Absolute Reading

In pondering the reinterpretation of the tradition in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, I will pause to consider a historical figure of reading that I will call “absolute” reading, because it frees itself from the text and, in so doing, absolves itself from its law. It involves a paradoxical relation to the book, to this garden of ordered signs, this body tattooed with graphemes. It is not, properly speaking, a “reading,” in the sense of an interpretation, but rather a practice of reading: a modus lectionis, a modo di leggere, as it was called, a way of reading, that shows how to circulate in a space of signs, and how to use that space, in the same way that during the same period “guides” were intended to instruct the traveler more than to describe the visited countries.1 Beginning at the end of the sixteenth century, hence late (as is frequently the case) and after many treatises had been dedicated for over a century to specifying its rules, protocols, and principles, that art of reading was called “spiritual reading,” lettione spirituale.2 The term deserves to be underlined right away because the “spirit” thus designates “that which speaks,” and it refers here to that which speaks in the text or that which lets itself be heard in the text, in sum to the orality of the text, or to the text insofar as “it speaks to” its reader and thus becomes for him or her the “fable” of an initiative and unknown voice.

The new term (“spiritual reading”) circumscribes a set of behaviors that gradually becomes distinct from the medieval tradition it comes from, the lectio divina, and that is characterized, in a first approximation, by being less interested in the nature, authority, or even meaning of the book than in its use. The “method” it isolates is part not of a “hermeneutics,” relating to meanings, but of a pragmatics, attentive to the operations of the reader. Such a shift moves from the “truths” that the text is assumed to contain to the activities by which its user constitutes (or “edifies”) himself qua speaking, desiring, and answering subject. Thus it profoundly modifies the relation to works received from the past, at the same time as it reveals, in a figure perhaps exotic, but technical, of modernity, a postulate of all reading activity: a voice of the text.

Taking as my corpus the voluminous dossier of treatises, guides, descriptions, etc., that belong to a mystic literature and that, from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, define the rules or conduct specific to the “spiritual reading,” I would simply like to show, thanks to that history (perhaps less singular than it seems at first), what contribution it makes to a phenomenology or to a theory of reading, and how it posits in different terms the relation, apparently docile, that the reader has to books, those monuments assumed to be stable, like recumbent statues sculpted by a past.

1. The Book of the “Spirituals”: A Historical Framework

The mystic treatises of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries promote, as we will see, a detachment of the reader in relation to the book. This campaign (and it is one) seeks to autonomize the reading subject. It has a scandalous character, if we compare it to the ideology that the Aufklärung made the premise of pedagogy for nearly two centuries, and that holds the book itself, its content, to be the privileged agent of education. While during the eighteenth century the reader appears to be the result of the book, like the shadow it casts or its inscription in social history through the mediation of the school and the professor, the mystic conception aims to emancipate the reader-subject and to credit him with an existence of his own, detached from any subjugation or conformity to the book. The history of the readers cannot be reduced to that of their books.

Such a rupture is no less scandalous with respect to a medieval tradition that makes the cosmos the book of which all the others, including the Scriptures, are the more or less authorized revealers, and that considers all human beings to be readers called to make their lives conform to what has already been given to them to understand, by various means, of the fundamental book. Hence the “spiritual” reading of the modern mystics is inscribed within a greater whole in which the book receives a new status. As for the circumstances that brought about the transformation of the book, I will restrict myself to a few reminders. The crisis that took the theoretical form of Ockhamism definitively separates from all discourse the unfathomable Author of the world in which we are, and thus strips the concept “book” of its universal and ontological value. On the other hand, the beginnings, still disseminated and modest, of the “bourgeois” epopee replace the ontological and hierarchized Book with an instrumental book, the product of an operative writing and destined for the fabrication, accumulation, and diffusion of a kind of knowledge capable of ordering a world. An important corollary: Once detached from the cosmic order and from its Author, which in the past it was assumed to make readable, the book also ceases being the norm of experience; it acquires an operative value to the extent that it is conjoined with facts that are exterior to it. The one medieval Codex Naturae is divided into two figures, sometimes opposing each other, sometimes combinable, but henceforth irreducible—a bookish figure and an experimental one. From this point of view, the innumerable humanist declarations rejecting books in favor of observations3 attest to the movement to which the mystics also belong, in privileging “the experience,” but an experience whose terrain is the subject himself.

In its function within the network of hermits and other Christian groups designated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as “illuminati,” “mystics,” or “spirituals,” the book presents a few characteristics of its own. A brief look at these will serve as a framework for the absolute reading.

The book increasingly replaces institutions, considered as being decadent or corrupt, or their official representatives, adjudged incapable, often by the very fact of their knowledge, of understanding the demand addressed to them by the “spirituals.” Scripture compensates for the inability of the ecclesiastical agents. The former is assumed to speak while the latter are mute or deaf. This new role involves not only the holy books but all books capable of supplying a language to love and its anxiety. John of the Cross, at the threshold of his treatises, declares that he writes because the “directors,” or representatives of the institution, “do not understand” the desirous appealing to them.4 His books take the place of the authorized voice that is lacking. Teresa of Avila seeks, in contemporaneous works of spirituality, what the clerics cannot tell her.5 For a great many others the same is true. The book takes the place of the lacking or decadent institution. It plays its role. It becomes itself the major institution, while, lucidly, the clerical organizations react, with more or less violence, against this diversion.

The nature of the book also changes, along with its role. In truth, it is no longer even the same book, even though we are dealing with a selfsame text. In the spiritual practice of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the book, in the form of the liturgical Bible, the monastic Rule, or an “authority” coming from the “Fathers,” is an organ of the institution, which oversees its interpretation, controls its circulation, and ultimately has the function of “author.” From the fifteenth century on, it frees itself from that allegiance, in virtue of a triple autonomy. First, its printed dissemination, which ensures the texts a longevity hitherto reserved for magisterial genealogies, makes a personal appropriation possible, and the networks of its commercialization, a book institution independent of the academic or clerical authorities, allow for new relations of individual authors with individual readers.6 Second, the progressive use of the vulgar tongues favors all the shifting ambiguities of daily speech, that “parlance” of love already defended by Dante7 and that, eluding the semantic preciseness of university or theological Latin, infiltrates everywhere with its possible plays of free interpretation. Third, with the growing diversification of literary genres, a literature termed “spiritual” proliferates, already resembling the novel by its narration of passions and extraordinary journeys in the lands of desire. This new book procures an insularity for its readers. It gives every individual story its own place. It is autobio-graphical by nature.

It is no less a book for all that, a space external to the perusing eye, a “theater” of the mind (what we call an “atlas” was then known as a “theater”) and also, as many of these authors say, a “mirror” opening up within the visible a scenography of the invisible, but, by contrast to the parchment, which is rare and forbidden, this theater is transportable, manipulable, and available for all sorts of intellectual or phantasmagorical operations. Everyone thus has a laboratory for experimentation, the possibilities and rules of which will be explicated by the “ways of reading.” To be sure, these spaces available for “productions” (that is, for the performances of actors, for all the movements of the subject on a different stage) are connected to the spaces that were already produced by an “art of memory” for the purpose of mental activities, but the imaginary theaters of old are henceforth characterized by a twofold difference that in turn transforms the ars memoriae itself.8 First, the inner place that imagination created for itself is objectified, transformed into the spatial and cartographical reality of the book. Second, this exteriorization of the terrain on which the combinatory activities are carried out increases the possibilities of invention; it facilitates more complex possibilities of signs, and, in particular it gives more flexibility to the relations between “ideas” and the places in which they were stored in memory to retrieve them. While the art of memory presupposed a fixed “locale” for each type of figure, the book transgresses that order of definite places; it mixes with virtuosity “locales” and “figures,” and it refers to the old taxonomy only in the form—alphabetical—of a final index locorum, a relic of the traditional practice. In this perspective as well, the theater of the book individualizes and multiplies the operations possible for readers.

Still, and here its institutional character becomes clearer, the book circumscribes a place in which there must be a word to be heard. In the chaotic and mendacious space of the world, it cuts out, marks, and makes present, like the temples or sacred stones of yore, a place in which we may expect meaning to speak. What matters, more than the statements it composes, is the fact that it is, or should be, a sign of enunciation, the sacrament of a word to be heard. As such, it is “spiritual” if, and only if, it is inscribed in the problematic of the “dialogue,” of the conversar or the oratio that constitutes the focal point of the mystic approach.9 Circulating within a landscape of corruption that obsesses all the spirituals, punctuating a Christian history conceived everywhere as having become decadent since its origins, it gives objective form to the expectation that the Spirit of the beginnings must still manifest itself today. It gives rise to that belief that somehow survives the slow attrition of an aging world in which things, and even authorities, fall silent one after another. It safeguards a hope. Mute though it is, like Rabelais’s “frozen words,”10 the book gives form and feature to the waiting that, in the uncertainty or silence of the cosmos, puts its faith in an unknown voice, capable of being that of the divine interlocutor and of the faithful in turn—the voice that speaks and that prompts one to speak a language in the process of disappearing. It supervenes, falling into your lap like a treasure to be opened: a space for voices to be recognized.

2. The “Moments” of Reading

This conception of the book is part of a “horizon of expectation.” It is possible to recapitulate my first point in appealing to that category, developed either by the Soviet formalists, in particular by Yury Tynyanov, as extended by the Rezeptionsästhetik of Hans Jauss,11 or, in a probably more fundamental phenomenological mode, by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, attentive to what he calls “perceptual faith,” an expectation that structures all perception.12 Indeed, the ideological definition of the book of the spirituals refers us to the social expectation that characterizes that milieu of readers. This first exploration does not suffice, however, to specify their reading. In connection with the situation in which the book is placed, and which precedes the activity of reading, we have still to inquire into the product of that activity: the meaning. This second exploration, focusing on the last stage of the process, will consider the effects of expectation on the understanding of the book and the discrepancies or alterations that a “resistance” of the text introduces into what its readers expect to find there. The interplay between the readers’ expectation and the resistance of the text forms what we call the “meaning.”

But this study itself examines only one partial aspect of reading. The book is no more reducible to its meaning than a statement is reducible to its content. Like the statement, it is embedded in a holistic manifold of practices, or “directions for use,” that give it quite other values than its semantic definition. These practices of the book, moreover, modalize the interest directed to its meaning, sometimes to exaggerate it or isolate it, sometimes to relativize or depreciate it. Today the object of a “pragmatics” and of an “ethnography of speech” or “of communication,”13 the sociocultural uses made of language constitute a mediation between the expectation of the reader (which concerns a history of mentalities) and the identification of a meaning (which comes under hermeneutics). They give rise to a third exploration, relative to a third function, differing from the two others, and involving the behaviors or intentional practices of the reader. These last were the basis of the distinction formerly established by Roland Barthes between reading for pleasure, reading for instruction, and reading for the purpose of writing:14 this classification was in reference to instructions for use. Borges already said that “one literature differs from another less by the text than by the way it is read.”15

Now this question is privileged by the spirituals, who are, moreover, conscious that this point, and not a problem of meaning, is what contrasts their way of reading with the theological or academic one. There is nothing surprising about this. From “the way of speaking”16 to the way of reading, their strategy consists in specifying which uses of language allow us to say, to confess, or to hear what escapes language, namely, the Other or God. In theory, this strategy has as a consequence the priority, sometimes obsessive, that the spirituals grant modalities (for example: can, should, know, believe). In practice, it consists in specifying the behaviors by which an “intention” can be expressed in instructions for use. This is what we find in the texts devoted to ways of reading, on the basis of the principle posited, already in the twelfth century, by a major work of the spiritual tradition, the Lettre aux frères du Mont-Dieu by Guillaume de Saint-Thierry: “Intentioni enim servit lectio” (reading is subservient to intention).17 This transgressive principle, which imposes the law of the reader/listener on the book/teacher, is in keeping with the ways of doing things that frame “the intention of the reader”18 in terms of operations. In order to present them, I could analyze the “Notice to the Reader” texts that open these works of spirituality by referring to the practices of their intended readers. With variations, they repeat and develop the “envoi” sent by one of them: “Amy, lecteur, utere et fruere.”19 Use this book and profit from it. These two words say the essential, which focuses on a use of the book. I will, instead, in order to describe this art, sketch out the ideal schema of a few essential “moments” as found in numerous documents that tell us the story of the relations of the reader with the book. These relations are not stable. They vary with the itinerary of the reading subject; they mark his progress and are transformed or reiterated in keeping with his comings and goings. I will retain only four figures: the positing of the beginning, the mutation of the book into a garden of affects, the fabrication of a speaking body thanks to a “mastication,” and the interruption that detaches from the text.

A beginning. The book acts as a threshold: a border is needed, so that there may be an other in relation to a quest on the part of the subject. Its first status is that of object. It marks an exteriority. It cuts an otherness out in the vast field of language in which there roams a desire that does not know itself. Essentially it is intended not to furnish knowledge, but to trace out, in an uncertain landscape that one supposes to be haunted by the divine and therefore assimilable to a dialogical (“religious”) language, the difference of an opaque, separate, being-there. Rather than being the statement of a signified, it is a signifier of the Other. The book is a distinct place that serves as the index designating the “want-to-say” of another.20 It creates division, an elementary structure and minimal condition for the initiation of a dialogical praxis: without difference, no relation.

Teresa of Avila relates that “when a book was lacking, her soul was in confusion and her thoughts in disorder”: the book is the placeholder of the other and creates distinction. It allows one to “busy oneself” (ocuparse mucho en leccíon) during the time of oracíon; in that respect, still according to Teresa, it is recreación: she says that when, for lack of imagination, she feels a “void,” a vacant scattered state, the book appears once more as an ob-ject in that undifferentiated space, casting the little stones of its words into it, as if already offering consonants for the confused vocalization of desire. Therefore she declares reading “necessary, even if one reads little.” It is a principle of articulation. “During those years,” she concludes, “except after communion”—a characteristic restriction, for the Eucharistic bread (or Host) also plays the role of ob-ject, it is the material signifier of the other—“I never dared to begin to pray without a book.”21 The “dialogue” does not begin without the book. Nicht ohne: the category of “not without” designates the way of beginning.

Most of the spirituals underline this point that the book maintains an essential relation to the void. But its position is characterized, in these beginnings, by the fact that it “occupies” an empty place; it maintains it, it marks it, without filling it. Teresa also points out that this book/object allows her at once to “go out” and to “stay.” It takes her “out” of the neutral of the undifferentiated (at times when “nothing comes out of her”) and it makes her “stay” there, in the desert of a solitude (at times when her spirit prompts her toward vagabondage and wandering). Organized in keeping with a mental physics of attention, or rather of admiration (that surprise without object—Betroffenheit or dazed perplexity), the book keeps a place more than it supplies a meaning. In the extreme case, it suffices to hold that index of otherness in one’s hand: “Often,” says Teresa, “I would open the book with no need for anything more.”22 Opened, but not read, it embodies what it does not interpret. In a word, like the institution it takes the place of, it constitutes the mute being-there of the twofold assumption on which a believing is based: there is otherness; there is meaning. But what “other,” and what meaning? It says nothing about that. Like a rock in a landscape, it is there, as a monument and not a document, a witness but not an interpreter of these assumptions.

In this role, it can be replaced by elements of the countryside: flowing water, flowers, etc., are inscribed in the landscape like the open page in visual surroundings; they “replace the book.”23 A century earlier, Suso, Jean Tauler, and many others counseled the worshiper to support or fix the prayer with those “natural” things, but, for them, the things in question signified the will of a Speaker. They were documents: a teaching. At the end of the sixteenth century, with Teresa, the book is no longer a variant of the great cosmic Book spoken by God; it becomes itself the referent. The flowers refer us to the open setting of the unread page. Like the book, they make up an alphabet of beautiful silent things that guarantee a reality without saying a truth.

The garden of affects. In insisting on a beginning that excludes curiosity and promises admiration, this art of reading prepares a second “moment” that consists no longer in setting the tone for the reading, but in indicating its matter, its stuff: affects. That the readers should change the book into a garden of affectivity—this is affirmed by a long tradition. Sapor et non scientia, as Saint Bonaventure said in the thirteenth century. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Álvarez de Paz repeats: “Non notitiam, sed gustum et affectum,” and, at the end of the preceding century, Luis de Granada, a great collector of mystic literature, defines the way of practicing it in speaking of the “charm” and “pleasure” of reading.24 The gustus, sapor, inflammatio, etc. clearly express a “passionate” use of the book. Furthermore, the “savors,” “tastes,” “fervors,” that occur periodically in it presuppose a reading made of movements: emotion and motion are joined; the affectus implies and stimulates a motus. Hence lectio is considered to be an actio. This performance is carried out, it seems, only in order to exit itself. It is drawn out of itself now toward dialogue with the other (oratio), now toward the service of the other (opus),25 in the form of quasi-ecstatic and transitory expressions on the frontier of the activities toward which its dynamic tends. An operation of passage, it turns elsewhere, far from the book, what it puts in play in its garden.

Thus there is an essential ambivalence in this mobilization of affects in the enclosure of the open page. What it captures and represents comes from a very old pleasure. As Teresa of Avila testifies: “I always wish I had time for reading, and have always been fond of it.”26 Since the novels of chivalry that she devoured as an adolescent, unbeknownst to her father, or the “lives of the saints,” which are but a variant of them, she has read with “pleasure,” with “passion.”27 The works of spirituality will take over the same fictional function where the former leave off; they are poems revelatory of affects, just as poems awaken sleeping fairies. This reading resembles the dream, narrating desires day denies. Faithful to the biblical alliance of dream and spirit, Teresa calls the other life she seeks and discovers “dream”: “Life gives me the impression of a dream; nearly always I think I am dreaming what I see.”28 Thus lección and sueño come together. Reading originates, legitimizes, and nourishes dreams. It authorizes the temerity they express: “Take your desires for realities.” In the tradition of the monastic paradise (paradisus claustralis) and of the gardens of courtly love,29 the book becomes the covered walk of lovers, a “solitude” in which feelings are declared. It is situated between a dream that has written itself and a writing that one dreams, between the dream that has taken the objective form of a text and the dream that, like a phantom awakened by a passerby, invents other voyages. The Carmel as conceived of by Teresa will, moreover, be the reproduction of what she makes the book into, a place enclosed, in which lovers can walk freely and speak to the Beloved.

But this reading constructs the fiction of a text. By the novel into which it metamorphoses, if it expresses or liberates the real movements of desire, it produces only an imaginary book or objects, a fugitive language constituting nothing appropriable, neither discursive knowledge nor positivity. In going beyond the text, it runs toward the nothing of what it represents. It is an exercise of absence. To take things from a different angle, it may equally be said that since the affect refers us back to the speaking subject, this exercise overvalues utterance, the act of saying (oneself), and devalues the said, the semantic content. It excavates, in language, that “empty place” that is, for Émile Benveniste,30 the “I” of the speaker. Hence, if we do not identify the “spiritual” life with that set of imagery (an illusion against which the mystic authors constantly put their readers on guard), this art of reading tends paradoxically toward something other than the book and other than the reader; it makes the place it institutes untenable. By the very representation of his affects, the reader loses himself in something other than himself. Such is the ambivalence of an expression produced only to sink away in the silence of contemplation or the silence of service, two forms of access to the reality of the other. Reading makes the book a passing thing (it fades away) and a passage (it transports), in short, a metaphor of the subject.

The fabrication of a speaking body. To opinions recommending a reading that is “slow” (that should not read too much, or too quickly, or too many different authors), “interrupted” (segmented by a hundred and one ways of addressing the feelings it awakens to the interlocutors), and “elevated” (detached from the information furnished by the text),31 and thus considering the book as a “ferryman” or a shifter, there must be added apparently contrary opinions suggesting a “mastication” of the book. “Take and eat”: on this traditional theme, a whole series of counsels are developed for “swallowing,” then “ruminating,” “chewing over,” and “digesting” the text. An eating orality replaces a saying one. It has as its model the ruminatio of the cow, an alchemy internal to an immobile body, a work performed on itself by that animal, meditating like a Buddha on the grass. Thus, not to go back too far, the rule given in the twelfth century by Guillaume de Saint-Thierry: “Of daily reading, each day something (aliquid) must have gone into the belly of the memory to be more surely digested, then brought up to be more frequently ruminated.”32 The words enter into a physiological machinery, owing to “sympathies” that today might receive a psychoanalytic legitimization. Until the seventeenth century, that reading remains an affair of the mouth and the stomach. Surin requests that bookish “nourishment” be “solid” and well “prepared” for the “necessities” of the “stomach.”33 These are not just images. Eating the book can cause illness, portliness, or fitness. Not only that, but the swallowed text irritates or soothes the taste buds and mucous membranes of a spirit that haunts the grottos of the body. It visits, “restores,” or wounds an internal sensoriality.

My purpose is not to restore to this digestive reading its medical or chemical setting,34 but only to stress, first, the relation of the text to the body, and second (to use a term from these authors), what “profit” their readers derive from it. Indeed, these are two essential aspects of mastication.

The first concerns the fabrication of a body by some language. To be more precise, fragments of the body are transformed by bursts of language as if lead were changed to gold in those places where the body is “stricken” by a “word.” This experience would probably bear comparison with what much evidence indicates today, from the phenomena of hysterization to the varieties of structuration of the body by societal systems, namely, that the body is modeled along the lines of cultural and linguistic codes; it is itself made up of heraldry (or pages) historicized by bits of “ruminated” phrases. It is marked by textual citations as if it had an inner skin on which words were tattooed. There are, in the course of this reading, textual sequels: “intestinal” pains or distention, instances of sudden warmth in the head, heart palpitations, the outpouring of tears. The Way of a Pilgrim will restate it once more in the nineteenth century: “What are you crying about?” . . . “she would answer, ‘It touches me so, that beautiful writing in the Bible.’”35 What, then, is this “something” (aliquid) of the language that is able to “strike” a part of the body and to metamorphose it into a relic of the other, an erotic sign, a spoken and speaking memorial? Let us ask psychoanalysts—or lovers.

Basically, “profit” designates that “touch” itself, the corporeal response to a textual feature. “A few things penetrated [by us] are of more profit than many [merely] grazed,” writes Surin on the subject of those “few books” that one must “espouse” and “familiarize oneself” with.36 The intensity of the response is measured by the depth of a penetration. To analyze this “profit,” we must return to Valentin Voloshinov: “to understand is to respond”; “the sign exists only in interaction.”37 But the interaction here is played out between the body and the text; it is “symbolic” fiction (or fabrication), having the structure of the echo, for the local physical alteration belongs neither to the reader/subject nor to the book read, neither to the body nor to the mind; it is neither the one nor the other, but between them, like a pain of love. Letting happen what he does not know of his stricken body, the reader could say with Marguerite Duras: “I cry for no reason that I can explain. It’s as though I were shot through with grief. Someone has to cry, it is as if it were me.”38 These anonymous tears present a form of the aedificatoria lectio,39 which “edifies” or produces the fragment of a new body responding to an unknown.

Interruption. In inscribing itself in the body, reading leaves the text. It escapes. The truth is that this moment of detachment begins to form from the beginning: “With your eyes fixed on the book,” says Juan de Avila, “do not attach your heart to it.”40 A diffuse attention maintains a horizon of the absolute. It cannot be held within the textual enclosure; it considers the pages of the book as places of transit that must be abandoned one after another. No house is its own: it is not here, not there. The book is a residence that must be left behind: “It is good to interrupt reading.”41 This universal counsel is an invitation to interrupt the text with dialogue and invocation: Lectionem interrumpat oratio, repeats J. Álvarez de Paz.42 The use of the book, daily and regular, is interrupted by periodic separations that forbid identification with the text. This rupture is the only thing that will allow access to a “never spoken” word, perhaps like Don Juan, who continually breaks up with women to seek The Woman who will ultimately have the face of his death. This practice articulates a work of mourning. A commentator will go so far as to say: “The best book is the one that disappears the most.”43The text stands under the law of the not too much. It rapidly becomes exorbitant, obscene. The reader is claustrophobic; he suffers from an excess of book presence and from being enclosed by meaning. He needs exits. He flees by his way of cutting, the way oral speech oddly leaves the sentence once begun in suspense, the way it comes to a halt, turns away, passes on to other musical patterns—captive, one might say, to a voice that is the hinterland of language. A true reading, according to Tony Duvert, is “discovered from the first utterance of strangeness”: this “readability obscures the work because it gives up the socially prewritten communicable for the never spoken language of a never said reality—the body, the object, the nonmeaning.”44

This pared-down text is related to a great number of excerpta: manuscripts collating excerpts, they assemble, in the form of personal notebooks, bits of texts read, “extracts” and quotations that represent not a summary or the gist of the book but the parts that have “touched” or “smitten,” and that one retains in leaving it—a few words, as if from a song from one’s childhood, debris relating to the history of the reading subject and not to the positivity of a thinking or information, signifiers analogous to those Freud would exhume in the course of an analysis and to which he gives the beautiful name Stückchen Wahrheit—a little fragment of truth.45 But what truth, and whose? These ruins of texts are gathered there, in these collations of enigmas that make up, added to one another, at once scattered and gathered together, the visible linguistic magma through which the invisible location of that which speaks is indicated. With respect to the books themselves, those ruins tell the story of a desertification of the countryside left behind by the mystics. They form the tableau of an impoverishment, or rather of a disorientation due to a willed insecurity in the form of a fragility toward the other. Like a last subway ticket in the pocket of the emigrant, all that is left of a library is a line or two from a poem. And if the worshiper does not fetishize this last word (by a reversal that remains always possible), he ends up forgetting it. He is at sea.

An apparently opposite practice is possible. The fragment “adapts” to an increasing diversity of situations. It is the same, and yet it serves very different intentions. Hence it is emptied of its own content. It ceases being objectifiable, taking on the position of subject. Speaking of the Scripture, which has “several faces” and which “each person can adapt as suits him,” a text that is mobile like cloth, Francisco de Osuna compares it to the “people in certain paintings,” who “always seem to look at the observer, wherever he stands.”46 The radiance of the text is the look that follows the passersby/readers and changes them into looked-at beings. Thus the broken statue alluded to by Rilke, “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” headless and meaningless, becomes this “candelabrum set before his gaze which is pushed back and hid, restrained and shining”; so that

. . . there is no place

that does not see you. You must change your life.47

Similarly, the textual debris, the ruins of the text and of meaning, no longer says anything true or false; it “signifies” as one makes a sign to leave or come forward; it issues a “summons” to “your life” to appear before it, it judges you. It changes into a word that says nothing and is no longer anything, of the Other, than his look.

The Tomb of a Voice

After having considered the expectation and the practices of reading, we must turn to the meaning to which they give rise. But, precisely owing to these ways of reading, it now becomes a question of something other than meaning. The medieval circuit went from the interpretation given by the master (the lectio) to the inner assimilation of the message by the listener (the meditatio), and from this last to the response addressed by the faithful to the founding Verb (the oratio). It recognized a “reading” at each stage that the creative Word went through in its descent, first through the Book of the World, then through a magisterial and scriptural instruction, down to the listeners/readers called by it to conform to its Law. During the period I am speaking of, that chain broke, even though each of the links remained organized by its prior belonging to the great dogmatic story of the divine locution. The book no longer “speaks,” nor does the master. Meditation functions on an automatizing of the understanding and produces fields of knowledge. Thus the word passes through all those corporeal sounds whose speaker is no longer known.

Of this breakup of the theological story I shall, to conclude, retain only its major consequence, because, besides the fact that it is the focal point of the “spiritual” or “mystic” reading, it also became the prerequisite of a “modern” reading: the exegesis that scrutinized the meaning of the statements (or “mysteries”) emitted by a bona fide Speaker was replaced—as if assuming a backup position with respect to that exegesis and concerning its premise—by a questioning directed at the enunciation itself. The essential problem is no longer what the divine messages are saying, but whether there still is a saying, and if so, where and how? The question has shifted from an elucidation of the meaning to the search for a voice. The new status of the book and the privilege granted to the way of reading are decisive symptoms of this shift—the book ceases to be a “master” and becomes the instrument of a quest, and the way of reading replaces obedience to an instruction with a way of loosening or breaking the book, like a tombstone, to hear the voice it is assumed to contain.

That the book is no longer the master is declared by all the spiritual authors, thus taking up a position in the debate that, on the topic of reading, continues to ask: Who is the master? Indeed, Augustin Baker, in his Sancta Sophia, reduces books, those “masters,” to being no more than “servants.”48 Modern contemplation abandons them, contrary to the faithfulness maintained in this respect by a whole medieval monastic tradition.49 To “celestial philosophy” they furnish only “an alphabet,”50 itself transitory, white stones dispersed where there is no real traceable pathway. Finally, the book is only the fragment, or the index or metaphor of a mystic “Book” whose hidden figures form a litany in the Pro theologia mystica clavis of Sandaeus, “Liber Dei,” “Liber experientiae,” “Liber vitae,” “Liber mortis”51—and whose utopian definition is the unhoped-for coincidence between a living word and an order of meaning.

This does not mean that the deterioration and/or mythification of the book works toward an individualization of the reader. If this reversal does indeed take place in the course of modernity,52 it remains foreign to the perspective of the spirituals, attentive to the loss and possible reunion with the Voice presupposed not so long ago by the theological understanding of the world. They do not introduce an individual-master using a book-instrument; they articulate the desire of the Voice capable of founding the subject qua respondent. Relative to the uncertainty of the subject as well as of the book, their way of reading pins all its hopes entirely on the postulate that there is a saying that is more essential than the text, and that ultimately only a voice can make us believe in the text. In devaluing the book/object, they return to what is presupposed by all human practice of the book and to what it cannot forget, namely, that one way or another it “speaks.” Beyond the threshold of the word introduced by the automatization of the book, they expect, they work (in a way that is in turn disappointed and fulfilled) toward the emergence of the voice from the tomb.

That there is no reading without the quest for a voice—this has become the paradox of a modern practice of the book, since, as has been said about E. T. A. Hoffmann, “that voice that the written text continually makes heard, at the same time continually eludes all its [the text’s] attempts to grasp it.”53 The question that haunts and organizes the way of reading of the “spirituals” thus survives to this day, in various still recognizable guises. May it suffice to mention the form it takes under the name, equally obsessive, of “the oeuvre” and its relation to the book. “The book is there, then, but the work is still hidden. It is absent, perhaps radically so; in any case it is concealed, obfuscated by the evident presence of the book, behind which it awaits the liberating decision, the ‘Lazare, veni foras.’”54 The story of the ghost told by the absolute reading probably gives reading its mythic narrative. In any case, it illustrates in ways of doing things, an interrogation that effectively concerns, apropos of the voice or the work buried in the book, the possibility of that performative: Lazarus, come forth.

1. Abundant literature since Jehan de Cuchermoys, Petit traité du Voyage de Hierusalem (Paris, 1530?); Henry Castela, Le Guide et adresse pour ceux qui veulent faire le S. Voiage de Hierusalem (Paris, 1604); Yves Dugué, Brief Discours de la manière de voyager (Bourges, 1638); François Du Soucy, L’Art de voyager utilement (Paris, 1650); S. Sorbière, De l’utilité des grands voyages (Paris, 1660); etc. See N. Doiron, “De la manière de voyager,” Dérives (Montreal) 41 (1984): 3–16.

2. The term seems to appear for the first time in Bartolomeo Ricci, Instruttione di meditare [1600], 2nd ed. (Rome, 1602), 216–20; Latin trans., G. Busée (Mainz, 1605), 185–91. See Hermann Josef Sieben, “De la lectio divina à la lecture spirituelle,” Dictionnaire de spiritualité, vol. 9 (Paris, 1976), col. 494.

3. See for example Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (New York: Cambridge, 1979), 453–88, on this dichotomy (“books versus Nature”) among the humanists, whose intellectual impact, however, as the author rightly emphasizes, is contingent on their activity as writers, and as public ones, too.

4. John of the Cross, La Subida del Monte Carmelo, prologue, etc.

5. Teresa of Avila, Libro de la vida, 4, etc.

6. See Eisenstein, Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 3–42.

7. Dante, De vulgari eloquentia.

8. Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago, 1960), 1–128.

9. See Certeau, Mystic Fable, 1: 157–205.

10. François Rabelais, Quart livre, chaps. 55–56. See, among numerous other studies, Michel Jeanneret, “Les Paroles dégelées,” Littérature 17 (1975): 14–30.

11. Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 14ff.; Tzvetan Todorov, Théorie de la littérature. Textes des formalistes russes (Paris, 1965).

12. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962), 330ff.

13. Particularly since John J. Gumperz and Dell Hymes, eds., Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972).

14. Roland Barthes, “Sur la lecture,” Le français aujourd’hui 32 (January 1976): 11–18.

15. Gérard Genette, Figures (Paris, 1966), 123ff.

16. See Certeau, Mystic Fable, vol. 1, chap. 4, “Manners of Speaking.”

17. Guillaume de Saint-Thierry, Lettre aux frères du Mont-Dieu (Lettre d’or), ed. J. Déchanet (Paris: Sources chrétiennes, 1975), 240–41, §124.

18. Ibid.

19.Instructions spirituelles aux bonnes âmes (Paris: Jacques de Laize-de-Bresche, 1674), notice to the reader, unpaginated.

20. Throughout this volume, the French term vouloir-dire (sometimes unhyphenated), will be translated as “want-to-say.”

21.Libro de la vida, chap. 4.

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid., chap. 9.

24. See the texts cited by Sieben, “De la lectio divina à la lecture spirituelle,” cols. 487–96.

25. See for example J. Álvarez de la Paz, De exterminatione mali et promotione boni libri quinque (Mainz, 1614), book 3, part 5, section 2, 2 (“De lectione spirituali”), cols. 1173–76.

26. Teresa of Avila, Primera Relación [1560], 7, in Obras completas (Madrid: BAC, 1954), 2: 505–6.

27.Libro de la vida, chaps. 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, etc.

28. Ibid., chap. 40.

29. See Terry Comito, The Idea of the Garden in the Renaissance (New Brunswick, NJ, 1978), chaps. 2–4.

30. Émile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary E. Meek (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1971), 217–30.

31. See J. Álvarez de Paz, De vita spirituali (Mainz, 1614), book 2, part 4, 31, col. 379.

32. Guillaume de Saint-Thierry, Lettre aux frères du Mont-Dieu, 240, §122.

33. Jean-Joseph Surin, Catéchisme spirituel, IV, 2 (MS of Bordeaux, 1654).

34. See for example Allen G. Debus, The Chemical Philosophy, 2 vols. (New York, 1977).

35.The Way of a Pilgrim, translated from Russian by R. M. French (Pasadena: Hope, 1989), 66.

36. Jean-Joseph Surin, Guide spirituel, ed. Michel de Certeau (Paris, 1963), IV, 3, p. 183.

37. Louis Guespin, Introduction, Langages 74, “Dialogue et interaction verbale” (1984): 7.

38. Marguerite Duras, The Vice-Consul, trans. Eileen Ellenbogen (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987), 158 (trans. modified).

39. An expression from Speculum inclusorum, written at the end of the fifteenth century by a disciple of Richard Rolle.

40. Juan de Avila, Audi filia, trans. J. Cherprenet (Paris, 1954), 2: 195.

41. Ibid.

42. J. Álvarez de Paz, De exterminatione mali et promotione boni, col. 1175: a classic, often repeated expression, dating back at least to Guillaume de Saint-Thierry, Lettre aux frères du Mont-Dieu, §123.

43. Gaston Brillet, “La Bible et la lecture spirituelle,” La Vie spirituelle 73 (1945): 498.

44. Tony Duvert, “La Lecture introuvable,” Minuit 1 (November 1972): 11.

45. Sigmund Freud, Der Mann Moses, in Gesammelte Werke (London, 1950), 16: 239.

46. Quoted by Fidèle De Ros, Un Maître de sainte Thérèse, le P. François d’Osuna (Paris, 1936), 396.

47. Rainer Maria Rilke, From Rilke: Selected Poems, trans. C. F. MacIntyre (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 92.

48. Dom Augustin Baker, La Sainte Sapience (translation of Sancta Sophia [Douai, 1657]) (Paris, 1953), 1: 68.

49. See Jean Leclercq, L’Amour des lettres et le désir de Dieu (Paris, 1957).

50. Luis de Granada, Œuvres complètes, ed. J.-F. Bareille, vol. 2 (Paris, 1863), 143–44.

51. Maximilianus Sandaeus, Pro Theologia mystica clavis (Cologne, 1640), 263–64.

52. See Pierre Kuentz, “Le tête à texte,” Esprit (December 1974): 946–62.

53. Claude Rabant, Délire et théorie (Paris, 1978), 99.

54. Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 194–96; my quotation is from p. 195 [“Lazare, veni foras”: John 11: 44].

The Mystic Fable

Volume Two

The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

Michel de Certeau

Vaccination - Historical Blunders

 

Modern medicine has tried to convince us (and for the most part pretty successfully) that vaccines are a sort of armor, protecting the human body against repeated attacks from disease-producing germs.

But the reality is quite different, and at times, quite the opposite. The truth is that the genetic and chemical vaccine cocktail has been shown to cause disease and even accelerate its spread.

When we study and analyze the historical record of the many pandemics that have killed large swathes of the population across continents, it makes you wonder how many lives could have been saved, had hundreds of thousands of people not been vaccinated at all.

When you read the following information, there are several factors you might want to bear in mind. Vaccination research has always been a cutting-edge area of medicine, and mass immunization provides researchers, drug companies and governments a captive and willing human sample to test new drugs and formulations.

Introducing these chemicals into the human body through vaccines sometimes has little or nothing to do with the vaccine being administered or the outbreak of a particular disease. In other words, throwing ethical considerations to the wind, researchers have used mass vaccinations as a readymade testing ground or a human laboratory, as it were.

On other occasions, scientific ignorance and inadequate equipment and testing procedures have led to errors of judgment in the development of vaccines, which has cost thousands of lives while leaving others afflicted with debilitating diseases.

In still other instances, either the antigen, or the contaminants, or the additives in vaccines have actually caused disease and death.

1. The Polio Controversy

It is not surprising then that more than half a century after the first polio vaccine was developed, controversy still rages over the contamination of the vaccine with the deadly SV40 virus.

The Simian Vacuolating Virus 40 or Simian Virus 40 is found in the kidney cells of the rhesus monkey. The SV40 is carcinogenic, causing tumors especially sarcomas or cancer of the connective tissue.

Let’s rewind to the mid-20th century, when polio was a health crisis across continents and had claimed more than 50,000 lives in the US alone. No wonder the development of the first polio vaccine by Dr Jonas Salk (‘dead’ or Inactivated Poliovirus Vaccine or IPV) in 1953, and the second polio vaccine (‘live’ or Oral Polio Vaccine) by Dr Albert Sabin in 1957, were embraced with a collective sigh of relief.

Mass vaccinations began as soon as the Salk vaccine was approved by federal agencies in 1955, and by 1961, more than 90 million people across the globe were inoculated with the IPV.

But it took only two years after the Salk vaccine was approved for scientists to discover that it contained strains of SV40, which lives in the rhesus monkey’s kidney cells (the rhesus monkey’s kidney cells had been used to grow the polio virus). In subsequent years, numerous eminent scientists and research studies confirmed this contamination after demonstrating that SV40 could infect and cause cancer in human cells.

More recently, the American Journal of Medicine cited many studies which have reported the presence of SV40 from the polio vaccine in human brain tumors and bone cancers, malignant mesothelioma, and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

In the late ’50s, when the SV40 controversy could no longer be ignored, the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) decreed that companies submitting their polio vaccines for approval to the FDA after June 30, 1961, must be free of SV40 contamination.

But the FDA left two gaping loopholes for drug companies. One, the government allowed vaccine manufacturers who had made millions of doses prior to June 30, 1961, to sell their vaccines till their shelf life expired two years later.

Two, the FDA did not require vaccine-makers to discard tissue cultures and other related material. What some vaccine manufacturers claimed to have done to prove that their vaccines passed muster after 1961 was to add rabbit anti-SV40 antibodies to their viral cultures to neutralize the simian virus!

With drug companies keeping their facilities under lock and key, there is no way to officially prove that they actually did this. Also, the assumption that these rabbit antibodies were effective against the SV40 has never been proved. Also, vaccine manufacturers have never been forced to prove that they had indeed destroyed their contaminated stocks worth millions of dollars.

Despite this charade, four decades after the first polio vaccine was developed, the World Health Organization proclaimed in 1994 that it had eradicated the scourge of polio from the face of the planet.

However, the damage had already been done. In a candid admission, the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) announced that around 10-30 million Americans may have been inoculated with the SV40-contaminated IPV whereas another 10,000 people may have been administered the OPV. What the CDC omitted to mention was that millions of individuals in the former USSR, where clinical trials on the OPV had been conducted, had also received the vaccine.

Here is another way to present the argument that the polio vaccine does not produce immunity. If live viruses in vaccines can still induce polio today when standards of sanitation and hygiene are high, it is plausible to assume that the polio epidemics half a century ago were also caused by immunization against the disease when hygiene, sanitation, housing and nutritional standards were relatively crude. What is absolutely clear is that the infection rate is high in areas with poor hygiene. It is important to know that only 0.1 percent of all polio infections are likely to progress to paralysis. The rest of symptoms resemble other viral infections such as influenza.

No matter what may have caused polio outbreaks in the past, it is ethically, morally and medically questionable today to immunize vast sections of the population against a disease that scarcely exists any more but may be experience a comeback because of mass vaccination.

2. Vaccines Cause Disease

 There is more than sufficient evidence to show that vaccines have repeatedly failed to prevent disease. In fact, history is littered with instances where vaccination during epidemics has actually led to an increase in the incidence and further spread of the diseases they were meant to prevent and eradicate.

Yet with statistical manipulation and pro-vaccine propaganda, the medical fraternity has been able to convince most of us that these chemicals protect the human body from disease and death.

After the polio controversy, let us learn another lesson from history. Smallpox had been sweeping across 19th and early 20th century Europe and taking a heavy toll, till Britain finally passed a law mandating compulsory and universal smallpox vaccination in 1854.

It was a disastrous mistake. In the years following 1854, every successive smallpox outbreak coincided with a mass vaccination campaign. In other words, there was a sudden increase in the incidence of the disease after the vaccine was administered to the population en masse.

The London epidemic (1857-1859) claimed more than 14,000 lives; the 1863-1865 outbreak resulted in 20,000 deaths; and between 1871 and 1873, smallpox spread across Europe, recording the worst epidemic of the disease in history. In England and Wales alone, the disease claimed 45,000 lives despite the fact that 97 percent of the population had been vaccinated by then!

Germany too experienced the same vaccination pains. The country had passed a law allowing for compulsory vaccination in 1834. Yet, as the disease raged across England, Germany too took a heavy hit.

Despite a rigorous vaccination campaign that had covered 96 percent of the population, the country recorded 125,000 deaths from smallpox. Of these, 17,000 cases in Berlin took place among a fully-vaccinated population. Baffling, isn’t it?

But Europe alone has not suffered the mistakes of history. Compulsory vaccination against smallpox in 1872 in Japan caused a spurt in the disease every year after that, till the country registered 165,000 cases and 30,000 deaths in 1892. Ironically again, most of the victims had been vaccinated against smallpox.

Compulsory vaccination was introduced in the Philippines in the early 20th century, which seemed to result in a marked decline in smallpox in that country. However, inexplicably, the disease dealt a deadly blow between 1917 and 1919 in an epidemic that saw 160,000 cases and 70,000 deaths. Here too, the population affected had been fully vaccinated.

There may be several reasons why the smallpox vaccine didn’t work then, the most frightening and real one being that the very premise on which the smallpox vaccine is based is flawed.

The smallpox vaccine is made from the genetic material present in cowpox, a disease in cows characterized by pustular lesions on the animal’s udders. Incidentally, it was the cowpox virus – or vaccinia virus – which lent its name to the generic term ‘vaccine’.

Though vaccine manufacturing procedures are refined today, the smallpox vaccine is still made from the vaccinia virus, and though the scientific establishment today publicly denies this, its so-called success is based on pure presumptions rather than scientific experimentation.

These presumptions were made by an 18th century English physician named Edward Jenner, who had observed that milkmaids and farmers who worked with cows infected with cowpox appeared to be resistant to smallpox.

Jenner went a step further and experimented with the cowpox and smallpox viruses on human beings. In 1796, he injected the smallpox virus into an eight-year-old boy who he had already inoculated with cowpox and observed that the child did not die. (!) Jenner then proclaimed that his ‘theory of vaccination’ was successful.

This and other ‘experiments’ performed by Jenner, all of them based on loose observation, managed to convince the medical establishment then that he had found a vaccine for smallpox.

What if it wasn’t the cowpox that had produced immunity but the human immune system that prevented Jenner’s ‘subjects’ from developing smallpox? The English physician’s ‘proof’ that the vaccine did indeed work was to round up farmers who had contracted cowpox and inject them with material from smallpox lesions. When the farmers showed no symptoms of smallpox, Jenner offered this as ‘proof’.

What if these farmers had already acquired immunity to smallpox from exposure to the disease from others infected with it? When others presented cases that suggested exactly the opposite, Jenner’s defense was to scoff at these claims!

Half a century later, England and the rest of the world were to pay for Jenner’s unscientific and incredible claims.

Vaccination history continues to expose the claims and myths of global bodies such as the WHO and the Red Cross, who have spearheaded immunization programs across the world. Yet, in a huge embarrassment for the WHO, Ghana was declared measles-free by the global health agency in 1967, after a mass immunization drive that covered more than 90 percent of the country’s population.

The WHO should have been more careful before making such bold and self-congratulatory statements because between 1970 and 1972, Ghana was hit by one of its worst-ever measles outbreaks. The Journal of Tropical Pediatrics reports that 235,930 cases were recorded during that period including 834 deaths.

Measles outbreaks and immunization programs continue in Ghana today, turning history’s mistakes into a billion-dollar industry for the drug companies who make these vaccines.

The claim that the measles vaccine protects against measles is totally unsubstantiated. Although most Japanese children are vaccinated against measles, a measles outbreak took place in Japan in April 2007, causing a total estimated 27,600 cases.

The US is far from immune to the tall claims made by the pro-vaccination lobby. In 1989, measles outbreaks were reported in American schools where 98 percent of the children had already been vaccinated. These outbreaks were recorded across geographies.

The American Medical Association admitted in 1990 that despite the fact that 95 percent of school children are covered by mass vaccination campaigns against measles, it has failed to altogether stop the disease. The incident sparked a heated debate, with some researchers claiming that immunization suppresses the immune system, leading to a general vulnerability to infection.

The case for the spread of diseases by vaccines becomes iron-clad when you include whooping cough, tuberculosis and diphtheria and practically any other communicable disease.

In a bold move, Sweden decided to stop inoculating the population with the whooping cough vaccine in 1979 when the country discovered that of the 5,140 cases which surfaced in 1978, more than 80 percent had been vaccinated three times already.

The New England Journal of Medicine reported a study conducted in 1994 which found that more than 80 percent of children aged under five who were afflicted with whooping cough had already been inoculated against the disease.

In the UK, the Community Disease Surveillance Centre detected more than 200,000 cases of whooping cough in children between 1970 and 1990. All these children had already been vaccinated.

Returning to polio, after the introduction of mass immunization. in the US in 1955, the number of polio cases increased by 50 percent between 1957 and 1958, and by 80 percent from 1958 to 1959.

In five states, cases of polio doubled after the vaccine was given to large numbers of people. As soon as hygiene and sanitation improved, despite the immunization programs, the viral disease quickly disappeared.

3. Oops! We Forgot!

 There are several conclusions we can draw from the data presented above. Foremost among these is that history has established no causal link between vaccination and protection from disease.

The immune system is the most critical factor that determines whether an individual develops a certain disease or not. It is also a factor that was not taken into account during the development of vaccines.

All that these pioneering researchers noted was the prior presence or absence of the disease in the individuals they observed while conducting their experiments. There were no long-term studies (and still aren’t) and no control groups used.

Other crucial factors that contribute to the development and spread of are living conditions. Poor quality living conditions, overcrowding, unsanitary and unhygienic environment and malnutrition, and most importantly, vitamin D deficiency due to lack of regular sun exposure, systematically weaken the immune system, thus compromising its ability to maintain homeostasis and ward off disease.

It is no coincidence that epidemic outbreaks have declined over time as the quality of living improved. By that same yardstick, diseases take a far greater toll in poorer countries where malnutrition, contaminated water and unhygienic conditions are widespread.

A glaring omission while performing a headcount during an epidemic or tallying the death toll is that the medical establishment has never stopped to inquire into the medical histories of the individuals affected by the ‘killer’ virus in question.

Despite this, during epidemic outbreaks, the polio, smallpox and whooping cough viruses, among others, are routinely blamed for cases whose weakened immunity may not have saved them from most illnesses anyway. This raises serious questions about the very foundation of vaccine theory and the so-called efficacy of vaccines.

This is also a matter of documented record. A study conducted by the British Association for the Advancement of Science reveals that improved hygiene and sanitation between 1850 and 1940 coincided with a 90 percent decline in childhood diseases in general.

In the US, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company documented the four leading causes of death from infectious diseases between 1911 and 1935. It named diphtheria, scarlet fever, whooping cough and measles.

By 1945, the death toll from these diseases had fallen by a dramatic 95 percent – before the advent of mass immunization programs for these diseases. Again, this dramatic decline in disease was due to improved sanitation, nutrition and better housing.

Buttressing the argument for hygiene leading to decrease in mortality, is the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report of July 30, 1999, which cites better sanitation, water quality, hygiene and the introduction of antibiotics as being the most important factors in disease control in the 20th century.

Could it be that these advancements (with the exception of antibiotics which weaken the immune system) were boosting health and immunity and saving lives, and not vaccines? The descending and ascending timelines for disease and better conditions, respectively, coincide almost too perfectly to ignore this conclusion.

But when it comes to vaccination, there are more sinister factors at work – the deliberate manipulation of facts to suit the ulterior motives of the medical establishment and drug companies. This includes fudging data, misdiagnosing disease, under-reporting a disease in patients who have been vaccinated against it and over-reporting illnesses in patients who have not been afflicted by them. All this to support the theory that vaccines save human lives!

4. The Semantics of Disease

 One of the most obvious factors that affects the incidence – or apparent incidence – of an infectious disease is its definition. And history has shown how sleight of hand, or a few strokes of the pen, can seem to make diseases appear, disappear or look less menacing.

In the US, during trials of the Salk vaccine, there appeared to be a significant decline in the number of polio cases between 1954 and 1957. But did you know that the definition of polio was rewritten during that period?

By this single stroke of genius, the number of polio cases was destined to fall during this crucial time – specifically chosen because the Salk vaccine was officially approved in 1955, when mass vaccination was introduced. It was a deliberate attempt to suggest that the new vaccine was responsible for the decline in the infectious disease.

The medical community took three steps to ensure this. One, diseases that had hitherto been misdiagnosed as paralytic polio were now suddenly excluded from the definition of the disease. These diseases included viral and aseptic meningitis, which had been affecting thousands of children in the US annually.

While the medical establishment may have corrected an inaccuracy, doing so at this juncture served the agenda of the promoters of the polio vaccine. Conversely, in a double sleight of hand, cases of non-paralytic polio were now being classified as viral or aseptic meningitis!

As if this was not enough, an overzealous medical establishment was intent on bringing down the apparent incidence of the infectious disease even further. It therefore raised the limit for the declaration of an epidemic from 20 to 35 for every 100,000 people. This meant it required a larger number of cases to declare that the disease had assumed alarming proportions.

The definition of polio was overhauled in one more critical way. To qualify as polio, symptoms of paralysis had to now persist for 60 days as opposed to just 24 hours. Convenient, isn’t it?

5. Hiding The Virus

 Medical records are replete with examples of how statistics have been twisted to suit hidden agendas. One way to do this is to conceal the whole picture. Take a bunch of medical statistics out of context and you could get a drastically distorted view of infectious diseases.

Here is an example of how this was done by two researchers from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, in the book Communicable Diseases Handbook. Arguing in favor of the red measles vaccine in the US, the authors claim that inoculating the population with the vaccine (80 million doses) post-1963 brought down the number of cases from 500,000 before that year, to around 35,000 in 1975.

Nothing wrong with these figures – till you read them against the pre-1963 figures for red measles or rubeola. In 1958, there were 800,000 rubeola cases, indicating that the number of cases was actually falling before the vaccine was administered in 1963.

Add to this picture figures for 1955 and you will see that the death rate for red measles had already fallen 97 percent since the early 1900s!

All this hoopla when there was a bigger lie being perpetrated on the American public in the ’60s. The CDC publicly admitted that the inactivated vaccine for rubeola administered between 1963 and 1968 was ineffective, and advised the public to get re-vaccinated! So was the massive drop of red measles infection that occurred between 1963 and 1968 due to the ineffective vaccine, and the continued reduction of infections after 1968 due to the effective vaccine after re-vaccination?

Here is another way in which the medical fraternity has hoodwinked not only the public but budding researchers as well. Close scrutiny of medical texts and journals will reveal that infectious diseases across the spectrum appear to decrease in incidence and severity from 1940 onwards.

Is it any coincidence that this was also the time when advances in antibiotics were made and many immunization programs were undertaken? Deliberately excluding data that reflects the incidence of disease before the era of mass vaccination suggests that vaccines are the champions of good health.

However, medical students, fed on a distorted picture of disease and on baseless assumptions, therefore regard their textbooks as the absolute truth and thus, over time, medical untruths turn into ‘fact’.

Here is another example of a dishonest medical establishment. According to publicity material published by a provincial government in Australia, a three-decade-long campaign against tuberculosis before the 1950s had considerably whittled down the incidence of the disease in the country.

