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By Christine
Colebeck
Today is my daughter's sweet
16th birthday but we will not be celebrating. Instead I will light a candle
and when I blow it out I will make a wish in my daughter's memory. My
wish is for all mother's worldwide, that you will educate yourselves and
that you make informed choices so that you may prevent unnecessary tragedy
and be spared from my pain.
Laura's
Story
After 41 weeks of pregnancy,
on July 27th, 1986, a perfect and healthy little baby, Laura Marie, made
her entrance into the world. We were welcomed home by family and friends
anxiously waiting to meet the new family member. They showered her with
so many beautiful, little tiny, pink dresses, we joked that she would
never be able to wear them all in one lifetime.
Our lives changed completely
and now revolved around stroller walks in the park, visiting friends,
changing diapers, night feedings and shopping for more little pink dresses.
We were parents now, we had a family and life was absolutely perfect.
I took Laura for several baby
check-ups at the pediatrician. She was a kind and gentle older woman.
At 3 months old, the pediatrician was very pleased with Laura's development
and weight gain and vaccinated her with DPT OPV. I didn't even question
her, I knew that all my friend's babies had this same vaccine and "all
good mothers" vaccinated their children to protect them. I left the
pediatrician's office and walked home.
Laura was very fussy, which
was unusual. She was crying loudly all the way home in the stroller. When
we got home, I realized she had urinated so heavily she wet everything
in the stroller. Then her cry turned into screaming and she developed
a fever, her leg was very swollen and red, and felt hot. I called the
pediatrician who told me this was "normal" and to give her Tempra.
I gave her baby Tempra and I felt better, the pediatrician had assured
me this was normal.
Laura continued to scream and
I could no longer console her. My every instinct told me this was not
normal but I was young with my first child and trusted the doctor. I could
not hold Laura in my arms because she screamed louder as any movement
of her leg seemed to cause her terrible pain. I put her in the swing and
she cried herself to sleep. I was so relieved, the Tempra was working
and the doctor must have been right. I began to feel silly for all my
worrying. A short time later, Laura woke up screaming and spent the evening
screaming and sleeping on and off.
She had no appetite and nothing
made her stop crying. Finally it was bedtime and she cried in her crib,
until she fell asleep. She had never cried herself to sleep before and
I felt very bad for letting her but if I held her, she screamed louder.
My husband came home from work and I told him about everything that had
happened that day. Laura was sleeping soundly in her crib and we were
both relieved that she seemed to be feeling better and decided not to
worry... I should have worried.
In the morning I awoke and
was startled to realize my husband had slept in for work. I immediately
knew something was wrong and the worry from the previous night came rushing
back to me. I quickly ran to her crib, with a feeling of dread. She did
not look right. I closed my eyes tight and opened them again, and considered
the possibility that this was a dream, but when I opened my eyes she looked
dead.
I went into shock and after
that, much of this day remains a blur. I touched her and she was very
warm. I screamed for my husband to call 911.
I watched as he performed CPR,
my body was frozen and I couldn't move. He tried to revive our child to
no avail. He was shouting for me to open the door for the paramedics,
I was temporarily jolted back to reality and I went and opened the door.
I could now move but couldn't speak. I just stood there numbly shaking
my head, feeling completely helpless as dozens of paramedics, police and
firemen rushed past me into our home. I didn't cry, and I wanted to scream
at them to leave her alone but I couldn't speak. She was on the floor
and they were shocking her tiny body, in the little bedroom with the yellow
painted walls and clown wallpaper. I stood there praying in my head that
they would just leave her alone, that they would get out of her bedroom
and that I would wake up from this horrible dream.
Then I heard someone saying
there was a faint pulse and I suddenly felt hopeful. She was rushed from
the house in an ambulance. It was then that the homicide detectives led
us into another room and the interrogation began.
