This is a factual narrative that details an E.R. nurse’s experiences with adverse vaccine reactions. This is not about being for or against vaccines, this is about education and
informed consent. This is a must read for every parent!
(Re-posted with his permission)
“As an E.R. nurse, I have seen the cover up. Where do you think kids go when they have a vaccine reaction?
They go to the E.R.
They come to me.
I cannot even begin to guess how many times over the years I have seen vaccine reactions come through my E.R. Without any exaggeration, it has to be counted in hundreds.
Sometimes it seemed like it was one or two cases in a single shift, every shift, for weeks. Then I would get a lull, and I wouldn’t catch one for a week or two, then I’d catch another case per night for a couple weeks. This was common.
Once, I was training a nursing student, about to graduate, on their E.R. experience rotation in nursing school. This student and I floated up to triage to cover the triage nurse for a break. I was quizzing them on what to ask and look for as a triage nurse on pediatric kids that came through. I made a point about asking about immunizations right out the gates. The student was puzzled, and asked why, and I told the student because we see vaccine reactions every day and it’s their job to catch it, alert the doctor and the parents, and report it to
VAERS.
Some higher power apparently smiled on my attempt to open the eyes of another nurse I guess, because not even ten minutes later, a woman brought her child up to the counter. Sudden onset super high fever and lethargy. I asked if the child was up to date on vaccination.
The mother replied he had them just a few hours ago.
I glanced at the student, who looked shocked and looked back at me in disbelief. I nodded, told them to remember this, and then took the mom and her child to finish the triage in back. When I was done I came back and sat down with the student, and asked what he learned that night so far.
The first response: “What I was told about vaccines wasn’t true”.
I couldn’t have said it better. That student is going to go on to be like me, advocating for his patients with his eyes wide open.
The cases almost always presented similarly, and often no one else connected it. The child comes in with either a fever approaching 105, or seizures, or lethargy/can’t wake up, or sudden overwhelming sickness, screaming that won’t stop, spasms, GI inclusion, etc.
And one of the first questions I would ask as triage nurse, was, are they current on their vaccinations? It’s a safe question that nobody sees coming, and nobody understands the true impact of. Parents (and co-workers) usually just think I’m trying to rule out the vaccine preventable diseases, when in fact, I am looking to see how recently they were vaccinated to determine if this is a vaccine reaction.
Too often I heard a parent say something akin to “Yes they are current, the pediatrician caught up their vaccines this morning during their check up, and the pediatrician said they were in perfect health!”
If I had a dollar for every time I’d heard that, I could fly to Europe for free.
But here’s the more disturbing part.
For all the cases I’ve seen, I have NEVER seen any medical provider report them to VAERS. I have filed VAERS reports. But I am the ONLY nurse that I have EVER met that files VAERS reports.
Mind you, I have served in multiple hospitals across multiple states, alongside probably well over a hundred doctors and probably 300-400+ nurses.
I’ve worked in big hospitals (San Francisco Bay Area Metro 40 bed ER, Las Vegas NV Metro 44 bed ER) and small hospitals (Rural access 2 bed ER, remote community 4 bed ER) and everything in between.
When I say NEVER, I mean NEVER.
I have even made a point of sitting in the most prominent spot at the nurses station filling out a VAERS report to make sure as many people saw me doing it as possible to generate the expected “what are you doing” responses to get that dialog going with people.
And in every case, if a nurse approached me, their response was “I’ve never done that” or “I didn’t know we could do that” or, worse “What is VAERS?” which was actually the most common response.
The response from doctors? Silence. Absolute total refusal to engage in discussion or to even acknowledge what I was doing or what VAERS was.
The big take away from that?
VAERS is WOEFULLY under reported.
I am PROOF of that.
The number one place parents bring their kids in the event of a vaccine reaction is the E.R., and as an E.R. staffer, I have NEVER met anyone who filed one, in spite of seeing hundreds of cases of obvious vaccine associated harm come through.
What does that say about reported numbers?
The CDC/HHS admits that VAERS is under-reported, and probably only representative of 1/10th the actual number of injuries. I contest that, and from personal experience, I would say the numbers in VAERS are more like 1/1000th the actual numbers, not 1/10th.
And the final part of that, is that I have, first hand, seen blatant cover ups from doctors. I have seen falsification of medical records and documentation via intentional omission.
I have challenged doctors who refused to put in the chart that the child was vaccinated 4 hours ago and was in perfect health, and now suddenly they are non-responsive, seizing, febrile at 105, and that labs, LP, and imaging confirms cerebral edema/encephalitis.
I reminded the doctors as they are writing their report that the child was vaccinated mere hours before. And at the end, there is total omission of this fact, and the physician pass-off notes state encephalitis of unknown origin.
I ask the doctor if they will file a VAERS report, and they argue that this has nothing to do with it, its purely coincidental, and nothing should be filed, they are safe and effective.
I remind them that VAERS is a reporting body for ANY symptoms that are contemporaneous to vaccination, whether causation is believed to be associated or not, and I get the dismissal that they are not filing it because it has nothing to do with it.
No one brings it up to the parents.
It’s this giant rug-sweep that happens, and any mention of the vaccination is systematically removed or withheld from the record.
A perfect example of this was an ambulance crew that came in with a pass-off report that included the fact the child had been vaccinated only hours prior to onset of symptoms. The physician made sure this pass-off sheet disappeared mysteriously and could not get filed with the patient medical record.
So yes, I have seen the vaccine damage cover up first hand. I know that it is intentional and active in the medical community. I know that it is happening.
And on top of total denial of any association, and total cover up, they also refuse to report to VAERS which is supposed to be reported to for ANYTHING that is even in NO WAY SUSPECTED to be associated with the vaccine. This is a systemic suppression of information and statistics.
