Dream Come True

Decades in the waiting, but never too late.

When I began questioning immunizations I didn’t have a computer. The internet was barely a thing. The World Wide Web did not exist. Nobody knew Andrew Wakefield’s name. And we were a whole decade away from the arrival of “anti-vaxxer” as a smear, and of RJK Jr. into the vaccine safety movement.

It was December 1991 and I was eight months pregnant with the first of our five children. A friend invited me to a local Nursing Mothers meeting, a monthly gathering of experienced moms with new or expecting mothers to offer support and info on caring for babies, and especially on breastfeeding. The evening that I attended, a friend of the group leader had come from a neighboring state to address the topic of vaccines and to share her experience as a mother of two. It changed my life.

Until that moment the issue of immunizations was not on my radar. In all my planning and anticipation of welcoming our baby into the world, the topic never crossed my mind. I had no idea that consenting to a vaccine would be among my first decisions as a mother; the hepatitis B vaccine for day-old newborns had just been added to the U.S. childhood schedule a few months earlier. So it felt blindsiding to be confronted with a question of such monumental import mere weeks before our child was due. And what alerted me to its true weight—despite learning that the medical establishment regarded these shots as routine and unremarkable (and still does)—was this mother’s story of following their recommendations without questioning, and shattering her children’s lives.

I don’t recall the details of the tragedies but I can sketch the outlines. She had a son and daughter, ages eight and six (I think) at the time of our meeting. Both had been born healthy, normal, meeting milestones, enjoying happy regular childhoods. Until a vaccine injection suddenly wrecked them. Their injuries occurred in different years, at different ages, and by different vaccines (DPT and MMR), but the connection between their immunization and their catastrophic reaction, within days, was unambiguous and undeniable. One child was paralyzed from the waist down, the other from the neck down. Permanently. This mother’s living nightmare was beyond my imagination. And the horror of it jarred me into awareness that I must not simply trust the system, follow its guidelines. I needed to question everything.¹

For me, this skeptical posture wasn’t new, or even particularly uncomfortable. Though I had grown up a devout and compliant rule follower, six years earlier I’d had an experience that turned me, then a 20 year old college student, into a skeptic of pharmaceuticals as a path to health. I’d gone to a doctor for severe bronchitis and significant hearing loss that lingered after a bad cold. He prescribed two antibiotics which I took . . . faithfully and hopefully . . . for two full weeks, with zero results. Actually, some symptoms worsened.

On followup the doctor responded by renewing those two failed prescriptions and adding a third. I left his office discouraged, crumpled his scripts and spiked them into the trash bin outside the door. Later that day my boyfriend’s mom (my future mother in law), upon hearing my woes, asked me details about my symptoms and gave me a dose of little white pellets. “Homeopathy,” she explained. (Nux Vomica, in fact.) I had no idea what to expect, but three days later my cough had disappeared. I was a convert to alternative medicine.

All of which is to say, questioning conventional medicine wasn’t a stretch for me, nor for my husband. In fact we’d opted for a nurse-midwife rather than obstetrician for my maternal care. So when our daughter was born a few weeks later, perfectly healthy but extra tiny (4.5 lbs—a whole other story with a miracle involved), I became a mama bear on a mission: no vaccines until I could thoroughly investigate their safety and better determine her individual risks.

That “pause” on following the conventional protocol led to a decade of seeking out information wherever I could find it. At first I was limited to magazine and newspaper articles, and occasional TV news clips (true investigative journalism still being popular, and the era one where it was not yet verboten to critique vaccines). Eventually we got a computer and I turned to the internet which provided a trove of useful info and data, algorithms having not yet been harnessed to censor search results.

None of what I learned reassured me. My focus was early on the money, and it became alarmingly clear that the regulatory system was significantly compromised by conflicts of interest and cronyism. Proper, impartial, gold-standard science untainted by Pharma’s grubby, self-interested fingers was not actually available to support the confident messaging around vaccine safety. From what I could tell, all of it was closer to carefully crafted marketing—aka propaganda—than objective science—aka fact.

And then the battle for truth really began. By the end of the nineties the word autism had begun appearing in conversations about vaccine risks. Thanks to the viciously maligned Dr. Wakefield, a spotlight of doubt was cast upon the MMR and its mercury-based preservative, thimerosal, and the Establishment’s hostility began to organize, intensify, and grow. Their messaging hardened and the slur “anti-vaxxer” was introduced to stigmatize the expanding chorus of parents who were making claims of serious injury, demanding answers, pleading for recognition, and help.

Throughout this period my presumption was that the truth would eventually surface. We just needed someone in the mainstream media to find the story. I kept waiting for a hungry journalist with workable connections to stumble onto it—uncover the corporate capture, realize its institutional depths, and blow the whistle. It was a scoop of such magnitude, such an epic of venality, it would be any reporter’s dream-come-true. I was convinced it was only a matter of time before the corruption was unveiled and the harms revealed.

But then Bobby Kennedy appeared on the scene and exposed the magnitude of my naiveté.

I didn’t realize he’d joined the cause until well after the fact. It was around the mid-2000s and I had no longer been closely following the vaccine debate, only dipping into it every once in a while. So by the time I learned of RFK Jr.’s involvement he was already a few years into it. (That fact alone should have tipped me off to his impact.) But I happened across a sympathetic in-depth interview on EcoWatch’s website (now unpublished) about what led him into the vaccine debate, and I can still recall the instant rush of excitement, the relief that FINALLY we had a powerful person—a Kennedy!!—on our side. Everyone would start listening now! At last the truth would come out! The public would learn of the corruption! Justice would prevail! I was jubilant. And wrong.

