The Truth About Vaccines: Edited from original transcript by Katie McAllister

I was thinking this morning about the idea of flu vaccines and how that many people have misconceptions about vaccines. I want to go over this and give you some ideas.

First I will give you some overview. As most of you probably know, the various strains of influenza, or “the flu” are designated with letter and number combinations, (H5N1, H1N1, etc…) for scientific and epidemiological purposes. The system that we use to name hurricanes would not work for flu strains because there are many more strains then there are hurricanes and they have various classifications. For instance, bird flu and swine flu are both influenza so they have a different number designation.

Influenza is a contagious viral respiratory infection. The symptoms include fever, chills, runny nose, sore throat, cough, muscle aches, fatigue, and decreased appetite. Typically the condition will improve after 2-3 days of bed rest although some symptoms might persist for about a week. If you have an immune system that is not functioning at optimal efficiency those symptoms can extend for 2 or even 3 weeks. I had client who had a particularly harsh kind of flu bug and still had some muscle aches a month later. Fatigue, muscle aches and decreased appetite can persist for more than a week although clinically the average person is considered asymptomatic after about 5-7 days.

What many people don’t know is that death caused directly by the flu virus is very rare. Contrary to what you might have heard, almost nobody dies from the flu. Same for AIDS and cancer, though we won’t cover these issues in this article. The vast majority of so-called “flu deaths” are in fact due to various strains of bacterial pneumonia. There is an overlooked caveat that the primary risk associated with all flues depends on the shape your immune system is in at the time of exposure. Your immune system strength has a vast influence over what will be the course of that flu, how virulent it will be, how strong the symptoms will be and how many symptoms you will have, whether it will be a 3, 5, 7, 0r 10 day flu. The difference in intensity of the flu is not so much the virulence of the bacterium or viruses but the functioning of your immune system.

Other complications can include ear or sinus infections, dehydration and worsening of chronic health problems. If you already have some chronic health problem (fill in the blank) and you get the flu, the flu can exacerbate the problem. If you have Lyme disease and you get the flu, then you can have lyme’s disease with a capital L. If you have Chrone’s disease and you get the flu, you can have a huge increase in your symptoms of Chrone’s disease. If you have virtually anything that you can think of, the flu can exacerbate it and that can cause another subset or a secondary tier of symptoms and issues, some of which can manifest for quite a bit longer than the flu. The flu is no laughing matter and it can be quite serious. We promote vaccines to “prevent death,” but if the vaccine affecting your resistance to getting the flu does not affect the complication that is already compromising the immune system then the vaccine is not actually reducing your chances of dying. In other words, if what you really die of is pneumonia and the vaccine has no affect on the pneumonia, then the vaccine not going to have an effect on you dying. The elderly and people with pre-existing medical conditions such as asthma, diabetes, or heart disease, are at higher risk of developing pneumonia after a bout of the flu. How many people have asthma? Lots! Asthma can be a complication due to environmental factors like exposure to pesticides and chemicals, mesothelioma, exposure to asbestos particles in the workplace, etc. How rampant is diabetes? Diabetes is epidemic! You want to reduce your chances of dying from the flu? Then get your diabetes under control! Stop eating crazy food and crazy diets and drinking diet sodas and being grossly obese, morbidly grossly obese. Guess what? You will be more resistant and your chances of surviving the flu will be much higher because your immune system will be much stronger. It is the same for heart disease- get your heart disease under control and you remove the risk factor of death from you having the flu.

Flu Vaccines Do Not Work!

“The flu vaccine does not prevent the flu, nor protect against a vast majority of flu-related deaths.” This is just a statement. The conventional treatment for bacterial pneumonia is an antibiotic, not a viral flu drug. So to think that taking a flu vaccine will prevent death for pneumonia doesn’t really make sense. Some might proclaim, “But the vaccine will prevent the flu, which will prevent the possibility of developing pneumonia!” That sounds like a good theory but the statistics don’t actually support that assertion. The master studies that compile and review the results from many studies to get a more objective result keep coming to the same conclusion: Flu vaccines DO NOT WORK! In many cases, they do more harm than good. One shocking statistic brought to light in a recently published video: before the CDC advocated vaccinating children under the age of 5, the number of children dying from the flu was very low and on the decline, (according to the CDC). Then in 2003, just after the children age 5 and under started getting vaccinated, the number of flu deaths skyrocketed. The death toll was enormous compared to the previous year when the flu vaccine was not administered en masse to that age group. In other words there was a HUGE spike in child deaths.

