Sample newsletter

The newsletter advocates natural immunity, natural childbirth, breastfeeding, natural remedies for disease, and organic agriculture.

Subsequent issues of NWNM Today will address the following topics:

Vol. 4: NATURAL IMMUNITY (March 2003)
Vol. 5: CIRCUMCISION (April 2003)
Vol. 6: ORGANIC AGRICULTURE (May 2003)
Vol. 7: VACCINATION (June 2003)
Vol. 8: BREASTFEEDING (July 2003)
Vol. 9: CHILDBIRTH (August 2003)
The newsletter currently has 6,000 subscribers worldwide. A sample of the newsletter is included below.

October 19, 2002

Welcome to the first issue of NWNM Today.

NWNM Today is a monthly e-newsletter providing accurate, evidence-based information on alternative living practices such as natural childbirth, breastfeeding, natural immunity, natural remedies for disease, and organic agriculture.

NWNM Today welcomes your responses! A Reader Response section will be included in subsequent newsletters.

Permission is given to all parties to reproduce, post, and distribute all or any part of this newsletter.

In health,

Jock Doubleday
Director
Natural Woman, Natural Man, Inc.
A California nonprofit corporation
http://www.gentlebirth.org/nwnm.org
P.O. Box 1794
Ojai, CA 93024
jockdoubleday@aol.com

* * *

NWNM Today, Vol. 1: “VACCINATION”

Table of Contents
Intro
1. Dr. Mendelsohn on Vaccination
2. Ian Sinclair’s Evidence and Conclusions on Vaccination
3. News Brief
4. Girl gets $4.7M for Vaccine Injuries


Friends,

Four years ago, I created the nonprofit organization Natural Woman, Natural Man in response to a perceived need for cogent information regarding alternatives to conventional health care and agricultural practices.

Three years ago, I was living in Nevada City, California and writing a book comparing midwifery home birth to hospital birth.

I had been an occasional guest on KVMR (the local radio station), speaking on breastfeeding and natural childbirth. I wanted to continue speaking on these subjects, and the station was all for that. But they said, “First we want you to talk about vaccination.” I said, “I don’t know anything about vaccination. Can I just do my childbirth talks?” They replied, “We really want something on vaccination.”

The first thought that went through my mind, after spending several years researching childbirth, was, “Now I have to research vaccines, too?”

Anyway, I did a little research on vaccination, and I found some very odd things. And these odd things led me to do more research, which again turned up some odd things. So I kept digging until I seemed to come to the very root of the issue. (I eventually did give the radio talk. Because I was so new to the subject, I brought a number of books with me, and I had my papers spread out all over the studio to help me with my figures.)

The conclusion I’ve come to after researching vaccination is that vaccination is not only ineffective, and sometimes dangerous, but a hoax. I’ll give you two small facts to hang your hat on.

— Fact #1 (disputed by no one): There are no long-term controlled studies of any vaccine for any disease published in any industry journal in any country in any time period. (If one wanted to perform a long-term controlled study of vaccination, one would take two large groups of people, and vaccinate one group and not vaccinate the other. Then one would wait and see how the individuals in each group fared over a period of months or years.)

— Fact #2 (vehemently disputed by doctors who were never given this evidence in medical school): Epidemiological evidence (epidemiology, as Sandra Steingraber so famously put it in her 1996 book, Living Downstream, is the science of body count) shows that vaccines are ineffective and that they sometimes even work to increase incidence of disease.

Since controlled studies and epidemiological evidence are all we have to understand something scientifically, one wonders what it is that doctors and other vaccine advocates use to support their pro-vaccine stance.

As for vaccination-as-hoax . . . in my research, I discovered that our much-heralded princes of modern medicine, Louis Pasteur and Edward Jenner, are in fact the Barnum & Bailey of medicine–ringmasters putting on a show for their, not our, benefit.

If you want to look into the origins of their several hoaxes, pick up Ethel Douglas Hume’s book, Pasteur Exposed: The False Foundations of Modern Medicine , or go to the web site http://www.sumeria.net/dream/0.html. Regarding Jenner, read Neil Z. Miller’s excellent books, Vaccines: Are They Really Safe and Effective? and Immunization Theory vs. Reality (out of print, but try to pick up a used copy).

The best web site for people just coming to the issue of vaccination is:
http://www.vaccinationdebate.com. (See esp. http://www.vaccinationdebate.com/web1.html, which contains graphs depicting various diseases’ incidence through time.)

Please feel free to contact me with any questions or concerns you have on the issue of vaccination, or on other health or environmental issues.