Again, even a quick look at statistics from the 1920s reveals that the disease was already in decline well before drugs were introduced to combat tuberculosis in the country. The march of modern medicine had, in fact, little if anything to do with the situation. Alas, they are always quick to usurp credit.

So do infectious diseases pose any significant threat to us now? Well, see for yourself. According to Dr. Robert Sears, author of The Vaccine Book, the number of childhood cases of diseases included on the vaccine schedule in the US in 2007 was:

• Pneumococus – approx. 10,000 cases a year

• Diphtheria – 5 cases per year, 0 cases some years

• Tetanus – 1 case per year in children under 5

• Pertussis – approx. 10,000 cases a year

• Hepatitus B – 30 cases in 1 year olds, 30 cases in 1-5 year olds

• Rotavirus – 500,000 cases, 50,000 hospitalizations, 20-70

• deaths

• Polio – 0 cases since 1985

• Measles – 50-100 cases a year

• Mumps – 250 cases a year

• Rubella – 250 cases a year

• Chickenpox – 50,000 cases a year

• Hepatitis A – 10,000 cases a year, most in children aged 5-14

• Flu – Millions of cases

• Meningococcal Disease – approx. 3000 cases a year

To reiterate, vaccination has nothing to do with these low infection rates. Improved sanitation, nutrition, healthcare and living conditions played a major role both before and after vaccines came on the scene. Other first-world nations, such as Iceland, which give just a third of the number of vaccines to children than the US, experience the same decline in infectious diseases as every other country that improves living conditions.

However, the vaccine fraud comes tagged with a hefty price to pay. In the US:

• 1 in 6 children is diagnosed with a learning disability

• 1 in 9 children suffer from asthma

• 1 in 94 develop autism

• 1 in 450 become diabetic

Vaccinating – or rather poisoning – millions of children one shot at a time, year after year, leaves us with future generations that have to live with disabilities and chronic diseases. We are literally breeding sick populations for many years to come, until hopefully, some day, vaccines will be banned because they are largely being considered responsible for the continuously escalating healthcare crisis.

Switching Diseases

 When the term ‘re-diagnosis’ is used by the medical fraternity, it spells ‘hoax’. Re-diagnosis, or changing diagnostic criteria, is usually a means to falsify statistics to achieve a pre-determined objective. And the pro-vaccination lobby uses it time and again to support the premise that vaccines work.

According to the National Anti-Vaccination League in Britain, more than 3,000 fatal chickenpox cases were reported in England between the turn of the century and the 1930s. The league goes on to point out that chickenpox is not a fatal disease and that the deaths took place due to smallpox. Doctors had allegedly ‘re-diagnosed’ smallpox cases as chickenpox because each of the individuals affected had already been vaccinated for smallpox.

Remember, the smallpox vaccine was the ‘first successful vaccine ever to be developed’. Hence, the re-diagnosis served to cover up the embarrassment of the medical establishment.

Vaccine-nation Poisoning the Population,

One Shot at a Time

Andreas Moritz

The Vaccine Myth

 

This is perhaps the most damning yet ironic testimony against vaccines, a confession that comes from none other than the man who developed the first polio vaccine – the Inactivated Poliovirus Vaccine or IPV.

Quoted in the medical journal Science in 1977, Dr Jonas Salk admitted before a US Senate Sub-Committee that mass inoculation against polio was the cause of most polio cases across the US since 1961.

Salk is also reported to have said that “live virus vaccines against influenza or poliomyelitis may in each instance produce the disease it intended to prevent… (and) the live virus against measles and mumps may produce such side effects as encephalitis (brain damage).”

There are many interpretations of Salk’s testimony. Pro-Salk proponents point out that the scientist was referring to the “live” or oral form of the polio vaccine developed by Dr Albert Sabin in 1957 vis-à-vis his own IPV which he developed four years earlier.

However, even if that were true, it is alarming to hear from a scientist who made vaccine history that a vaccine – any vaccine – administered to vast sections of the human population could result in widespread deaths, or for that matter, any deaths at all.

We will return to this controversy in Chapter 2 on Historical Blunders But for now, suffice to say that with Salk’s testimony, the very premise of vaccination theory suffered a serious blow.

1. Definition of Disease

 Before I illustrate how vaccines cause, and not prevent disease, let us first define ‘disease’ in the context of vaccines and immunity.

It has long been known that in some illnesses such as measles, chickenpox and scarlet fever, one bout of the illness usually provides lifelong immunity. A second experience with measles or scarlet fever is extremely rare.

Why is that so? That is because nature has gifted the human body with wonderful natural armor – an in-built immunity – that protects the body by kicking in after a bout of a particular disease.

Till modern science unraveled the secrets of the immune system, the concepts of medicine formulated in the 19th century were in part based on the understanding of medicine by the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates.

According to Hippocrates, an illness manifests itself as signs and symptoms that travel from the inner vital organs and blood circulation to the outer surface of the body. These outer symptoms manifest themselves as visible symptoms such as a rash or discharge of blood, mucus or pus.

This ‘throwing off’ of an illness was considered a natural healing response which returned the body to a state of balance or equilibrium. And it took place only after the inner poisons produced by the disease were cooked and digested (pepsis) during the inflammatory process.

Hippocrates’s astute observations were further developed by modern science, which later uncovered the actual mechanisms of infection, inflammation and healing on these very same lines.

Disease symptoms can indeed be caused by pathogens such as bacteria and viruses. But we have also been led to think of them as enemies that we need to battle. The fact is that disease does not begin when we are exposed to or are infected with a bacterium or virus. It begins when the body begins to respond to a pathogen or the inflammatory-infectious process that it sets in motion. This means that disease equals healing, which is the body’s way of returning to a balanced condition (homeostasis). Disease is a sure sign that the body is engaged in correcting an underlying condition that is otherwise unfavorable to its efficiency and survival.

It is critical to understand this because it turns on its head the very foundation on which vaccination theory rests. The human body’s inflammatory response to disease is, in fact, a healing process. Symptoms of disease are the body’s attempt to deal with accumulated toxins, waste matter, and weakened or damaged cells. The so-called pathogens appropriately assist the body in destroying and eliminating such potentially harmful materials from the system, and return the body to a healthy state of equilibrium.

Also, the magnitude of the body’s response, or the severity of illness, is not only influenced by the magnitude of the resulting infection but also by the stamina of its immune system.

The healing force employed by the body is, in turn, influenced by a variety of factors such as the individual’s emotional state, spiritual foundation, diet, lifestyle, environment, etc. It definitely does not depend on whether we have been vaccinated against infectious agents.

If the immune system is weak, the body becomes congested and toxic, or vice versa. As a result, pathogens are likely to invade the body and start the detoxification process (disease), although the majority of germ ‘invasions’ occur silently, without ever disturbing us. Think about it. The human body is exposed to a multitude of pathogens every day, some of them agents of (presumed) deadly diseases. If germ invasion were synonymous with disease and death, most human beings would not survive very long.

Germ Theory: Yet it is precisely this assumption on which the 19th century French scientist, Louis Pasteur, postulated this famous Germ Theory, which has since become the cornerstone of modern medicine and vaccination.

Pasteur was the first researcher to suggest that diseases are caused by germs. According to him, germs or pathogens are ‘after us’ because they need to prey on us for their own survival. He initially believed that infectious/inflammatory diseases are a direct result of germs feasting on us but then retracted that theory at the time of his death.

In microscopic studies of host tissues in such diseases, Pasteur, Robert Koch and their colleagues repeatedly observed that germs proliferated while many host cells were dying. These researchers concluded that germs attack and destroy healthy cells and thereby start a disease process in the body.

Although Pasteur’s assumption turned out to be wrong, it had already worked its way into the world of science and got under the skin of researchers and doctors, and thus the myth that ‘germs cause infection and disease’ became an undisputed reality. Today, this idea continues to prevail as a fundamental ‘scientific truth’ in the modern medical system.

Pasteur could have just as easily concluded that bacteria are naturally attracted to sites of increased cell death, just like they are attracted to decaying organic matter elsewhere in nature.

Flies, ants, crows, vultures and, of course, bacteria are drawn towards death. This is an undisputed law of nature. Why would this be different in the body? Weak, damaged or dead cells in the human body are just as prone to germ infection as an overripe or bruised fruit.

Pasteur and all the researchers that followed in his footsteps chose to think of germs either as predators or scavengers. Had they assumed that cells die for non-apparent biochemical reasons (such as toxicity buildup), our current thinking about illness and health would be quite different.

Pasteur’s ‘germs-are-equal-to-disease’ theory basically ignored, or at least bypassed, the immune system and its awesome, if not sometimes mysterious, powers of healing.

Why it is flawed: The fact is that inflammatory/infectious illnesses cannot be attributed to germs but are located in the various human frailties that necessitate the forces of decay and death.

It is a question of subtle emphasis. While germs are indeed involved in the disease process, they are definitely not, as Pasteur assumed, intent on harming us; nor are they the actual causal agents of infectious diseases.

Germs only become aggressive to us when confronted with the poisons we create. Our body does not battle germs because they are the enemy. Likewise, germs don’t wage battles against our body. In fact, there are at least 10 times as many bacteria as human cells in the body, and none of them are causing us any harm. An estimated 500 to 1000 species of bacteria live in the human gut and a roughly similar number on the skin.

As reported in the Annual Review of Microbiology, the human flora is the assemblage of microorganisms, benign and otherwise, that reside on the surface and in deep layers of skin, in the saliva and oral mucosa, in the conjunctiva, and in the gastrointestinal tracts. They include bacteria, fungi, and archaea (single-cell). The relationship between germs and humans is not merely commensal (a non-harmful coexistence), but rather is a mutualistic relationship. The microorganisms perform a host of useful functions such as fermenting unused energy substrates, training the immune system, preventing growth of parasitic species, regulating the development of the gut, producing vitamins for the host (such as biotin and vitamin K), and producing hormones to direct the host to store fats. We need them and they need us.

If the body becomes overtaxed with toxins and trapped metabolic waste products, cells may suffer severe oxygen and nutrient deprivation and subsequently become damaged or die. An immune reaction such as high fever or depletion of energy is meant to cleanse the body of these harmful substances that otherwise could lead to the eventual demise of the entire body. The presence and activity of destructive microorganisms (infection) in this situation, encouraging the inflammatory response of the body, is not only natural but desirable.

Microorganisms become only ‘pathogenic’ as the health of the body’s organism deteriorates. Disease is built by unhealthy conditions such as buildup of toxins and waste matter, and in most cases, the disease itself becomes the medicine to cleanse the affected organs and systems of the body and return it to health.

In situations of extreme toxicity, severe physical congestion, or overuse of medical drugs and vaccines, the immune system may be so overwhelmed by the toxins it tries to eliminate that it may not be able to save the individual. In the worst-case scenario, the immune system doesn’t respond to the poisons and germs at all, and no acute disease symptoms appear (fever, inflammations, pain, or other signs of infection). These individuals cannot even develop a cold or get the flu, which otherwise could serve as a relief outlet for these toxins. The result then is a chronic, debilitating illness such as congestive heart failure, lupus, arthritis or other so-called autoimmune disorders, or death.

2. The Truth About Viruses

 Contrary to what conventional medicine would have you believe, viruses don’t kill people. If someone is sick and also has a virus in their system, he or she is not sick because of the virus. Sickness must exist before a virus can show up.

Viruses are designed to induce healing, not illness. Symptoms such those produced by the body’s effort to heal (fever, headache, dizziness, fatigue, etc), do not constitute the disease. Increasing body temperature (fever), for example, is one of the body's best methods to increase the production of immune cells to deal with toxins and then dispose of bacteria, viruses and fungi when they are no longer needed.

Influenza, for example, is the final stage of healing an underlying disease; the disease consists of a buildup of toxins, medical drugs, heavy metals, acidic waste products, dead cell material and other noxious substances that could otherwise lead to a life-threatening condition.

An infection is merely used to break down harmful substances, like metals, drugs, chemicals, pesticides, food additives and trans fatty acids from restaurant foods or readymade foods, artificial sweeteners, etc.

Usually, some of these toxic substances are broken down by the body but most of them require bacteria to dispose of them. Some other chemical compounds, however, require solvents to dissolve and remove them.

That is when the body makes viruses or allows them to be made and spread through the body via the blood and lymph. Hence, we don't need to destroy viruses; they are on our side.

Viruses are inert proteins that the body produces in order to attack and dissolve such noxious substances. Unlike bacteria, viruses are not living organisms. They are actually microscopic strips of genetic material – DNA and RNA – housed inside a capsule. Unlike bacteria, they cannot reproduce because they have no digestive system or reproductive system.

The human body makes more of these solvents when it needs to dissolve harmful substances, and it stops making them when the danger of cellular suffocation has subsided. Viruses act effectively, just like solvents in paint cleaners, and play an important role in the detoxification process. Viruses don’t stop being reproduced because the body attacks them; they diminish when the body no longer needs them.

The bottom line is that viruses can only become active and increase in number in a toxic body that cannot be cleaned up by bacteria or the body itself. Allow me to reiterate something at this crucial point: The human body only creates more viruses when there is a need to mop up drug chemicals, food preservatives, air pollutants, as well as toxic metals such as mercury and aluminum, pesticides, antibiotics and animal parts that are present in every vaccine.

To protect itself, the body may store an enormous number of different viruses but they remain inactive till a need arises for them to become active and spread to do their important work. The body removes and disposes of most of them once the detoxification process is complete. It is commonly believed that the immune system produces antibodies to combat and destroy viruses, but this may not be true. More on the true role of antibodies later.