CDC Update 04/23/2011: Autism and Vaccines Researcher for CDC who studied the correlations between thimerosal and autism, indicted for Fraud and Money-Laundering

How anyone could consider a strategy that yields a higher death toll to be a success is a mystery to me! It shouldn’t be a mystery because what determines the success of a vaccination program is purely based on the number of people who receive the vaccine. It has absolutely nothing to do with iatrogenic (the branch of allopathy that deals with treating side effects) or the actual number of people who died. The deaths and causes of deaths are not accurately portrayed. The problems with flu death statistics are; a) you have to consider the source, and b) you have to consider the methodology. Did you take statistics in college? You have to consider the source and how reliable it is. You have to consider the compilation methodologies; you have to look at how those numbers were acquired. Was it an interview process? Was it a form, sent out in the mail? How controlled was the study? How reliable was the person providing the information? Was the statistic compiled by a layman or by an actual medical source? Was it documented in a hospital’s admission record or in a hospital’s iatrogenics or mortality attrition record? Or was it compiled from nightly news reports? You have to consider the source, the reliability of the source, what was done with the numbers after they were collected, and you have to consider the point at which you are viewing the statistics. Are you seeing the raw data or are you seeing someone’s interpretation of what the actual data shows? You also have to consider who did the interpretation and according to what criteria. There are so many things that come into play when you look at statistics that you can easily take the same raw data and give it to two different groups and they can come up with very different interpretations of what it means. “No, Bush won the election,” “No, Gore won the election.” Men with Nobel prizes in economics were crunching the numbers! “No Bush won,” “No Gore won, I can prove it!” To the present day, using the same numbers back and forth, back and forth. It is still not settled who won that election! But now Bush has come and gone so history says it’s over and done with. If that will apply to something so important to the national interest as a presidential election, do you think there is more or less scrutiny with other numbers? I’ll tell you for a fact that there is less. The bottom line here is that the drug and pharmaceutical companies promoting the vaccines use "relative" vs. actual statistics to make the drugs look more effective and safer than they really are.

However frightening much of this may sound it is important to keep things in perspective. According to the statistics shown, more Americans die from asthma and more Americans die from malnutrition every year than the flu. How about that? In the US more people die from malnutrition than die from the flu. But you don’t see alerts on MSNBC for malnutrition and teams of nutritionists in white vans being dispatched to Detroit suburbs to pass out nutritional supplements and trace minerals and vitamin C and B vitamins. Nope, you don’t. More people die from malnutrition, statistically, than die from the flu. Yet we see this big push for public awareness which is then followed by government edict and forced vaccination programs for something that is not as threatening as malnutrition to the health of the public.

Why is that? (These are things we want to know!) Unfortunately, the CDC grossly distorts its facts about flu deaths, making the flu virus seem far more dangerous than is warranted. On the CDC’s main flu page, (notice that I did not say to go to the National Inquirer’s homepage, under the “aliens ate my baby” link, I said to go to the CDC’s main Flu page, (the world authority on epidemiology, public health and contagious disease) they state that about 36,000 people die from the flu in the US each year. That’s what it says on their homepage. But, if you actually go into their backend and look at the studies that they are using for their synopsis reports and actually add up the numbers yourself you will come up with a different number. If you search a little harder you will find the actual number of people who die from the flu, (say the last year that they are publishing statistics for is 2005, that’s the most recent data that they feel is correctly and completely done and publicly available) is 1,806. There’s a difference between that and 36,000, which sounds like a big number, right? That’s almost equivalent to the number of people who die in DUI accidents and it’s the same kind of number that you hear describe how many women will die this year from breast cancer. When we get up in that 30-40,000 range you know that’s a trigger number so there’s a reason why certain things are reported with certain numbers. At 1,800 we cannot get a massive mobilization push from the public, but as soon as we top 30-40,000 we can justify bringing the army in. People who collate these numbers have target numbers that they look for. What is the difference between 1,806 and 36,000? The remainder was caused by pneumonia. In 2004 there were just 1,100 actual flu deaths and in 2005 there were just 1,806. All the remaining deaths were directly attributed to other causes like asthma, pneumonia, and heart attack, but the person also had the flu. The statistics that the CDC gives are skewed partly because they classify those dying from pneumonia as dying from the flu, which is inaccurate. You can have the flu or you can have pneumonia without ever having the other. I’ve had pneumonia 3 times and during none of those times did I have the flu. What I had was a chronic bronchitis that advanced into pneumonia after I was exposed to pneumonia.

How is the flu vaccine made?

This is another area that many people do not understand or consider before getting a seasonal flu shot. Now it is not just a flu shot- there is tamiflu, there is flumist. There are 5 different delivery methods for bringing that vaccine into your body. All are the same basic types of vaccine with all the same components. How are vaccines made? In January or February of each year health authorities travel to Asia to determine which strains of flu are currently active. Based on their findings in Asia, they assume that the same strains of viruses will spread in the US by fall. At this point US vaccine manufacturers start making the season’s flu vaccines that contain the strains found in Asia. However, if the viral strains circulating in the US that season are not genetically identical then the vaccine you receive is a complete dud. The strain cannot have mutated into any variation, they have to be absolute perfect genetic matches or else the vaccine will have absolutely no affect on the virus.

What is in a seasonal flu vaccine?