They decided that my husband
and I needed to be questioned in separate rooms. I immediately realized
they suspected that we had done this to our child. We all know that perfect
children do not suddenly die for no reason. I was silent, I had already
decided in my own mind that this was somehow all my fault and although
I wasn't quite sure what I had done to kill her, I was convinced that
I had somehow caused this to happen. Perhaps, I was being punished by
god for a sin or perhaps it happened because I had let her cry herself
to sleep that night. The fact remained that my child was dead and "good
mothers" do not have dead children.
My husband began to protest
loudly about the line of questioning and he demanded we be taken immediately
to the hospital, to see our child. The detectives finally took us to the
hospital and put us in the "bad news room." The doctor came
and insisted we sit down before he spoke to us. He began telling us that
they had tried this and that and then finally he said the words that would
echo in my ears for a lifetime:
"She is dead."
The pediatrician whom I so
respected and adored broke down and cried when I gave her the news on
the phone. She went back and forth defending the vaccine that she was
told was safe, and blaming it for killing my child and those who told
her it was safe.
She then told me that she also
had another patient, an infant boy, die after this same vaccination.
Then the detectives took us
home for more questions, often repeating the same questions several times
until they grew tired of asking them. The questions constantly centered
around our involvement, then they searched the house and checked for signs
of forced entry. My husband repeatedly told them that he thought the vaccine
had killed our child and told them over and over about her unusual behavior
since she was vaccinated.
Everyone we knew arrived at
our house. I made coffee and tidied the house, like it was any other day
and we were having "guests". Shock is a strange and wonderful
thing and of course you don't know you are in it.
My parents finally insisted
on taking me to their house for a few days, while my husband and his friends
had the horrendous task of packing up the nursery because I couldn't stand
to look at it any longer. The room I had so lovingly made was now empty
and a source of great pain.
Several days later, after the
funeral and the tiny white coffin that was so small my husband carried
it alone, I finally came out of shock and allowed myself to cry a river.
I cried for all the things I would never do with my daughter. All the
ballet classes I would never take her to, the wedding I would never attend,
the grandchildren I would never know and all the dreams I would never
realize with her. I cried for all that was and all that would never be.
There was an emptiness inside of me that threatened to swallow me up whole,
as I fell into the depths of grief during the darkest days of my life.
The detectives eventually became
satisfied that we had not harmed our daughter in any way and the investigation
into her death ended. We were then left without answers.
The doctors did not want to
talk about her death being related in any way to the vaccine and, one
after the other, refused to answer our many questions. I was repeatedly
told that vaccines were for "the greater good." I was even told
that loss of life through immunization was "expected" in the
war against disease but these losses were considered to be at "acceptable"
levels. However, this did not feel very acceptable or good to me as a
mother with empty arms that ached for my child. The coroner finally told
us months later that the cause of death was determined to be "SIDS"
(sudden infant death syndrome), meaning "no known cause," and
refused to release a copy of the autopsy report to us.
It took almost a year for us
to obtain this report and to our great horror, we realized that the autopsy
summery was copied directly from the vaccine product monograph under the
heading "Contraindications" as follows:
"Sudden infant death syndrome
has been reported following administration of
vaccines containing Diphtheria, tetanus toxoids, and pertussis vaccine.
However, the significance of these reports is not clear. One common factor
is the age where primary immunization was done between the age of 2 to
6 months, a period where most sudden infant death syndromes are found
to 1occur with a peak incidence being at 2 to 4 months."
There was no toxicology testing
performed and the pediatrician never filed an adverse vaccine reaction
report with health authorities. I later learned that most vaccine-induced
deaths in this country are listed as SIDS and SIDS statistics are NOT
included in vaccine adverse reaction data, even if a child dies only a
few hours after receiving inoculation. This data is presented to physicians
and the public to reassure them that vaccines are
safe.
The government's own literature
advises that there has been little or no testing in the area of vaccine
safety or efficacy. Essentially, our children are the test. According
to their literature, immunization is "the most cost effective"
way to prevent disease. Nowhere in their literature does it claim to be
the safest. We are trading our children's lives to save the government
money. We are told that the benefits outweigh the risks but many of the
diseases that we vaccinate for are not even life threatening; however,
the vaccine itself has the potential to kill.
