A Midwestern Doctor weighs in on the RFK Jr. hearings and the vaccine debate
CROSS POST (EXCERPT)
by A Midwestern Doctor, who writes “The Forgotten Side of Medicine.” Substack at https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/
This guy writes really long posts but they are meticulously researched. He has an actual practice and treats actual patients, and writes about his experiences.
Disclaimer: I do not take vaccines. When I was 5 years old in 1956, my parents brought me to the hospital to get the Salk polio injection. Since then I have not taken another, and have stayed healthy (except for the occasional cold or flu. During COVID I was sick for 5 weeks from mid-December 2019 to most of January 2020 with a bad cold, but stayed on my feet for all that time.) Interestingly, when I stopped eating refined sugar my energy levels went up and I stopped getting even colds and flus. Best thing I ever did for my health, but that’s just me.
As RFK Jr. said in his hearing, vaccines do not cure infectious diseases, only public health measures such as sanitation, good food, and a clean living environment can do that. The best public health measure ever devised was the sewer system and the invention of the automobile, which got horses and their poop off city streets.
This is an excerpt from A Midwestern Doctor’s substack post titled “Dismantling The Common Lies Used To Push Vaccines.”
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Framing Vaccination
by A Midwestern Doctor
Within the vaccination debate, over the years, a variety of frames have been developed by the industry (and PR firms) that are constantly overlaid onto any discussion of vaccine safety. As you might expect these frames:
•Reinforce the reality that all vaccines are 100% safe and effective and that all ways vaccines are given are “necessary.”
•Reinforce the reality that vaccines were the greatest thing in human history.
•Reframe any questions of vaccine safety or efficacy as an existential danger to mankind.
Note: the phrase “safe and effective” is a very clever marketing frame, as the terms are deliberately not defined but imply “100% safe and effective,” thereby both giving vaccinators the wiggle room to not be caught in a lie (as they [e.g., Fauci here] can say “I never said it was 100% effective”) but simultaneously effectively able to constantly assert that lie [e.g., which Fauci did throughout COVID-19] and gain all the political capital that comes with it (since arguing against the widespread belief vaccines are completely safe and effective is a huge uphill battle). As such, vaccine zealots will never define what “safe and effective” means (as that would destroy their grift), and as I showed here, this slogan so effectively frames the vaccination debate that it’s been re-used since the dawn of vaccination despite honest experts in each generation complaining about its dishonesty.
In turn, since the same arguments are continuously reused, one of the “missions” of this Substack has been to dispel the false premises behind many of the common vaccine talking points. As such, when I watched the confirmation hearings, I noticed that the deceptively framed arguments repeatedly used there were the same ones I’d repeatedly discussed in this publication.
Measles Deaths or Chronic Disease?
Many of the Senators chose to blame RFK Jr. for a “deadly” measles outbreak in Samoa and used that to argue they could not justify voting for him. In truth, the press and medical literature had long stated the declining Samoan measles vaccination rates were due to improperly administered measles vaccines killing children in 2018, which the Samoans were outraged about, particularly since the responsible nurses covered up what happened (and it was only recently that history was revised to blame all of that on RFK Jr.). However, beyond it being a lie, this argument establishes the following frames:
•Measles is an existential threat to humanity, and as such, the 83 deaths that happened in Samoa are far more important than the millions of Americans with (ever-increasing) chronic illness and the deaths that result from them (which is obviously absurd).
•All deaths from measles are due to a lack of vaccination rather than nutritional deficiencies (whereas large reviews have found vitamin A deficiency causes 87% of measles deaths).
•Prior to vaccination, measles was a deadly killer and we are forever in debt to mass vaccination for ending this scourge. This however omits that the death rate for measles had massively declined prior to vaccination (e.g., in 1967 in Sweden, 2 or 3 out of an estimated 86,300 infected died—which means the flu now is hundreds of times more deadly than measles was then).
