HOME: THE JOHN LAVERTY, JR. CASE-- FALSE SBS CHARGES, WRONGFUL CONVICTION & IMPRISONMENT

THE "SHAKEN BABY SYNDROME" MYTH: Why top scientists say it isn't possible to shake an infant hard enough to cause the symptoms used to diagnose SBS and the probable real causes

AUTHOR'S FOREWORD
On 12th October 1985 my life changed profoundly. On that day I met Leif Karlsson, a biomedical electronics engineer specialising in patient monitoring systems. After only a few hours'acquaintance, on learning of his professional specialty, I asked him to develop a breathing monitor for babies.

He said yes.

One year and one day later, the first Cotwatch went to the first parents wishing to monitor their newborn baby's breathing. We had decided to rent the first 150 units and to keep in close contact with the parents who used them. Soon, some twenty units were out there working and some time later parents started ringing us to report that the Cotwatch was sounding alarms.

A few questions soon established that alarms occurred at certain hours while babies were deeply asleep. Clusters of five to seven short alarms sounded within about a 15 minute period. These occurred after the baby had been exposed to stress, or happened a day or two before the child went down with a common cold or cut its first tooth. An important fact about the vast majority of these alarms was that the babies had not actually stopped breathing, but, rather, were breathing very shallowly.

In most cases no intervention was needed to interrupt the type of breathing that triggered the alarms as the babies spontaneously resumed normal (deeper) breathing.

All new parents who monitored with Cotwatch were given a questionnaire on which to record all alarms for two weeks. By chance, 28 of the monitored babies were 'near-miss' (babies who stopped breathing, were found in time and successfully resuscitated). A further 22 newborn babies were monitored by choice of the parents.

Records by parents of near-miss babies showed substantially higher numbers of alarms compared with the number of alarms reported for newborn babies. We realised that the alarms were an important indicator of stress level in the babies.

We concluded that when babies are under stress (whether due to insult or while cutting teeth or incubating illness), their breathing changes to what we named the stress-induced breathing pattern and they experience episodes of low-volume breathing in clusters at critical hours while asleep

We could not find a paediatrician who would undertake independent research to elucidate and further develop our ideas, based on the initial observations with Cotwatch, so we decided to do the necessary data collection and research ourselves.

It was a long and rocky road to travel. One task was development of a microprocessor-based breathing monitor, to ensure that the data collection was completely objective and scientific. It took over six months' full-time work before we were" able to produce computer records of babies' breathing.

Without endeavouring to do so specifically, we recorded the breathing of babies before and after they were vaccinated. The pattern of breathing that emerged over the days and weeks was extremely interesting and highly significant. It showed that babies' breathing was affected in a certain characteristic manner and over a long period of time following diphtheria-pertussis-tetanus (DPT) injections.

At this time, (1988), we did not know that the merits of vaccination were being hotly debated and we did not know that a lot of evidence on its dangers and ineffectiveness had been published in very reputable medical journals. We saw only that DPT vaccinations caused babies a lot of stress, reflected in sometimes major flareup of stress-induced breathing over a period of at least 45 to 60 days following the injections. The dynamics of these flareups showed a remarkable uniformity: even though the amplitude of the flareups differed, the days on which they occurred following injection were the same.

Paediatricians to whom we showed our first records pointed to the arrow indicating day zero (when DPT injection was administered), and commented without hesitation: 'This is the cause". Then, pointing to the summaries of stress-induced breathing patterns over several days, each unfailingly followed with 'This is the effect". They, of course, knew that the day zero arrow indicated the DPT injection.

We also learned from parents who monitored a subsequent child after a cot death that most commonly the previous child had died after DPT injection. We realised that a great number of cot deaths followed DPT injections and we felt we had to address the issue.

However, when we approached a few paediatricians with this observation and conclusion, we realised that we had touched a very sensitive and contentious issue. Once again, we were forced to start our own search for the truth.

