This is an open letter from Megan Heimer to Focus on the Family’s pro-vaccine stance which, I too, think is completely unbiblical.
Dear Focus On the Family, You’re On the Wrong Side of the Vaccine Controversy
Dear Focus on the Family,
We need to talk. Sister to brother, friend to friend, one Christian homie to another. Recently, I’ve seen several other Christian organizations whose opinions I typically value, step into the vaccination controversy. These articles have all had three things in common: they support vaccines, are void of scientific and biblical citation, and fail to address the valid religious objections Christians have (or should have) to vaccines.
Imagine the surprise of thousands (if not millions) of parents — some of whom have vaccine injured children or children who will never be able to subscribe to your magazine (because they were killed by a routine vaccination) — when they opened up your highly anticipated “Thriving Family Magazine,” only to see your stance on a polarizing subject that was neither scientific, nor biblically based.
Because I am a Christian who cares deeply for your organization and our religious liberties, let me tell you, in love, where this article went sorely wrong and why you should retreat from your stance on vaccines until it is aligned properly with the scripture that forms the foundation of your organization.
In the “Thrive” article, a mother asked a question on whether she should get her newborn vaccinated.
My doctor says I should get my newborn vaccinated, but I’m not sure because of safety concerns I’ve heard from my friends. Besides, are these diseases kids are being vaccinated against even around anymore?
Dr. Daniel Hinthorn responded to the question in print by stressing that vaccines are both safe and effective, are founded upon solid research, and that adverse reactions are uncommon and usually minor. He then inaccurately stated that measles, mumps, rubella, and whooping cough are “making a comeback” because parents, like us, aren’t vaccinating, and backed it up with manipulated statistics.
Wait, it gets better. He then degraded your highly educated supporters by insinuating that parents who don’t vaccinate, opt out because they are ignorant of the “horrible toll” these mild, common, childhood diseases caused in years past. It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the fact that vaccinating violates our religious beliefs founded upon the very word of God your organization claims as their foundation or because the “solid research” Dr. Hinthorn claims vaccines are founded upon doesn’t exist.
Now, I’m sure Dr. Hinthorn is a nice guy. I’m also sure he’s highly educated. Clearly, Merck pharmaceutical company (a major manufacturer of several vaccines our children receive) thought so or they would have never paid him thousands of dollars to promote their shingles vaccine (which, ironically contains aborted baby ingredients). But financial contributions aside, Dr. Hinthorn was wrong on both scientific and biblical grounds.
First, vaccines have never been proven to be safe. This assumption would require proper safety studies, which not a single pharmaceutical company has conducted to date. Go ahead, look at the package inserts. The pre-licensure studies are not double-blind, placebo-controlled studies using an inert substance (like saline) as the control, as required to meet the standards of evidence-based medicine. The “placebos” are other vaccines or toxic adjuvants also contained in the vaccine, rendering all results inaccurate at best. So if we’re going to test a vaccine to see if it causes brain damage but we test it against a control that is classified as a neurotoxic hazardous waste and is scientifically proven to cause brain damage, exactly how accurate are those safety studies going to be?
Now look at the post-licensure studies in the National Institute of Health’s database. You’ll see that much of the results are manipulated to reach the desired outcome, cohorts are excluded, studies are financially backed by the very pharmaceutical companies who stand to profit from the results, or they’re conducted by individuals who have a financial relationship with or hold stock in the pharmaceutical company whose vaccine they’re analyzing. Better yet, many are supported by huge corporations like the “Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,” whose “agenda” I’m sure we’re both aware of.
Of course, there are a few properly conducted, unbiased studies. They either have “RETRACTED” written across the front page, aren’t accessible to the public, or require a fee to access.
This leaves the “safety studies” conducted by the CDC, which has incestuous relationships with the very pharmaceutical companies whose products they are supposed to objectively evaluate and is infamous for manipulating the results of their safety studies to exclude cohorts that would show vaccines have negative health consequences. The CDC also has a non-profit arm called the “CDC Foundation” which is heavily supported by pharmaceutical companies. No conflicts of interest there.
Now, Dr. Hinthorn insinuates vaccines are safe again when he says the negative effects are minor and uncommon. But this simply isn’t true and is inconsistent with the package inserts, research, billions awarded by our own government to children who’ve suffered severe vaccine injuries, and millions of parents who’ve said their children suffered more than a “rash, fever, or swelling at the injection site.”