Vaccines Ending Infectious Diseases
Due to the industrial revolution, the lower class were packed into the early cities and lived in absolute squalor where infectious disease could rapidly spread. For instance:
•There was no public sanitation, sewage ran in open ditches outside people’s windows, human fecal matter often overflowed into the streets or into the water supply (frequently leading to disease outbreaks), and animal feces littered the streets (e.g., this article gives an idea of just how vast a public health hazard horse manure created).
•Houses were so tightly packed with impoverished people that when a relative died, they often had to keep the (diseased) corpse in the house because the family could not afford to pay for a burial.
•Children as young as 4 worked 12-16 hour days in extremely dangerous environments (with the most vulnerable and malnourished children typically working the most dangerous jobs because they did not have parents who could effectively advocate for them)—to the point in 1830, children composed 50% of England’s labor force.
•A significant amount of the food the lower classes could afford was rotten and adulterated. Because of this, they frequently were sickened by the food and faced significant nutritional deficiences.
Within this context, the death rate of children were astronomically high (e.g., in some cities 60% of children died before age 5). As such, the progressives of the era fought lengthy and arduous battles to improve public sanitation and protect the basic living conditions of the common people, and because of this, the rate of death, including from infectious diseases rapidly declined.
The medical industry in turn pulled off one of the greatest PR feats in modern history and was able to take credit for this decline, despite the fact (as this chart shows) that much of the decline preceded vaccination, and that scarlet fever (severe strep), the number one infectious killer (which we conveniently never hear about now), also declined, despite a vaccine never having been made for it.
Note: many different schools of natural medicine which emerged during this era all noticed that living in squalor made one dramatically more likely to die from infectious disease (which in turn played a major role in shaping the natural medicine philosophy of focusing on the body’s terrain to prevent infectious disease).
In turn, I believe a key reason why the medical profession is so wedded to asserting vaccines rescued us from the dark ages of infectious disease (and hence are the “greatest invention in human history”) is because much of the profession’s credibility and superiority to every other form of healing rests upon this mythology.
Smallpox and Polio
Whenever you question vaccines, one of the most common counter arguments is that vaccines eliminated two of the deadliest diseases in history, so it is unacceptable to ever question any vaccine. Beyond this being illogical (as rather than be the same, the risk-benefit ratio varies immensely—something I discussed in detail here in regards to each vaccine we give our children), it’s also a lie.
In the case of smallpox (which I covered in detail here), many do not know that:
•At the time the smallpox vaccine was created, it was met with immense skepticism by the medical profession, with many doctors (correctly) accusing the Jenner of fraud as no data existed to support it, they’d known many people who’d gotten cowpox and then smallpox, and they routinely saw the vaccine fail. The medical profession in turn only got behind the vaccine once they started being paid to administer it, and even then, many doctors still spoke out against it.
•The smallpox vaccine had an extraordinarily high rate of severely injuring recipients, so as the years went by, more and more people resisted getting it. Conversely, there are documented instances of doctors covering up those injuries to protect the vaccine program.
Note: I believe that the smallpox vaccine was the initial culprit behind the immense decline in vitality humanity has seen in the last 150 years.
•The smallpox vaccine routinely failed to prevent smallpox. In fact, outbreaks frequently followed its deployment, which remarkably were attributed to “not enough people being vaccinated” and harsher and harsher mandates being enacted to ensure they were.
•This (and the tsunami of injuries) led to increasingly large public protests against mandatory vaccination that eventually culminated in an 1885 English protest in Leicester consisting of 100,000 people from around Europe that resulted in the municipal government being thrown out and mandates being replaced with improved public sanitation and quarantining of both individuals with smallpox and those who’d been exposed to them.
•When Leicester’s policy was enacted, the medical profession proclaimed that it would create a smallpox disaster which would make the world never again question vaccination, but instead the opposite happened, Leicester got rid of smallpox, and the rest of the world copied their epidemiological methods. In turn, the actual reason we were able to eliminate smallpox was not due to vaccination but rather because the disease spread very slowly and had no animal reservoir (hence making it possible to eliminate—something which despite many attempts has only been accomplished for one other disease [the cattle virus rinderpest]).
