One of the first patients I took care of as a new nurse was a man in his 40s who had developed Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS) and was paralyzed from the neck down and on a ventilator. His wife was fiercely devoted and set up camp in his room, coffee machine and all. She was very involved in his care, and would monitor all of the staff’s actions, down to making sure we rotated his insulin injection sites in a certain pattern.

One time, as I was going over the medications that I was about to give him through the tube in his stomach, she apologetically told me that she had to go over everything before it was given to him and make sure it was absolutely necessary, because an unnecessary flu shot did this to him.

I remember at that moment feeling a little jolt. It was the very first time that I recall a vaccine being connected to a severe adverse outcome. I had only been out of nursing school for about a year at that point, and was still under the impression that vaccines contained bits of viruses and bacteria and saline solution or other basically inert substances. That jolt didn’t inspire me to do much more thinking about vaccines, unfortunately. It wasn’t until 2014 when the CDC Whistleblower situation was completely ignored by the media and most of the country that I really started my research.

In the time that passed between the GBS patient and my last month working in a pediatric clinic, I administered quite a few vaccines to people of all ages. I also had several vaccines administered to myself and my own children. I would now like to offer a public apology to all the people to whom I administered vaccines, and to my children, for consenting to have them vaccinated without truly being informed.

In her book A Mind of Your Own, Kelly Brogan, MD briefly discusses vaccines. She says:

“Despite acknowledgement of genetic variants and their relevance to vaccine effects from the likes of Gregory Poland and his team at Mayo Clinic, this reality has yet to be acknowledged by the purveyors of this one-size-fits-all product. Vaccines were designed before we knew about DNA, viruses that contaminate cells used to produce them (SV40, retroviruses), the microbiome, or how toxic one chemical can be to one person while leaving the other unscathed. One-size-fits-all medicine is no longer appropriate, and we just don’t know how to determine who might be at risk for adverse effects ranging from psychiatric conditions to death.”

The key phrase here is “we just don’t know.” We don’t know which person is going to develop GBS after the flu shot. We don’t know which baby is going to develop encephalitis, have seizures, or die after their 4-month vaccines. We don’t know which young girl is going to develop a debilitating autoimmune condition or die after the HPV vaccine. We don’t know which child is going to develop severe  food allergies  or  a neurodevelopmental disorder after a set of shots.

We just don’t know. We do not thoroughly screen. We drastically under-report adverse reactions.

We do give out Vaccine Information Sheets. These sheets tell us that adverse reactions are extremely rare and focus on the more common and less severe local reactions and fevers. We do not give out vaccine package inserts. These list all of the reported adverse reactions that range from the local reactions to death. I have seen it said that the inserts are just developed by lawyers due to liability. To this I say: Vaccine manufacturers are not liable for the damage done by their products. The inserts aren’t covering their butts because they don’t need to be covered. Vaccines are also not appropriately tested for safety.

So, to be blunt, when I handed Mom the VIS and then administered four vaccines to her infant, she did not give real informed consent. Real informed consent for vaccination would go more like this (although, with the lack of real safety data, true informed consent is not possible):

“We are not going to do any testing or take a complete history to screen your child for possible adverse reactions to this (or these) vaccine(s). The possible adverse reactions range from swelling at the injection site, to autoimmune diseases,  to seizures, to death. We do not know if your infant will experience one or all of these. We are only going by the guidelines laid out by the CDC, not by the unique biochemical and historical characteristics of your child. Here are the package inserts for the vaccines we plan on giving your child. Here is the information about each disease we are vaccinating against. Please read through them and let us know what you decide.”

I never once said or did this when I was still administering vaccines. If I sit and really think about it, an overwhelming sense of guilt washes over me because I could have potentially injured many people, thinking I was providing them and their communities with protection. I read heart-wrenching stories of vaccine injuries and what the victims and their families have to go through, or worse, stories of babies or children who have died directly following vaccines, and I cry. I cry because I know that they were not giving truly informed consent when they agreed to those vaccines, and it easily could have been me giving them.

I am so very sorry.

I implore my fellow nurses, doctors and pharmacists to please research vaccines outside of what we were taught in school and told by our professional organizations and government agencies. We are violating every professional code of ethics when we perform these medical interventions on people without getting real informed consent. We need to inform our patients that “we just don’t know.”

“Do the best you can until you know better. Then, when you know better, do better.” – Maya Angelou