Vaccines, Coercion and Control

I became what is now known as an anti-vaxxer quite by accident. I didn't even know what the term meant at the time, or why it was considered so dangerous for me to look into it. What I did know on that fateful afternoon in Koh Samui, Thailand, was that I needed answers to my infant daughter's nonstop screaming.

As a new mother to my miracle baby, I had meticulously researched everything during my pregnancy. I read What to Expect When You're Expecting and What to Eat When You're Expecting cover to cover. I joined a Mums and Bubs group started by a British woman in our little expat community. Many were older women and some of whom had undergone fertility treatment in order to conceive. It was an international, well travelled, well educated crowd, with husbands who were stockbrokers and diplomats. I was the only American, and the only mother who worked, as a staff writer for an online smallcap news company called FinancialWire. 

I was also ardently pro vaccine. Until I wasn't.

I was terrified of being in Thailand, a country with bugs and germs and snakes and spiders lurking around every corner, just waiting to devour my newborn. In 2006 it was just a hair before prenatal vaccines were suggested or normalized, so none of my California docs pushed them on me. But I wanted my infant daughter to have every vaccine possible as soon as possible. I was angry at the hospital, a high end place that looked like somewhere movie stars might go for rehab, for not giving my newborn any vaccines at birth, even though they had promised one "wellness jab" in our birth package. What that "wellness jab" was for, it never occurred to me to ask. I was sure it was for some terrible preventable disease. So my boyfriend and I both argued at two weeks old that our newborn should get this jab. It was for hepatitis B.

The Hell started immediately. My perfect little daughter let out the most ear piercing scream on injection and didn't stop. "Normally!" The Thai nurses at the hospital assured me as they tried to coo and rock her. The entire drive home was nonstop screaming. The entire afternoon was nonstop screaming. God did my first girl have a soprano. It could break eardrums.

Perhaps five hours later we took our baby back into the same hospital ER where she had been injected. Amidst the backdrop of constant nonstop screaming, we demanded answers.

The chief director, a Thai man who had lived in the USA for 30 years after studying at Johns Hopkins, who had opened the hospital primarily for fertility treatment, took a middle road. With our infant daughter screaming outside the door as a nurse tried to rock her, he tried to calm us down. "I think you got a bad batch. It happens sometimes. You should report it to VAERS." My boyfriend had been talking about suing the hospital. We sure as heck had never heard of VAERS. The director was all to happy to provide the batch number and my baby daddy said he filed a VAERS report.

That didn't stop the crying though, or colic, as the nurses called it. Every test was out of pocket to us, and we had no idea what we were looking for anyways. The nurses thought it was inflammation and gave our daughter some infant Tylenol. After that we took our newborn screaming baby home.

The first night of this was hell to me. Everytime she started to breastfeed she'd start up again and scream. My boyfriend and I tried rocking her all night, feeling impotent at the results. Our girl cried, sometimes too exhausted to scream, but never sleeping or normal as in the two weeks before this jab.

The next morning, having gotten zero sleep on top of the exhaustion of being a new parent in general, my boyfriend said he was going to work. I tried to take care of our girl, who had slowly drifted into a restless slumber at about 6 AM. I did my morning report for FinancialWire then crawled into bed to breastfeed my baby. I was exactly drifting off when her ear piercing scream hit my ears again.

I picked her up, exhausted myself. She hit me then with the most ear piercing scream imaginable, right in my ear. I pulled her back from me, stared at her in exhaustion, and dropped her onto our bed, a distance of about 18 inches. I listened to her nonstop scream as I walked out. I couldn't deal with this anymore.

I walked out of the house to the landlady across the street, a good Thai woman named Kuhn Jeep. "I can't I can't right now." I said as she heard the screaming from our house and understood immediately. Kuhn Jeep went to comfort our daughter as I walked the neighborhood in search of Ruth. She was a British gal instrumental in the Mum's and Bubs club formation.

She was in front with their four month old daughter, as her husband Tim was inside and did some stock trades on the Internet. I exhaled and explained about my daughter's non-stop crying since her shot. She came over immediately. Over the course of several hours, we got my girl to quiet down. At around noon my baby drifted into a deep sleep.