Several years later I had collected just about every publication written on the subject of the effectiveness and dangers of vaccines. Supported by data from our continuing research with the Cotwatch breathing monitor, I decided to write a concise and brief summary of my literature search, reviewing the many thousands of pages of scientific journals and other publications I had studied.

I did not find it difficult to conclude that there is no evidence whatsoever that vaccines of any kind — but especially those against childhood diseases — are effective in preventing the infectious diseases they are supposed to prevent. Further, adverse effects are amply documented and are far more significant to public health than any adverse effects of infectious diseases.

Immunisations, including those practised on babies, not only did not prevent any infectious diseases, they caused more suffering and more deaths than has any other human activity in the entire history of medical intervention.

It will be decades before the mopping-up after the disasters caused by childhood vaccination will be completed. All vaccination should cease forthwith and all victims of their side-effects should be appropriately compensated.

Dr Viera Scheibner
Principal Research Scientist (Retired)
Blackheath NSW
17.5. 1993.

This book is dedicated to those babies and their parents who suffered from vaccination

VACCINATION: 100 Years of Orthodox Research shows that Vaccines Represent a Medical Assault on the Immune System.
By Dr Viera Scheibner

ISBN 0 646 15124 X.

SUMMARY
Extensive study of medical papers dealing with vaccination published over the past one hundred years reveals a number of facts which can be summarised as follows:

1. Vaccines are highly noxious substances made up of bacterial or viral components in a solvent.

The solvent is saline or water solution containing tissue fixatives (formaldehyde, aluminium phosphate, aluminium hydroxide) and preservative (thiomersal, a mercury compound).

The solvent solution alone is often used as a "placebo" in vaccine trials. When injected it causes local reactions (redness, swelling at injection site) or even systemic reactions (fever, vomiting). Allergy to thiomersal has been described.

The bacterial and viral content of vaccines are the main antigenic component. Bacteria and viruses, which are supposed to provoke immunity against a particular disease, can be live, killed or attenuated (usually by formaldehyde treatment).

However, even killed microorganisms still contain foreign nucleic acids, DNA and RNA, which continue to have a deleterious effect on the recipient. It has been documented that attenuated bacteria and viruses can become virulent through passage in humans.

Having known foreign substances injected into the blood stream is bad enough, but vaccines present additional serious danger: contamination by tens or hundreds of unknown animal or human bacteria and viruses which are inevitably present in the animal (or human) tissues used for culturing the vaccine microorganisms.

Contamination of polio vaccines with animal viruses living in the monkey kidneys used to produce those vaccines has been extensively
studied and the results published. The most intensive research of this subject was conducted mainly in the fifties and sixties.

The most important of these contaminating animal viruses is a group of some 40 simian retroviruses, of which SV40 has been extensively studied and found oncogenic (cancer producing) in hamsters, mice and other animals (small wild rodents) and in humans. The enormous upsurge in incidence of leukaemia and cancer in children since the introduction and mass use of vaccines is also well-documented in the medical literature.

In addition to this, antigenic over-stimulation by foreign antigens in vaccines also leads to cancer as amply documented in animal studies and in humans.The presence of animal retroviruses was known soon after the mass polio vaccination started. The reason given by the PDA for not taking drastic action was that there was no published material on harmful effects of these viruses to humans. However, even when the harmful (oncogenic) effect of these viruses did become known, vaccines continued to be administered, despite containing these animal viruses.

Treatment with formaldehyde proved to be ineffective to a great extent — a 14 day treatment by formaldehyde, although destroying the bulk of the microorganisms, tapers off and leaves some viruses intact.

The second group of animal viruses , documented to contaminate polio vaccines, are simian immunodefficiency viruses (SIV). An elegant analysis of the batch of polio vaccines and the timing and geography of the polio eradication campaign in certain African countries by an independent scholar, Louis Pascal, provided evidence for a causal link between administration of these contaminated polio vaccines and the origin of AIDS.

The repeated injection of polio vaccine at weekly intervals in an attempt to treat genital herpes in American homosexuals is now blamed for the start of the epidemic of AIDS in the United States. Polio and smallpox vaccination with vaccines contaminated by S V40 and bovine retrovirus is blamed for starting the epidemic of AIDS in Africa.

This affected most those countries targeted for the so-called smallpox eradication programme by the World Health Organisation.

2. Vaccines are ineffective in preventing infectious diseases.
Again, medical literature brings evidence upon evidence that vaccinated children contract the very diseases against which they are vaccinated at the same as or at a higher rate than unvaccinated children.

The percentage of fully vaccinated "victims" simply reflects the vaccination compliance.

Proponents of vaccination often claim that if the vaccines do not prevent children from catching the diseases, at least they make the diseases less severe.

Now there is ample evidence that for instance whooping cough became a mild disease in those countries that do not vaccinate against whooping cough — Sweden, the former West Germany (especially Hamburg and Stuttgart) and Italy.

On the other hand, there is growing evidence that measles in vaccinated children can often be a much more serious illness than in the unvaccinated. Children vaccinated by either live or killed measles vaccine may develop atypical measles, an especially vicious form of measles with pulmonary involvement and atypical rash, serious side effects and high death rate.

Vaccines, like any other noxious substances, do not immunise when injected into the blood stream, rather they sensitise.

This was known more than 100 years ago and was well described in medical journals like The Lancet. The upsurge of allergies in children in the past 50 years is the result of repeated multiple injections of the foreign antigens in vaccines. An exaggerated reaction to measles virus or subsequent measles virus vaccine is just another example of sensitisation by vaccination.

Asthma and other autoimmune diseases are another widespread side effect of vaccination. Animal viruses contained in the vaccines cause lingering upper and lower respiratory tract infections, such as otitis media and bronchiolitis leading to the development of wheezing and asthma. Increased incidence and mortality due to these diseases is also well-documented in medical papers.

3. Vaccines may cause serious local and systemic side effects, of which the most worrying is neurological damage.

When adults experience local or systemic reactions from vaccines, there is no problem accepting these as causally connected with the vaccines.

The fact of delayed reactions is well-documented and accepted in adults. However, when it comes to babies who also have delayed reactions to vaccines, when a convulsion, fit or encephalitis starts later than 72 hours after vaccine injections, it is considered 'coincidental'.

Time and time again doctors do not hesitate to say that "it would have happened anyway". No reason for the onset of these events could be more potent than an injection of highly noxious substances, such as are in vaccines. The reasons for this most unfortunate interpretation are that vaccines are considered innocuous and totally safe and that babies cannot speak. A baby screaming in pain is usually ignored or handled almost with contempt.

Quite obvious signs of encephalitis like drowsiness, excessive somnolence, irritability, screaming with pain, and/or uncontrollable movements and fits, are described as events on their own as if they were not clinical signs of encephalitis or encephalopathy.

When adults after vaccination experience the same clinical signs, they are readily and without hesitation described as signs of encephalitis or encephalopathy.

This general habit of considering side effects of vaccine injections coincidental is of special concern, whether it is the onset of adverse reactions like convulsions, fits and serious brain damage or illness against which the person was vaccinated.

There is now an enormous pile-up of "coincidental" adverse reactions or onset of illness within 14 or more days of vaccination all over the world amounting to tens of thousands of cases. Clustering of the onset of adverse reactions or of illness around the same - critical - days are published time and again.

In fact all papers dealing with side effects of vaccination or onset of illness and especially deaths after vaccination brings data on clustering. Most authors, however, do not understand the importance of clustering. Instead of talking of coincidence, it would be much more reasonable to see clustering for what it is: the evidence a causal
relationship. Again, nothing can be more intruding than an injection of a highly noxious and infectious substance like vaccines.

4. There is no need to artificially immunise our children and ourselves.

The body has proper, natural mechanisms to create immunity to diseases. The diseases themselves are the priming and challenging mechanisms of the maturation process leading to the competence of the immune system.

It has been demonstrated time and again, that infectious diseases of childhood are very beneficial for children to catch. They function to even out differences in rates of development of different body systems and so perform a sort of balancing act in a fast-growing organism.

They also represent important milestones in the overall development of children. The general inflammatory process is important in the dynamics of maturation of the immune response to diseases. I feel embarrassed to hear and read of orthodox medicine's futile efforts to stop children from getting childhood diseases — it is a sign of ignorance and a naive approach.

The fanaticism fed by ignorance, irrational fear of illness and greed are the moving forces behind the ritual of vaccination. Vaccine injections represent an enormous and unjustified insult to a young child.

5. Normal portals of entry for infectious agents — mouth and nose — are instrumental in the natural immunological
process. Vaccines, being injected into the blood stream, bypass these normal passages.

Immunologists repeatedly warn that unless vaccination exactly emulates the natural immunity process, life-long immunity cannot and will not be achieved.

Moreover, introducing vaccines into the circulation gives them direct access to the major immune organs and tissues without any obvious way of getting rid of them.

Various elements of vaccines can stay in the body for long periods of time, some of them permanently, often by incorporating themselves into the genetic material of the host's cells. This provokes constant effort to expel these foreign substances leading to a systematic weakening of the immune system.

Constant antigenic stimulation of the immune system leads to cancer and leukaemia and a host of other autoimmune diseases.

Instead of providing protection against acute infectious diseases, vaccination drives the disease deeper into the body and leads to chronic infestation by the pathogenic agent. Subacute sclerosing panencephalitis is one of many examples of this slow process. Warts, herpes, shingles and AIDS are other examples.

6. Proponents of vaccination claim victory over diseases.
Despite all this being published in innumerable medical papers, those pushing for mass vaccination seem totally to ignore the equally well-documented fact that all infectious diseases, including those against which they vaccinate, have been on the decline for decades, before any vaccine was even developed.

Better living conditions, better nutrition and uncrowded living, and above all, better sanitation and clean water are the only factors that should be credited with the fall in incidence, mortality and especially severity of infectious diseases.

The best evidence for the validity of this is that many diseases, like bubonic plague, scarlet fever and tuberculosis which used to cause many deaths, have disappeared without mass vaccination programmes.

Even smallpox receded substantially, although not entirely, despite the very low percentage of people vaccinated. Indeed, those countries with the highest vaccination rates experienced time and again the biggest smallpox epidemics with very high mortality.

None of these disease has the ability to spread these days, even though bubonic plague occurs in small outbreaks even in the United States and tested domestic and semi-feral animals show antibody to Yersiniapestis.
Bubonic plague, tuberculosis and smallpox have potent animal reservoirs.

Nevertheless their importance has totally disappeared; the only factors relevant to this being improved nutrition and better living conditions. Even influenza epidemics do not eventuate any more. In my opinion, the reason for this is that some 40%-50% of people (at least in the developed countries) take regular supplements of vitamins, and especially of vitamin C.

Flu vaccines not only do not prevent influenza outbreaks, they introduced serious and deadly reactions like the Guillain-Barre syndrome and the Legionnaires' disease.

Many data indicate that the existing downward trend at the time of the introduction of many vaccines like whooping cough was actually slowed down after mass vaccination started. Based on hospital admissions, it was estimated recently that some 125,000 cases of whooping cough per year occur in the United States despite mandatory vaccination. This incidence matches the reported cases of whooping cough in the countries that abandoned whooping cough vaccination.

7. Proponents of vaccination often misrepresent results of trials and tests of vaccines. Babies that died during the trial are as a rule excluded from evaluation. A convenient 'waste basket' label called cot death is readily available.