Vaccines kill at a much higher
rate than we are led to believe. We play vaccine roulette with our children's
lives and we never know which child will fall victim next.
If the odds are 1 in 500 thousand
for death, 1 in 100 thousand for permanent brain injury, 1 in 1700 for
seizures and convulsions or one in 100 for adverse reaction, are you willing
to take that chance? Are any odds acceptable enough to convince you to
gamble with your child's life?
I can assure you that death
from vaccination is neither quick nor painless. I helplessly watched my
daughter suffer an excruciatingly slow death as she screamed and arched
her back in pain, while the vaccine did as it was intended to do and assaulted
her immature immune system. The poisons used as preservatives seeped through
her tiny body, overwhelming her vital organs one by one until they collapsed.
It is an image that will haunt me forever and I hope no other parent ever
has to witness it.
A death sentence considered
too inhumane for this county's most violent criminals was handed down
to my beautiful, innocent, infant daughter, death by lethal injection.
Today, on my daughter's birthday,
I will grieve not only for the loss of my own child but for all the innocent
children for which the benefits of vaccines do not outweigh the risks
and are unnecessarily sentenced to death by lethal injection, under the
guise of "the greater good." The true war is not against disease;
we have somehow become our own worst enemy by putting our faith in science
instead of nature. Today, I call on all mothers across the world to join
me in putting an end to this senseless slaughter of our most precious
resource, our children.
Response
from Dawn Richardson, President, PROVE
Dear PROVE Members
I am forwarding this ...
as a tribute to baby Laura and all the other children who have been injured
or killed by a vaccine so that parents can learn another side to the vaccine
story.
When I was almost 8 months
pregnant with one of my daughters, I had volunteered to go to the Travis
County Morgue with Karin Schumacher who, for years before she went to
Law School, ran the NVIC news-list. Karin asked me to help her go through
autopsy reports of infants listed as SIDS deaths and look at vaccination
information. I will never forget the experience. We sat there in this
basement buried in infant autopsy reports as my own baby kicked and turned
inside of me.
Here were two of our observations:
1) A highly disproportionate
amount of SIDS deaths clustered at 2, 4, and 6 months -- which are the
very times infants are vaccinated. If vaccines had nothing to do with
these, the numbers should have been randomly spread throughout the first
6 months of life. Not so. I challenge the naysayers to go to any morgue
in the country and to be honest and see what I'm talking about.
2) It was shocking at how
rare it was for the vaccine information to be recorded and how little
investigating into the cause of death of these babies was actually done.
It floored me that the when the vaccine information was even mentioned,
it was often so incomplete. Medical examiners routinely missed asking
for this indispensable information and failed to note the correlation
of the date when the child died to even raise the question.
One of the things that struck
me when reading Christine's story ... is that here we are 16 years
later and so many doctors are still downplaying and denying the risks
of vaccines and healthy babies are still dying after being vaccinated.
One of the most offensive things
that Senator
Frist has in his vaccine bill which shields the drug companies from
all liability when a vaccine injures or kills someone is that he is proposing
that the federal government increase the amount of money that a parent
receives from the government compensation program when their child is
killed by a vaccine. Parents are not willing to be bought off with this
blood money. Elected officials like Frist who want to eliminate the financial
responsibility of the drug companies all together and throw the bone to
parents that the government will pay them more if the government mandated
vaccine kills their kid need to be voted out of Congress.If drug companies have ZERO threat of liability,
the one thing we can be certain of is that stories like [Laura's] will
become far more common.
The key to change is education.
Fortunately, the Internet allows parents to educate parents. Please stop
for a quiet moment after reading the note and say a prayer for all the
babies whose lives were ended before they even got a chance to really
start ... and then take the time to forward this on to other parents.
Sincerely, Dawn Richardson
President, PROVE
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