One topic which is always sure to get heated on both sides is, of course, Vaccines.
There is a huge amount of disinformation on either side of the argument, not least on the topic of the Polio Vaccine.
The official narrative goes something like this:
1954, the Salk polio vaccine field trials, involving 1.8 million children, begin at the Franklin Sherman Elementary School in McLean, Virginia. Children in the United States, Canada and Finland participated in the trials, which used for the first time the now-standard double-blind method, whereby neither the patient nor attending doctor knew if the inoculation was the vaccine or a placebo.
On April 12, 1955, researchers announced the vaccine was safe and effective and it quickly became a standard part of childhood immunizations in America. In the ensuing decades, polio vaccines would all but wipe out the highly contagious disease in the Western Hemisphere. [source]
The Polio Vaccine is the ‘special weapon’ argument used to defend vaccines by just about everyone you will ever speak to on the subject. We hear of the terrible Polio epidemic in the 1950s and how desperately terrible it was, we hear of how the Polio Vaccine eradicated the disease and saved us all. However this is simply not true, in fact, the Polio Vaccine was responsible for many of the polio infections in the 1950s.
From the ‘Journal Of The Royal Society Of Medicine’:
In April 1955 more than 200 000 children in five Western and mid-Western USA states received a polio vaccine in which the process of inactivating the live virus proved to be defective. Within days there were reports of paralysis and within a month the first mass vaccination programme against polio had to be abandoned.
Subsequent investigations revealed that the vaccine, manufactured by the California-based family firm of Cutter Laboratories, had caused 40 000 cases of polio, leaving 200 children with varying degrees of paralysis and killing 10.
A picture I’m sure you’ve all seen is the Hospital ward of ‘Iron Lungs’:
This picture is, in fact, staged and produced by the March of Dimes for an informational film.
You can also watch the full video from Dr Bergman below, ‘Exposing The Truth About Vaccines’: