More From Christine Colebeck on Vaccines

My first born child was vaccinated at age 3 months with Diphtheria, tetanus, whole cell pertussis and oral polio. These were the vaccines available at that time and I was clueless. My child had an adverse reaction and died a few hours later.

When my daughter died, I was already pregnant with my next child. This was almost 20 years ago, so there was no internet to get easy access to vaccine info. In fact VRAN was just forming and the USA just formed the NVICP. The only info I had at that time was what our attorney was able to dig up. Which was actually enough to prove liability in his pertussis-brain injury case, but he was not able to prove causality and in Ontario law, both liability and causality must be proven. Of course science does not even know how the immune system functions, so it is almost impossible to prove causality without this knowledge in science.

We filed suit against Connaught laboratories with a lawyer who had a case in the Ontario supreme court system at that time against Connaught laboratories, now known as Aventis pharmaceuticals in Toronto. The maximum for wrongful death in Ontario is $250 000, not much for a life. The other case the lawyer was handling was for pertussis vaccine causing severe and permanent brain damage to an infant. We did not know all the facts at the time our child was vaccinated, but Connaught Laboratories was co-owned by the Ontario government. The government cut ties with Connaught labs after this lawsuit and switched to using acellular pertussis vaccines.

The doctor did not record the lot number of the vaccine that killed my child. There was no adverse reaction report ever filed. The reporting system for adverse vaccine reactions was and still is passive in Ontario. Other infants continued to get this vaccine, completely unaware of any potential problem to this vaccine.

We could not get any straight answers from anyone. Several doctors were willing to talk to us off the record and they told us the pertussis component of the vaccine was linked to brain injury and sometimes death but there was no hard evidence of this. Everyone was afraid of lawsuits so no one would talk to us about vaccines. The autopsy was not even released to us until after my son was born exactly 1 year and 10 days after my daughter.

I was trained in infant CPR before my son could be released from the hospital when he was born. Then we were sent home with an apnea monitor. The doctor started asking us about vaccines for our new son and we were freaked out. We were afraid to vaccinate and kill another child or not vaccinate and got the lectures about the deadly diseases that would surely consume our child if we did not vaccinate. We felt very damned if you do damned if you don't and there was really no unbiased or balanced information available despite us asking repeatedly for it.

Finally we found a really nice family doctor and a pediatrician that were much more open about vaccine dangers. I will not mention their names because they still practice medicine. They advised us to wait until an older age to vaccinate, and not to give our son the whole cell pertussis vaccine. My son was hospitalized at the age of 1, to monitor him for his first vaccine, diphtheria, polio and tetanus only. They did not have Hib or all those other vaccines back then. Everything was fine, I was the most relieved mother on earth.

I went on to have more children and we selectively vaccinated them with just diphtheria, and tetanus and polio, none of the extra stuff. Even when acel-pertussis came on the market, I refused it. Everything went fine but I did not realize that the new pentacel-quadracel vaccines had no thimerosal in them. Since I was giving my children selective vaccines, I was inadvertently exposing them to vaccines containing high amounts of thimerosal.

All of my children did fine with their few vaccines, always given at an older age, until my 5th child. He had an adverse reaction to his 3rd Diphtheria, tetanus IPV vaccine. Our allergist called it a serum sickness reaction. I have studies that show adverse reactions are often higher in 3rd, 4th and 5th doses of vaccines, perhaps once the immune system is already primed, it over-reacts to the next doses.

My son is now 10 and has spent the last 6 years in treatment for neurological issues, he was diagnosed with autism, by one of the top autism experts that continues to treat him. There was never any adverse reaction report filed on behalf of my son. I contacted Health Canada to get a list of adverse reactions to the lot number my son was given, I was told no such data exists.

After contacting my MPP, MP and writing ATI, phoning and emailing as many people as possible to complain for almost a year, I was finally sent a list of adverse reactions and there were many. I was also sent an apology from Health Canada, apparently a *computer glitch* was at fault, and I was politely thanked for bringing this issue to their attention. (ha!) I was advised by Aventis Pasteur to no longer contact their office, and that their legal department instructed them to give me no information.

I have spoken to Health Canada TPD and they cannot disclose to me the ingredients of vaccines due to proprietary reasons. It is law in Ontario that food manufacturers list all their ingredients. but pharmaceutical companies have special protection that allows them to withhold this info, despite the fact they also have patents to protect their products from competition.

So now my children do not get vaccinated for anything. None of my children have ever had Hep B shots, flu shots, chicken pox vaccines, pertussis or any of the new *fringe* vaccines, which in my not so humble opinion, are excessive. My 2 yr old has never had a vaccine, had no vitamin K at birth, no doppler, no ultrasound. Due to an enormous education in these products, I also do not give them to my dog.

Christine Colebeck
ccolebeck at rogers.com

Note from Ben Kim: If you haven't already done so, you can read the full story of Christine's daughter, Laura, here: Death By Lethal Vaccine Injection