When I graduated from college in 2007, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I felt deeply unskilled and had the sense that the past 4 years of my supposed higher education hadn’t been spent pursuing anything serious or practical. I’d had a good time, and formed some deep and loving bonds, but what was I supposed to do with a B.A. in International Studies and zero desire to work in that field? With no serious alternatives lined up, I ended up following some of my friends who had moved to a city on the East Coast after school. A couple of months after I arrived, I attended an open night at the local massage school a few blocks from my house. Massage was one of the options I was considering as a next step to getting on some sort of life track. Shortly after that, I enrolled for the year-long certificate course.
One of the many gifted and entertaining teachers at the school, was a massage therapist named Tom Kariss who specialized in orthopedic massage and anatomy. In body mechanics, when the movement of the sacrum is restricted, no other structure will move correctly and the body will compensate in a variety of ways. Lordosis: exaggerated extension of the lower back. Kyphosis, exaggerated flexion of the upper back. Pelvic tilts, rotations, hip hikes, shoulder issues, neck problems, restrictions in the abdomen and diaphragm, knee pain, sciatica… The possibilities are as endlessly varied as people are, and in Tom’s opinion, restoring proper function and movement of the sacrum affected all of the downstream compensatory patterns in a positive way. He would regale us with stories of alignments restored and dysfunctions corrected and always signed his lectures by saying: “Free your ass and the rest will follow!”
The reason people get stuck in a particular pattern of movement is simple. We use our bodies in the way we are used to using them. We form movement habits and those habits form grooves. Those grooves become comfortable, but if we always stay in those grooves they turn into sticking points, and then our bodies begin to compensate because we are not using our bodies in their full range of movement potential.
Here’s an example. My last summer as a massage therapist on Cape Cod, I was doing my usual range of motion (ROM) tests with an older male client who happened to be very tall—maybe 6’4 or 6’5—and noted that his shoulders were severely restricted in the overhead direction. What was surprising is that he had excellent ROM in all other directions, and was relatively flexible for a man his age. At the end of the massage, I mentioned this to him, explaining the importance of addressing these restrictions for his long-term shoulder health. He looked at me in surprise, and said, “I never lift my arms over my head!” With his height, everything was at head-height or below and he never had any need to reach as far up as most of us have to in order to access things above our heads.
My own experiences of navigating pain and dysfunction within my body enriched my early understanding of this particular facet of the human experience, and I know first-hand how difficult it is to change a habit of movement. When we’re used to doing something in a way that has always worked for us, we can be very reluctant to explore alternative movements unless our bodies give us no choice. When there has been significant pain, there is often a fear of returning to a state of pain, or of causing re-injury. Sometimes we have to give up activities we love because they are causing too much harm, or requiring compensation that is too costly for the body to bear any longer. We have to learn to move differently, and become more attentive to the messages our bodies send us. We have to learn to listen.
What about the habits we form in our minds? The grooves we wear in our mental spaces also become comfortable and we often resist new knowledge or new information that would force us out of those grooves into less comfortable territory. Sometimes that new knowledge feels very threatening, and we resist mightily in order to preserve our sense of self, our ideas about others, or our beliefs about the world we inhabit. Anything new is uncomfortable at first. Sometimes it causes us a great deal of anguish and we’ll do everything we can to avoid that distress.
The funny thing is that the more we practice new things, the more we open ourselves up to new experiences and perspectives, the easier it gets and the less threatening this process becomes. We acclimate to shifting and it no longer becomes a source of stress. This has been the case for me on many many subjects. The one I’ll explore here came to mind after I listened to Joe Rogan’s interview of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. last week. Kennedy is a Democratic candidate for the presidency, and long-time environmental and health advocate. Prior to Covid, I never paid attention to either Rogan or Kennedy, but my experiences of the past three years have taught me to reconsider things I used to believe and question the things I took as firmly established.
I hope you will read this from a place of curiosity and will strive to entertain these ideas rather than dismissing them outright. It is hard to have our certainties challenged, but after much research I believe it is important to investigate the subject seriously and to reevaluate our belief that vaccines—as currently manufactured and disseminated—are safe and effective in their stated purpose.