The possible “minor negative effects“ of vaccines include (but are not limited to): meningitis, encephalitis, vaccine-strain chicken pox, mumps, rubella, shingles, and measles, Guillain-Barré, pneumonia, autism (p. 11 of the DPT we all had as kids), multiple sclerosis, diabetes, blindness, deafness, arthritis, acute disseminated encephalomyelitis, transverse myelitis, Stevens-Johnson Syndrome, eczema, seizures, paralysis, SIDS, and death.
The statement that “negative effects” are “uncommon” is unsupported, as the only database set up to monitor the adverse reactions of vaccinations (VAERS) is unreliable at best and is said to only represent 1-10% of actual adverse events. But that’s how it’s supposed to be, because if a proper system were set up it would be too easy to “causally connect” a vaccine with a “negative outcome” and parents would question vaccines and doctors would actually have to be trained to recognize and required to report adverse reactions. We would also not be able to discount the testimonies of millions of parents (who are informed and highly educated, not crazy) who say their children experienced more than a minor, uncommon, negative reaction.
We all need to open up our eyes and come to terms with the fact that vaccines play a role in the unprecedented number of children who have chronic disease and neurological damage in this country. And that starts with the parents…and the church.
As for the efficacy studies, these don’t exist either but that doesn’t matter because Dr. Hinthorn says that the fact that we don’t hear a lot about how dangerous these diseases is a testimony to the effectiveness of immunizations. Case closed? Hardly. We hear what the media wants us to hear and we get the story how the media wants us to get it. You go ask your Grandma what it was like to have chicken pox, measles, mumps, or rubella. (Polio is an exception that we’ll get to in a minute.)
And let’s talk about what it means for a vaccine to be “effective.” The CDC says a vaccine is effective if it introduces an antigen, that may or may not initiate an antibody response, that may or may not provide immunity, but it if does, is only temporary. So you get junk immunity (if any) and it wears off (at an unknown date and time), catapulting you into an age bracket where exposure to that disease is much more serious. Oh, and that temporary immunity may have come at a severe cost.
Does that seem “effective” to you?
What’s effective, is getting a common, mild, childhood illness…as a child…that yields lifetime immunity and protection against more serious diseases as an adult and likewise, gives a mother protective antibodies to pass on to her babies to protect them for their first year of life. But that’s just me. (Clearly, the scientific community gets it or we would not be using polio and measles viruses to treat cancer.)
So what’s decreased the prevalence of these diseases then? It’s very simple: increased breastfeeding, abolishment of routine tonsillectomies, the vast improvements we’ve made in sanitation, hygiene, living conditions, and access to acute medical care over the past century, as well as the purposeful change in diagnostic criteria in an attempt to make the vaccines look more effective.
Think I’m wrong? Coxsackie, Enteroviruses, DDT, arsenic, and lead poisoning, hand-foot-mouth disease, Guillain-Barré, aseptic meningitis, and any other illness resulting in paralysis for at least 24 hours would have yielded a polio diagnosis prior to the polio vaccine. Actual polio was asymptomatic 95% of the time and what we would have diagnosed as polio still exists today under various different names. Non-paralytic polio became aseptic meningitis (which we still have) and the iron lung got a makeover into what is now our modern-day ventilator.
Go ahead, research measles too.
Now, I’d be lying if I said vaccines didn’t play any role in the decrease of some diseases, but I argue that it came with a price both children today and future generations will have to pay for as incidences of cancer, childhood death (the statistics of which, should embarress any industrialized nation), and chronic disease continue to rise and our most vulnerable populations (adults, infants, and the immunocompromised) are put at risk.
Moving on to the statistics, Dr. Hinthorn stated that from 2000 to 2007, there was an average of 63 measles reported in the U.S. per year. He then compared the median annual number from this time period to the 2014 measles number that didn’t have the privilege of being extrapolated out over a period of years. That’s not very objective, is it?
If you look at the CDC’s MMWR measles statistics, you’ll see that measles isn’t making a comeback because it never left (despite our high vaccination rates). In 2008 there were 140 cases of measles, in 2011 there were 220 cases, in 2012 there were 54 cases, in 2013 there were 189 cases, in 2014 there were 644 cases, and in 2015 there have only been 159 cases. Even during the one year of “measles elimination” there were 86 cases of measles (and countless cases of measles post-vaccine that aren’t counted as measles cases thanks to the change in diagnostic criteria).