Ruth and Tim came back in the afternoon, after my boyfriend was home from work. They had something on their mind.

"We never vaccinated our baby." Tim told me, as I stared at them blankly. It was like they were initiating me into a top secret club. 

"Okay." I said, still completely clueless. I guess my first thought was something along the lines of jabs work and jabs save lives, so why is what you do with your kid any of my business? I was open, I guess. I'd just never thought about it before.

Tim was shocked by my complacency. "This is a very big deal! My family said they don't want to see our girl over it." He nodded forlornly. "But we did the research."

"You told me your girl stated screaming right after she got the jab, right?" Ruth asked me. I nodded. There was absolutely zero lag there. "Please. I have some things I'd like you to read." She handed me two books. One was "The Truth About Vaccinations."

My baby girl, perhaps exhausted from the nonstop screaming, slept quite heavily for the next few days, giving me plenty of time to read. I looked up a section on hepatitis B vaccine for babies. I was horrified when I realized that this jab was for a disease that could only be passed to my baby through injected drug use, unprotected sex, or a hep B positive mother. Since I'd been screened for everything during prenatal testing and was negative for hep B, there was no reason for my baby to have gotten this vaccine at all. It was completely useless to her. Why would US health authorities even have this on the vax schedule for newborns, if the mother has been screened and is negative, I asked myself. That started me at the top of the rabbit hole.

My views evolved slowly, on a vaccine by vaccine basis. My baby daughter remained a colicky screaming baby through her first eight months of life, though gripe water and bicycle kicks to relieve gas in her tummy seemed to help. We learned to live with it, I suppose.

We got her one more vaccine at the hospitals prodding, this one a combination shot for some diseases like polio and whooping cough that theoretically could hurt her. My pediatrician had landed on the bad batch theory for her first negative reaction. This time she had no obvious adverse event, but her eyes couldn't seem to focus on me anymore, and she slept very deeply. I was reading about the connection between SIDS and infant jabs. I kept on nudging her awake to make sure she was okay. Some mother's instinct in me was more profoundly affected by her mild reaction to the second shots than it had been by her undeniable reaction to the first. I decided to stop giving her any more vaccines until I had done more research. That pause continues with my healthy valedictorian in middle school now 15 year old.

I talked to other mothers about my concerns. It was usually like hitting a brick wall. I got much further when I narrowed my focus to moms whose child appeared to be having an immediate adverse reaction to shots. I figured that was where Ruth had found me. People much more readily change their minds when confronted with crisis.

What I discovered on the other side of it was a type of soft coercion was being used. Some of these women admitted that their kid probably did get hurt by some jab, but they had to continue on the vaccine schedule. One cited a closed investigation by Child Protective Services that she feared would be reopened if she didn't toe the line. Another mentioned a vindictive ex seeking custody of their son, who would use her not continuing to take her child in for wellness checks as ammunition in his case. Yet another didn't want to rock the boat with her child's placement in an elite private school. 

There were also sadistic attempts to blame the mother for vaccine injuries. I knew that well. When I had explained what had happened to my infant daughter after her hep B shot, I stupidly mentioned dropping her on the bed from 18 inches when she screamed in my ear. "Don't ever shake the baby!" One friend admonished me. I hadn't shook her but I conceded I was overwhelmed and had made a mistake. A male friend from Ohio launched into an even worse tirade on how the only reason I was even able to keep my baby after what I had done was because I was in a third world shithole country like Thailand, where proper rule of law didn't apparently exist. I had a woman whose daughter died of SIDS 36 hours after her two month jabs. She told a very sad tale of how blame shifted to her and what she had or hadn't done as soon as she started questioning the vaccines. It was a doubling down on a failed strategy.

In abusive relationships the abuser gets his (or her) way most often through a form of soft coercion. He sets up a system of rewards and punishments that is designed to force the victim to police themselves. It seems to me that governments Covid strategy is based on these exact models. I can tell you that they've had a lot of trial runs and practice at it.

So how are you going to break free?