Vaccinating an individual to invoke antibody production interferes with the body’s most basic healing mechanisms, and I consider it to be one of modern medicine’s most dangerous weapons – truly a weapon of mass destruction.

3. Who’s The Life-Saver?

 In the scenario where the immune system has successfully restored the body’s functions, the body is healthier and stronger than before. This bestows what many call acquired immunity but doesn’t necessarily involve immunity against specific germs. It may just as well mean the body is now healthy and free of toxins, and hence there is no further need for germs to evoke the body’s cleansing and healing response. Many people argue that the body has then acquired immunity to the germs that initiated the rescue mission, but, in truth, it is the heightened state of health and vitality that keeps the body from falling ill again.

Vaccine science has pursued the question of how we can bring about lifelong immunity to an infectious/inflammatory illness without having to experience the illness first.

The assumption is that by evoking production of antibodies to combat certain illness-causing germs, you are automatically protected against them. However, modern medicine has not been able to prove whether protection from the germs is due to the presence of antibodies or to a naturally healthy immune response which is primarily intended to purify and heal the congested, damaged tissues. It is actually much more likely that the latter is true, unless vaccine poisons have damaged or even paralyzed the immune system. (We shall explore the issue of immunity in Chapter 3: Is There A Conspiracy?: The War Within)

The current germ theory suggests that only when the number of germs or their rate of growth exceeds a certain threshold are they then recognized by the immune system, resulting in the formation of antibodies specific to the particular microbe. Or could there be another explanation as to why antibodies are produced?

A large presence of germs indicates that the cell tissue has become damaged or weak due to the accumulation of acid waste or another kind or injury. At that level of infection, things begin to spin seriously out of control and a tribe of germs proliferates wildly and provokes the full healing force of our immune system. This is what doctors call an ‘acute inflammatory response’.

Symptoms usually include fever, release of stress hormones by the adrenal glands, increased flow of blood, lymph and mucus, and a streaming of white blood cells (lymphocytes) to the inflamed area (wound). The afflicted person feels sick and may experience pain, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, weakness and chills.

The sweating out and throwing off of the illness is a natural response by the body that reflects a healthy immune system. In other words, the illness actually shows that the body is capable of successfully dealing with an unhealthy condition. This mandates that the illness is allowed and supported, not suppressed and aggravated. A really sick person would no longer be able to produce such healing responses.

Once we have successfully passed the challenge of a particular illness, it is less likely that we will experience it again. Somehow the illness and our response to it have made us immune to its recurrence.

It is highly doubtful that vaccination can do the same for us by forcing the body to make antibodies for some germs that appear to be causing an infection, thus protecting the individual against an infectious disease in the future.

On the contrary, it has been shown, time and again, that despite vaccination against a particular illness, the vaccinated individual may develop the very illness he is supposedly protected against. The proven fact that the mere presence of antibodies to a specific pathogen does not protect a person against infection should have raised serious doubts among medical professionals and lay people alike that the vaccine theory is seriously flawed or invalid. We cannot have it both ways; antibodies either protect us or they don’t. Why do so many vaccinated people with high antibody presence for whooping cough and measles develop these diseases when vaccine science insists that these antibodies serve as protection against them? It is obvious that we are not being told the truth.

In Chapters 2 and 3 on Historical Blunders and Is There A Conspiracy?, we shall look at instances in the past where mass vaccination during or after an epidemic has in fact increased the incidence of an illness, apart from killing large swathes of the population. In many cases, these deaths have been directly linked to the introduction of a specific virus, as well as animal parts used to grow the vaccine, and toxic chemicals and metals contained in vaccines, into the human body.

4. Antibodies due to Vaccine Injury

 If vaccines can cause death and paralysis in some, they can certainly cause injuries in many others, even if these harmful side effects are not immediately recognized. When tissues are injured, the body initiates a wound healing process that may involve an infection during which pathogenic germs help decompose the damaged or dead cells. Wound healing requires that the body dispatches immune cells, and yes, antibodies, to the site of injury.

Scientific research clearly demonstrates that lymphocyte participation in wound healing is a dynamic and distinctive process. The wound repair process is a very complex and highly ordered sequence of events that encompasses haemostasis, inflammatory cell infiltration, tissue regrowth and remodeling. If we want to successfully heal, we need to allow this ordered sequence to unfold without interference.

Wound healing follows tissue destruction, and antibodies bind to wounded tissues, which facilitates the engulfment of damaged tissues by macrophages, another important group of immune cells. B cells in particular, which produce and dispatch antibodies to damaged tissues, are involved in the process of wound healing. In fact, a recent study published in Immunology (2009 Nov) clearly shows that proper wound healing is impossible without the active participation of antibodies. For example, the researchers detected the antibody complex, immunoglobulin G1 (IgG1), binding to wounded tissues.

The fact that the body produces antibodies to heal damaged tissues raises a crucial point that is sufficiently convincing to challenge the current vaccine theory. What if antibodies are not at all produced to fight off germs, such as viruses or bacteria, but instead to repair the injuries caused by toxins, acidic waste matter, chemicals in foods, drugs, the poison fluoride in drinking water, etc?

In the case of vaccine shot injury, not unlike any other injury, antibodies must be produced in order to heal the tissue damage caused by injecting toxic chemicals, such as formaldehyde, anti-freeze agents, antibiotics and the deadly cocktail of preservatives they contain, directly into the blood stream. Just sticking a needle into someone’s arm is already enough to evoke the body’s inflammatory response which is necessary to heal the afflicted arm wound. In most cases, the body can repair the damage. However, if the immune system is weak to begin with, the vaccine injury may be fatal. A 2004 investigation has revealed that one in 500 children are born with a problem with their immune system that could cause serious or life-threatening reactions when vaccinated (Journal of Molecular Diagnostics, 2004 May, Volume 6 no 2, Pp 59-83). How many parents know whether their child has a weak immune system? Most parents and doctors are not aware of this risk because such information would seriously jeopardize the vaccine industry.

The other thing parents are not being told is that the viruses, bacteria, fungi and chemical toxins in one single vaccination force the immune system to respond and make antibodies that can cause genetic switches to be turned on and off. In the case of a developing child, this may lead to irreparable damage to the mind and/or body of that child. In the United States a child receives 36 vaccinations before age five, and one child in 91 develops autism. Eight deaths per 1000 in children below five years of age are due to vaccinations. In comparison, in Iceland a child receives 11 vaccine shots while only one child in 11,000 develops autism, and only four children per 1000 die as a result of being vaccinated. In 1980, a child received eight vaccinations and autism was rare. Today, Iceland ranks at # 1 in the world with respect to lifespan and the United States ranks at # 34. You can do the math and draw your own conclusions. More about the vaccine-autism link later.

All vaccine-makers claim that an increase in antibody production in the body results from the body’s exposure to a presumed pathogen (disease-causing germ). Given the very design of the body’s healing system (immune system), and supported by the aforementioned scientific research, it is just as likely that antibody production following vaccination is due to the necessity to heal the injuries caused by the toxins in the vaccine.

The question that arises is why do we refer to antibodies as being ‘anti’ something when the body uses them to heal itself? I propose to call them ‘probodies’, for they are primarily not against something, but rather for something. They are made and secreted by blood plasma cells that are derived from the B cells of the immune system to heal injury caused by a buildup of toxins. Vaccines are packed full with toxins, fragments of animal parts, and other foreign material that the body must recognize as antigens.

Antigens are usually proteins or polysaccharides. They are typically ‘bound’ at specific binding sites of an antibody. Antigens can consist of parts (coats, capsules, cell walls, flagella, fimbrae, and toxins) of bacteria, viruses, and other microorganisms. Non-microbial antigens can include pollen, egg-white, animal dander, plant toxins, etc.

Vaccines, which may include many different antigens, are intended to raise antibody production to raise the body’s so-called ‘acquired immunity’. However, as of now, there is no double blind control study to show that vaccines offer a higher level of immunity than by taking a placebo or by doing nothing at all. I wonder why there has never been such a study. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)’s official argument against studying the harmful effects of vaccines in humans is that any such a study (on humans) is ‘unethical’.

And so I ask whether it is ethical to inject hundreds of millions of unsuspecting people, including children, each year with vaccines that have never been proven effective in preventing infectious disease, but on the contrary have been clearly shown to make them ill? Aren’t we allowing double standards and legalization of mass experimentation to override this legitimate question by parents who want no harm done to their child: “Where is the proof that vaccines improve my child’s immunity and keep it healthy?” Do we have to take the doctor’s word for it?

Take the answer from someone who is best suited to have an objective insider’s perspective. Dr. Marcia Angell disclosed after two decades as an editor for The New England Journal of Medicine: “It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines.”

The fact of the matter is that vaccines inhibit and systematically destroy the immune system. And there is real scientific evidence to prove it; evidence that has not been manipulated to yield more power and resources to vested interest groups.

5. Vaccines Suppress Immunity

 One careful study of illness patterns observed in 82 healthy infants before and after vaccination was published in Clinical Pediatrics (1988). In this study conducted in Israel, researchers compared the incidence of acute illnesses in the 30-day period following DTaP vaccine (against Diphtheria, Tetanus, Pertussis) to the incidence in the same children for the 30-day period prior to receiving the vaccine. The three-day period immediately following vaccination was excluded because children frequently develop fever as a direct response to vaccine toxins. According to the researchers, the babies experienced a dramatic increase in fever, diarrhea, and cough in the month following DTaP vaccine compared to their health before the shot.

It is relatively easy to observe whether vaccines have any negative effect on white blood cells, which form the body’s primary immune system. Accordingly, a more recent peer-reviewed study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in May 1996, revealed that tetanus vaccine produces a drop in T Cells and thus disables the immune system in HIV patients. Of course, this means, the vaccine can damage anyone’s immune system, not just in those whose immune system has already been compromised. It is anyone’s guess what a compromised immune system can lead up to.

In 1992, the New Zealand Immunization Awareness Society (IAS) conducted a survey study to find out how many of its members' children were suffering from health problems. Among other disease conditions of an impaired immune system, the vaccinated versus unvaccinated children suffered:

- five times more asthma

- nearly three times more allergies

- over three times more ear infections

- over four times more apnea and near miss cot death

- nearly four times more bouts of recurring tonsillitis

- ten times more hyperactivity

I can certainly vouch for these findings. In all the 37 years I have been involved with the natural health field, I have rarely seen unvaccinated children who were also autistic, hyperactive, or suffered from asthma, ear infections, allergies and tonsillitis. On the other hand, I have witnessed these occurrences among vaccinated children at alarmingly high rates.

A study published in PEDIATRICS Vol. March 1998 (pp. 383-387) found that acute encephalopathy followed by permanent brain injury or death was associated with measles vaccines. A total of 48 children, ages 10 to 49 months, met the inclusion criteria after receiving measles vaccine, alone or in combination. Eight children died, and the remainder had mental regression and retardation, chronic seizures, motor and sensory deficits, and movement disorders.

In September 2010, CNN reported that nine-month-old twins in Ghaziabad, India died within minutes of receiving a measles vaccine. Avika and Anika Sharma were given the vaccinations at a private nursing home by Dr Satyaveer Singh. Within about 15 minutes, both little girls were dead. The Indian Medical Association’s local president Dr Santosh Aggrawal, who visited the hospital after the incident, confirmed that the health of the twins deteriorated after being administered the vaccine. He said, “The doctor had a fresh supply of the vaccine. Still there could be something wrong with the batch of vaccines. Similar deaths have been reported from Kanpur and Lucknow,” he added. When asked for comment, investigators said: “This is a case of adverse event following immunization … This is not a new phenomenon …”

One problem with determining the number of vaccine injuries or vaccine-caused deaths is that only a tiny fraction of the reactions are actually made known. Studies have estimated that only between 1 and 10 percent of side effects are ever reported. Doctors and hospitals are very reluctant to blame vaccines for the sudden onset of disease or death. They still consider vaccination to be the greatest medical achievement of all times. Besides, it is not good PR to admit that the medical treatment is responsible for causing brain damage or death. Blaming accidental occurrence of disease instead of vaccines on these side effects automatically works as a waiver of liability that extends to all acts of negligence.

Accordingly, most people have no idea how serious an issue vaccine injury has become. Unsuspecting parents may be taking their perfectly healthy children to the doctor, and moments or several days later they find them to be crippled or deceased. For the medical industry, it is collateral damage or collateral gain (losing or gaining a potential patient). For a parent, it is unimaginable trauma.

If such obvious injuries and immediate death can be inflicted upon children by the measles vaccine, I ask what other more subtle and unnoticeable disease-generating conditions can it bring on that eventually lead to cancer, diabetes, heart disease, liver and kidney failure, etc years later?

Instead of filling up a child with obviously unsafe and untested vaccines and thereby risking their health and lives, we may be better off nursing them through a few typically mild and harmless childhood diseases. Doing not much at all and letting nature take its course may actually strengthen their natural immunity and improve their health in the long term.

Germs produce toxins (antigens) which trigger an inflammatory response to help heal an underlying condition that the body may not be able to heal without employing their assistance. The plasma cells produce antibodies binding to these antigens where appropriate, which facilitates healing. B cells, lymphocytes, macrophages, and antibodies are all intricately involved in this healing process, which includes the neutralization and removal of toxins. The immune system is not a war machine that is equipped with weapons to target and destroy invading enemies; on the contrary, it is a highly sophisticated healing system whose sole purpose is to return the body to a state of balance and harmony (homeostasis).

It is important to mention here that not all vaccines are useless or harmful. For example, ‘homeopathic vaccines’ which are made up either from things that cause the disease, or from products of the disease, such as pus, have been shown to lead to remarkable recoveries.