During the listed years above, there were no confirmed cases of measles death or encephalitis. Yet, each year numerous children suffer brain encephalitis and die from the MMR vaccine – two potential “minor negative outcomes” listed on the manufacturer’s insert and downplayed by Dr. Hinthorn’s article.
Now I could go into detail on each vaccine. I could touch on the fact that Merck is accused of lying about the efficacy of its mumps vaccine, that the CDC is accused of covering up research that would show the MMR vaccine isn’t safe, data showing that live virus vaccines shed, infecting our most vulnerable populations, and I could cite the pertussis statistics so that anyone with two eyes could see that the pertussis vaccine is nothing short of a joke. (This is a fact that even the government acknowledges.) But I would like to move on to the more pressing issue.
You promoted a viewpoint in “Thriving Family” that contradicts the Word of God and makes it exponentially easier for our government to violate the religious liberties of your readers (and Christians everywhere). I realize that this is a bold statement to make. I understand that many have not contemplated the biblical view regarding vaccinations or felt the Holy Spirit’s conviction on this subject. Clearly, I am not one of those people.
You, as a religious organization made up of religious leaders, have an obligation to uphold the word of God, even if it contradicts the world around you, your education, and your bias. It is my conviction that God does not support vaccines (at least in their current state) and neither do you, if you’re looking at your own position on a number of things from religious liberties to the sanctity of life.
I know what you’re thinking, “What does abortion have to do with our position on vaccines?” A lot actually. You see, you publish extensively about abortion and the sanctity of life on both your website and your 74 page “Sanctity of Human Life Guide.” And I quote,
There is no doubt that the unborn is a human being from conception. […] At conception, a whole human being, with its own genome, comes into existence […].
[…] Truth requires action: [We must] remind those around us of the value of all human life by speaking out for “those who cannot speak for themselves” (Proverbs 31:8). Look for opportunities to talk about and act upon your pro-life views.
[…] For she is saying that the government may exclude small, vulnerable, defenseless, and dependent unborn human beings from its protection for no other reason than because others consider the unborn’s destruction vital to their well-being. (Kind of like vaccine manufacturers that require aborted baby parts to make their vaccines?)
[…]Advocate a biblical view of human value and apply that view to abortion, embryonic stem cell research, cloning, physician-assisted suicide, and other assaults on human dignity. (Except vaccines?)
Are you aware that there are more than 23 vaccines that contain aborted baby DNA, cellular debris, cells, and protein? These include, Adenovirus, Polio, Dtap/Polio/HiB Combo, Hep A, Hep A/Hep B Combo, MMR, MMRV Pro Quad, Rabies, Varicella, and the Shingles vaccine, and there are more in the pipeline. A lot more.
Despite what the mainstream media or Dr. Paul Offit (a supposed atheist, former financial beneficiary of a vaccine patent, who has a $2 million dollar Maurice R. Hilleman chair at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine (3/4 of it funded by Merck), wants to eliminate religious exemptions, touts an unchallenged, unscientific message from an unbiblical viewpoint, and is cited in footnote 18 of your vaccine position statement) will tell you, we’re not talking about just two babies here.
We are talking about hundreds, if not thousands of aborted babies who have been and continue to be dissected in order to obtain the perfect cell line for the vaccines you just promoted in your article. It’s listed on the CDC’s vaccine adjuvants and additives list, the vaccine package inserts, and you can even purchase these cell lines online. Here’s just a short list of some of the babies used to cultivate vaccines. Note…there are more than two.
PER C6 came from a healthy 18 week-old baby who was aborted for social reasons. This tumorigenic strain is being used to develop adenovirus, Ebola, influenza, malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV vaccines. Developers call it a “human designer cell” but what they really mean is “aborted baby cell.”
The HEK293 cell line is derived from the kidneys of a healthy aborted fetus and is being used to develop new influenza vaccines.
IMR-90 cell line came from a 16-week old female aborted baby and IMR-91came from a male aborted baby. Both were created for vaccine production and functional references.