Serious side effects, especially of a neurologic nature, are considered 'coincidental'. Infections which are directly caused by vaccine injections, due to their ability to lower the resistance of the host, are also described as 'coincidental'. Many diseases have been renamed and reclassified to conceal the true nature of vaccine-caused disease: instead of paralytic poliomyelitis we have cerebral palsy, smallpox has become monkey pox or white pox.

Researchers often do not quite understand their own raw data. Therefore it is very important to study in detail the basic data on which many trials of vaccine effectiveness or safety are based. Conclusions contradicting the data are often expressed and published. Absurd reasoning in medical papers is not rare. As if the only conclusions allowed are that despite all the demonstrated ineffectiveness and dangers of various vaccines, vaccination must go on. The pain and deaths of babies seem quite irrelevant. As if the death of a small baby was a lesser death.

8. Fear and intimidation are powerful weapons. These are the weapons of mental torture applied to make parents submit their babies to this barbaric, unscientific and totally unnecessary procedure.

However, it is the parents who have all the power over vaccination in their hands. Therefore, it is important and indeed vital for the parents of small babies to educate themselves about everything pertaining to the well-being of their children.

Since they are left with the problems caused by vaccines, they also have to decide whether they are going to vaccinate their children or not. Parents have to realize that illness is good for the health and development of children and they have to allocate the time and patience to allow the infectious diseases to take their natural course.

Above all, parents have a moral and legal obligation to ensure health and good prospect of a full life for their children. Their loyalty should at all times be with their children and not with their peers or the medical system.

Medical doctors also have to see the writing on the wall and decide to protect and truly serve their patients. The medical system in the developed countries has become totalitarian and highly politicised.

It lacks the philosophy of healing and true knowledge of the physiology of the human body. It is little more than a big business which is mandating their procedures and enforcing their medications. Who would not wish to have a product or service that everybody has to buy by law?

9. Vaccination is the single biggest cause of cot death. Thousands of babies die every year of cot death in the so-called developed countries.

The age at which most (80%) cot deaths happen is between two and six months. Doctors usually say that this is coincidental with vaccinations. However, most studies of cot deaths and infantile convulsions do not include information on vaccination. Those few publications which listed cot death babies by the time interval from the injections to death provided the evidence of the causal association between DPT (and polio) injections and cot death even though, they, quite absurdly, concluded that there was no causal relationships between the two.

The simple scientific truth is that there was a significant and clear clustering of these deaths around the critical days as recorded by the microprocessor Cotwatch and as even accepted in a few medical papers dealing with side effects of vaccines.
These critical days are the days on which any baby has flare ups of stress induced breathing after vaccine injections.

The post-mortem findings of cot death babies are quite characteristic of the non-specific stress syndrome as defined by Hans Selye. It is sad that most medical doctors in the developed countries never heard of Selye's work. It is also sad that Hans Selye did not live long enough to see the reflection of the dynamics of his non-specific stress syndrome in breathing of babies as recorded with microprocesssor Cotwatch.

When Japan moved the vaccination age to 2 years, the entity of cot death, following DPT injections, disappeared in that country. Japan zoomed to the lowest incidence of infant mortality in the world.

10. Vaccination is one of the biggest "magic bullets". Vaccination is the epitome of ignorance and the unscientific approach to illness.

Yet, modern medicine considers itself scientific. Nothing could be further from the truth. The only scientific medical systems are those which are based on detailed and meticulous observation and knowledge of the human body and which cater to individuality. One does not need expensive and complex diagnostic tools to be able to diagnose the patient's condition and choose the right remedy.

Without the knowledge of dose-related effects of remedies and without testing these on themselves, the orthodox medical doctors will continue causing more harm than good.

Hippocrates is all but forgotten. Homeopathy, based on the intimate knowledge of the human body and the dynamics of health and illness, is the medicine of the twenty-first century. Although developed by Dr Hahnemann some two hundred years ago, it is based on the most modern understanding of the dose effect of remedies and the most modern physics of solutions. It is also based on an intimate knowledge of the dynamics of health and illness.

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