Robert S. Mendelsohn, M.D., author of the bestselling book, How to Raise a Healthy Child in Spite of Your Doctor, introduces his chapter on vaccination with the following words:

“I can only hope that you will keep an open mind while I present my case. Much of what you have been led to believe about immunizations simply isn’t true. I not only have grave misgivings about them; if I were to follow my deep convictions in writing this chapter, I would urge you to reject all inoculations for your child.”

Dr. Mendelsohn lists five key concerns about vaccination:

“1. There is no convincing scientific evidence that mass inoculations can be credited with eliminating any childhood disease. . . .

“2. It is commonly believed that the Salk vaccine was responsible for halting the polio epidemics that plagued American children in the 1940s and 1950s. If so, why did the epidemics also end in Europe, where the polio vaccine was not so extensively used? . . .

“3. There are significant risks associated with every immunization and numerous contraindications that may make it dangerous for the shots to be given to your child. . . .

“4. While the myriad short-term hazards of most immunizations are known (but rarely explained), no one knows the long-term consequences of injecting foreign proteins into the body of your child. . . .

“5. There is a growing suspicion that immunization against relatively harmless childhood diseases may be responsible for the dramatic increase in autoimmune diseases since mass inoculations were introduced. . . .”

Dr. Mendelsohn sums up his position on vaccination:

“The greatest threat of childhood diseases lies in the dangerous and ineffectual efforts made to prevent them through mass immunization.”

“What a strange religion medicine makes. It’s the only religion that is federally backed, and that can’t be questioned openly without persecution.”
–Julie Duffield (mother of two children with vaccine-induced autism) Julie’s email address: valentinewiggin@juno.com

Ian Sinclair’s Evidence and Conclusions on Vaccination

For graphical evidence that vaccines have not been responsible for the decline in any disease, visit http://www.vaccinationdebate.com/web1.html

. The above web site was created by an Australian named Ian Sinclair. Mr. Sinclair has researched the vaccination issue for 17 years, and he has written three books on the subject:

1. Vaccination: The Hidden Facts (1992)
2. You Can Overcome Asthma (1993)
3. Health: The Only Immunity (1995).
Ian Sinclair’s conclusions on vaccines and vaccination:

“1. Vaccines were not responsible for the decline in death rates from infectious disease, and offer no protection whatsoever.

“2. Vaccines are biological poisons, harmful to health, and a contributing factor in childhood illness.

“3. Childhood infections e.g., measles, chicken pox, whooping cough, etc., all serve a beneficial purpose, and if correctly treated will result in an improvement in the child’s health.

“4. Complications and fatalities associated with childhood infections are due to poor underlying health and/or wrong treatment, including suppressive drug therapy.

“5. The only immunity against childhood infection is a state of physiological health.”

“The study of the evolution of disease patterns provides evidence that during the last century doctors have affected epidemics no more profoundly than did priests during earlier times. Epidemics came and went, imprecated by both but touched by neither. They are not modified any more decisively by the rituals performed in medical clinics than by those customary at religious shrines.”
–Ivan Illich Limits to Medicine, page 15

News Brief

“Forced Vaccination and Quarantine?”

You and your neighbors soon may be rounded up by U.S. police or military personnel and placed in quarantine.

Why? Because you have refused to be injected with the smallpox vaccine.

The federally sponsored Model State Emergency Health Powers Act (MEHPA) gives authorities the right to vaccinate people, enforce quarantines, and seize and destroy property without compensation.

The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons is opposed to MEHPA. “It goes far beyond bioterrorism,” says Andrew Schlafly of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons. “Unelected state officials can force treatment or vaccination of citizens against the advice of their doctors.”


Girl gets $4.7M for Vaccine Injuries

Friday, August 16, 2002

By LINDY WASHBURN
Staff Writer North Jersey News
http://www.bergen.com/page.php?level_3_id=1&page;=4640061

A New Jersey girl whose mental development stopped at 2 months old after a routine immunization has received a $4.7 million settlement from a national trust fund.

More than $3 million of the award will go to an annuity that will pay for the child’s care as long as she lives. Its payout could exceed $61 million if she lives to 71, said Mindy Michaels Roth, the Glen Rock attorney who brought the case in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims.

The payment to the girl, now 9 years old but with the mental ability of a 2-month-old, comes from the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, funded by a 75-cent tax on each vaccination. Congress created the fund in 1986, at a time when a growing number of lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers was driving them out of the marketplace, and more parents were choosing not to immunize their children because they feared harmful side effects.

