I flew back to Denver from Boston on a non-stop the other day. At our gate, I settled into some tea while waiting to board.

What I saw would have stopped parents of another decade in their tracks.

Next to me was a harried dad with two children. His boy, overweight and somewhere around 10-12 years old, had autism. He was verbal, but stilted and singsongy in his language effort. He furiously dangled his wrists close to his eyes. He hummed, he rocked. He was doing all he could to manage himself in an overstimulating airport terminal, with crowds, loudspeakers, beeping carts, and TV monitors in every direction.

The father’s younger child was the bigger challenge. About eight years old, she had a high octane case of ADHD. She ping-ponged around the gate area, pulling on other travelers’ children, jumping off furniture, squealing and yelling, crashing into things and people. Her dad worked steadily and calmly to rope her in, to no avail. He couldn’t abandon his less independent son to chase her, or go to the bathroom, or get a coffee. Our flight was delayed over an hour. He stood vigil with his son, soothing him, while lassoing his daughter as best he could with his voice.

A row across from  me in the gate area sat another young family with two kids. Their older child, who looked to be about five years old, was bald. A delicate, pale girl, eyes hollow, skin grey, she wore the signature cancer headband: Sparkly, pink, with a sweet fabric flower on it. By comparison, these parents had the easier job, at least in this moment: Two children who, though much younger, were capable of listening, processing, understanding, and complying.

One full jet, ten kids boarding, a third of them seriously affected by a chronic condition. Which would you rather? Two children with severe and life-long functional disabilities that are regarded as virtually untreatable per standards of pediatric medicine today, and poorly covered by insurance if they are treated, with odds for dying youngish; or, one child with a severe life threatening illness that brings immediate but difficult treatment choices, more supported by insurance, with odds for dying soonish? Kids with autism have higher mortality rates than typical peers, and die most often by drowning, due to a lack of sense of danger; ADHD children are at higher risk of death from all causes once in their teen years; and cancer kills more US children than all other chronic conditions combined. Cancer incidence is at nearly 19 cases per 100,000 children (up from 13 per 100,000 in 1975), and autism is at 1,470 cases per 100,000 children (versus 10 in 100,000 in 1975).

For American parents following conventional rules of prenatal and pediatric care, this has been the result. It is now more common to have a sick or disabled child than to not have one. Despite having the costliest health care and the most aggressively vaccinated children in the world, our kids are literally sicker than ever. Over half of our children have a chronic disease, condition, or disability. These trends, advancing rapidly in just one generation, show no signs of abating their pace. Our children have more autism, epilepsy, allergy, asthma, developmental disability, diabetes, obesity, Crohn’s disease, growth failure, and cancer than they did 1975. So common are these conditions, they’ve become normalized.

They are anything but normal. It didn’t used to be like this. I did not know any children with asthma, autism, cancer, diabetes, or epilepsy when I was a

Mumps, measles, and chickenpox were regarded as important rites of passage for a maturing immune system


school age kid. I never had the flu, or flu shots (there weren’t any), nor did my four siblings, nor did my friends or their siblings. Kids went to school, and played and explored outside for hours on end, unsupervised. Being sick was rare – unless you still hadn’t had chickenpox or measles by the time you got to first grade (for that, you were teased for still being a baby). In which case you could miss two weeks of school, once.

My memories aside, causes of death for US children have shifted since 1970. Accidents and injuries are still the top cause of death; poverty is still a potent predictor of higher mortality. But while survivability of cancer has improved, children get cancer more often. Treatments have improved so it’s more survivable – that’s all good. But why are kids getting more cancer, more …everything?

Your children’s birthright is vibrant energy, a healthy strong body, infrequent and ordinary childhood illnesses, and curiosity to learn ably. We all expect that, but how do we increase our kids’ odds for having it? Three things have profoundly changed in pediatrics since 1970. Learn about these. Then you can choose how to navigate the potential toxic triggers for the chronic illness and disability in our kids today.

