How the Truth about Vaccination has been Suppressed for Years

Dr Vernon Coleman





These days, doctors only get to read and hear what the drug industry wants them to read and hear. Anything controversial, anything questioning the status quo, must be suppressed.

A year or two ago I was invited to speak at a new conference in London. The conference was, I was told, intended to tackle the subject of medication errors and adverse reactions to prescribed drugs. The company organising the conference was called PasTest. `For over 30 years PasTest has been providing medical education to professionals within the NHS,' they told me. `Building on our commitment to quality in medical and healthcare education, PasTest is creating a range of healthcare events which focus on the professional development of clinicians and managers who are working together to deliver healthcare services for the UK. Our aim is to provide a means for those who are in a position to improve services on both national and regional levels. The topics covered by our conferences are embraced within policy, best practice, case study, clinical management and evidence based practice. PasTest endeavours to source the best speakers who will engage audiences with balanced, relevant and thought-provoking programmes. PasTest has proven in the past that by using thorough investigative research and keeping up-to-date with advances in healthcare and medical practice, a premium educational event can be achieved.'

That's what they said.

Sounds wonderful, I thought (in one of my more naive moments).

Iatrogenesis (doctor induced disease) is something of a speciality of mine. I have written numerous books and articles on the subject. My campaigns have resulted in more drugs being banned or controlled than anyone else's.

In addition to my speaking at the conference the organisers wanted me to help them decide on the final programme. I thought the conference was an important one and would give me a good opportunity to tell NHS staff the truth. I signed a contract.

PasTest wrote to confirm my appointment as a consultant and speaker for the PasTest Conference Division. And then there was silence. My office repeatedly asked for details of when and where the conference was being held.

Silence.

Eventually a programme for the event appeared on the Internet. Curiously, my name was not on the list of speakers.

Here is part of the blurb promoting the conference:

`Against a background of increasing media coverage into the number of UK patients who are either becoming ill or dying due to adverse reactions to medication our conference aims to explain the current strategies to avoid Adverse Drug reactions and what can be done to educate patients.'

Putting the blame on patients for problems caused by prescription drugs is brilliant. Most drug related problems are caused by the stupidity of doctors not the ignorance of patients. If the aim is to educate patients on how best to avoid prescription drug problems the advice would be simple: `Don't trust doctors.'

The promotion for the conference claims that `It is estimated errors in medication...account for 4 per cent of hospital bed capacity.' And that prescription drug problems `reportedly kill up to 10,000 people a year in the UK'. As I would have shown (had I not been banned from the conference) these figures are absurdly low.

The list of speakers included a variety of people I had never heard of including one speaker representing The Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry and another representing the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency.

Delegates representing the NHS were expected to pay £250 plus VAT (?£293.75) to attend the event. Delegates whose Trust would be funding the cost were asked to apply for a Health Authority Approval form.

So why was I apparently banned from this conference?

This is what PasTest said when we asked them: `certain parties felt that he (Vernon Coleman) was too controversial to speak and as a result would not attend.'

Could that `certain parties', I wonder, be the drug industry? Is the drug industry now deciding whom they will allow to speak to doctors and NHS staff on the problems caused by prescription drugs? If I was banned at the behest of the drug industry do NHS bosses know that people attending such conferences will only hear speakers approved by the drug industry and that speakers telling the truth will be banned? (I think it is safe to assume that I won't be invited to speak at any more conferences for NHS staff.)

If I was banned at the behest of the medical profession why are doctors frightened of the truth?

I could not, of course, be banned by the NHS itself. Why would the NHS not want its employees to know the truth about drug related problems?

Why are people who had me banned so frightened of what I would say? It can surely only be because they know that I would have caused embarrassment by telling the truth.

The scary bottom line is that the NHS paid to send delegates to a conference where someone representing the drug industry spoke to them on drug safety. But I was banned. The truth was uninvited.

Details of the ban were sent to every national and major local newspaper in Britain. None reported it.

The question is this: If doctors or drug companies believe I am wrong why don't they let me speak and then explain why I am wrong?

The unavoidable answer is that they know my criticisms of the profession and the industry are accurate and unanswerable.

What happened with PasTest is by no means unusual. All sorts of strange people (mainly politicians and administrators) have taken control of medical care these days; their brains are uncluttered with scientific stuff and they `know best'. Vaccination is now a political issue rather than a scientific issue. Facts are just a damned nuisance that get in the way and about as welcome as hot dog vendors at a meeting of vegetarians.

When the London Assembly (in reality the best known EU Regional Assembly in England) invited members of the public to send in thoughts on vaccination for their `rapporteurship' I sent them a copy of my book Coleman's Laws, which contains a lengthy medical explanation of why vaccination is irresponsible and dangerous and a significant cause of illness. An administration officer for the London Assembly wrote to thank me for my views which would, I was assured, be included in their analysis of evidence for the report.

However, there was no mention of any of my evidence in their report and the details of the evidence I had submitted did not appear in the list of references included at the back of the report. I was not surprised by this. Nor was I surprised to see that the report followed the official line. Their first conclusion was that the Department of Health should make childhood immunisation a key performance indicator for Primary Care Trusts. (In other words, GPs should be given extra money if they met vaccination performance targets.) They also recommended that all London Primary Care Trusts `should appoint an immunisation champion to work with GP practices in order to boost immunisation rates'.

