The drug biz's wartime shot-in-the-arm Voluntary vaccination vindicated If you've been a reader of mine for long at all, you know I'm not a fan of the vast majority of vaccinations - for children or adults. For the most part, I think they're needless. And since they cause hundreds of deaths per year from adverse reactions, I believe the risks of vaccination far outweigh the benefits (if there are any). But as usual, I'm in the minority on this issue. The bulk of medicine champions injecting folks with a whole litany of the very diseases they hope to prevent… Especially people who HAVE NO CHOICE: Soldiers. A year and a half ago (Daily Dose, 6/17/2003), I sounded the alarm about how the U.S. military is forcing our troops to submit to all manner of vaccinations - often against their will - in the name of readiness for warfare. To recap, I told you about how our brave servicemen and women endure endless injections designed to "protect" them against bio-toxins like smallpox, anthrax, ricin and others, plus a potent dose of "pre-treatment" against chemical warfare agents. If it doesn't kill them, that is. Several have died, and others have been severely sickened by the practice - and these are just the cases that made the news. As it turns out, some of these chemicals haven't been tested on humans yet. That's right: Our soldiers have become guinea pigs in massive drug studies! Those who refuse the shots face court martial and prison time, or at the very least, a dishonorable booting from the armed forces. Hundreds, in fact, have refused injections, some having been discharged in punishment, according to a recent Reuters health article. How is this possible? A legal loophole exempts soldiers in times of war from the "informed consent" laws that civilians like you and I are protected by. But in a rare and encouraging decision handed down by our judiciary, a federal judge has set aside a ruling by the Food and Drug Administration that declared the anthrax vaccine currently being pumped into our troops as "safe." Common side effects of the over one million vaccinations so far injected in our soldiers have included joint pain, extreme fatigue, and memory loss. What's this mean? It means that the government, at least for now, can't force the vaccine onto non-consenting troops without a special order from the President. The ruling came in the wake of a lawsuit filed by several soldiers and civilians challenging the Department of Defense's vaccination policy. Not a clean win, true, but a step in the right direction. What really troubles me about all of this is that the military may not be forcing the vaccination of our troops simply for their own safety. It might be a far more insidious reason causing our brave soldiers to be "shot" by our own government. Keep reading… As I've shown you time and again, drugs are big business - among the most profitable enterprises on planet Earth. But within the patent medicine world, there's a redheaded stepchild that just doesn't usually make much money: Vaccines. Why? For one, many vaccines (like this year's much-ballyhooed flu vaccine) have to go through costly reformulation every single year to keep pace with the latest strains of killer bugs. Secondly, vaccines have to be offered for reasonable prices so that everyone can afford them - the bad press a drug company would face for jacking up vaccine prices would cost them far more than the extra profit they'd make on the vaccines themselves. So it's kind of a catch-22 for the drug makers. They have to develop vaccines to stay competitive, but unless they corner the market on a blockbuster vaccine for some new illness, it's hard for them to make much money on this class of medications. Unless they're selling millions of doses to the U.S. Department of Defense. Yes, wartime has become just the shot in the arm the vaccine business needed. All of a sudden, several million preventive doses are needed for a half-dozen or more different bio-toxins. Think the drug makers aren't licking their chops at that prospect? No wonder the FDA is rushing to declare even virtually untested vaccines as "safe" - it means billions of dollars in profits for the drug business. This, in turn, means untold millions in tax revenue pouring into the government's
coffers. True, the tax dollars these drugs cost far outweigh the tax revenue generated, but since when has the government cared about being fiscally responsible with your cash? All they care about is being able to say, "Look, the economy's growing! Just look at how the drug business is booming! We've created thousands of jobs in drug plants! Vote for us!" Plus, the drug companies reap the benefits of the biggest publicly funded drug studies ever conducted - using our troops as the guinea pigs! Look, I'm not claiming that these are the only reasons our troops get vaccinated, but logic dictates that they have to be a factor in the equation. That scares me a little.
Your "vaccine" against bureaucratic bamboozlement,
William Campbell Douglass II, MD | 
