If They’d Solely Had H-E-A-R-T
By Julie Obradovic
It’s been 5 years since I’ve written anything about autism, vaccine safety, or the controversies surrounding both. I took a break at the end of 2017 for personal reasons and focused exclusively on it for some time. Subsequently, 2018 and 2019 were very difficult but exciting years for me, free from at least one difficult situation that I had immersed myself in the previous 14: advocacy.
And then 2020 happened.
Like everyone else, I never thought in my wildest dreams that we would experience what we did when we did it. But perhaps not like anyone else, I long ago foresaw the impact of a vaccine-only response to a pandemic that swept across the railroad tracks. I just didn’t see that impact happening in 2021.
I thought the kind of things that were presented to us last year… like vaccination records… and segregation based on vaccination status… and losing the freedom to make your own medical decisions and still participate in a free society and/or your job keep…and “quarantine” camps….and organized censorship of medical dissent worldwide….I wouldn’t see until old age.
Oh, it’s decades earlier here. The worst-case scenario of worst-case scenarios is playing out before us. All the things that other advocates and I feared became a reality in full effect back in 2005, just 17 years later. (Consider this from some perspective. California was a medical freedom destination as recently as 2014. They have long been one of only a handful of states with a philosophical exemption from vaccines.)
When I first got involved back then, I wrote and spoke about the potential impact of the medical industrial complex’s behavior on vaccine uptake, hesitation and injury. I naively believed that logic, fairness and compassion still ruled the day and that everything could be fixed if only we could make the right arguments with the right evidence in front of the right people.
It seemed so simple, so reasonable.
Limit liability protection to specific products for a specific period of time. Allow manufacturers to be sued in real court. Submit your data and research to discovery. Create a tiered schedule that ranks vaccines as “highly recommended”; recommended; and lifestyle situationally. Establishment of an independent supervisory authority. Release the security records sent ashore for anyone to review. Let consumers choose what to inject and what not to inject into their bodies. Let the free market rule.
Not as easy as it turns out, especially when it comes to trillions of dollars and criminal charges.
So many things in life are paradoxical where what we must do to achieve our goal seems completely at odds with our goal. In other words, eat fat to lose fat. Or upholding the rights of individuals to sustain a country’s existence. Or put an oxygen mask on yourself before putting one on your child to save them.
I firmly believe that the same paradox applies to the vaccine controversy. The response to vaccine hesitation has never been to censor or deny or minimize the dangers of vaccines; it was to let them openly. It should never fear liability, it should welcome it. It was never about burning those injured in the vaccine, it was about honoring them.
If the powers that be had seen this years ago, we might not be in this mess today. If only they had HEART, the trust would never have gone away.
H – honor
Honor the injured, their families and the sacrifice they made for society. If the justification for mandates is the greater good, then the greater good owes these fallen comrades and their families recognition of their service.
(The current practice of denying their injuries, tampering with evidence, gaslighting victims, and accusing the injured of harming others for speaking their truth is as shameful as it gets. These families are on the defensive too pushing and then making enemies is nothing short of evil. To be clear, there would be no “anti-vax” movement if this had never happened.)
E – educate
form people. Educate medical consumers and providers about vaccine injuries, what they look like, sound like, how they work and how they present. We need doctors who know about short-term AND long-term vaccine injuries and how to treat them. Also, stop saying it’s rare. You can’t say something is rare if you’ve never studied it closely or thoroughly. And most importantly, if it happens to you or someone you love, it doesn’t matter if it’s rare.
A – Confirm
Recognize the enormous conflicts of interest and work tirelessly to limit them. Confirm what you know and don’t know about vaccine safety throughout life. Acknowledge that you don’t know how to recognize it or how to treat it very well. Acknowledge the lack of an independent regulator. Acknowledge that the CDC serves two masters: the same agency responsible for promoting vaccine uptake is also responsible for their safety. Acknowledge that this is a problem.
R – research
Research vaccination injuries. Really. Really do your research. Once and for all, study the entire recommended vaccination schedule for children, not just one vaccine and one ingredient. Do not add another vaccine to the schedule before doing so.
Examine short- and long-term effects over a lifetime. Investigate genetic vulnerabilities. study treatment plans. Study everything you can think of to implicate vaccines in causing harm and how to avoid or fix it by identifying those at risk. Medical consumers deserve nothing less.
T – Treat
treat injured people. Find robust, effective and quality treatments. Tell the truth about what happened to them. Enough with this “coincidence” nonsense. Assume the injury is due to the vaccine until you prove it isn’t, rather than the other way around, as is the case with many other conditions. (I eat something and instantly get sick, nobody is forcing me to prove it was the food. Nobody tells me millions of other people have eaten the food and felt good, so it can’t have done me any harm.) Quality, independent Research will prove what happened anyway. There is nothing to worry about.
We don’t have a crisis of faith in science or medicine and never have. We have a crisis of confidence in our leadership and an industry with a miserable track record of harming the consumers it supposedly cares about when money is at stake.
The answer is not to censor, insult, or ignore those whose trust has been broken. The answer is to take responsibility for why and how the trust was broken and do whatever it takes to restore it. You know, to actually have a HEART.
Julie Obradovic is Associate Editor of Age of Autism. She has served children and families affected by autism for over 15 years by working with and for various organizations. She is also the author of An Unfortunate Coincidence: a mother’s life within the autism controversy (Skyhorse Publishing, 2016).
