Lead investigator for HPV vaccines "comes clean so she can sleep at night."

[pnwmom]

86. Yes, hurdles. When I was a young parent and didn't know any better,

my son had small seizures with the old DPT vaccine. Although his fever wasn't high (no more than 102), it and the screaming/shaking episodes persisted for a week. My pediatrician thought there was no connection with the vaccine and never reported the reaction and never told me that I could have reported it. How was I, as a young parent, to know about reporting to the FDA if my doctor didn't tell me? Doctors like him use circular reasoning. My son had an atypical reaction; therefore the doctor thought it couldn't have been caused by the vaccine; therefore he discounted it and didn't report it. So the FDA never hears about many atypical reactions.

We had moved to a new city when it was time for my son to get his next booster, so we had a new doctor, thank goodness. I happened to mention to my mother that I was dreading the next round of vaccines, and that's when I first learned that my sister had developed seizures and DIED the day after her 6 month vaccines. In the hospital, they had diagnosed her with encephalitis, but the doctor wrote "pneumonia" on the death certificate. Somehow, she had gone to her well-baby visit and died of "pneumonia" within 24 hours. (And so that's what I'd been hearing my whole life -- that my sister suddenly died of pneumonia.) My new pediatrician pointed out that whooping cough (part of the DPT vaccine) causes a severe form of pneumonia, and she so stopped giving the vaccine to my son -- just switched to the Dt. (My daughter and niece had already had the pertussis part stopped because they'd developed the above 105 degree fevers that the FDA recognized as a reason not to get the vaccine.) And THEN my mother called to say she remembered that her cousin had died of a vaccine reaction, and another cousin had been permanently paralyzed -- but they were told it was a bad batch of the vaccine!

So yeah, you can say "correlation does not equal causation" till you're blue in the face but you'll never convince a family whose baby suffered seizures and died, within 24 hours of a vaccine, that there wasn't a connection.

P.S. Thankfully the DPT vaccine available now is much safer and my family has gotten boosters without incident. But this only came about because the "anti-vaxx" people were vehement in demanding a safer vaccine.