The flu strains selected are cultivated in chick embryos for several weeks before being inactivated with formaldehyde, a known cancer-causing agent. Then they are preserved with Thimerosol, which is 49% mercury by weight. Many heath care professionals are confused about this and are not aware that the preservative Thimerosol contains mercury. Vaccines have to have preservatives because they are animal products. Lots of vegans and vegetarians don’t know that their vaccines are animal products and made as by-products of animal products (produced in chicken eggs, etc…) They are animal products and they are alive, so have to have preservatives so they don’t die or go bad. That’s not in any of the advertisements! There are lots of vegans and vegetarians and people who are conscientious meat objectors who are still taking in animal products in the form of medical vaccines. To add insult to injury, you’ve just been injected with a laundry list of harmful ingredients. Thimerosol is just one, which happens to be 49% mercury by volume and we have all heard that mercury is not a nutritional supplement. It is referred to in nutritional terms as a deadly poison and there is no known safe dosage of mercury. Mercury is persistent, meaning once its taken into your body it can remain in your body indefinitely. You can ingest mercury in your body today and we can test you for mercury 20 or 30 years from now and still find high traces. That’s the way it goes. There is a lot of research on this published by the dental associations of Europe. They talk about how trace mercury became an issue with the amalgam fillings and why amalgam fillings were banned and are now illegal for dentists to use. If you’re a dentist and you use a mercury amalgam filling in Europe you can go to jail! It is considered criminal.

Flu strains for vaccines are cultivated in chicken embryos. We understand that they have a preservative called Thimerosol that is 49% mercury by volume. Many health care professionals, doctors, nurses, and pharmacists are confused about this and are not aware that this preservative is mercury. One of the contributors to this information told me that the doctor’s office told him that the vaccine does not contain mercury, just “something called Thimerosol.” Please don’t be fooled by this incredible ignorance. If you have carefully studied this issue, there is a great possibility that you may know more than your physician about this topic. Don’t back down even if they tell you something that you know is false. According to the CDC the majority of vaccines contain Thimerosol. Since it is the most common industry standard for medical vaccine, you have to assume that whatever vaccine is being offered has it. Some contain as much as 25 micrograms of mercury per dose. That means it can contain more than 250 times the EPA’s safety limit for mercury! If you got that much mercury from the environment in a neighborhood, the EPA would most likely close that neighborhood down and make it a super-fun site (a toxic site) causing you to move out of your house, yet a doctor will shoot that stuff right up your nose! (Or your child’s nose.)

Now most people are well aware that children and fetuses are most at risk from damage from this neurotoxin, as their brains are still developing. Yet, the CDC still recommends that pregnant women and children over 6 months receive the flu vaccine every year! In addition to mercury, flu vaccines also contain other toxic or hazardous ingredients: Aluminum (a neurotoxin that has been linked to Alzheimer’s disease), Phenol (carbolic acid), Ethylene glycol (commonly known as anti-freeze), Beta propialactum (a disinfectant), and Nonoxynol-9 (used to kill or stop the growth of STD’s).

Isn’t it fascinating that your flu vaccine is also inoculating you for STD’s? I bet you didn’t see that on the nightly news. The flu vaccine also contains Nonoxynol-9 (a vaginal spermicide) and sodium phosphate. Isn’t that interesting? I’m not going to go into it in this article but I think there are reasons why birth control is put into our vaccinations. What if you want to get pregnant? What if you are trying to? What if you’ve been paying UIC in Chicago $10,000 for your in vitro but you also get the recommended flu shot and you don’t get pregnant? Then it becomes your fault, because you have a “hostile uterus” or a chronic PH imbalance or the sperm is not motile enough and so on. Your vaccination has both male and female anti-reproductive components!

How safe is the flu vaccine?

Serious reactions to the flu vaccine include: life-threatening allergies to various ingredients. Vaccines can increase allergic responses to many things. They can exacerbate existing allergies or create inclinations to have allergies that did not exist before the vaccination. Other reactions are Guillain-Barre Syndrome (GBS), a severely paralytic disease that is fatal in about 1 in 20 cases. postvaccinal encephalitis (brain inflammation), neurological disorders, thrombocytopenia (a serious blood disorder). You can go online and actually watch live videos of children receiving vaccines having adverse responses like paralysis, epileptic seizures, various obvious neurological stress, deformations, keening, screaming and convulsing into the fetal position. This doesn’t happen every time or there would really be an outcry. Even if it only occurs one time out of every several thousand, trust me, if it is your kid you get no consolation from that.

How effective is the flu vaccine?

Remember that the potential effectiveness of a flu vaccine is dependent on the assumption made nearly a year in advance that Asia’s viral strains will be the ones hitting the US and when they guess wrong the vaccines are worthless. The beautiful part is that if you owned a company that was making the vaccines, you get paid the same whether the vaccines work or not. You are making fat cash, living in fat city, no matter what. Even if you make a vaccine and the strain is not appropriate or changes, you just made a fat bank account for that year, no matter what. You cannot lose because it is not possible to lose if you are in that business. You make billions of dollars a year. For these companies, this is the bread and butter. They easily make billions of dollars even if they miss 10 years in a row! If you had a business, and for 10 years everything you made didn’t work and also had side effects, you would go out of business! You would have to do something else; you would not be getting richer and richer off of what you were doing. But if you make vaccines, score! Why didn’t I think of that?