[Thus, instead of vaccine manufacturers paying for vaccine-related injuries, American citizens pay for them out of their own pockets. –JD]

“It removes a tremendous weight as to how we’ll care for [our daughter] financially,” said the girl’s father, who lives in Central Jersey and asked that the family not be identified. “As finite human beings, we die. Who’s going to care for her? This eliminates that burden” because her eventual care in a nursing home is provided for, he said.

Congress established the program to stabilize the supply of vaccines and free money for research on safer alternatives. The program also created a less expensive method to resolve claims outside the normal court system.

[The above is the spin put on the creation of the NVIC program by vaccine manufacturers and their government cohorts. –JD]

Since its inception, the fund has settled more than 5,500 claims, and awarded nearly $1.4 billion. Awards range up to $9.1 million. This year’s average has been $800,000.

The fund provides compensation for injuries from all vaccines mandated by the federal government: diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis (DTP); measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR); polio, hepatitis B, chickenpox, and H. influenza Type B.

This month, the pneumococcal vaccine was added to the list, and it became easier for parents whose babies suffered a bowel blockage following the rotavirus vaccine to secure compensation. Injuries from smallpox and anthrax vaccines are not covered by the fund.

Legislation is also pending, Roth said, to consider autism as a possible vaccine-related injury.

Some people believe the rising incidence of autism is partly attributable to the growing number of vaccines administered before a child’s immune system is mature. In particular, they cite the mercury used as a component in some vaccines as a possible toxin.

However, a recent Institute of Medicine report concluded there was insufficient evidence to accept or reject a link between thimerosal, a mercury component in some vaccines, and autism and other developmental and neurological disorders.

[For the establishment of a clear connection between autism and vaccination, see http://www.autism.com/ari/mercury.html –JD]

Of the 4 million children each year who receive multiple vaccines, about 10,000 adverse reactions are reported to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Most of those reactions are minor, but about 15 percent report incidents of hospitalization, disability, life-threatening illnesses, or death. Those reports do not prove the vaccine caused the problem, however.

The Central Jersey girl, the youngest of four children, was a bright, healthy 2-month-old when she visited a pediatrician in September 1993, her mother said. While there, she was given a vaccination for diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis (DTP).

Eleven hours later, her mother noticed odd eye movements as she changed the baby’s diaper. She put the baby to bed and went to sleep, she said. When she awoke the next morning, she realized her daughter hadn’t cried for her 3 a.m. feeding.

She found the baby “red in the face, foamy at the mouth, and having difficulty breathing,” the mother said. The baby didn’t have a fever, however, and the pediatrician advised her to keep an eye on the situation. The baby was very lethargic, her parents said. Later, as her father held her in his arms, she started to shake–the first of many seizures. As the seizures increased, she was hospitalized.

“It was very frightening,” the girl’s mother said.

At first, neither the family nor the doctors connected her problems with the vaccination. “It’s a highly emotional state,” the father said. “It takes time to wrestle with this. … There are all sorts of different distractions.”

A child injured by a vaccine must file a claim within three years after the first symptoms appear. The family of a child who dies must file within two years of the death.

No lawsuits concerning vaccine injuries can be filed in a civil court, the law says, until after a claim has been filed with the vaccine compensation program and the litigant has decided to reject its award. As a result, the number of lawsuits filed against vaccine manufacturers has plunged since the fund’s inception: four suits against DTP makers in 1997, compared with 255 in 1985.

In New Jersey, four attorneys are listed by the Court of Federal Claims for filing vaccine-related claims with the program. Roth and her partner, Drew Britcher of Britcher, Leone & Roth, are two of them.

“People need to know to get to the fund,” Roth said. “They have this child. They have huge medical bills. They’ll be capped-out on their insurance. There is a place to go. If you don’t go there, you aren’t going to go anywhere. You will be dismissed from state court, and have no recourse.”

The program, which operates with a special master, pays attorney fees regardless of whether the claim succeeds or fails. The fees are based on an hourly rate of $175, plus expenses–not a percentage of the settlement, as in malpractice cases. Awards for pain and suffering are capped at $250,000.

The child is the sole beneficiary of the award, not the family. If the child dies, the annuity established as part of the award reverts to the compensation fund.


Friends,

Please feel free to write to me at jockdoubleday@aol.com with your questions, concerns, anecdotes, and ideas.

The information contained in this email is not a substitute for professional caregiver advice.

Jock Doubleday is the author of Spontaneous Creation: 101 Reasons Not To Have Your Baby in a Hospital, to be published soon. He is also active in the international endeavor to bring the dangers of vaccination to light.