that these conditions are ‘normal’ when they know that ‘normal’ does not mean a child who is taking medication every day for illnesses which were nearly unheard of when they themselves were growing up.

In addition, too many families of fully-vaccinated children have seen diseases like measles, whooping cough, chicken pox and more infecting their babies and they question why their doctors told them that this was the result of exposure to an unvaccinated person – not evidence of primary vaccine failure.

Parents are not stupid – and they deserve better reasons than these. They also deserve the truth.

As the peak organisation representing the interests of medical practitioners and a key advocate for measures that seek to protect and promote the health of those living in Australia, the AMA is a vocal supporter of routine childhood immunisation. Routine childhood immunisation was introduced in Australia in the 1930s and 1940s, with the introduction of Diphtheria vaccine, followed by Pertussis and then Polio vaccines. Vaccine innovation continues and the current Australian Immunisation Schedule protects infants and children from a broad range of diseases.  Parents should be assured that the health of their children is an extremely important consideration for the scientific and medical experts that are involved in the implementation and delivery of the immunisation program in Australia.

In many countries, including Australia, immunisation programs have achieved such success that many people are unaware of the serious health complications that can arise, permanently disabling or killing those infected by vaccine preventable diseases. This may be contributing to an apathy among some parents about the need to vaccinate their children. The rates of childhood immunisation in Australia are fairly high. According to the rolling immunisation rates produced by the Australian Childhood Immunisation Register, we have:

• 93 per cent of children fully immunised at 12 months
• 90.7 per cent of children fully immunised at 24 months (2 years), and
• 92.9 per cent of children fully immunised at 60 months (5 years).

Despite these very high levels of complete vaccination, the reported incidence of whooping cough is the highest per capita since mass vaccination started in 1953. Such large increases in vaccination should have, were the vaccine effective, led to declines in reports – not increases.

I also recommend your read the Science of Immunisation booklet, which the AMA and the Australian Academy of Science jointly launched last year. This import publication states that medical conditions with unknown causes have been incorrectly linked to particular vaccines, such as the alleged link between the MMR vaccine and autism. It is important to emphasise the Academy’s wording:

“Many comprehensive studies subsequently ruled out this suggested link by showing conclusively that rates of autism are the same among children who have and have not been vaccinated. Ultimately, the original report was shown to be fraudulent, and was retracted by the medical journal that published it.”

Not only has the AVN read this booklet – representatives of our organisation met with the Chief Medical Officer’s staff and submitted fully-referenced data showing that vaccine effectiveness is overstated whilst its safety issues are downplayed or ignored. This information was ignored completely.

In addition, I believe you are mistaken when you say that many studies have compared autism in the vaccinated vs the unvaccinated and found there was no connection between vaccines and autism. To date, I am only aware of one published study that compared these two groups in relation to autism. The Mawson homeschool study[1] looked at a range of conditions in those who were fully vaccinated vs those who were fully unvaccinated. For autism, it found that the vaccinated were 4.2 times more likely to be autistic than those who were unvaccinated.

[1] https://info.cmsri.org/the-driven-researcher-blog/vaccinated-vs.-unvaccinated-guess-who-is-sicker