If the company knows the vaccine is not working (and they will, very fast, because they can test the strain and see if it is compatible with the vaccines) do they withdraw it? Do they stop giving it to people once they know that the strains are wrong? No! They just keep giving it out anyways. I’ve listened in on some discussions about this, and the reason why they do it is the government health authorities and medical health authorities will say things like, “if we don’t give it out, we will jeopardize the public trust in the health system.” In other words, “if we don’t give them a medication that we know is no good and will cause them side effects which are completely illogical and unreasonable, (considering that we already know that there’s no reason in the world to give them this medicine), it will “jeopardize” their trust in the public health system.” If that is the justification, then that is crazy talk! Even if they were to overcome that hurdle and select the correct strains, there is still no evidence that it does anyone any good to get a flu vaccine.

Study after study comes back showing the same dismal results, that flu vaccines are not an effective method of preventing the flu and they do not save lives. As mentioned earlier they may even be responsible for an increased death rate in some groups. Sometimes determining efficacy is as easy as reading the information that comes straight from the vaccine manufacture. Here is a quote taken directly from the flu vaccine Fluluvol’s package insert (remember I tell you to always read the white paper on every drug that you take?). This is from the white paper, which you likely never see when you get a flu shot because when you go to the office they don’t exactly hand it to you when you or your child get the vaccine. They get one per box, and they put them in the trash as soon as they open the box. The 2009-2010 formula “Fluluvol is an influenza virus vaccine indicated for active immunization for adults 18 years of age and older against influenza disease caused by the influenza virus subtypes A and subtype B contained in the vaccine. This indication is based on immune response elicited by Fluluval. There has been no controlled trials demonstrating a decrease in influenza disease after vaccination with Fluluval.”

It says this right in the label that the company that is making the vaccine has no evidence. Don’t you think that if the company had even the slightest bit of evidence that the vaccine might work that they would say so as opposed to saying there is NO evidence to support that it is effective? That’s right, no controlled trials demonstrating any decrease in your risk of contracting the flu after vaccination. It also states that each dose contains a total of 25 micrograms of mercury. For those of you who are still unconvinced, there is plenty of scientific evidence available to back up the recommendation to avoid flu vaccines in addition to studies mentioned in the video. (what video?) Here are several other examples showing that flu vaccines do not work for ANY age group:

A study published in the October 2008 issue of the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine (Influenza vaccine effectiveness among children 6 to 59 months of age during 2 influenza seasons: a case-cohort study) found that “vaccinating young children against the flu had NO impact on flu related hospitalization or doctor visits during two recent flu seasons. The researchers concluded that significant influenza vaccine effectiveness could not be demonstrated for any season, age, setting examined” (the emphasis on the word ‘no’ is my own).

A 2008 study published in The Lancet (a highly respected medical journal) found that, “influenza vaccination was not associated with a reduced risk of pneumonia in older people.” Yet older people are targeted to go and get their flu shots! This supports an earlier study published in the New England Journal of Medicine (notice I did not say the New England National Inquirer. And by the way, even though I make fun of the National Inquirer, in the last few years there have been several absolutely amazing original scoops and exposé’s made by the National Inquirer. They can actually afford to pay reporters to do investigative reporting that nobody else will do and they don’t care if it is PC or not. SO we may find in the future that we may actually get much more reliable information from The Star and the National Inquirer than we get from these prestigious journals because they are not politicized. They’re just in it for the circulation. They don’t need scary stories anymore because they can just publish the truth and it freaks people out. Just like a horror movie, they flock, they want more…truth is addictive like that).

"Research published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine also confirms that there has been no decrease in deaths from influenza and pneumonia in the elderly despite the fact that vaccination coverage among the elderly has increased from 15% in 1980 to 65% now." No statistical change noted by the doctors who specialize in the critical care of people with pneumonia and the flu. Amazing!

Flu Related Death Statistics Not Reliable, Risks Exagerated

In 2007, researchers with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the National Institute of Health published this conclusion in The Lancet’s Infectious Disease journal (The Lancet is not just one magazine or one journal, just like JAMA is not just one journal, there are specialized journals for different medical disciplines). “We conclude that frailty selection bias and use of non-specific endpoints such as all-cause mortality have led cohort studies to greatly exaggerate vaccine benefits.” What this means is if you took the vaccine and within a fairly liberal time period after taking it you die from any darn thing, (food poisoning, pneumonia, heart attack) statistically it is collected and reported as a flu death. Because of this liberal interpretation that allows for things that scientifically you have to say are unrelated, you get these greatly inflated numbers. As a result people think the risk is much greater. This is done with great intention- it is not random! I hope you are starting to understand this, and please do make a note of these sources! (Because again, I’m not quoting The Star here).

There are think tanks that collect research, review the research and then issue reviews of the research. You could actually do this yourself. First, choose a medical topic to review, then go online or to the library and collect a certain number of studies. Let’s say you decide that you want to review only 50 studies because you don’t want to take the rest of your life to do it and you want to have it done in about a month or two. You would then collect 150 studies, then throw out the ones from people you don’t know, throw out the ones from organizations that you don’t respect or recognize as being competent until you narrow it down to the 50 that you want to review. Then you start with one and as you go through it you sit there with your yellow legal pad and you make a note of the salient statistics and the salient statements that come out of that research and you make a note (“I found in this first study that there are 10 principle points that the researchers address”) Then you go to the second study and do the same thing again but everywhere the two studies crossed over or had a shared point, make a little check mark. It is really simple. After you have done this 50 times, you can tell me the three things that all 50 studies agreed on. Then you can tell me 10 things that three quarters of the studies agreed on. Then you can tell me the dozen things that nobody agreed on. Then you can write a summary review of those studies.

A large-scale systematic review of 50 studies in the Cochrane database of systematic reviews is just a bunch of geeks, probably in Boston, (Cause’ I figure there are a lot of those people in Boston…tell me I’m wrong…). In 2006 they found “no evidence that the flu vaccine is any more effective than a placebo in children.” The studies involved 260,000 children age 6-23 months. So it wasn’t that they randomly selected 10 kids, there were 260,000! No more effective than a sugar pill! They would have been better off getting a Flintstone’s vitamin as their prevention for flu. At least a Flintstone’s vitamin, although it contains a poison called aspartame, does not have 25 micrograms of mercury. It does have some vitamins and it has no sexual additives. Why are we giving children drugs that prevent conception?

Q: Even if a child is obviously not in a state where it could be reproductive, would that cause sterility?

A: I don’t know, I can’t answer that. There is now some research that they are starting to see impotence and sterility occurring in populations receiving these vaccines. For example, it has been noted that a percentage of teenage girls that have received the new vaccine for HPV are becoming sterile. They won’t get the HPV but they may not be able to have babies. The HPV vaccine might cause infertility or death.

Doctors may refuse to get vaccinations!

Last but not least, 70% of doctors and nurses and 62% of other health care workers do not get the yearly flu shot. The reasons why they opted to not get vaccinated (according to survey) was they didn’t believe the vaccine would work. That’s the #1 answer! The #2 answer was that they believed their immune systems were strong enough to withstand exposure to the flu, and the #3 answer was that they were concerned about side effects. Why would they be concerned about side effects? Well, because when you give out a couple thousand doses of the flu, you’re going to see some side effects. Once in a while you’re going to go, “Whoa! Sucks to be you! Glad it’s not me. I’m not going to get one of those!” Why? Because they are rational people. They are normal, rational people with above average intelligence, (you know, like Prairie Home Companion, moderately attractive and above average intelligence) and so they tend to notice things. But you know, it is how they make their living and its not like they are going to quit their jobs.

Might influenza be little more than a symptom of Vitamin D deficiency?

Vitamin D, “the sunshine vitamin,” may very well be one of the most beneficial vitamins there are for disease prevention. Unfortunately its also one of the vitamins that a vast majority of people across the world are deficient in due to lack of regular exposure to sunshine. We are going to see Rathish Nair research on the role of Vitamin D, the Sunshine Vitamin, natural light and light spectrum and light frequencies in healing. You will see where some of this information originally came from and it is quite current.

A paper titled “Epidemic Influenza and Vitamin D” published in the Epidemiology and Infection Journal 2006 by Dr. John Cannell and colleagues raises the possibility that influenza is a symptom of vitamin D deficiency. In other words, there is a group of doctors that believe they have creditable evidence, shown through their research, that the flu is opportunistic and targets a weakened immune system. It specifically tends to target an immune system that is suppressed by a vitamin D deficiency. The vitamin D formed when your skin is exposed to sunlight regulates the expression of more than 2000 genes throughout your body including ones that influence your immune system to attack and destroy bacteria and viruses. Being overwhelmed by the flu bug (you know, “Ah, I’m overwhelmed by the flu bug!) could be a signal that your vitamin D levels are too low and this allows the flu virus to overtake your immune system. At least 5 studies show an adverse association between lower respiratory tract infections and 25 OHD levels. That is, the higher your vitamin D level, the lower your risk of contracting colds, flu and other respiratory tract infections. We still recommend that you have vitamin C (you should be taking more vitamin C, by the way) because vitamin C is always indicated in recovery from disease and helps with the cellular regeneration process and all the metabolic processes that are involved.

Let’s get back to vitamin D. A 2007 study suggests that a higher vitamin D status enhances your immunity to microbial infections. In fact, persistent microbial infections may be a symptom of vitamin D deficiency. They found subjects with vitamin D deficiency had significantly more days of absence from work due to respiratory infection than the control subjects. A 2009 study on vitamin D deficiency in newborns with acute lower respiratory infection or ALRI confirmed a strong positive correlation between newborns and mother’s vitamin D levels. Over 87% of all newborns and over 67% of all mothers had vitamin D levels lower than 20 milliliters, which is a severe deficiency state. Newborns with vitamin D deficiency appear to have an increased risk of developing ALRI and since a child’s vitamin D level strongly correlates with its mother’s, the researchers recommend that all mothers optimize their vitamin D levels during pregnancy, especially in winter months, to safeguard the baby’s health.