What happened? These three things:

1995:  Genetically modified crops entered the US food supply without safety review or regulation. Papaya and tomatoes were among the first foods tinkered with (Hawaii is now locked in its own Monsanto battle, just one of hundreds around the US). Soon after came soy and corn – two common ingredients in infant formulas and countless processed foods given to infants and children. Thus was produced the first generation of children ever in human history to get a genetically modified vaccine injected on the day of birth, while being fed genetically modified food from birth, for those who weren’t breast fed. Despite disturbing data on how genes from GMO foods can disrupt human gut microbiota, trigger allergies, or injure organs, the band plays on. While other countries refuse US imports of GMO crops, ban GMO foods for safety reasons, or require GMO labeling, the US continues to kowtow to industry preference by keeping GMOs in its food supply and keeping  consumers in the dark by refusing federal regulation of any sort. State by state, town by town, consumers face protracted, costly, and cumbersome ballot initiatives to obtain the right to know what’s in their food, when it comes to GMOs – typically followed, when consumers win, by a lawsuit from Monsanto for impingement on its “corporate rights”.

1991: The US adopted the first-ever vaccination program for newborns. For this leap of scientific faith, which was a major departure from global consensus on when to safely vaccinate babies, a genetically recombined (GMO) vaccine was chosen. This was unprecedented too. No GMO vaccine had ever been used before – in any age group, much less newborns. Small scale testing had been done on school aged children, with a 17% adverse event rate. But the real test drive was to be taken via what the FDA called “post market surveillance”. That means the vaccine was licensed for the newborn market in record time, and the government would observe how babies managed. Newborns nationwide were thus used as subjects in an FDA-approved experiment to see if hepatitis B infection could be eradicated in a generation by universally injecting all newborns – even though the government quietly acknowledged that newborns did not need the shot.

In 2002, I wrote in detail about this debacle in my first book, after this shot, given without my knowledge or consent, nearly killed my newborn son in 1996. I combed through a disturbing paper trail (much of it pre-internet) explaining how this spurious effort took root in the first place, and why it failed to achieve anything but fattened profits for the pharmaceutical industry. If you know this tale at all, you know the added horrific oversight in it – that this vaccine was given to newborn babies (including premies) with the adult dose of mercury in it, by mistake, for over a decade, before the error was quietly corrected by the pharmaceutical industry. Infants received 12.5 micrograms of mercury in this shot at birth for years – equivalent to over two hundred times the EPA limit. Oops.

There were no fines, no sanctions, not so much as a wrist slap for the manufacturers. All was quiet, because there were no lawsuits – except for the death and injury claims that poured into the government’s compensation system (since 1986, individuals cannot sue vaccine makers for injuries or deaths, thanks to lobbying efforts).

How do I know this? Two reasons: One, I researched it in depth for my book. Two, I was among persons giving testimony on this matter in a Congressional hearing in 1999.

To this day, many parents still believe their babies need this shot at birth (they don’t), and, many countries refuse to approve this vaccine for newborns. Because it is given at birth, at the peak of vulnerability, it may well be responsible for more developmental or immune system injury than any other vaccine your child gets. In France, hepatitis B vaccine was banned in 1998, due to its links with devastating autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis and lupus. To date, there have been 4,145 “serious” (life threatening or causing death or disability) adverse events reported in US children age 0-4 given this vaccine; 3500 of these were in infants under one year old. The true number is likely much higher, since adverse events are underreported and since at least two other vaccines bundle recombined hepatitis B virus along with other viruses or bacterial material.

1980’s: The US vaccine schedule grew by leaps and bounds. In 1983, children went from receiving a total of ten vaccines by the age of six to receiving forty-nine vaccines by age six in 2013 – not counting flu shots. Manufacturers and health insurers alike found it more profitable to bundle as many vaccines as possible into one syringe. To accommodate this and the increasingly crowded schedule, the CDC swiftly moved to recommend (and the FDA approved) virtually anything and everything that vaccine manufacturers could conjure up. Doctors went from being told to give no more than four simultaneous vaccine doses to allowing nine in one visit.

“Bundled vaccines” have several bacterial or viral substances per syringe. Pneumococcal vaccine, for example, now has thirteen different bacterial strains in a single shot. Currently the CDC tells us that children need this shot four times by age six. That’s fifty-two antigens from just one vaccine by the time your child is six years old. And, pneumococcal vaccine is recommended for dosing with eight other vaccine syringes, on the same day, for twelve month old babies, for a total of twenty-five antigens injected in one day. That’s an astounding immune assault on the body of any twenty pound person, not to mention a one hundred and twenty pound person.

