-----Original Message-----
From: JVirgi5097@aol.com [mailto:JVirgi5097@aol.com]
Sent: Tuesday, August 15, 2000 7:07 PM
To: feat@feat.org
Subject: Re: Shedding Light On 'Mind Blindness'


    I read this article and was impressed by its content until it came time
to once again hear the side in "favor" of the MMR vaccine.  I am just very
tired of the same measles outbreak being cited time and time again.  Is this
the only thing that is in the arsenal of vaccine advocates?  It is not
enough.
    I am the mother of three children, all of them beautiful children.   My
youngest son is autistic and my older two are perfectly normal, typical
children.  The ONLY thing I did differently with my third pregnancy was that
I received the MMR vaccine three months before I got pregnant.  That child
is autistic.  Coincidence, perhaps but I think not.  He has all of the GI
problems that have been found to raise question with MMR antibodies being
present in the intestine and he has had alternative medical practitioners
perform various tests on him to confirm that the main neurotoxin in his
system is an overload of the MMR.
    Like I stated previously, not only did I receive the vaccine three
months prior to my pregnancy but then the little guy was overdosed when he received
his own MMR at 15 months.  Imagine the amount of antibodies that flooded in
to the system of my developing child when receiving a vaccine three months
earlier, that is potent enough to last a lifetime!  My antibodies during my
pregnancy were 387, when I asked what they should be I was told you are
considered immune at 10!  The MMR vaccine is purposely held off until 15
months in children because there is a conflict in the body due to maternal
antibodies.  They must wait until those antibodies wear off before giving
the child another dose of this extremely powerful vaccine.  It seems very
logical to assume that the high does of antibodies that poured in to the fragile
developing system of my child could have caused some damage to his system
before it was mature enough to handle the insult.
    My difficulty with advocates citing the same story of "The Outbreak of
'89."  Is that every time I read it the death rate changes, some say 90 some
say 100 some even say up to 123 children died.  But what they fail to
mention was that 96% of the population in Texas during that outbreak were
unpreventable.  What this means is that 96% were either fully immunized,
medically exempt from immunization or born before the year of 1957.  The
people that were born before 1957 had probably had measles as children,
since it was and always has been a routine childhood illness.  The medically
exempt group may not have been able to receive the vaccine due to serious adverse
reactions from previous vaccinations that could have proven fatal for them
if they did receive the vaccine.  And the rest were FULLY immunized.  What that
tells us is that no matter how much faith we want to put in to this vaccine,
no matter how much we want to feel we are protecting our children by giving
them this vaccine, this vaccine may not work on a person that has been fully
immunized and then when they do contract the disease due to vaccine failure
it turns a simple childhood illness in to a fatal one.  I am living proof
that this vaccine is not as effective as some people like to think that it
is.  I was vaccinated as a child, I was then vaccinated as an adult.  In
less than 4 years my body has lost all of it's rubella antibodies.  The first
time they told me that all the shots given in my generation as children, failed!
What is the story now?

Joelle Virgilio, S. Florida