Even though we know about prenatal vitamins and this kind of thing, the majority of pregnant women do not take them. There is a very simple reason for that- its called economics. A bottle of brand new, very high-grade prenatal vitamins, the last time I checked (we did this in Georgia) was $30-$40 a bottle. If you’re a poor person or have a low income and you only have $30 or $40 per week as your spendable income, that’s a fourth of your month’s spendable income and many people just choose not to do that. And because there’s a social stigma associated with being a mother and not taking your prenatal vitamins, you go to a health care worker and they ask if you are taking your vitamins and the answer is always yes. You say yes because you don’t want to be yelled at, you don’t want to be embarrassed and you don’t want to look stupid. “Of course I’m taking my vitamins, I want my baby to be healthy.” But are you actually taking the vitamins? The studies show that many are not. That may be why a large number of babies (over 87% of all newborns) show symptoms of vitamin D deficiency.

A similar Indian study published in 2004 also reported that vitamin D deficiency in infants significantly raised their odds for having ALRI. The 2009 analysis of the Third National Health and Nutritional Examination Survey examined the association between vitamin D levels and recent upper respiratory tract infection or URTI in nearly 19,000 subjects over the age of 12. Recent URTI was reported by 17% of participants with vitamin D levels of 30(30 what, insert unit) or higher, 20% of participants with vitamin D levels of 10-30 or higher and 24% of participants with vitamin D levels below 10. The correlation between lower vitamin D levels and an increased risk of URTI was even stronger in individuals with asthma and COPD (chronic obstructed pulmonary disease).

If the number one reason for fatalities attributed to the flu is pneumonia and respiratory related illnesses such as asthma, and if the vast majority of people who suffer from asthma and pulmonary disease and pneumonia are vitamin D deficient, then it is not the flu that is killing them. They are actually dying from a form of malnutrition that is complicated by the illness. You can survive a long time and be malnourished, you can have scurvy or whatever, but when malnourishment is coupled with something like the flu it can be deadly.

Another 2009 report in the Journal of Pediatric Research stated that “infants and children appear more susceptible to viral rather than bacterial infections when deficient in vitamin D and that based on the available evidence showing a strong connection between vitamin D infections and immune functions in children, vitamin D supplementation may be a valuable therapy in pediatric medicine.” If you want to guarantee that your children are resistant to respiratory-based illnesses, give them vitamin D. Say little Macy is going to school. She’s going to be exposed every time she goes to camp or school with children who have colds, flues, bugs and so on. That’s just the way it is, school is like a hospital because it is a high-risk area and children are notorious for not washing their hands.

What would be a good strategy aside from just trying to make hand-washing fun so every once in a while they might be inclined to do it even on their own? Hand washing is very valuable, but you want to make sure that they are getting plenty of vitamin D in their food supply and that they are spending time outside, away from the computer, away from the TV. Get them outside and let them get dirty! The way that the D-K metabolism works is the essential fatty acids come out in your sweat, sit on the surface of your skin, react to the sunlight and then when you cool off they are reabsorbed. If you exercise and you get out in the sun and you get all sweaty (you got your sunlight goin’ on and you got your little glow goin’ on) and then you rush in the house and take a shower, you just washed off all the vitamin D-K. It has to be reabsorbed and it takes time for that to happen. I’m saying that if your going to use the sunlight as your primary source of these vitamins then you’ve got to get a little skuzzy goin’, and you’ve got to sit with it and let it marinate a little bit. What that means in practical terms (because we are all too clean), is that we have to supplement our diet even if we are getting out and exercising and getting lots of good sunshine, because we are like manic obsessive-compulsive clean freaks. The very second we head inside we head directly to the shower and wash it all off. By doing this we completely disassociate the regenerative cycle of absorption that brings the metabolic products that have been produced on the surface of our skin into the body, so the easy solution is to supplement. Kids do need to have supplements, just don’t give them Flintstone’s. Don’t give them supplements that have aspartame (or mercury!).

Q: Is it true that vitamin D is absorbed also through the eyes?

A: No, it’s a reaction in the fat on the surface of the skin where oil is excreted onto the surface of the skin and the light changes the chemical composition of that fat, which is then reabsorbed.

How to prevent the flu without getting the flu shot?

For most people a flu shot does not make you healthy, it does just the opposite and weakens your immune system. If you follow a healthy lifestyle you will not have to worry about getting the flu. Take it from me, ok? I’ve never received a flu shot, not once, not in my life. I have had pneumonia a couple of times but I have not had the flu. I haven’t missed a day of work due to illness other than injury (like when my back went out).

These are the steps that I suggest:

Get plenty of sunshine, or supplemental vitamin D3. If the tanning bed solution has been changed, if the technology of it has been adapted to being a healthy technology, than I would say do that if it is available to you. I can’t recommend it though because I haven’t looked at it. It’s all about the wavelength when you start talking about light. It’s all about frequency and percentages of UVB vs. UVA because it determines depth of penetration. For vitamin D-K production you have to have a shorter frequency that does not penetrate too deeply in the ski because it has to affect the oils that are right on the surface of your skin.