In the case of Polio (which is discussed extensively in Dissolving Illusions):
•Populations existed who had widespread poliovirus infections but no cases of polio (e.g., a 1964 paper discussed the Xavante Indians of Brazil). Similarly, prior to 1900, polio was extremely rare, but then suddenly exploded in incidence. To some extent, I believe this was a result of vaccination as immune suppressing vaccines (e.g., DTwP) can provoke latent infections, and as I showed here many polio outbreaks were conclusively linked to vaccination campaigns (which has long made me wonder if the urgency to find a vaccine for polio, to the point a contaminated one was released, was in part due to the need to sweep that issue under the rug).
•In 1955, the year the Salk polio vaccine was released, the diagnostic criteria for polio was made much more stringent, specifically requiring laboratory confirmation of the polio virus and for paralysis to last at least 60 days after disease onset. In contrast, to quote a noted expert in the field:
Prior to 1954 any physician who reported paralytic poliomyelitis was doing his patient a service by way of subsidizing the cost of hospitalization and was being community-minded in reporting a communicable disease. The criterion of diagnosis at that time in most health departments followed the World Health Organization definition: “Spinal paralytic poliomyelitis: signs and symptoms of nonparalytic poliomyelitis with the addition of partial or complete paralysis of one or more muscle groups, detected on two examinations at least 24 hours apart.
The change in 1955 meant that we were reporting a new disease, namely, paralytic poliomyelitis with a longer-lasting paralysis. Furthermore diagnostic procedures have continued to be refined. Coxsackie virus and aseptic meningitis have been distinguished from paralytic poliomyelitis. Prior to 1954 large numbers of these cases were mislabeled as paralytic poliomyelitis. Thus, simply by changes in diagnostic criteria, the number of paralytic cases was predetermined to decrease in 1955-1957, whether or not any vaccine was used.
Note: one of the most noteworthy polio misdiagnoses was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s, which was most likely actually Guillain-Barré Syndrome (a condition that from the start was recognized to be caused by vaccination).
•Many neurological injuries can cause paralysis. Pesticide ones are particularly noteworthy, as waves of paralysis followed lead arsenate spraying (used to stop the gypsy moth) and then DDT spraying (which caused almost identical spinal cord lesions to polio). In turn, the rise and fall of polio roughly parallels the use of DDT in the United States (which was rapidly phased out in 1959).
•At the time polio emerged, modern (positive pressure) ventilators did not exist. As such, people had to be treated with external negative pressure ventilators (the iron lungs). Nowadays, many individuals have a wide range of neurologic conditions (e.g., transverse myelitis—another complication of vaccination) which can lead to respiratory paralysis, but we do not associate them with the horrors of polio because iron lungs are no longer needed to treat them.
•While highly effective treatments for polio existed (e.g., ultraviolet blood irradiation and IV vitamin C), the normal approach was to cast the affected limbs (under the erroneous belief it would protect them), when in reality, it caused permanent paralysis to develop (e.g., immobilizing polio-affected muscles causes rapid muscle loss with rates of 5-10% loss of strength per day, or 10-20% per week).
•Unlike the injectable (inactivated) polio vaccine, the oral polio vaccine is a live virus which can shed and cause polio. In turn, each year about a thousand cases of polio are due to vaccination campaigns (e.g., see this 2021 CDC report), and since 1979, the only cases of polio in the USA (e.g., one in 2022) have been due to the polio vaccine virus.
In short, while Polio did “disappear” after the polio vaccine, much of that disappearance was effectively smoke and mirrors, and it’s very hard to know how much was actually due to the vaccine.
Note: other issues existed with the polio vaccine such as it having hot lots which contained the actual polio virus (which the government was warned about but nonetheless released) which then caused polio outbreaks. Given this, the association between severe polio and previous tonsil surgeries,1,2,3 and its association with other types of vaccination, the medical field eventually concluded that penetrating injuries which directly exposed nervous system tissue enabled the polio virus to enter it and cause paralysis.
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To read the entire article, go here.
