I find it so disturbing that an entire New York Times opinion piece written by Tara Haelle about the anti-vaccine movement pussyfoots around the subject without actually addressing why a person is vaccine hesitant.

According to Haelle, anti-vaccine campaigners such as Joshua Coleman whom she mentions in her first paragraph, as well as other groups, are opportunistic, exploitative, ‘spread misinformation about vaccines,’ and have ‘set back decades of public health advances‘–accusations which are in and of themselves entirely superficial and misinformed.

The vilification of this group is no accident, because conversely to humanize these people, and explain the context of their actual position, would inadvertently extend compassion and validity to a very small group of people who, as it turns out, did vaccinate their children once.

Why are people anti-vaccine?

It’s an inconvenient truth that the vast majority of people who would be labeled ‘anti-vaccine,’ started out as normal vaccinating parents, and only stopped after they witnessed an injury or reaction in their child or a loved one. If it were any other medication, there would be no controversy at all–lots of medications are readily acknowledged to have side effects, even serious side effects, and not be well tolerated by all people.

But when it comes to vaccines, and reactions to them, it’s a whole different story. What Tara Haelle calls an “opportunistic” group of people are really the victims, or the collateral damage, of an ever-growing vaccination paradigm, that relies on a suppression of any information that questions or undermines its authority. These people–who are the haunting reminder that vaccines have palpable risks–threaten the paradigm not because they are lying, but because they are telling the truth.

They are the ‘one in a millions,‘ the extremely ‘rare‘ reactions, the stigmatized vaccine injuries of autism and SIDS (no, science has not been settled in either of these instances), SUDC is another (1 in 7 children who die of SUDC had a vaccine less than 2 weeks prior to death), as well as the health conditions that are medically acknowledged as happening more frequently in the vaccinated: asthma, epilepsy, ear infections and eczema.

The injuries experienced by their children or their loved ones, as unfair as they were, are no different in my opinion than a soldier whose leg is destroyed by a landmine. The sacrifices these families have made in a war they never enlisted, without even their full informed consent, is sadly met with disbelief, callous disregard, and gaslighting. People who should be cared for and protected, the vaccine injured are instead victimized by an unaccountable, self-involved medical system and labeled as ‘anti-science’ and ‘anti-vaccine,’ even though they followed the rules, and they did what was expected.

Their total experience is a vanishing point in medicine and science, government and media, a void which was destined to be filled by a community of people who have been there, who believe them, hear them, see them, and will fight for them. We fill a void made by people like Tara Haelle.

The unvaccinated are a small minority

The numbers of vaccine injured children and adults far outweigh the numbers of children who are truly 100% unvaccinated, but you would never hear that from the media or politicians, who have weaponized the “unvaccinated” as a way to drive fear and policy.

A 2018 National Immunization Survey found only 1.3% of 2 year olds born in 2015 had no vaccines. This one percent minority while statistically inconsequential to every theory of herd immunity, is super charged as ‘the biggest threat to global health’–sadly ignoring the real reason for vaccine hesitancy: the ‘vaccinated but injured’.

It is only a threat in as much as unvaccinated children are much healthier than their vaccinated peers which belies the one-size-fits-all vaccine schedule so widely marketed.

Once you hear or read the actual stories, and explore the information for yourself, it becomes clear there are a vast spectrum of risks with vaccines that are downplayed and underestimated to maintain a public health facade that haphazardly doesn’t factor in the negative health consequences of its own creation. All the negative non-specific health effects of vaccinations are completely ignored, over a looming and unfounded fear that somehow the infectious diseases of yesteryear (lest me remind you that pre-vaccine era is also pre-plumbing, pre-sanitation, pre-antibiotic era) are going to return with a vengeance if we miss a dose, yet historically we never vaccinated children against tuberculosis, scarlet fever, or typhoid fever in the United States and those aren’t circulating.