Eat right for your nutritional type and avoid sugar. We watched one documentary called Eating so we have one set of good ideas to start changing your diet, which is to go to a plant-based diet. There is more than nutritional type, depending on your body type. In this class we are going to talk more about body type than we are nutritional type. I don’t get into metabolic typing and nutritional type until at least the 2nd yr curriculum. There is too much information on the front end to get into it. To be a successful Holistic Health Practitioner you need to be able to type your clients. You need to do metabolic typing and need to know how to get someone to do it for you.

Exercise. I exercise because it is fun and because I want to keep my body fit and healthy and I want to be mobile and agile. That’s why I do it but also because I know that if I don’t do it that I am giving up something that’s very important to my well-being and to my long-term health. I am simply not willing to sacrifice that or throw it on the roulette wheel of chance that I can give up exercise and movement indefinitely and it will have no deleterious effect on me. Basically everything we know says that you have to work out. So you must find your work out and get your work out on. It could be belly dancing, hatha yoga, martial arts, or whatever. It has to have an aerobic component, a strength component and a flexibility/range of motion component. If it doesn’t have those three things then it is not exercise. It might be work and it might cause you to break a sweat, it might make you tired, but it is not exercise if it doesn’t have strength, flexibility, range of motion, and aerobics.

Get adequate sleep, if possible.
Address emotional stress- possible at all times. We study methodologies for addressing emotional stress and the harmful effects of negative emotions. I didn’t talk about negative emotion and flu but I did say that there is an obvious correlation between depressed, insufficient immune system response and susceptibility to things like influenza and variations of the flu. The only thing that changes in the variations of the flu is opportunity. If there is an outbreak of avian flu at chicken farms in Chiang Rai, Thailand, don’t go visiting chicken farms in Chiang Rai, Thailand! You are very likely not to get it. If there is an outbreak of swine flu, which has been located primarily around slaughterhouses of pigs imported from Mexico, then don’t spend a lot of time around slaughterhouses with pigs imported from Mexico.

Be cautious and wash your hands a lot when you’re around people who are. The flu is opportunistic in that way. I just don’t worry about it, you guys know that we go to Southeast Asia every year and sometimes I go twice a year or three times a year. You’ve heard me tell stories of how I spend time in remote villages with Hill tribe people where the chickens run loose with the pigs which run loose with the dogs and there are buffalos in the village and chickens piled up (I’ve got pictures of chickens taking a poop on top of the buffalo’s head, which I thought was very funny at the time). By and large, these people don’t get sick with the flu any more than we do. They have a very different idea of what you might think of as a standard. I know a lot of people here are very clean people. If you went into a Karen village or a Sharn village or a Lahu, Lisu, Mien, Karen village, you would be shocked and horrified at the level of cleanliness and overall hygiene in the village. You would catch your breath, you would! You would be afraid to touch anything because you would think it was so dirty, but after you lived there for a couple of months you would realize that not everyone was dropping dead like flies and not everyone was consumed with infectious disease. You would realize over time that there must be a happy medium between the hypoallergenic, compulsive, obsessive, cleanliness of the typical western person and the native tribal person living in a place with dirt floors. Tribal people live with their animals and are healthy. In the villages of Southeast Asia, try and keep a house made out of grass with a dirt floor clean. I don’t care how many times you sweep, its dirt! You are sweeping the dirt! But guess what? No one is dying unless the foreigners bring in some bug that they have no immune system resistance to.

The primary thing that keeps you healthy is your immune system. You should avoid emotional stress because emotional stress lowers your immune system, and negative emotion is what we focus on the most about that.

Wash your hands regularly. I can’t say it enough. But do not use strong soap! We want to wash the hands, but we do not want to sterilize them. We need some bacteria to keep the surface of our body healthy.

Any questions? Thoughts?

Q: Do you think it may be in part a conspiracy, especially since they advertise a lot of those shots to people in lower income areas and offer them for free like on “super shot Saturday” to sterilize and limit the population?

A: I don’t think conspiracy is a correct word. I actually know many health care workers and I have had many doctors, nurses and PA’s in class and they are all good people. I don’t believe that they are subscribing to some kind of conspiracy to take advantage of poor people, I really don’t. It’s not happening at their level. At the upper levels of these massive multi-billion/multi-nation conglomerates that are behind promoting these products to governments around the world and to us- I believe that is where they specifically target low income and poor people and uneducated people and people who don’t even have access to alternative points of view and to the internet, (to use it like I did to get this information this morning before class). Yes, I believe they do. I believe it is completely profit driven and I believe that they are completely OK with what we call “medical attrition.” They are completely OK that their policies and their way of making money is harmful to the consumers because that’s what it is, it’s a business, a business model of health.

