A prestigious medical journal says a controversial study linking autism to a vaccine is flawed. The retraction by The Lancet is a big blow to many parents who believe the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine is indirectly to blame for their child's condition. Michelle Guppy's son Brandon, 16, wasn't born autistic. Instead, the Cypress mother says something triggered Brandon's autism after his first birthday. "He lost the eye contact. He lost social skills of wanting to be around people. The head banging started," said Guppy. Guppy and parents across the country, desperate for a proven cause and treatment, were swayed by the British study published in 1998. Lead author Andrew Wakefield theorized the measles vaccine causes gastrointestinal problems which lead to autism. British parents abandoned the vaccine in droves, leading to a resurgence in measles. On Tuesday, The Lancet fully retracted the study, saying Wakefield acted "dishonestly and irresponsibly." Wakefield is accused of taking blood samples from children at his son's birthday party, paying them five pounds each for their contributions and later joking about the incident. Britain's General Medical Council ruled Wakefield had shown a "callous disregard" for the children used in his study and acted unethically. Houston pediatrician Dr. Norris Payne says it's time for parents to find closure to the controversy. "Parents should give their children the MMR vaccine. There's absolutely no scientific proof that MMR is linked in any way to autism. The MMR vaccine is clearly safe and necessary," said Dr. Payne. – Fox

Dominant Social Theme: Cooler heads prevail.

Free-Market Analysis: Wakefield's co-authors had already retracted the paper, so the Lancet retraction is probably predictable. However, the retraction by his co-authors, Wakefield has pointed out, is somewhat puzzling since the paper never made a direct connection between vaccines and autism, only suggested further study. Wakefield did go on to make a series of controversial comments after the paper's publication. Since then his unapologetic stance regarding the potential danger of giving large doses of vaccines to children in a short period of time has no doubt made him a marked man within the medical community.

Nonetheless, the various retractions among the paper's authors, crowned by Lancet's retraction are indicative of a kind of ritual propaganda, and may be aimed more at cowing the medical profession at this point than influencing public opinion. Mess with vaccines and you're risking your career – that's the message from Big Pharma, and there is no doubt Western doctors will "get it."

Big Pharma's medical approach comes from the barber shops of the Middle Ages. It is a surgical approach to sickness, which attacks the specific problem and seeks to solve health care issues serially. If someone has a heart condition, he or she will be treated, through surgery and drugs, for the heart problem. But in fact, the heart problem may be part of a larger circulatory problem, and that in turn may be related to nutritional deficiencies and there may be other factors as well. There are many age-old treatments and disciplines that may be much more holistic in their approach to sickness, and just as successful. But in the West anyway, Big Pharma's combination of money and regulatory clout is gradually squeezing out other kinds of treatments

There is little doubt that the Western power elite is joined at the hip to Big Pharma, which, as an industry, is to act as a fulcrum and lever to provide further ways of controlling society through treatments and prescriptions. If one, in fact, can control people's health and access to health care and provide approved methodologies of treatment, then one has gained extraordinary power over the culture and established oneself, eternally, as an "expert" with all the benefits that entails. This is part of what Big Pharma and its backers are after.

One of the ways Big Pharma and its backers are moving to retain and expand control – and to create an evermore exclusive professionalism – is through Codex Alimentarius, which seeks to codify standards relating to food and food safety to "protect" consumer health. The Codex is said not to be binding – and is meant merely as a reference – but that sounds an awful lot to us like the "free-trade" zone that the EU was supposed to create. Instead the EU is turning into the United States of Europe (see other article, this issue) and we're fairly sure if Codex backers have their way that eventually the Codex will morph from resource to regulation. Here's some more on the Codex, from Wikipedia.

It is important to understand that the Codex Alimentarius is not based on Common Law, wherein that which is not explicitly permitted is not necessarily illegal. The codex is instead based on the Napoleonic Legal Code, wherein "anything not explicitly permitted is forbidden." According to Dr. Rima E. Laibow, M.D, who has studied more than 16,000 pages of the Codex Alimentarius, the "Napoleonic Code allows the banning of natural health options by default." Also .. the codex uses the toxicological, rather than the biochemical method for regulation. For instance, Vitamin C would be restricted to a few milligrams per dose. Although this is not technically a ban, this does restrict its usage to a point where it becomes a ban. – Wikipedia

There is no doubt, so far as we are concerned, that Big Pharma and the power elite are taking aim at every other medical and health care discipline available in the world today. The preferred vehicle is the World Health Organization (WHO) which has already adopted the Codex as a prime reference, which means that when there are international health disputes, those cleaving closest to Codex will apparently have the advantage. Thus, Codex – with its surgical/pharmaceutical approach to medicine – gradually creates the gold standard for purposes of litigation and punishment.