The first time I ever heard someone question vaccines was about 10 years ago. I can’t remember if it was before or after the birth of their first child, but one of my cousins and her husband had decided to use the delayed vaccine schedule laid out in Dr. Paul Thomas’1 book: The Vaccine-Friendly Plan. Although I had explored many aspects of alternative medicine through books like Radical Healing by Dr. Rudolph Ballentine (one of my all-time favorites), The Web that has no Weaver by Ted Kaptchuk, or Healing with Whole Foods by Paul Pitchford, my focus was primarily on the role of diet in health. Since I never took pharmaceutical medications, I hadn’t thought to dive into the role of pharmaceutical products in health or illness until more recently.
That first conversation with my cousin elicited some slight curiosity on my part, but I never pursued it. Fast forward to 2020 and Operation Warp Speed which raised the specter of that decades-old chat. Though I didn’t know much about vaccine science, I did know that it takes between 7-10 years to develop what is considered a “safe” vaccine2, that mRNA technology had never been approved for use in humans (trials could never get past the phase I safety trials), and that it simply wasn’t logistically feasible for these Covid therapies to be safe. With odds massively in my favor for surviving the disease (still well over 99.9% three years later for practically everyone on the planet), I knew the best thing I could do was look after my health and treat early if I got sick.
Those objections might not have held much sway with a population in the grip of Covid panic, or in thrall with the moral righteousness of “doing the right thing,” but they were more than enough to deter me and a few of my loved ones. As 2020 wore on, I started finding other dissident voices with significantly better understanding of mRNA technology and vaccine development and I listened to what they had to say, weighing their professional opinions against the official story. By autumn of 2021, I had learned a lot more about the Covid vaccines specifically, and watched the heartrending stories from The Testimonies Project, but I still wasn’t questioning the other shots on the childhood vaccine schedule. I’d even gotten a DTaP booster in May of that year after being attacked by a very sick cat. I didn’t start looking into the other vaccines until a conversation with another of my cousins, who was herself injured by her DTaP several years prior. She set my feet on the path of discovery and I will be forever grateful for that unblinding.
In considering what resources to recommend to those who are curious enough to embark on this journey, I’ve tried to provide sources that are useful and informative without becoming overly sensationalistic. In 2016, a widely censored film on the MMR vaccine scandal, Vaxxed, was pulled from screening at the Tribeca Film Festival. Contrary to the intention of the censors, demand for the film exploded and it was screened at independent theaters all over the US. The story of the response to Vaxxed is told in the follow-up documentary Vaxxed II, where parents who believe their children have been injured by vaccines tell their stories. The parents’ testimonies, and the footage of unvaccinated vs vaccinated children at the end of the film are particularly striking.
Reading other Substackers, whose journeys into this field paralleled mine, helped me find new resources and provided some shortcuts into the published research on vaccine history. Lies are Unbekoming is one of the best explorations to follow along with, and this post is a good place to start. The Forgotten Side of Medicine is hands down my favorite Substack and it all started with this piece on the history of the smallpox vaccine.
Other excellent (and non-alarmy) documentaries are Trace Amounts, on the use of mercury as Thimerosol in vaccines until 2001, and L’alu Total, a French documentary with English subtitles on the use of aluminum adjuvants in vaccines as a replacement for mercury since 2001. These two documentaries break down, in simple terms, the reason vaccines are dangerous to developing children. The story basically follows the same template for both mercury and aluminum. Both are dangerous neurotoxins utilized in vaccines to trigger a “better” immune response. The safety studies use animal experiments of injested not injected versions of those heavy metals (MAJOR difference in how the body responds) which do not match the types of mercury/aluminum present in the vaccines, and the researchers assume an astounding number of things to be true in order to infer safety.3
For a brief, but thorough breakdown of the one study (yes, only one) the CDC uses to justify its stance on the safety of aluminum in vaccines, check out How the CDC Lies about the Safety of Aluminum in Vaccines by Jeremy R. Hammond. The study, “Updated aluminum pharmacokinetics following infant exposures through diet and vaccination,” conducted by Robert J. Mitkus et al. and published in the journal Vaccine in 2011, provides the shaky foundation for the entirety of the CDC’s vaccine program. It is truly astonishing.