Besides jabbing infants and toddlers with unprecedented aggression, we’ve also begun telling women to get vaccinated while pregnant – another major departure from what was considered reasonable, prudent, safe – until just a few years ago. Flu shots given to pregnant women were found to trigger more fetal deaths.

Recently vaccinated? No pool for you, you'll spread infection

Recently vaccinated? No pool for you, you’ll spread infection

The FDA has never required or conducted a safety review on giving all these vaccines together in one day, nor are vaccines specifically tested for carcinogenic or mutagenic activity (read the vaccine package insert, with search term “carcinogenic”). So we really are playing roulette with our children; though individual vaccines get safety tested, our government’s commitment to study safety of grouping them together, as we actually routinely dose them, is non-existent. By the time your child is six years old, if you follow the current schedule, you will have injected them with at least eighty-five viral and bacterial antigens, plus mercury (still in flu shots), aluminum (linked to Alzheimer’s), formaldehyde, nut oil adjuvants, and contaminant viral or bacterial DNA. Incredibly, a whole continent of pediatricians has been slowly, insidiously led to believe this is okay, and that whatever happens to our children as a result is “normal”.

So our children become the canaries. One in fifty gets autism and we call it a “mystery”. Asthma has tripled in children since 1980 and we buy more inhalers. Allergies have skyrocketed, and we make nut-free schools de rigeur. Juvenile diabetes has risen by 25% and we dutifully bring our children to the endocrinologist for life long insulin support. We give young leukemia victims “likes” on Facebook. Vaccines fail, shed and spread infections, and injure on a daily basis – but parents still think they are life saving elixirs that their children must have. And so on.

Ready For A Change?

Is this what we really want for our children? What kind of nation can the US possibly become, when its youngest population is increasingly, unstoppably sick and disabled?

You can do way better. Want a family? Do you homework for toxin-free health care – beyond what you think you need to learn. Read independently, a lot. Go way out of the box, take it all in, read all you can stand, talk to the craziest of your friends. If you have friends who don’t vaccinate, are their kids healthy? Compare their kids to the friends whose kids get every shot, every year. Who is struggling with sleep, behavior, developmental delays, learning, allergies, or speaking? Which kids have OT appointments, psych meds, inhalers, multiple cavities, and lousy eating patterns? Which kids are more calm? If you have a family with health challenges already, the good news is that our bodies respond to restoration efforts. You can start anytime. We all can experience better health, especially children; the younger they are, the quicker they respond to restorative real food, nutrition, and non-toxic health care.

Need a place to start? There are thousands of websites and books to help you. Read my blog or books, read Vaccine Free Child, visit Ask Dr Sears, the Healthy Home Economist, Green Med Info, or Fearless Parent. Interview family nurse practitioners, naturopathic doctors, or family practice physicians if you don’t like your pediatrician. Scrutinize sources for pharmaceutical industry sponsored content, direct or indirect. Our for-profit health care system, which is owned and operated by pharmaceutical and insurance industries, with its rank and file physician providers, is all but asleep to the health crises of our children today. In fact, unwittingly or not, they have created it, and now profit from it, handsomely. For these entities, there is enormous financial reward in intensifying your children’s chronic debility, not reducing it.

Countless physician heroes are caring for our young loved ones with cancer, diabetes, and other chronic conditions. I believe they truly think they are doing right by medicating and vaccinating our children so relentlessly. But my question is this: Do they really, deeply believe that it’s safe, prudent, or sensible to give pregnant women, infants, and children so many processed foods, pharmaceuticals, and toxin-filled biological products, at once? Do they truly regard this level of invasion into our bodies as health, on an intuitive level? Do they honestly think that we can rear healthy children on untested genetically modified foods, pesticide laden crops, toxin tainted injectibles, water contaminated with fracking fluid, or reflux and psychotropic medications?

Those might be good questions to ask your doctor yourself. In any case, you are empowered with choice and duty for raising your children as healthfully as you can. Whose opinions you engage about what is healthy are yours to choose too. It’s never too late to restore your children’s birthright to good health.

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