Mass Vaccination: a holistic perspective.
Mass vaccination: a holistic perspective.
by RICHARD HOUSE
With every childhood illness something new is breaking through into the child’s life, which is why every childhood illness generally brings with it a powerful stride forward in personal development.
Thorwald Dethlefsen & Rudiger Dahlke, The Healing Power of Illness
In this brief article I will develop a simple, logical, ecologically informed case against the principle of (mass) vaccination. I am not a trained medical practitioner, so I cannot (nor do I need or wish to) invoke such “expertise”. I write as a registered chartered psychologist (BPS), a former senior university lecturer in psychology and education, a former psychotherapist, and a Waldorf teacher with a long-run interest in holistic philosophy and ecological sustainability.
I will highlight two levels to address in considering mass vaccination: first, the effects (both immediate and life-long) upon individual children of being, or not being, vaccinated; and secondly, the long-run effects upon the whole human ecosystem of vaccination programmes which are driven by the view that it is somehow possible to control nature in a mechanistically crude fashion – underpinned by what one might call a control-fixated patriarchal view of science and technology.
As I wrote this article some 18 years ago, in June 2002, new research was then being reported that counter-intuitively concluded that too much cleanliness is actually bad for children’s health, as their “pristine” immune system doesn’t therefore get the opportunity to develop a robustness (or “natural immunity”) to deal with life’s many “impurities”. Similarly, the phenomenon of superbugs was discovered back in the 1990s (see Geoffrey Cannon’s book Superbug), which forcefully argued that the overuse of antibiotics is helping to “breed” harmful diseases. The subtitle to Cannon’s book was “Nature’s Revenge”; and for the kinds of reasons adduced to explain the harmful effects of too much cleanliness or too many antibiotics, I maintain that there is a very real possibility that Nature will also exact her revenge on our species as a result of its short-sighted and misguided attempts to control life through mass vaccination programmes.
Where is the “scientific research” on the impact on the human immune system of children being subjected to scores of vaccinations in their formative years? In the world’s wealthiest nation, American children are blitzed with scores of vaccines – but where is there any link being made between this fact, and the US being the worst-affected nation in the world by COVID-19? The answer: precisely nowhere; because our positivistic scientists (and certainly not Big Pharma) dare not look into such vital scientific questions. I wonder why?... No, the authoritarian tendencies of modern science and technology, that philosopher of science Paul K. Feyerabend wrote about in his 1978 book Science in a Free Society and in his posthumous 1996 book The Tyranny of Science, are clear for all to see today, as any voices that challenge the unctuously uncritical mainstream narrative on vaccination are systematically silenced. Professor Feyerabend must be turning in his grave. It’s not as if he didn’t warn us of these great dangers to democracy.
However, there thankfully exists a mounting groundswell of dissent against the narrow world-view that materialistic modern science champions – knowing more and more about less and less, with its obsession with only measuring the empirically measurable, and with species-centred control and manipulation as its goal; its ignoring of the human soul and spirit; and its largely unconscious attempt to deny the existential realities and necessary sufferings of human life.The Scientific and Medical Network is just one cultural manifestation of this disquiet – a global network of prominent scientists, philosophers and medical practitioners (including numerous university professors and some Nobel prize-winners) who are questioning the one-sidedly materialistic worldview of modern science and technology. Within the field of philosophy itself, the project of “modernity” has been decisively undermined by “New Paradigm” thinking; and the orthodox medical view that vaccination is an unambiguous human “good” is firmly rooted in a modernist, empiricist worldview which conveniently ignores the wealth of reputable literature which comprehensively undermines it. There are also massive commercial vested interests involved in perpetuating the vaccination ideology (“Big Pharma”) – but I will not be addressing those highly dubious, self-interested forces in this short article.
At the individual level, then, it is clear that a considerable number of families believe that their children have been deeply harmed by – for example – the MMR vaccine (any casual perusal of the press back in the early 2000s revealed a litany of such stories). The problem with the scientific research that claims MMR to be harmless is that it is essentially based on aggregative “statistical reasoning”, rather than upon detailed and painstaking individual case-studies of actual children. Where the latter kind of research is conducted, it routinely reveals cases which strongly suggest harmful effects.
Moreover, empirical research can only monitor immediate or, at best, medium-term effects; for at present, it is quite impossible for modern empirical science to assess the long-term, life-long effects of these vaccinations on the human organism. Yet many, many people have a deep intuitive sense that there is something fundamentally wrong with mass vaccination for diseases which are not normally life-threatening – and in an area (that of life-long effects) where empirical science is inevitably silent, such intuitive wisdom should be taken very seriously indeed, and not arrogantly or condescendingly dismissed by the medical establishment as “unscientific” and “ill-informed” lay prejudice.