I could find no mention anywhere in the report of the existence of evidence suggesting that sticking needles and potentially dangerous substances into small children might not be a good thing. There was no discussion of the evidence that vaccines are dangerous and might cause serious damage to young children and infants.

Ironically, the title of the report was `Still Missing the Point?'

I rather think they are.

And I expect that at some time in the future the same merry group will launch an investigation into why the incidence of `autism' is increasing.

I began this essay by pointing out that these days doctors only get to hear and read what the drug industry wants them to hear.

It is not, of course, only doctors who are protected from the truth.

I haven't been invited (or allowed) to discuss vaccination on the radio or television for many years. This is largely because the medical establishment (having lost a long series of debates) will no longer agree to debate any medical topic with me or, indeed, to appear on any programme which has invited me to be a participant. (I have no doubt that an awful lot of untruths have been told about me by various representatives of the medical establishment.)

Not long ago, however, I was, to my immense surprise, invited to discuss vaccination on a late evening programme on Radio City, an independent station in Liverpool. A local doctor was invited to debate with me. The result was extraordinary.

For quite a while the doctor refused to admit that doctors make any money out of giving vaccines. Until I pressed him directly he indignantly denied that doctors have a financial interest in promoting vaccination. Only when I pointed out that GPs receive fees and bonuses for vaccinating their patients did he, rather reluctantly, agree that I was right. The doctor's main defence seemed to me to be that because the Government and other doctors agreed with his views on vaccination (which were, naturally, diametrically opposed to mine) then he must be right and I must be wrong. I have never found this a very convincing argument and nor, for a while at least, did the listeners. The presenter wanted to know why the facts I was giving had never been aired before.

At the end of the programme I was told that the programme had never before had such a response from listeners. It was, I was assured, their biggest ever audience response. Listeners were desperate for more information. Many were astounded at the evidence I produced. Some accused me of scaremongering for questioning pro-vaccination propaganda and for pointing out that doctors get paid for giving vaccinations. At the end of the programme I was asked if I would make another, longer programme on the subject of vaccination. I said I would. I offered to debate the subject of vaccination with any number of pro-vaccination doctors and experts the radio station could find.

I was not, however, surprised when I never heard from them again. I contacted them to ask if they were still interested in another more intensive debate. They weren't.

And since then no other radio station has been prepared to allow me to discuss vaccination on air. I doubt if this will change. Patients, like doctors, will be protected from the inconvenient truths.

The media in general is constantly full of articles and programmes sneering at those who worry about vaccination and promoting vaccination as safe and effective.

Here's an extract from a pro-vaccination article by a columnist in Time magazine: `I'm pretty confident in the way I get my knowledge. Even in the age of Google and Wikipedia we still receive almost all our information from our peers. When presented with doubts, I don't search for detailed information from my side. I go with the consensus of mainstream media, academia and the Government. Not because they are always right but because they're right far more often than not, and I have a TiVo to watch. Also, unlike anti-vaccination people, they usually shut up after a little while.'

I could hardly believe that when I first read it and I can hardly believe it now that I've re-read it. But the truth is that most people now think like this and so the bad guys get away with their lies and their deceits and their manipulations and their spin. The drug companies are extremely powerful and effective at persuading journalists. They have bought most of the doctors and most of the medical journals and so they can be very convincing. Sometimes the pro-vaccine journalists become quite absurdly overblown in their support for vaccination. In December 2009, a magazine called Wired even claimed it was a `fact' that: `By any measure of scientific consensus, there is total agreement: vaccines are safe, effective and necessary.' And it's a fact that the moon is made of green cheese. Facts? Who needs the real thing when you can just make them up when you need them.

Most doctors are unquestioning - too frightened to upset the establishment. Asking uncomfortable questions can ruin a doctor's career. And medical journalists are just as useless. Most have very little formal medical training, they don't know what to look for, they not infrequently receive payments from drug companies (the payments are offered for articles written for drug company publications and are frequently far in excess of the sort of payments that the journalists would normally expect to receive) and they hardly ever have the courage to take on the establishment.

Far too many so-called medical and health journalists are wimpy incompetents who won't print or broadcast anything which might damage their cosy relationships with the medical establishment and the international pharmaceutical industry.

The power of the pro-vaccination lobby is powerful and far spread. When I wrote a short-lived column for the Oriental Morning Post in China the editors were at first reluctant to publish a column I had written criticising vaccination. Eventually, the editors printed the piece (simply because I refused to provide an alternative). After the column appeared, my book publishers in China wrote to tell me that the Chinese Government had informed them that they could no longer publish my books. My publishers in China had produced four of my books, all of which had sold very well, but they had been told by the Government that only `medical publishing houses' could in future publish books concerned with health care. Other Chinese publishers who had shown great enthusiasm for publishing my books suddenly changed their minds.

Note
The above essay is taken from my book `Anyone who tells you vaccines are safe and effective is lying: Here’s the Proof’. But the censorship is still taking place, of course. Today, no one dares invite me on their programmes lest they lose their platform, their sponsorship or their payment platform.

`Anyone who tells you vaccines are safe and effective is lying: Here’s the Proof’ is available as a paperback through the bookshop on www.vernoncoleman.com

Copyright Vernon Coleman July 2024





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