Response to Dr Samantha Hill
Dear Dr. Hill
I was moved by your blog post, ‘My Experience With the Vaccine Hesitant’, where you shared your experience speaking before the Toronto Board of Health on September 23, 2019. Your willingness to briefly suspend your medical training and place yourself in the hearts and minds of the parents before you was an act of compassion. Thank you for your compassionate heart. An open heart is necessary if we are going to heal the divide between parents of vaccine injured children and your profession.
I admire your willingness to “imagine being cornered and feeling that the doctors and nurses were out to hurt your child”. This is a step in the right direction. And yet, Dr. Hill, more is required. It appears that your medical training precluded you from actually hearing and acknowledging the plight of these “vaccine hesitant” parents. It is not that these parents have a “feeling” that doctors and nurses are out to hurt their children. It is that doctors and nurses have hurt their children.
And yes, the horror is untenable.
I invite you to reflect on what prevented you from responding with compassion to the tearful mom who shared the loss of two of her children as a result of the side effects of vaccination. What stopped you from saying – “I’m sorry for your loss.”
What stops you and your colleagues from declaring – “We need to do better. Your children are just as important as the children who are at risk by being unvaccinated. Your bereavement is just as in need of compassion as the mothers of children now deceased from preventable infectious diseases.”
But that is not how you and your colleagues responded to these parents. None of your colleagues on the Toronto Board of Health offered any compassion for these moms and dads who lost their healthy children to vaccine injury.
You state that you chose not to express your compassion out of fear of being perceived as “paternalistic and demeaning”. And yet you made a statement that was even more paternalistic and demeaning. You made the unqualified statement that “vaccines are safe and effective”, completely discounting the accounts of vaccine injury and death that were shared that morning. Your statement implied that the grief and loss experienced by these parents was unfounded and that their life experience had no merit.
It is hard to trust that the actions of you and your colleagues on the Toronto Board of Health are “borne out of compassion” when compassion and respect were so clearly absent during the submissions. After witnessing the actions of your colleagues, it should be painfully obvious why doctors are neither trusted nor respected by an increasing number of parents today.
As difficult as it was to watch such callous disregard, I was particularly alarmed by your statement –
“The aggressive opposition was unexpected, especially when presenting on something as factually obvious as vaccines. Among doctors, this isn’t a debate. We KNOW the benefits outweigh the risks. We know it more certainly than we know many other things in medicine. Vaccines work. Vaccines are safe.”
With all due respect, you don’t know that the benefits outweigh the risks for every individual. You don’t know that vaccines produce better overall health in every individual. You don’t know that vaccines are safe for every individual. And to say that you do is either ignorance or blind faith in the marketing claims of the vaccine industry. What you are practicing is ideology, not personalized and evidence based medicine.
The issue of vaccine safety and effectiveness is too complex to address in this space, however let me offer this one statement your consideration –
We don’t know the safety of the current vaccination program because the science has not been done to the level that would support this conclusion.
This is not my opinion, but rather the finding of the prestigious Institute of Medicine (IOM) which found that the safety of the current childhood vaccine schedule has never been proven in large, long-term clinical trials. [1] They state:
“Few studies have attempted more global assessment of entire sequence of immunizations or variations in the overall immunization schedule and categories of health outcomes, and . . . none has compared entirely unimmunized populations with those fully immunized for the health outcomes of concern to stakeholders.”
In 2011, the IOM reviewed 155 health conditions associated with the Varicella, Tetanus, Hepatitis B & MMR vaccines. In only 5 cases did the scientific evidence reject causation. In 134 cases the IOM deemed there were too few scientifically sound studies published in the medical literature to determine whether more than 100 serious brain and immune system problems are or are not caused by the vaccines, including multiple sclerosis, arthritis, lupus, stroke, SIDS, autism and asthma.
In 2012, the Cochrane collaboration reached this conclusion about MMR vaccine safety testing –
“The design and reporting of safety outcomes in MMR vaccine studies, both pre- and post-marketing, are largely inadequate.” [2]
Your statement exposed how uninformed or misinformed you and your colleagues are on the science of vaccine safety and effectiveness. It would appear that the parents in the room know more about the status of vaccine safety science than members of the Toronto Board of Health.
I invite you to deepen your knowledge about vaccine risk and the significant limitations of vaccine induced immunity. I encourage you to thoughtfully and humbly engage parents of vaccine injured children. Suspend your medical training and become truly curious about this growing phenomenon of “vaccine hesitancy”. You might discover that it is you who are uninformed or misinformed.
As the parent of a vaccine injured child, now deceased, I can tell you that our anger, our fear, and our commitment to informed consent will not be diminished by vaccine mandates. Instead, our movement will continue to grow at a dramatic rate. This growth will not occur because of a sophisticated marketing program by well-funded “anti-vaxx” organizations as is often claimed. Rather, this movement is growing world-wide because more and more parents are witnessing the harm vaccines are doing to their children and are determined to end this systemic injuring and callous disregard when vaccine injury and death occur.
Dr. Hill, I trust you are well intended. I trust you entered the medical profession out of compassion and a deep desire to help others. I also know it takes humility to be willing to acknowledge that what one is doing, with the best of intentions, may not be working and may not be as safe as claimed.
Vaccine mandates will not solve this erosion of trust in the medical industry and in vaccines in particular. It will actually undermine our trust and confidence even further. The only solution is to acknowledge vaccine injury and preserve and protect our medical and legal right to informed consent. It also means that the medical industry has to acknowledge that vaccines are not the panacea they have been made out to be.
“People will vaccinate when they have confidence in regulators and industry. When public confidence fails, coercion and censorship became the final options. Silencing critics and deploying police powers to force untested medicines upon an unwilling public is not an optimal strategy in a democracy.”
Robert Kennedy Jr., CEO
Children’s Health Defense
We need wise, compassionate and humble leadership in the medical profession. I believe you have the potential to offer this kind of leadership. I pray that you have the courage and wisdom to do so. I invite you to extend your research beyond the marketing materials offered by Health Canada and the vaccine lobby. I invite you to truly listen with an open heart and mind. This is the only way forward.
Ted Kuntz, parent of a vaccine injured child, now deceased
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK206940/
[2] https://www.cochrane.org/CD004407/ARI_using-combined-vaccine-protection-children-against-measles-mumps-and-rubella