The last video source I’ll list is attorney Aaron Siri’s recent testimony in the Arizona State Senate during hearings for the Arizona Novel COVID South Western Intergovernmental Committee (NCSWIC), which provides a clear (if infuriating) picture of the legal framework in which vaccine science operates. An example pulled from his testimony touches on a number of freedom of information (FOIA) requests Siri has made to the CDC on behalf of the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN) regarding the studies upon which their recommendations rest. As you can see below, after several rounds of FOIA’s, the agency cannot provide a single study to support their assertion that aluminum adjuvants in vaccines is safe for human health (not even the Mitkus study previously referenced).
Last but not least is some recommended reading for all of the book lovers out there who might want a more in-depth take with references and studies. It’s pretty clear to me that the agencies tasked with safeguarding our health are entirely captured by the industries they are supposed to regulate, and that therefore the science they use to support their policies cannot be trusted, but you may come to different conclusions. In my opinion, the Covid crisis highlighted how dangerous it is to outsource health decisions to an expert class that clearly either intentionally misled the public, benefitted from abusing the public’s trust, or was deeply delusional about the realities of human health while being totally ignorant of even basic interventions for improving the immune response to a pathogen.
Though some of you might recoil at the idea of questioning something that we’ve always been told is safe and life-saving, I would once again urge you to set aside any knee-jerk reaction and ask yourselves whether this is something you know, or something you believe. Whom we trust with our health should not be a partisan issue. It is an issue of human health, of transparency, of accountability within our public institutions, and of being aware of what influence and conflicts of interest impact those agencies’ behavior towards the public. Historically, democrats were significantly more vaccine hesitant and only switched their stance when former President Trump voiced his belief in the existence of a link between childhood vaccines and the autism epidemic. In contrast, the madness of the Covid injection mandates pushed many republicans to become as, if not more, vaccine hesitant as their political counterparts once were. For those of us who swear allegiance to neither party, Covid served as an undeniable wakeup call.
In the spirit of my former instructor, I beseech you:
Free your mind, and the rest will follow.
Some of you may know that Dr. Thomas had his medical license suspended by the Oregon Medical Board for allegedly spreading medical misinformation related to vaccines. A quick Google search will pull up one article after another denouncing him as “anti-vax.” One thing you should know, before jumping to any conclusions, is that over the course of his career Dr. Thomas ran the longest continuous observational study comparing the health outcomes and frequency of well visits between the vaccinated and unvaccinated children in his practice. After passing peer review, the study was retracted by the journal due to a complaint by a reader (which was later shown to be unfounded, yet the journal has not reinstated the paper). Informed Choice WA (ICWA) wrote a powerful open letter in support of Dr. Thomas’ work in response to his suspension, which is worth a read.
To read a good recap of the study findings by one of the authors, click here. They are currently in phase III of redoing the entire study to ensure strict adherence to appropriate methodology to ensure publishing with the goal of addressing the following questions:
1. Are specific adverse health outcomes associated with aluminum-containing vaccines?
2. Are there differences between the vaccinated and unvaccinated patients with respect to the age of onset of specific vaccine-associated health outcomes?
3. Is the receipt of >1 vaccine per well-child visit associated with increased risk of new diagnoses of potential adverse health outcomes.
There are questions that remain such as health outcomes associated with live vs. non-live vaccines, aluminum-containing vaccines vs. non-aluminum containing vaccines, as well as studying the impact of individual vaccines on specific health outcome risks.
As it turns out, this term is largely exaggerated when it comes to vaccines, which are not subjected to true placebo-controlled trials, nor are they tested for impacts on fertility. Lastly, there are no long-term studies on the cumulative effects of receiving multiple vaccines as per the CDC’s childhood vaccine schedule. Given the “mysterious” astronomic rise in poor health in the US, this seems like a question our public health agencies should be pouring resources into solving.
It should be noted that although the CDC has removed Thimerosol from the vaccines on the childhood schedule, it remains present as an adjuvant in the flu vaccines, which many people, including pregnant women, receive every year.