Unlike with Joshua Coleman, Tara Haelle brushes over Jennifer Larson’s reason for being an anti-vaccine activist: Jennifer believes vaccination caused her child’s autism. I have no reason to doubt Jennifer’s story–our scientific experts still to this day have not designed a case control with a completely unvaccinated control group with regard to autism. Merely removing the MMR vaccine, or removing thimerosal, or comparing the injection of 5 antigens to 200 antigens could never really answer the question: Do vaccines cause autism? For that, we need a completely unexposed group, an unvaccinated control group, and there is not a single autism study that does this.

Otto’s Story

Joshua Coleman’s son, Otto, was born perfectly healthy and developed normally. He met all milestones, had begun walking, climbing and even running. At around 15/16 months old, he had a well-baby visit on May 25th, 2010, and got 4 vaccine injections: Dtap, hib, prevnar13, and polio.

Soon after the shots, he started walking a little wobbly, but his parents thought he was just figuring his body out and still learning how to walk or just being silly. There was no real indication anything was wrong. Little did his parents know but Otto was losing muscle control.

And then one morning in early July, Otto woke up and couldn’t move his legs, or walk at all.

They rushed him to the ER, where doctors ordered an MRI and spinal tap, and doctors diagnosed Otto with transverse myelitis, a neurological disorder caused by inflammation of the spinal cord. 

Doctors brought up that this could be caused by either an airborne virus or vaccination. The Coleman family flew to Johns Hopkins Hospital where physicians there confirmed this to be a “one in a million” reaction to vaccines. Doctors told the family it was very rare, and the Coleman family believed it. Joshua did not start researching vaccines yet.

The Coleman’s welcomed their second baby, and they gave him his first round of vaccines, but he got very sick. That’s when the bells went off, and he started researching vaccines. He thought…. maybe there was something in their family’s genetics that make them more susceptible to vaccine related injuries.

Finally, he fell down the proverbial rabbit hole. And like any parent, he wanted to protect his children from being harmed again, or treated differently for being susceptible to vaccine injury–which I think any parent would do if they found themselves in his circumstance.

Years later, Otto, now 12, is a typical pre-teen in every respect. He’s into books and video games. While he did get minor sensation back in his legs, he did not get any muscle control, and he is still in a wheel chair.

Hear Joshua Coleman’s story in his own words:

V is for Vaccine

After SB277 removed all non-medical exemptions in California, Joshua Coleman and Olivia Mikos co-founded V is for Vaccine, which is a vaccine risk awareness campaign that uses giant signs, irrefutable facts, and simple and uniform messaging to break through barriers of vaccine misinformation.

You may have seen one of his large protest events either in person, or on the news. V is for Vaccines uses very characteristic visual displays: bold block letters in a simplified color scheme often consisting of black, red and white. He or his group has set up protests at city capitals, in front of such iconic places as Disneyland or Comic-Con, and at free-way overpasses.

Last year, nearly every US State and many countries worldwide simultaneously draped one of the V is for Vaccine signs over freeway overpasses echoing messages of vaccine facts such as “COVID-19 Vaccine Manufacturers are Exempt from Liability.” It received lots of news coverage, with news anchors painstakingly reading every word on the sign, so you knew the truth so many are not allowed to say without retaliation.

Before forming V is for Vaccine, Joshua Coleman travelled with the Vaxxed crew, as one of the videographers, filming parents and families describing in detail their vaccine injury stories.

This is a club no one wants to be in.

There is a remarkable privilege in the ignorance of not knowing about vaccine injuries.

But if you do find yourself in this situation, and many more people have in the last year because of the COVID vaccines, you can bet your life it would awaken something inside of you. You would be standing beside people like Joshua Coleman, holding up signs, calling your legislators, sharing your story, others stories, passing out advocacy materials, screaming from the rooftops–doing EVERYTHING in your power to make this all stop.

To at the very least, make it so we all have the choice. Because at the end of the day, all we want is choice.

Without choice, there is no freedom.

Rally at the Sacramento Capitol, Wednesday September 8th

Join Joshua Coleman and thousands more health freedom activists at the CA State Capitol on Wednesday, September 8 at 10 a.m. More information here.