Health is a product that we sell, as in, “sell the sizzle.” They know more than any of us could imagine and they do this willfully, intelligently and deliberately and as far as they are concerned, it is not a big issue. The mortality rates and the complication rates and the increase of rates of hospitalization are completely OK because it serves their profit model. If you own hospital corporations than you want hospital occupancy rates to go up and you need those beds to be filled. You need 98% occupancy rates. If you have hospitals with only 30%, 40%, or 50% occupancy rates because the hospitals are successful at treating people and curing them so they can go away and no longer need treatment then the hospitals will go bankrupt. You will have to close them, because they are not making money.

Ideally, if your primary aim is to make income for share holders you want a hospital that is filled to the rafters with people stacked up in the hallways like cordwood, waiting for the next available slot, next available treatment regimen, next available office visit and so on. You want that and you want it 24 hours a day. How do you guarantee that? This is where we get into these backhanded mechanisms of guaranteeing a sick population to feed into an industry that is entirely based on making money from sick people. How do we keep our relatives happy with this? It’s called baksheesh. Your ethics are actually proportional to your income. We find that the higher the income bracket, (generally speaking in regard to these issues), the lower the ethics or moral considerations are because there is a point where its actually considered to be OK if you off a few people while you’re doing business.

Thank goodness we are all at least somewhere in an echelon where our level of life activity and income bracket says that it’s NOT OK that we off a person or two a year to keep ourselves living in the lifestyle to which we are accustomed. Part of this is a kind of cultural illness that comes from greed. Michael Moore says that capitalism is the cause of this illness. That capitalism, by default, is based on somebody being taken advantage of. That 1% of the population controls 98% of all of the resources of all of the other people combined. The system is based on that model. As long as this is true, then we are always going to see these kinds of situations.

I wanted to do this discussion to show you how easy it is to do a little research and to get some very serious sources and very serious information and put it together to have for yourself or your clients. Once you get into what I call a “research mind” it is very easy and you don’t necessarily have to rely on other people to give you the facts. Not anymore, since we have google. Always look for reliable sources! I have the 10 websites that I go to when I have a medical question. I have my alternative sites and I have non-alternative, standard, industry-based sites because I look at both.

My preference for treatment is always that we look for the least invasive, most natural, holistic, drug-free, surgery-free, solution first. Then we try it, wear it out, and then if it doesn’t work we escalate to the allopathic remedy. We use the least invasive allopathic remedy that we can justify morally, ethically, and financially. We don’t skip three steps and go to the most dramatic dangerous risky step first. We work on a continuum and that is what a holistic practice is all about. A holistic practice is not anti-medicine or anti-allopathy, it is just that I see allopathy as the last resort. Often, when used appropriately as a last resort, it is very good.

Of course western medicine and even antibiotics are not all bad! Western medicine saved me from dying from pneumonia in Thailand. I choked down the antibiotics and I didn’t like it, and it made me puny, but yes, I did it and I survived because of them and I know that for a fact. After the 10 days when I completed my course of antibiotics (and I would recommend to everybody how important it is to finish the full course of antibiotics, not just “until you feel better”) I went through a program of replenishing my gut and re-building the flora in my colon. You have to do this because a good course of antibiotics can upset the equilibrium in your colon and throw you into a state of constipation for a year.

On day 13 (because you must allow 48hrs to let the antibiotics move through your system) you start with pro-biotics to replenish your intestinal flora. This is compatible, and it is what I mean by complementary. The idea of using probiotics to replenish lactobacillus, essodophelus, and biofodus, is complementary to the antibiotics. We always try to partner those kinds of things!

Of course, during this time in Thailand if I could have had access to a good selection of natural antibiotics I would have chosen this first! There are many good natural based treatment possibilities as alternatives to conventional anti-biotics.

Thank you very much! I hope this is helpful for you when thinking about flus and vaccines because we are into the flu season and we are all healthy minded people who would like very much to avoid unnecessary suffering!

Discussions and classes on health issues like the use of vaccines are a standard part of the curriculum of the SomaVeda™ Thai Yoga, Thai Massage and Holistic Health Practitioner Certification Programs. Programs are hosted four times a year at the Thai Yoga Center in Plant City, Florida. For details on the CTP and other fine educational offering at the Thai Yoga Center Click Here!

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All Information is provided for educational purposes only and not intended to be used for any therapeutic purpose, neither is it intended to diagnose, prevent, treat or cure any disease. Please consult a health care professional for diagnosis and treatment of medical conditions. No infection treatment products are sold from this website and every attempt is made to make statements which are unbiased and are solely in the best interest of the members, public and patient.While all attempts have been made to ensure the accuracy of this information. The author and ThaiYogaCenter.Com does not accept any responsibility for any errors or omissions.

The information provided has not been reviewed by the FDA. The FDA specifically considers anecdotal information and or research to be unreliable and or non valid. Additionally the information provided in this article is educational and to some degree anecdotal and in no context or meaning is it implied by the author or the website that it be intended as a substitute for competent medical advise. Patients suffering from a severe medical condition are advised to consult with their physician.
 
Copyright© 2011, Anthony B. James ND, MDAM  All rights reserved under International and Pan American copyright conventions. World rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Inquires should be addressed to: Anthony B. James, ND, MDAM, Brooksville, FL ·  http://www.ThaiYogaCenter.Com