In fact, many people bitten by poisonous snakes are saved by administering them the venom taken from that particular species of snake. According to Wikipedia, the acquisition of human immunity against snake venom is one of the oldest forms of vaccinology known to date (about AD 60, Psylli Tribe). Even today, people of the aboriginal tribes intentionally cut their skin and expose the wound to dirt to build a strong, natural resistance to toxins present in their environment. Wild animals often follow similar self-immunization practices.

Snake venom is highly modified saliva consisting of proteins, enzymes, substances with a cytotoxic effect, neurotoxins and coagulants. When self-injected, Eastern diamondback venom develops a high IgG neutralizing antibody for several rattlesnake species. Exposure to the snake poison induces immunity against future rattlesnake bites. The immunity is caused by the body generating antiserum to neutralize the toxic effects of the snake serum. This principle applies to every toxin that the body ingests. Simply put, our body produces specific blood proteins (antibodies) to bind to and neutralize toxins and to heal the injury caused by the toxins. The achieved cellular immunity (ability to reproduce the same antidote serum in the case of another snake bite) protects the body against future exposure to the same toxin, unless the degree of exposure greatly exceeds the body’s detoxification and compensation ability.

This happens especially when numerous vaccines are administered within a short time frame i.e. several months or years. As the previously mentioned research has shown, children in Iceland or Norway who only receive a total of 11 vaccines have a much lower risk of developing autism or dying than children in the US. Federal public health officials recommend that children should get a total of 69 doses of 16 vaccines from the day of their birth to age 18. We have already seen that children have a much higher incidence of asthma, allergies, ear infections, tonsillitis, and other serious ailments after they are vaccinated.

A child, who comes into the world with virtually no functional immune system, and who receives dozens of vaccine shots filled with toxic compounds, will subsequently suffer short-term damage as well as long-term damage, some of which will show up as autism, cancer, diabetes, heart disease, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease, etc years later. Perhaps, this is the reason that the United States population ranks so low with regard to life expectancy (#49) when compared with countries like Iceland, Sweden and Switzerland, where fewer vaccinations are given and where more informed parents refuse them because of the mounting evidence of widespread vaccine injuries among the population.

Is it just coincidence that the US ranks first in health care costs and spends more than twice the amount on health care as other developed nations? Why are Americans so much sicker than people from other countries, in spite of having the most advanced health care system in the world? Or is it because of that?

Barbara Loe Fisher, founder of the National Vaccine Information Center, recently described this dilemma in one sentence: “The truth is, nobody knows how many vaccine victims there are in America, how many of the 1 in 6 learning disabled children; or the 1 in 9 with asthma; or the 1 in 100 who develop autism; or the 1 in 450 who become diabetic, can trace their chronic inflammation, disease and disability back to vaccine reactions that have been dismissed by public health officials and doctors for the past century as just "a coincidence”.

Planting dead or alive microbes into the blood stream in order to acquire immunity against future infections is entirely different than acquiring immunity by going through the entire course of a disease. There are no real shortcuts to immunity.

At this point, I would like to emphasize that the mere presence of specific antibodies cannot protect the human body against illness; only the cellular immune system can. And to reiterate, it accomplishes this not through the force of fighting but through the power of healing. Although science has learnt how to bestow antibodies through vaccination (by injuring the body), it mistakenly assumes it is bestowing the immune strength that can only be developed through the experience of a particular illness. Tricking the body’s immune system does not work; allowing nature to take its course does.

The bottom line is that antibodies against pathogens alone are not sufficient to produce immunity. It is well-known that several diseases such as herpes outbreaks may keep recurring despite high antibody levels.

Whether or not antibodies are present, immunity to these infectious diseases can only be conferred by our cellular immune system. The theory that exposing the body to germs will trigger an immune response similar to the one generated during an actual disease experience is seriously flawed. (See Chapter 3: Is There A Conspiracy?: The War Within)

Therefore, while questioning the very premise of vaccine theory, the question we must instead ask is: Who is the real life-saver? The vaccine? Or a healthy immune system?

However, vaccine proponents almost completely bypass the role of the immune system, choosing instead to reduce it to a mechanism that produces antibodies, a robotic army of soldiers that moves in as soon as there is a ‘germ invasion’. Ergo, it is the vaccines that induce immunity! Or so they would have us believe, ‘they’ being those who profit from other people’s sickness.

They want to distract us from discovering and utilizing all the other factors responsible for bestowing a healthy, vital immune system, including vitamin D produced in response to sun exposure, exercise, good nutrition, sufficient sleep, clean water and air, choosing a more relaxing, less stressful lifestyle, etc.

Having produced antibodies to a particular substance, food, or vaccine does not ultimately determine whether an illness such as an infection or allergy will actually occur. For example, people who have multiple personality disorder may be severely allergic to orange juice (allergen) while exhibiting one personality, yet when they suddenly switch to a different personality, these very same antibodies no longer trigger an allergic reaction. They may also be diabetic in one personality, and a few minutes later, they are diabetes-free. Women may even have different menstrual cycles while passing through their different personalities.

There is another example. A normal person who is allergic to cat dander and comes into contact with the proteins of the cat hair triggers the production of antibodies and subsequent inflammatory reaction. However, as it happens frequently, this person may only be allergic to white or orange cats, but not to black cats, or vice versa. Typically, a previous traumatic incidence involving a white cat, such as its death, may have led to the production of antibodies. Whenever the person touches a white cat, the body generates the antibody reaction based on the memory of that previous emotional trauma. And since black cats are not part of this memory, touching a black cat will not trigger an allergic reaction.

Along this line, something similar may happen to a person who suffers from an allergic reaction to gluten whenever he eats bread, but he doesn’t have a problem with eating pasta that also contains gluten.

In other words, there is no way of telling for sure whether the mere presence of antibodies generated by a vaccine against the mumps or measles virus will offer any protection. The entire vaccine theory is based on the idea that the presence of such specific antibodies in the blood stream bestows immunity against these diseases. For example, the research data collected during the most recent outbreak of mumps shows without a doubt that having antibodies against such viruses has zero protective benefits without the underlying cellular immunity produced by going through the disease. Not only that. We know that 770 out of the 1,000 people sickened with mumps were fully vaccinated against it and 230 weren’t. Not having any vaccine-induced antibodies against the mumps virus apparently provides a much better guarantee to remain disease–free than having them. To say it bluntly, the unvaccinated are obviously better protected than the vaccinated. The bottom line is that vaccines increase one’s chances of viral infection, not decrease it.

6. Infecting Volunteers

 In 2006, a team of research scientists from Duke's Center for Genomic Medicine, University of Virginia, University of Michigan and the National Center for Genomic Resources, conducted a project with a total of 57 volunteers. The participants were infected through the nose with either a cold virus, an influenza virus or a respiratory syncytial virus. Twenty-eight volunteers subsequently developed flu- or cold-like symptoms.

The aim of the study was to determine whether any of the more than 20,000 genes in the human body underwent any changes in response to the viral exposure. Accordingly, among the 28 study participants who ended up getting sick, researchers found a set of about 30 genes that were turned on in response to having been infected with a virus. In the 29 people who never developed symptoms, there were no changes to the group of genes.

I am not going to comment about the genomic implications of the study since it is well-known that foreign protein fragments (called viruses) can turn on genes. I rather want to pose the question why the 29 participants who never developed any symptoms remained healthy in spite of the same degree of exposure to the disease-causing germs. Why were the viruses in these individuals unable to turn on these same 30 genes? If an influenza virus successfully enters the body, what decides whether or not the body will meet the intrusion with a flurry of antibodies and the mounting of an inflammatory response? The answer is quite simple. Obviously, the healthy participants didn’t fall sick due to the viruses because viruses cannot make healthy people sick. Their genes remained unaffected by viral intrusion.

On the other hand, why did the other group of 28 participants fall ill? The answer is that only unhealthy people can fall sick because of viruses. As mentioned before, viruses can trigger a powerful cleansing and healing response in the body that returns a congested, toxic body into a more balanced condition.

Before assuming that viruses cause disease, rather than restore a person’s failing health, it would be wise to briefly examine why the so-called epidemics really occur. During the 2009 H1N1 epidemic, the media reported that several toddlers had developed swine flu symptoms and subsequently died. As it turned out, these children had never before been in contact with anyone who carried the H1N1 virus or any other infectious virus. However, these children all suffered from a serious pre-existing condition, such as heart disease.

Likewise, there are thousands of children that test positive for the HIV virus, yet both their parents test negative. Even some newborn babies test positive for HIV while their parents don’t. If nobody infected these children, how did they get infected? This is an inconvenient question to ask health officials because it completely contradicts the germ theory which states that pathogenic germs are transmitted from person to person. In truth, a healthy, strong immune system and toxin-free body will not require to contract an infection to return to a balanced state, and therefore will remain unaffected by pathogens.

There are a number of reasons why children may fall ill. First, their blood never had the chance to be properly cleansed by the mother’s placenta because the umbilical cord was clamped right after birth instead of 40-60 minutes later. Early clamping also causes the infant’s blood oxygen to be at no more than 60 percent of normal levels.

Second, a child’s evolving immune system is injured by multiple vaccines right from birth, including the unnecessary hepatitis B vaccine (given for a disease children hardly ever develop, and for which they require revaccination anyway when they are a little older because of diminished antibodies). Injecting aluminum and formaldehyde contained in this vaccine into newborn babies should worry every parent and doctor.

Third, babies who are not breastfed, or the mother is unhealthy herself and does not produce good quality breast milk, cannot build a normal healthy immune system.

Fourth, at doctor’s orders, babies are kept out of the sun for at least six months after birth and therefore become vitamin D deficient. By contrast, mothers in Africa regularly take their newborn babies into the sun, and thus these infants rarely suffer from vitamin D deficiency. Vitamin D is essential for building a strong immune system. A recent study by researchers at Oregon State University showed that vitamin D is so crucial to the functioning of your immune system that vitamin D’s ability to boost immune function and keep the body protected and healthy has been conserved in the genome for over 60 million years of evolution.

“The existence and importance of this part of our immune response makes it clear that humans and other primates need to maintain sufficient levels of vitamin D,” said Adrian Gombart, an associate professor of biochemistry and a principal investigator with the Linus Pauling Institute at Oregon State University.

Vitamin D, which is actually a steroid hormone produced in large amounts as a result of regular sun exposure, regulates over 2,000 genes. It acts like a switch that turns the body’s healing system on and keeps it active and responsive. If vitamin D becomes deficient, the switch turns off and the body’s healing and detoxification ability drops significantly. This, in turn, blocks the body’s ability to heal and rid itself of toxins, including those produced by micro-organisms.

As a result, a vitamin D deficient person, child or adult, will become so congested with toxins that an increasing number of cells become damaged or die, an infection therefore becomes necessary to invoke a powerful healing and cleansing response. As seen in the above mentioned examples, it doesn’t matter whether the affected person has received a virus or bacterium from someone else, although this may certainly accelerate the speed with which disease symptoms occur. Our body is home to numerous species of bacteria and many viral materials that remain well hidden and dormant, but become activated and multiplied should their assistance be required. Typically, the resulting infection will come to an end once the cleansing and repair job has been accomplished.

However, in a person who is severely vitamin D deficient, the inflammation may escalate to a degree that can turn out to be fatal. Vitamin D normally prevents the ‘adaptive’ immune response from over-reacting and reduces inflammation. In other words, it keeps the immune system in check, and suppresses it if necessary.

Young children and elderly people who do not expose their skin to the sun enough, or who use sunscreens to block off the vitamin D-generating ultraviolet rays of the sun, are particularly susceptible to an over-reactive immune system.

The above are the first to get a winter cold or the flu. Have you ever wondered why there is no flu season in the summer? It’s because most people spend more time in the outdoors during the warmer summer months which allows them to replenish their vitamin D stores and makes them less prone to falling ill.

A paper covering research conducted at major American universities has shown that many common diseases are linked with low levels of vitamin D. According to the paper which was published in the Journal of American College of Cardiology in 2008 (2008:52:1949–56), low vitamin D levels have been documented in patients with myocardial infarction, stroke, heart failure, and cardiovascular disease. Chronic vitamin D deficiency can cause secondary hyperparathyroidism, which predisposes patients to inflammation, insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome, and diabetes mellitus.

Furthermore, in the United States, cancer rates and cases of multiple sclerosis are more prevalent in the Northeast, where people tend to be more vitamin D deficient than in the South or Southwest, where it is a lot warmer and sunnier during the winter months.

Also, obese persons, smokers, and those using medications (e.g. anticonvulsants, glucocorticoids, antiretrovirals), as well as the institutionalized, are more likely to be vitamin D deficient. Persons who are dark-skinned but reside in less sunny countries or states, or who neglect spending a lot of time in the sun, are often the most vitamin D deficient. Hence their generally higher risk of infection, cancer, heart disease and diabetes.

A study published in the Virology Journal in 2008, and confirmed by another study in 2009 that involved 19,000 Americans, found that people with the lowest blood vitamin D levels reported having significantly more recent colds or cases of the flu.

In conclusion, lead author of the study, Dr Adit Ginde, stated: “The findings of our study support an important role for vitamin D in prevention of common respiratory infections such as colds and the flu. Individuals with common lung diseases, such as asthma or emphysema, may be particularly susceptible to respiratory infections from vitamin D deficiency.”

Why do we need to expose our bodies to potentially life-threatening vaccines for all kinds of diseases when we can remain disease-free by exposing our skin to the sun? (See also my book, Heal Yourself with Sunlight).

