Vaccination and the Loss of Health Freedom: A Review By Mrs Vera West

     Dr Judy Wilyman, has published her controversial PhD thesis done at the University of Wollongong in 2015, entitled A Critical Analysis of the Australian Government’s Rationale for Immunisation Policy. The book is entitled Vaccination: Australia’s Loss of Health Freedom: A Critical Analysis of the Australian Government’s Rationale for its Vaccination Policy (Vaccination Decisions, 2020). The opening quote on the endorsement page well sums up the controversy at the time, which I covered; her thesis supervisor Professor Brian Martin is quoted; “I have studied issues of intellectual freedom for many years; never have I heard of a campaign more relentless and abusive than the one against Judy.” Right he is too; there was an organised attempt to prevent her getting, then keeping, the PhD by various forces, that will not be named here, because of sheer fear. And the media went along for the ride, smearing her good name and qualifications. It was all pretty disgusting. But I still wondered why they were so upset, at the level of utter mouth-foaming madness. Reading the book, I now understand since this is the most comprehensive critique of vaccination ideology I have read.

    The book has three forewords that sum up the thesis of the book; that vaccination legislation is produced by the influence of Big Pharma; “Vaccine manufacturers can literally put any chemical they want into a vaccine and the FDA has nothing to say about it” including mercury/ thimerosal (US), and aluminium; and that issues of safety, including autism and vaccination induced injuries, are downplayed. “Science has been blinded by false narratives and kept in the dark on vaccination risk” (p.v) Alarmingly, and showing the illusion of scientific objectivity today, vaccine manufacturers “ghost write” publications and studies, and pay medical professionals to put their names to it, fraudulently. The studies then appear in pharmaceutically sponsored journals, leading to doctors and governments recommending the vaccines as a matter of fact.

     Underlying Wilyman’s critique is an alternative philosophy of medicine to the mainstream, and she quotes Professor Frank MacFarlane Burnett, the 1956 Nobel Prize in Medline winner in Immunological research who said: “Genetics, nutrition, psychological and environmental factors may play a more important role in the mechanics for disease defence than those of sub-clinical infection assumed by vaccination procedures.” In fact, Burnett thought that vaccination programs could genetically weaken humanity, “against the best interests of the state.”

     This is seen in the risks associated with vaccines, which we don’t hear much about in the Australian debate. But, in the US, the Vaccination Injury Compensation Program paid out over $ 4 billion to people harmed by vaccines.  One survey quoted in the book indicated that 39 percent of unvaccinated children had health issues, but 88.6 percent of vaccinated children had health issues according to their parents.

     The part of the thesis which must have really upset the medical/Big Pharma establishment must surely be Wilyman’s devastating critique of the lack of scientific justification behind vaccines, full stop. “Proof that ‘vaccine-induced’ seroconversion results in immunity to disease has not been demonstrated in controlled clinical trials” (p.186).

     There is a “lack of empirical evidence for the safety and efficacy of vaccines and for the claim that they create herd immunity.” The government has not supplied statistics showing that diseases are mainly occurring in unvaccinated people, nor is the government showing recognition of the “evidence of harm being caused by vaccines.” Government policy is “not to improve health but to increase the use of vaccines in the population and they are based on industry-funded science without any evidence to demonstrate that they can improve health outcomes.” Wilyman documents in an appendix (appendix 9) financial links to pharmaceutical companies to the government, in a kind of feeding cycle.

     The results of these conflicts of interest has also been recognised by other researchers, such as Marcia Angell, in an even wider context: 

“No one knows the total amount provided by drug companies to physicians, but I estimate from the annual reports of the top nine US drug companies that it comes to tens of billions of dollars a year. By such means, the pharmaceutical industry has gained enormous control over how doctors evaluate and use its own products. Its extensive ties to physicians, particularly senior faculty at prestigious medical schools, affect the results of research, the way medicine is practiced, and even the definition of what constitutes a disease. Consider the clinical trials by which drugs are tested in human subjects.5 Before a new drug can enter the market, its manufacturer must sponsor clinical trials to show the Food and Drug Administration that the drug is safe and effective, usually as compared with a placebo or dummy pill. The results of all the trials (there may be many) are submitted to the FDA, and if one or two trials are positive—that is, they show effectiveness without serious risk—the drug is usually approved, even if all the other trials are negative. Drugs are approved only for a specified use—for example, to treat lung cancer—and it is illegal for companies to promote them for any other use. But physicians may prescribe approved drugs “off label”—i.e., without regard to the specified use—and perhaps as many as half of all prescriptions are written for off-label purposes. After drugs are on the market, companies continue to sponsor clinical trials, sometimes to get FDA approval for additional uses, sometimes to demonstrate an advantage over competitors, and often just as an excuse to get physicians to prescribe such drugs for patients. (Such trials are aptly called “seeding” studies.)

Since drug companies don’t have direct access to human subjects, they need to outsource their clinical trials to medical schools, where researchers use patients from teaching hospitals and clinics, or to private research companies (CROs), which organize office-based physicians to enroll their patients. Although CROs are usually faster, sponsors often prefer using medical schools, in part because the research is taken more seriously, but mainly because it gives them access to highly influential faculty physicians—referred to by the industry as “thought-leaders” or “key opinion leaders” (KOLs). These are the people who write textbooks and medical journal papers, issue practice guidelines (treatment recommendations), sit on FDA and other governmental advisory panels, head professional societies, and speak at the innumerable meetings and dinners that take place every year to teach clinicians about prescription drugs. Having KOLs like Dr. Biederman on the payroll is worth every penny spent. A few decades ago, medical schools did not have extensive financial dealings with industry, and faculty investigators who carried out industry-sponsored research generally did not have other ties to their sponsors. But schools now have their own manifold deals with industry and are hardly in a moral position to object to their faculty behaving in the same way. A recent survey found that about two thirds of academic medical centers hold equity interest in companies that sponsor research within the same institution. A study of medical school department chairs found that two thirds received departmental income from drug companies and three fifths received personal income. In the 1980s medical schools began to issue guidelines governing faculty conflicts of interest but they are highly variable, generally quite permissive, and loosely enforced.

  https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2009/01/15/drug-companies-doctorsa-story-of-corruption/

     Apart from the contemporary material, Wilyman gives a fascinating discussion of historical sources disputing received vaccination “wisdom.” For example, Charles Darwin’s rival, Alfred Russell Wallace, in 1888 noted that the efficacy of the smallpox vaccine had not been subjected to clinical trials at the time, and concluded that the use of the smallpox vaccine was a “scandal” and a “delusion” due to the lack of any “systematic control experiment.” The mortality was reduced, not by vaccines, but by public health measures that were implemented before vaccines were available: I. Illich, Medical Nemesis, (1976).

     All of this destroys the government’s no jab, no pay ideology, which has been a tyrannical attack upon the health freedom of parent’s using the threat of poverty to produce compliance. Dr Wilyman has done the community a tremendous service by her most scholarly research, but of course, she has paid the inevitable price as the system mobilised against her. But, her book is out here, ready for purchase, and this book too is well worth getting to pass around.
  https://vaccinationdecisions.net/my-book-australias-loss-of-health-freedom-is-now-available/