There are plenty of people who are fighting the Codex/Big Pharma approach to medicine and health care – and you can find many of them, thankfully, on the Internet. In fact, the Western Big Pharma model of science cannot explain the apparent effectiveness of homeopathic treatments (though in sense vaccines are homeopathic). Acupuncture is inexplicable but seems to work. Nutritional supplements and additives have well-documented efficacious effects. People purchase alternative treatments all the time, and the popularity of these treatments, which live and die in the free market, is a testament itself to their apparent effectiveness.

Thus it is that Dr. Wakefield – from our point of view – is in a sense being victimized by Big Pharma's relentless quest to standardize its particular vision and practice. Never mind that the drugs it constantly creates are found to be fraught with dangerous side effects that "double blind" tests never seem to catch. Never mind that there is a richness and variableness to the human experience and condition that cannot be codified in a single "Codex" manual – which will likely retard human medical knowledge without necessarily enhancing it.

Sadly, the Anglo-American power elite always seems to work the same way. It seeks to involve the law to justify and enforce its preferred business methodologies. Central banking remains a Western financial model not because it is any good – it is not – but because its practices are enshrined into law. The power elite is trying to do the same thing with its medical model. The methodology has a name – mercantilism – and it is the scourge of the modern age. If Big Pharma's leaders wishes to compete in a free-marketplace with other medical disciplines, no one could have a complaint. But Big Pharma is very obviously on a quest to legislate its competitors out of existence. And those it cannot legislate against, it will try to demonize.

We don't know what causes autism. But we do see the same malignant forces lined up against Dr. Wakefield that slandered those in the anti-global warming movement – until the Internet savagely exploded the promotion (at least for the time being). The propagandists look to be out in force when it comes to Dr. Wakefield – celebrating the Lancet "retraction" and vilifying Wakefield. Yet we have a feeling Wakefield's concerns will continue to resonate because of the egregiousness of what is taking place – especially the trend toward more and more vaccines. Giving children dozens of vaccines before they are five or six years old is bound to strike some as excessive. Giving those same children a bouquet of vaccines at once is also bound to seem excessive, especially when they are live vaccines.

Vaccine proponents will claim that Big Pharma hardly makes any money off vaccines, but the ancillary benefits cannot be denied. Vaccines are a perfect Big Government program. They provide Big Government with the justification to work hand in glove with Big Pharma (mercantilism) and to organize and structure society militaristically. It is all being done, we hear "for the good of the children." And yet it is all too neat. It doesn't work like that anywhere else. Big government programs inevitably fail. Mercantilism is a plague upon society. Are we to believe in this one instance that the curriculum is apt? That WHO – which cannot manage a flu from one year to the next – is perfectly accurate, reasonable and efficient when it comes to vaccines?

There is plenty of anecdotal evidence about the destructive nature of vaccines when they apparently collide with the wrong genetic or biological type. There are dozens if not hundreds of stories of children receiving certain kinds of vaccines one day and becoming non-verbal the next. Opponents of this kind of apocryphal dialogue will point out that it means nothing without scientific rigor. And yet there seems so much of it. (Don't take our word for it, go online and look for yourself.)

Conclusion: Most children apparently can easily tolerate vaccines (for better or worse) but perhaps some cannot. There seems to be an ever-increasing amount of asthma and other "chronic" conditions (in addition to autism) that modern Western medicine cannot easily explain. Vaccine opponents are convinced that the over-application of vaccines may have something to do with it. Why is there not more research into the potential damage that vaccines may cause? If vaccines are as safe as their makers proclaim, then they should welcome such research and pursue it themselves. That would silence the critics once and for all. Until then, the questions will grow, not subside, in our opinion. The ‘Net never sleeps.

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