Pregnant Women and the H1N1 Vaccine

Last time I addressed the topic of vaccines it was to make sure we were all clear that vaccinations are not a matter of salvation.  If you missed that post, please read it here.

But I also gave my main reason for continuing a discussion about it, namely because we should be seekers of the truth.  Scripture tells us to “test everything; hold fast to what is good.  Abstain from every form of evil.” (1 Thessalonians 5:21)

To this end, I have a few more pieces of news to share specifically with my precious, pregnant friends.  With the fear-mongering going on in the government and media, and with so many pregnant friends who are still trying to determine what they should do, I feel obligated to share this information. Especially in light of the recently reported miscarriages.

So, here’s some critical information for your consideration.  If nothing else, please view the six minute video below to hear dozens of medical professionals voice their concerns about the vaccine.

Our media and government are targeting pregnant women.

We are being inundating with stories of the danger this virus poses to pregnant women. We are told daily that young, healthy people are dying.  The truth is that 73% of hospitalized H1N1 patients have underlying health conditions, such as heart disease, diabetes, cancer and other immune suppressive diseases.

Dr. Russell Blaylock, a board certified neurosurgeon, author and lecturer says, “The Minister of Fear (the CDC) was working overtime peddling doom and gloom, knowing that frightened people do not make rational decisions — nothing sells vaccines like panic.”

Which is worse: H1N1 or the Vaccine?

This is the big question. Is the risk from this virus significant enough to justify mass vaccinations with a vaccine that is essentially experimental, poorly tested, and of questionable benefit?

The H1N1 virus is quite mild even for pregnant women.

According to Dr. Michael Bronze, chair of Internal Medicine at University of Oklahoma Health Science Center, 0.32 per 100,000 pregnant women (or about 1 in 300,000 pregnant women) were hospitalized because of the H1N1 flu or something that presented like H1N1.

(It’s important to note that even these small numbers aren’t limited to confirmed H1N1 cases.  The CDC’s H1N1 numbers include any confirmed or probable flu cases along with any confirmed or probable pneumonia cases.  For more information on this shady counting system, see National H1N1 Health Emergency???)

The vast majority of people who get H1N1 have a brief and mild illness. Based on the Australian/New Zealand experience (at the peak of their flu season, which has already passed) and the American data somewhere in the middle of our flu season, pregnant women have about a 99.97% chance they will not become so sick as to require hospital care at any level.

Zero studies to prove safety

There have been no studies to prove safety of the H1N1 vaccines in pregnant women. Even the vaccine inserts themselves say so.  Simply follow the links and do a search for the word “pregnant” to find these statements yourself.

MedImmune (intranasal spray)
Novartis
Sanofi-Pasteur
CSL Biotherapies, Inc.

All of them say either word-for-word or very closely word-for-word:

• “Safety and effectiveness of [this] vaccine have not been studied in pregnant women or nursing mothers.”
• “Animal reproduction studies have not been conducted with [this] vaccine. It is not known whether [this] vaccine can cause fetal harm when administered to a pregnant woman or can affect reproduction capacity.”
• “[This] vaccine should be given to a pregnant woman only if clearly needed.”
• “It is not known whether [this] vaccine is excreted in human milk. Because many drugs are excreted in human milk, caution should be exercised when [this] vaccine is administered to a nursing woman.”

The studies that have been done show serious risks.

Perhaps even more concerning than the admission that no one has studied the safety and effectiveness of these vaccines in humans, is that studies that have been done on pregnant animals with non-H1N1 vaccines show that a single vaccine produces damage in the offspring’s brain exactly like autism and schizophrenia.

In this article, Dr. Blaylock refers to compelling research that shows that stimulating a pregnant mom’s immune system during mid-term and later term pregnancy:

• Significantly increases the risk that her baby will develop autism during childhood and schizophrenia sometime during the teenage years and afterward.
• Increases the baby’s risk of having a seizure both as a baby and as an adult
• Can trigger preclampsia in the mother
• Can trigger hypertension when the baby becomes an adult.

(See also Dr. Blaylock’s article entitled, Vaccines, Neurodevelopment and Autism Sectrum Disorders or listen to the interview linked at the very bottom of this article.)

Vaccinating pregnant women has gone seriously wrong in the recent past.

Gardasil vaccine was recommended to pregnant women, but was immediately pulled once women began losing their babies or delivering malformed babies.  Now they are careful to say, “the vaccine is not recommended for use in women known to be pregnant.”  But it’s a little late for all those women who lost their healthy babies.

1% vs 100% chance

Yes, a serious flu infection during pregnancy can cause damage to the baby because of the immune system stimulation it would cause in you. But Dr. Blaylock warns that getting the vaccination will guarantee immune system stimulation.

So, we’re talking less than 1% chance that you’d get a serious case of H1N1 and have serious immune system stimulation vs 100% chance that you will have serious immune system stimulation because of the vaccine.

Vaccine manufacturers have legal immunity

If you or your baby are injured by a vaccine, you have no access to the legal system.  According to the Public Readiness and Emergency Act (the PREP act), unless you can provide evidence of willful misconduct AND you get permission from the DHHS Secretary, you can’t sue to receive compensation or justice.  The manufacturers are completely shielded from liability.  This also means that they have no incentive to test their vaccines for safety.  After all, if they test and find that something is dangerous, they have to start all over again.  So, you take the vaccines completely at your own risk.

Reported Miscarriages

To me, this is the most compelling reason to avoid the H1N1 vaccine if you’re pregnant.  Here are just a couple of the first-hand reports from a June 2010 birth club.