We must also ask, why is it that the manufacturers are granted legal immunity from the harmful effects of vaccines? – with pharmaceutical companies having been granted exception from future product liability claims in many countries. Why has this happened, if the vaccines are “completely safe”, as we are constantly being told? Just a couple of examples. In the USA in 1986, the US Congress enacted the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, which expressly eliminates manufacturers’ liability for any adverse vaccine side-effects. And in Slovenia, the Contagious Diseases Act absolves the vaccinating doctor as well as the vaccine manufacturer from all legal responsibility for any adverse health impacts. Why? All these cases and others are described at length in the recent book Ideological Constructs of Vaccination by Dr Mateja Cernic (Vega Press, 2018).
At the cultural, ecosystemic level, modern empirical science is also quite incapable of determining what the medium- and long-term effects might be upon the evolving human organism of universal vaccination programmes. The disturbing example of superbugs mentioned earlier suggests at least the possibility that there may well be a calamity-in-the-making, with those diseases that mass vaccination is claiming to control eventually mutating such that scientists will be quite unable to produce any protective vaccines against them. Those diseases might well then rampage through the human ecosystem, but with the human population being far more vulnerable to them precisely because mass vaccination has left their immune systems with a much-reduced opportunity to develop a natural robustness and resistance to them – and indeed to a wide range of other illnesses.
More generally, human history is littered with examples of the way so-called scientific “experts” have got it quite hopelessly wrong, and often with quite devastating consequences for humankind – the BSE scandal being just notable example from two decades ago. An obsession with planning and control – colloquially termed “control-freakery” – is a defining feature of our age, which we might characterise as “the death throes of modernity”. In other words, when an outdated and increasingly irrelevant paradigm or “worldview” (i.e. that of one-sided technocratic science) comes under threat because of its inherent incoherence, it responds with a desperate attempt to re-assert its hegemony against all the mounting evidence that threatens comprehensively to undermine it. I am convinced that at some point in the future, in a New Paradigm era beyond modernity, we will look back aghast at the crass ignorance which currently passes for so-called “objective” science. And we can only hope that this time comes sooner rather than later – or the cost in terms of net human suffering might well be incalculable.
In my view, what I join Dr Cernic in calling “vaccination ideology” is grounded in:
the psychodynamic terror of illness and death, with that ideology being merely one symptom of modern orthodox medicine’s desperate but futile attempt to cheat mortality;
the deluded and arrogant fiction that it is possible to control Nature for our own species-centred ends, without any unintended (not to mention quite unpredictable) side-effects (or what we can characterise as “patriarchal science”); and
the narrowly myopic view that illness is necessarily a bad thing to be eradicated at any cost, rather than an intrinsic and necessary aspect of human growth, development and maturity.
To repeat, it is quite impossible for the “experts” to tell us anything about the long-run, life-long effects of these vaccination regimes - either on the individuals subjected to them, on the one hand, or on the human ecosystem and its essential built-in checks and balances, on the other. And mass vaccination is therefore little more than playing Russian Roulette with both the health of individual people and with our human ecosystem more generally. Until modern scientific medicine is able and willing to embrace a more holistic, spiritually informed vision of science and human understanding, this “modernist madness” will no doubt continue.
It behoves all of us who are sceptical about mass, industrial-scale vaccination fearlessly to stand our ground against the condescending intimidation to which so many ordinary, concerned families and citizens are being subjected by the political, scientific and medical establishment.
Further Reading:
Bradford Millar, G. (1998). ‘A shot in the dark: a look at the Measles Vaccination Campaign, 1994 and 1996’, New View, 7, pp. 14, 26.
Cannon, G. (1995). Superbug: Nature’s Revenge – Why Antibiotics Can Breed Disease, Virgin Publishing, London.
Dethlefsen, T. and Dahlke, R. (1990). The Healing Power of Illness: The Meaning of Symptoms and How to Interpret Them, Element Books, Shaftsbury.
Evans, M. & Rodger, I. (2000). Healing for Body, Soul and Spirit: An Introduction to Anthroposophical Medicine, Floris Books, Edinburgh.
Hayes, M. (2002). ‘Our children – the “MMR vaccine”’, New View, 23, pp. 10–11.
Rawlinson, G. (1997). ‘Incarnation, vaccination and destiny: the struggle for equilibrium’, New View, 5, pp. 14–15
In 2002, Richard House was an NHS counsellor, a Steiner Waldorf early years teacher and an academic writer/editor living in Norwich, UK. Today he lives and campaigns in Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK. Address for correspondence: richardahouse@hotmail.com