And there is more on the role of Vitamin D later.

7. What’s In That Vial?

So briefly, what is this highly-potent, poisonous cocktail introduced into the human body? Injected, taken orally or even sniffed as in the case of some flu vaccines, this concoction attempts to induce immunity by forcing bits and pieces of disease-causing agents or pathogens into the body.

These are foreign bodies such as a bacteria, viruses or genetic material from these pathogens, which are usually nurtured and cultured in the bodies of infected animals, to force an immunological response.

As soon as the human body detects the presence of a foreign body (one which does not have a ‘self-marker’) or an antigen, it produces antibodies to neutralize these toxins, foreign cells and injurious materials, and to heal any injuries that they may have caused.

Antibodies are protein molecules that bind to antigens and may be disease-specific. As soon as the antigen and antibody lock into each other, the body’s immune system is triggered to fight the intruder, according to theories taught at medical schools.

It is assumed that once an individual’s bloodstream contains the antibodies (either forcibly produced by vaccines or naturally produced from a previous bout of a disease) to a particular pathogen, the human body is protected against the disease ‘caused’ by that particular pathogen for life.

However, there is a crucial difference in immunity acquired naturally (from a previous bout) and that which is thrust upon an unsuspecting immune system. The natural routes for pathogens to enter the body are the mucous membranes of nostrils, the mouth, the lips, the eyelids, the ears, the genital area, and the anus. Injecting pathogens directly into the blood is an unnatural route and act of violence that disrupts, and interferes with, the very design of the body’s self-preserving, protective mechanisms.

These mucus membranes form the body’s first line of defense to trap and digest microorganisms (using enzymes) that offer no benefit to the host as long as the cells and organs remain well nourished and healthy.

Please be reminded at this point that bacteria and viruses do no harm to the body. They become pathogenic (disease–generating) only when the body’s level of toxicity has led to considerable cell damage or cell decay and an infection becomes necessary to decompose the cell debris and stimulate the immune system to repair and heal the damage. The mucus membranes form an essential part of the body’s detoxification system to ensure that this doesn’t need to happen.

Bypassing this first line of defense, which is also called ‘IgA immune system’, leaves gaping holes in the body’s self-protective ‘armor’. It doesn’t take too well to artificial immunization measures and hence revolts in many ways. One way is by actually causing the disease the vaccine was meant to prevent.

Getting the disease for which you receive the vaccine, such as mumps, may actually be a blessing for the afflicted and bestow true immunity to the disease. This may account for some of the disease-preventing effects of vaccines that have been witnessed in a small number of vaccinated individuals. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the vaccinated population doesn’t fall sick. If it did, vaccination could actually have some value. However, if an adjuvant such as aluminum or squalene is added to the vaccine, which is now typical for most vaccines, it can cause your immune system to overreact to the introduction of the organism you are being vaccinated against.

On such occasions, the human body is helpless against the foreign material and is overwhelmed by the antigens and the resulting overreaction of the immune system. This often gives rise to debilitating symptoms (among the agents most often introduced through vaccines is thimerosal, which is linked to neurological damage in the brain), crippling side effects (See Chapters 5 & 6: The Vaccine Hangover & Autism: Merury Assault) and even life-threatening conditions.

Despite documented evidence that links vaccination to disease and injury, modern medicine insists that vaccines are a type of ‘health insurance’. But just so you know your facts, here is a brief look at what these chemicals contain.

Antigen: At the crux of every vaccine is the disease-causing microorganism or pathogen against which immunity is sought to be induced.

Preservatives: Preservatives are used to increase the shelf-life of a vaccine by preventing bacteria and fungi from invading it. In the US, the FDA allows the use of three preservatives: phenol, 2-phenoxyethanol and thimerosal. (See Chapter 6: Autism: Mercury Assault)

Adjuvants: Adjuvants enhance the body’s immune response immediately after the vaccine is introduced. Though highly dangerous and known to even cause cytokine storms that lead to swift death, pharma companies continue to use adjuvants as ‘boosters’ in their vaccines.

Another compelling reason for the use of adjuvants is that these chemicals, by turbo-charging vaccines, allow drug companies to use less of the antigen in each dose so that they can make more doses. Do the math: More doses means bigger profits.

Aluminum salts are the most widely used adjuvants employed by drug manufacturers. They include: aluminum phosphate, aluminum hydroxide, aluminum hydroxyphosphate sulfate and potassium aluminum sulfate or simply alum.

Till recently, aluminum salts were the only adjuvants vaccine-makers in the US were allowed to use. However, with the FDA toying with the idea of allowing squalene as an adjuvant, there is growing alarm that this chemical, which played havoc with US Gulf War veterans, may be licensed for mass use in the US. (See Chapter 3: Is There A Conspiracy?: The War Within).

Additives or Stabilizing Agents: Stabilizing agents protect vaccines from getting damaged or losing their efficacy under certain conditions such as freeze-drying and heat. They also prevent the antigen from sticking to the side of the vaccine vial, and the components of the vaccine from separating.

Common additives include sugars such as sucrose and lactose; amino acids such as glycine, monosodium glutamate; and proteins such as gelatin or human serum albumin.

Concerns regarding these additives center around the use of gelatin, human serum albumin and material derived from bovines, especially cows. While gelatin is suspected to precipitate hypersensitivity reactions, human serum albumin (derived from dead human fetuses) could introduce pathogens into the body.

Material taken from cattle came into focus with the outbreak of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy or ‘mad cow disease’ in England in the 1980s. I’ve discussed this controversy in detail at the end of this chapter.

Residual Agents: Residual agents are used during the production process to inactivate the live pathogen and to culture the virus. They are eventually removed from the vaccine, or at least that is what vaccine-makers claim.

Residual agents include bovine serum (a popular agent used to grow the virus in cell cultures); formaldehyde (used as an inactivating agent); and antibiotics such as neomycin, streptomycin and polymyxin B to prevent bacterial contamination.

Animal Products: Animal products are most frequently used in vaccine production as the medium in which the virus is cultured and grown. They perform two essential functions: they provide nutrition to the pathogen and they provide cell lines that help it replicate to make the millions of doses that are then commercially sold.

Animals whose organs, tissues, blood and serum are commonly used to make vaccines are monkeys, cows, sheep, chickens, pigs and occasionally dogs and rabbits.

Human Products: Human fetal cells (human diploid cells) divide indefinitely and are used to make cell lines that make a virus replicate. For instance, the rubella virus is grown in human tissue culture as the virus is incapable of infecting animals.

After a virus is cultured, the pathogen is purified while removing it from the growth culture. However, traces of genetic material from the culture often remain in the vaccine.

This presents a real and ever-present danger. If the host animal or human being is infected, secondary pathogens are likely to be passed on during vaccination.

This is exactly what happened when the polio vaccine, grown in monkey kidney cells, were later found to be contaminated with the Simian Vacuolating Virus 40 or SV40. (See Chapter 2: Historical Blunders).

Having looked at the broad categories of components in vaccines, here is a list of some toxic agents (with documented side effects) used in their production.

• Acetone: Nail polish remover

• Oil Adjuvants: A neurotoxin linked to Alzheimer’s disease and seizures. It can also precipitate arthritis

• Formaldehyde: A carcinogenic agent used as an embalming fluid

• Ethylene Glycol: Antifreeze widely used in car engines

• Triton X100: A detergent

• Glycerin: Can damage internal organs such as the lungs, liver and kidneys and gastrointestinal tract

• Monosodium glutamate (MSG): According to the FDA, MSG Symptom Complex or MSG side effects can result in numbness, burning sensation, tingling, facial pressure or tightness, chest pain, headache, nausea, rapid heartbeat, drowsiness, weakness, and difficulty in breathing for asthmatics. More specifically, studies have shown that MSG can cause arrhythmia, atrial fibrillation, tachycardia, rapid heartbeat, palpitations, slow heartbeat, angina, extreme rise or drop in blood pressure, swelling, diarrhea, nausea/vomiting, stomach cramps, rectal bleeding, bloating, flu-like achiness, joint pain, stiffness, depression, mood swings, rage reactions, migraine headache, dizziness, light-headedness, loss of balance, disorientation, mental confusion, anxiety, panic attacks, hyperactivity, behavioral problems in children, attention deficit disorders, lethargy, sleepiness, insomnia, numbness or paralysis, seizures, sciatica, slurred speech, chills and shakes, shuddering, blurred vision, difficulty focusing, pressure around eyes, asthma, shortness of breath, chest pain, tightness in the chest, runny nose, sneezing, frequent bladder pain, swelling of the prostate, swelling of the vagina, vaginal spotting, frequent urination, nocturia, hives (may be both internal and external), rash, mouth lesions, temporary tightness or partial paralysis, numbness or tingling of the skin, flushing, extreme dryness of the mouth, face swelling, tongue swelling, bags under eyes

• Phenol or Carbolic Acid: A lethal toxin used in household and industrial products as a disinfectant as well as a dye

• Thimerosal (derivative of mercury): A toxic heavy metal used as a preservative. Closely linked to autism, autoimmune diseases and other neuro-developmental disorders

• Aluminum: A metallic element which, besides damaging the brain in children, can also predispose adults to neurological problems such as Alzheimer’s disease and dementia

• Polysorbate 80 (Tween80™): An emulsifier that can cause severe allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis. In addition, according to a Slovakian study on rats published in the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology in 1993, Tween80 can lead to infertility. Tween80 accelerated the rats’ maturation, prolonged the estrous cycle, decreased the weight of the uterus and ovaries, and caused damage to the lining of the uterus indicative of chronic estrogenic stimulation.

• All this makes me wonder why so many millions of people started to get afflicted with the diseases that are listed as side effects of these toxins after mass vaccinations were introduced into modern societies. Most of these diseases were nearly unheard of before the vaccine-mania began.

8. Vaccine ‘Mistakes’

The danger from vaccines doesn’t come only from these dangerous ingredients that go into them. There are other grave concerns. Among these are the vast gaps in scientific knowledge that exist in modern medicine. These gaps are then filled by what researchers call ‘theories’, which become the basis of government policies and even the production of medicines to ostensibly prevent disease.

When these mistakes are ‘careless slip-ups’ made by pharma companies, lives are lost and many people left diseased and dangerously ill. The fallout of the mad cow disease outbreak and the way it was handled by both governments and drug companies has left a controversial legacy that still affects human lives.

Mad cow disease is also called Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy or BSE, which was first observed in cattle in the mid-1980s in the UK. It is a fatal neurodegenerative disease, whereby infected proteins called prions invade the brain, spinal cord as well as other tissues in the affected cattle. These prions literally eat away at the soft brain tissue, creating holes that leave the brain tissue looking like a sponge.

Around a decade after the outbreak, in the mid-1990s, doctors in the UK observed a disease in human beings they believed had been contracted by eating beef and other animal products from cows infected with BSE.

The disease was first noticed in 1996 and was deemed to be a variant of a disease called Creutzfeldt–Jakob Disease or vCJD. Since vCJD has a long gestation period of several years, it was presumed that the victims had once eaten beef and other products from BSE-infected cows a decade earlier. The disease had claimed more than 160 human lives in Britain by 2009.

Both mad cow disease and vCJD are types of spongiform encephalopathy. However, to date, science has been unable to prove a causal link between the two. How do we know for sure that vCJD, first described by the scientists who lent their names to the disease back in the 1920s, did not evolve into a new strain independent of the animal variant?

Yet, fuelled by hysteria whipped up by the scientific and medical community, the British government opened floodgates of funding of research into vCJD, a move motivated perhaps more by politics than science.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) itself states that “the hypothesis of a link between vCJD and BSE was first raised because of the association of these two TSEs (Transmittable Spongiform Encephalopathy) in time and place”.

It adds: “More recent evidence supporting a link includes identification of pathological features similar to vCJD in the brains of macaque monkeys inoculated with BSE. A vCJD-BSE link is further supported by the demonstration that vCJD is associated with a molecular marker that distinguishes it from other forms of CJD and which resembles that seen in BSE transmitted to a number of other species.”

However, if vCJD did indeed arise from ‘mad cows’, then the consequences may have already proved fatal. The shocking truth is that despite being aware of the risks of using bovine material (tissue, calf serum, cow hide and bones used to make gelatin for virus culture) in the production of vaccines, drug companies in the UK covertly continue to use bovine material to make their vaccines.

An investigation conducted by the British newspaper The Daily Express in May 2, 2000, revealed that seven vaccines were at risk of being contaminated. These vaccines had been administered to millions of children made between 1988 and 1989 and administered until 1993.

Vaccines made by two drug majors in particular were identified:

• MMR (Measles, Mumps, Rubella) vaccine (GlaxoSmithKline)

• Various vaccines for Diphtheria, Tetanus and Pertussis (Wellcome)

• Oral polio vaccine (Wellcome)

• Inactivated polio vaccine (GlaxoSmithKline)

Alarm bells also went off in the US, which subsequently drew up a list of suspect vaccines. The health authorities in the US suspected that the bovine material used to make them had come from countries that were affected by mad cow disease. The list included:

• OmniHIB or flu shots (Aventis Pasteur)

• Combination vaccines for diphtheria, pertussis and tetanus (North American Vaccine and GlaxoSmithKline)

• Havrix hepatitis-A vaccine (GlaxoSmithKline)

The above data illustrates just how governments and policy makers take sweeping decisions based on pure hypothesis and how unscrupulous drug companies knowingly indulge in criminal (mal)practices with no regard for the lives they claim to protect.

At the end of it all, do we really know what’s going into that vial?

Vaccine-nation

Poisoning the Population, One Shot at a Time

Andreas Moritz