EBWashington:

I am so upset. I was so excited to be pregnant after trying for a year. As soon as I found out I was pregnant, I joined this birth club and I was due June 25th. We have two healthy boys with no history of miscarriage. Everything was going great. Last Monday, I got the H1N1 vaccine thimerosal reduced (mercury reduced for pregnant women). On Tuesday morning, I started cramping and on Wednesday I started bleeding heavily. My hcg was 50 on Wednesday and I was almost 6 weeks along so it was low. They still thought that I might be pregnant but on Friday my hcg was down to 22. I am an emotional wreck. I feel like I had a healthy baby and I caused this by getting the H1N1 vaccine. My doctors pushed it. I researched online and there have been many miscarriages after the H1N1 vaccine but they haven’t been reported since it is hard to say what caused the miscarriages. I hope that I did not cause this. I wish everyone the best.

Tayla08:

I don’t have an answer for you, but a friend of a friend just had a miscarriage 2-3 days after getting the shot. She was 7weeks. She had no previous history of m/c… No one can answer if they’re related…it hasn’t been out long enough and there haven’t been any studies done on pregnant women. I will tell you, that it has made up my mind on getting it…I won’t and I’m not going to get it for my DD either. My daughter and I both had H1N1 last week, and although it truly sucks…I think I’ll take my chances. One doctor will tell you to get it and the next will tell you not too…you have to do what’s in your heart.

90707:

my heart goes out to you as i recently miscarried as well and was due in june. i had a healthy heart beat at 6wks. then at 7.5 wks my son got the h1n1 mist vaccine which has live vaccine in it. the nurse said to be careful b/c it could technically spread if he rubbed his nose and touched a surface etc. the next night i miscarried and 5 days later was diagnosed with h1n1. i work from home, kids are home, hadnt been anywhere during that time. so the chances that it is all related are very high. the flu mist vaccine warns for immunocompromised patients (which includes prego) to stay away from recipients of the flu mist for 21 days.

You can read the full story along with many, many more first-hand reports of miscarriages here.

What Experts Are Saying

Suspicion about the H1N1 vaccines isn’t coming only from moms who have recently lost their babies and a single neurosurgeon who has dedicated his retirement years to studying these things more in-depth.  Here is what some other well-respected professionals are also saying.

Dr. Bob Sears, a board-certified pediatrician trained at Georgetown University School of medicine and co-author in the Sears Parenting Library, says:

As a doctor, we swear an oath to “First, do no harm.” So I have a hard time recommending a treatment that doesn’t show it causes no harm. It’s not just the H1N1 vaccine that’s not been tested. The regular flu vaccine has not been tested in pregnant women, either, to show that it’s safe in babies. That kind of boggles my mind, because the regular flu vaccine has been around for years, and there have been plenty of opportunities for the companies to do some safety testing on them so pregnant women can feel more comfortable about them.

Dr. Larry Palevsky, a board-certified pediatrician trained at the New York School of Medicine says:

When I went through medical school, I was taught that vaccines were completely safe and completely effective, and I had no reason to believe otherwise. All the information that I was taught was pretty standard in all the medical schools and the teachings and scientific literature throughout the country. I had no reason to disbelieve it.

Over the years, I kept practicing medicine and using vaccines and thinking that my approach to vaccines was completely onboard with everything else I was taught.

But more and more, I kept seeing that my experience of the world, my experience in using and reading about vaccines, and hearing what parents were saying about vaccines were very different from what I was taught in medical school and my residency training.

… It didn’t appear that the scientific studies that we were given were actually appropriately designed to prove and test the safety and efficacy. It also came to my attention that there were ingredients in there that were not properly tested, that the comparison groups were not appropriately set up, and that conclusions made about vaccine safety and efficacy just did not fit the scientific standards that I was trained to uphold in my medical school training.

Dr. Joseph Mercola, an osteopathic physician, board-certified in family medicine and NY Times best-selling author, says:

I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: I’m not anti-vaccines, but rather pro vaccine-safety. That means, I strongly believe that we should only inject substances into our bodies, and especially into the bodies of infants and the unborn, that have been rigorously studied and proven safe both short-term and long-term.

As it stands now, we’ve spent decades injecting materials into the bodies of young and old alike, without sufficient amounts of safety testing of the ingredients, and our society is showing the signs of this neglect.

Neurological dysfunction and disorders such as autism and Alzheimer’s have been growing steadily and show no signs of slowing down.

More resources about vaccines and pregnancy

• 9 Minute Audio: Mercola’s interview with Dr. Russell Blaylock
• Audio and Article:  Expert Pediatrician Exposes Vaccine Myths
• Article: Concerns over Swine Flu Vaccine During Pregnancy
• Article: Safety of First Trimester Flu Vaccines
• Article: Updates on Flu Vaccine Safety Research
• Article: Dealing with Unexplained Miscarriage
• And for a whole page of articles, visit organichealthadviser.com

My hopes

(This comes straight from my Cross-Centered Discussion of Vaccines? post I mentioned at the start of this post.  I thought it would be good to re-print after sharing all of this information.)

I hope that my communication on this topic informs you.

If you’re a wife, I hope you bring everything to your husband and ultimately rest in his leadership.

I hope that those of you who disagree with me never feel condemned or judged by me.

I hope that you will engage with me in this topic.  If you disagree, I’d love to hear why.  I am SO grateful for those willing to engage in debate, not just on this issue but on any!  There are certainly things I haven’t thought of, studies that I am not aware of, and sources I don’t know about that would be beneficial for consideration.  I am not seeking to be right.  I am seeking the truth.