Indeed, my dreams were quickly dashed. Crushed, would be a better word. For as I dove back in, eagerly searching for evidence that his relentless fact-finding was cracking the wall of lies, I discovered nothing had changed. Even his gilded family name, the political clout of the Camelot legacy, was not enough to attract interest in the compelling arguments, legal and scientific, he articulated, the mounds of evidence he compiled. As the predictable hit pieces emerged, tarnishing him with preposterous labels like “conspiracy theorist,” “grifter,” “nutcase,” and of course the ubiquitous “anti-vaxxer,” the realization dawned on me that no one in mainstream media was going to run with the most scandalous story of harm and greed in modern history.

They were not going to save the day because they were in on the corruption.

Indeed, they were its ultimate protectors.

Corporate media had effectively been purchased by Pharma advertising dollars. They were as wholly compromised and captured as any of the other agencies or industries supposedly safeguarding the public interest. Thus, upon experiencing that heart-breaking realization, I gave up hope.

From about 2006 until 2020 I totally lost faith that the morass of malfeasance would ever come to light. There was no avenue. If the Pharma cabal could sideline a Kennedy—American royalty, for pete’s sake!—if championing something as obvious and sane as vaccine safety and informed consent could transform a demigod of the elite class into a pariah among his people, then our cause was truly lost. It was a bitter, galling pill to swallow. Our last best hope had been vanquished. Or so it seemed.

Until COVID happened.

The first hint of a lifeline was dropped in March 2020 by none other than Dr. Anthony Fauci. He announced a vaccine was being created to save the day; red tape was being cut (ie. safety protocols were being waived) so clinical trials would begin within weeks. Hearing that preposterous promise I opined to my husband that attempting a vaccine at this speed was going to force a final showdown: either Pharma’s power would fully solidify, cement their deception into the future, or their web of the lies would blow apart, splintering the credibility of its protectors along with it.

However it played out, it was clear the public health gatekeepers and their greedy corporate cronies had grown so confident in their ability to control the Narrative that they’d decided to run their fraud in real time on the global stage, on the adult population. Their audacity was stunning . . . terrifying—but thrilling in its potential for failure. I held my breath and wondered how they could be that reckless.

And then came the moment when hope sprang fully back to life.

It was the very end of 2020, maybe early 2021. The new, novel “vaccines” were being rolled out amid breathless fanfare and fawning media coverage, and the day I’d been watching for arrived: the tried-and-true Pharma marketing slogan was offered to the public as a finding of mRNA science—the warp-speed cash cow was officially labeled “safe and effective.”

BOOM.

That was the moment I began to believe the truth could actually win out. The Gordian Knot of Pharma corruption might well and truly unravel. I was elated.

In their towering arrogance they had inserted their sacred lie into the global vaccine conversation and now it was set to be exposed for the propaganda it always was—along with everything attached to it. Somehow Fauci and his collaborators had deluded themselves into believing they could compel consumer confidence by slapping their most trusted vaccine slogan on a novel product which had no prayer of living up to the billing. How they managed to presume their pithy little phrase would survive the tsunami of injuries about to descend on us all was beyond me. But I was grateful for their blind over-confidence. Their cocky stupidity. Because as much suffering as they were about to unleash on the world, there would be no sustaining an endless campaign of gaslighting injured adults. Not even with the media in their pockets.

Indeed, infants cannot speak. Children cannot reliably articulate their pain or sense of something wrong. So sacrificing the health of some little ones and gaslighting their desperate parents as “crazy” for questioning vaccines, was always a profitable power move that the corrupt players could get away with—as long as most citizens believed vaccines are “safe and effective.”

A population of adults who know their own health histories, who can recognize their injuries and articulate pain and losses, however, is a game changer. Adults were never going to indefinitely put up with being dismissed, derided, lied to, and gaslit. Likewise, there would be no avoiding their inevitable, obvious questions, like: If you’d lie about something this huge to all of us, what other huge lies have you told? What else have you erroneously labeled “safe and effective”? Who else have you hurt?

And so it is, with this colossal arrogant overstep by the cocksure, corrupt public health powers-that-be, their decades of fraud and propaganda has begun to blow apart. The end has, at long last, come into view.

And we are here. ⬇️

Photo by: Alex Brandon/AP

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., one of the most dedicated champions of children’s health walking our planet, is now U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services. With vast government resources at his disposal he is now perfectly positioned to honestly investigate—without Pharma influence—the real unanswered questions of vaccine safety. And with the CDC and NIH under his oversight, he will ensure that public health policy and biomedical research going forward serve humanity and benefit Americans, contribute to our wellbeing instead of enriching a crony cabal.

Truly, this moment feels unreal. As a mother, citizen, and “anti-vaxxer”🙄 who cherishes informed consent and bodily autonomy, I’ve held onto the dream that one day our questions and concerns would be taken seriously by health authorities, be explored and honored as valid, reasonable, and worthy. Yet for so long it’s felt like a very distant, unreachable dream. Even hopeless. So to have our greatest hero actually poised at the helm now, ready to take on the research and find the answers is almost unbelievable. And yet here we are: our new and hope-filled reality is our deepest dream come true.

1. To be clear, the mother was not claiming her children’s injuries were likely to happen to everyone. The possibilities, as I recall, were that her children had a genetic predisposition which triggered the injuries and/or the DPT dose was from a “hot lot.” But given that genetic risk studies, much less testing for such vulnerabilities, were not part of immunization protocol (still are not), the potential for injury was—and remains—real.