WI-38 (RA 273) was a 16-week-old female baby (20 cm long) who was aborted in Sweden because the parents felt they had too many children. The baby was packed on ice and sent to the United States (speculation suggests without consent – which was common) where it was dissected. The use of WI-38 cells is a lucrative moneymaking business.
WI-1 through WI-25 cell strains were derived from the lung, skin, muscle, kidney, heart, thyroid, thymus, and liver of 21 separate elective (and some speculate illegal) abortions.
WI-44 was derived from the lung of a three-month old surgically aborted fetus.
MCR-5 cell line was derived from the lung tissue of a 14-week-old male (Britain).
Eighty elective abortions (recorded) were involved in the research and final production of the current rubella vaccine: 21 from the original WI-1 through WI-26 fetal cell lines that failed, plus WI-38 itself, plus 67 from the attempts to isolate the rubella virus.
But even if there were only two aborted babies that have or will ever be used in that process, it’s still not biblically justifiable. God doesn’t waver on his stance whether two or two hundred babies are involved, just like Focus on the Family would never waver on their cloning stance whether one person was cloned, or fifty.
So which is it, is human life sacred or not? Are we to advocate the biblical view of human value and apply our abortion viewpoint to “assaults of human dignity,” but remain silent in the area of vaccines? Because right now, you have a lot of readers who are having trouble reconciling your pro-life stance with your pro-vaccine stance and even the Position Statement on Vaccines by Focus on the Family is completely silent on this issue, when it shouldn’t be.
It’s not just about the babies though. It’s about the hazardous wastes, neurotoxins, carcinogens, animal parts, allergens, live viruses, and attenuated viruses and bacteria injected into our children that’s the problem. You see, God says we are “set apart” (1 Peter 2:9) and that our bodies are holy. He says we are to honor God with our bodies and that they are a temple to the Lord (1 Corinthians 6:19-20; 3:16-17). He says that he created our immune system (Psalm 139: 13-14), lists the things we need to do to keep it healthy, and says that our blood – the life-force of our body – is to be kept pure (Leviticus 17:14).
God says, you shall have no other “god” before him (Exodus 20:3) and that our Christian leaders are first and foremost, to be submissive to God’s words over the ways of man (Acts 5:29). They are to stand in the face of adversity and boldly adhere to his biblical principles (Acts 4:13, 29, 31, 28:31, Ephesians 6:19, 1 John 1:6). He gave parents the authority over their children, not the government and most certainly not “our neighbor.”
Jesus says to love our neighbor as ourself – which doesn’t mean I should love my neighbor like the world thinks I should, but how God thinks I should. It is ludicrous to think that loving my neighbor would require that I sacrifice the well-being of my own child, subjecting them to a medical procedure that could kill or seriously harm them, for someone else’s. That human sacrifice has already been made and his name was Jesus Christ.
Last but not least, let’s not forget that the Bible has a thing or two to say about Big Pharma and her vaccines:
[…] For thy merchants were the great men of the earth; for by thy sorceries were all nations deceived. And in her was found the blood of prophets, and of saints, and of all that were slain upon the earth.”- Revelations 18:23-24 (John is talking about a commercial and political system that controls the people. Sorcery comes from the Greek word pharmakeia (φαρμακεια), which is where we get the word “pharmaceutical.” In the New Testament, it is used to describe an occult practice using magic-based potions, poisons, or medicine and in this verse it was used to deceive the nations. I’ll let you figure out who’s who in this modern-day scenario.)
Like Dr. Hinthorn, I agree that parents should discuss any question or concerns they have with their baby’s doctor, but first and foremost they should consult the Word of God and run anything their doctor says through the lens of scripture. With 29 states trying to remove our right to opt out of vaccines for religious reasons, I hope that in the future, you will consider the implications your position might have on Christians everywhere and I prayerfully urge you to reconcile your position on vaccines with the scripture and not the shortcomings of our modern medical establishment.
NOTE: All of the above statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.
Dr. Conners graduated with his doctorate from Northwestern Health Sciences University in 1986. He holds AMA Fellowships in Regenerative & Functional Medicine and Integrative Cancer Therapy.
He is the author of numerous books including, Stop Fighting Cancer and Start Treating the Cause, Cancer Can’t Kill You if You’re Already Dead, Help, My Body is Killing Me, Chronic Lyme, 3 Phases of Lyme, 23 Steps to Freedom, and many more you can download for FREE on our books page.