And yes, in the cases described above, I did approach the parents, and I did tell them about VAERS, and I did start a case for them and file a report. I did force the issue through my charting, although it will most likely be buried and overlooked.
I have experienced the corruption and suppression of the truth in the medical community about vaccines first hand from the provider perspective. It does happen. Every day.
I am neither pro-vax or anti-vax. I am an informed consent person.
I believe that you, as a parent, should know the risks involved, and they ARE real.
I believe that you should be aware that, for whatever reason, some seemingly random smaller subset of the population IS in fact susceptible to these horrific adverse reactions that can be life-long debilitating in nature.
Yes the numbers are low. Yes I saw A LOT of cases, but I worked in BUSY very LARGE POPULATION areas. The nasty reactions are, in my opinion, probably down around the 0.5% chance range on the average vaccinations. The exception being Gardasil, that thing is horrible in my opinion and seems to have serious adverse reactions rates, I would guess maybe as high as 5 to 7% across the series. But that’s another subject in itself.
I wish I could tell what would make a child likely to be that 0.5% so I could see that trait and tell that parent to really consider it heavily, but I can’t. No one can. It truly seems random. Sometimes its a fragile sickly weak kid, and that makes sense that they would have a significantly higher risk of a serious adverse event. But sometimes its a perfectly healthy full term strong infant with no morbidities.
Although the boys do tend to get the reactions more often. Probably 2/3 of the serious reactions I’ve seen were boys.
But the truth is, you can’t tell by looking. Either at the kid, or their health history, or their family history. It comes down to chance. For some reason, every now and then, a child is just more susceptible to those injections than everyone else is.
Do I believe in vaccinations? For the most part. I believe that often times, the concept is good. I take issue with the use of adjuvants in the way they are currently used, and with how the FDA is suppressing additional adjuvants that have been tested successfully with fewer adverse reactions and better immune responsiveness going back decades.
But I can’t change that.
I think that they do work, kind of.
I have read about the way it can shift how the immune system functions. Shifting humoral and intracellular responsiveness so one is over-reactive and the other underreactive so the vaccine literally can make you more susceptible to certain illnesses (again, other adjuvants have mostly fixed this, but they have still not been approved 15 years later).
I have seen where the vaccine actually gave the subject the illness it was designed to prevent. (I am talking controlled studies. For an example, look at the Canadian Institute of Health ferret swine flu study).
I have seen people come in to my E.R. with the mumps in spite of being fully vaccinated against the mumps.
Same with chickenpox.
And whooping cough.
And on and on.
I have also seen the manufacturers engaged in fraud (see the federal case U.S. and two virologists vs Merck, regarding blatant fraud in MMR and forced cover-up) or the pharmaceutical industry intentionally giving people illnesses that will knowingly kill them just to turn a profit (see New York Times uncovering internal Bayer pharmaceuticals memos on their HIV-tainted hemophiliac medication where they continued to sell it AFTER they discovered they were giving people HIV by selling it, and then, when ordered to stop sales by a court in the US, they continued to sell it overseas).
But, I do acknowledge that, for the lucky few, these things do work. Although the numbers are hardly stellar, they do tend to grant some kind of protection in the majority of individuals. So yay. Yes, I do believe there is something to them.
But the truth is somewhere in the middle of the road. Not as bad as they are made out to be, but far less effective and nowhere near as safe as they would have you believe either.
In an industry that is rocked on a monthly basis by horrible medication scandals, if you didn’t question everything they told you, I would look at you funny. And it’s my job to give these medications to people.
Just to note, on a recent scandal, I have been warning people about Zofran use in pregnancy for 5 years. The information was right there in the insert. It was right there on the manufacturing website. It was right there in the PDR. As well as on every downloadable app and printed IV drug book.
The information is there.
It is the medical professionals that are failing the general public.
Now suddenly it’s all over the news, there are commercials about it, and everyone is running around in hospitals acting like they had no clue. No, we knew. We all knew. We just didn’t hold the line.
This comes back to informed consent.
As I said, I’m for informed consent. Absolutely everything we do has risks. Absolutely every medication we use has risks.
You can take Advil and have your skin scarify and blister and peel away from third degree burns originating below the surface of your skin. Is it common? Heck no. It’s darn right rare as heck. But is it possible? You betcha. And we know it.
How many nurses and doctors have told you that one?
Same goes for Benadryl.
And Tylenol studies have been shown to do liver damage at any dose in children. Any.
How many nurses and doctors have told you that?
We lie. As a profession. (I don’t.) But as a profession, we lie, we rug sweep the risks, and we sugar coat it. We do it everyday with every interaction. That is the truth of it.
And if you have to be lucky enough to get one that isn’t lying to you, they are probably simply ignorant of the truth and never read the insert or the PDR or the warnings on the manufacturers website.
That covers about 99.9% of everyone in healthcare. Well, allopathic health care anyway.
Now talk with another E.R. nurse. Are we saying the same things? No. Why? Because I have read more on the subject, because I have a strong sense of ethical and moral obligation to my patients, and because I will not simply take an order and follow it, even if it costs me my job. That is unusual.
You have to remember, pushing drugs makes hospitals money. Challenging doctors is a good way to make your work life suck, and bring down wrath of the administrators on you.
While that CT scan may not be the best thing for you, or warranted, or necessary by any yardstick, it will make the hospital several thousand dollars, imagine what happens to the easily replaceable nurse that stands in the way of it.
Profit.
The truth is that this is what it boils down to. Call me jaded. I am. I’m fine with that. I am the salty old dog in the trenches. I have earned my battle scars in the E.R., and I have a reputation that precedes me.
I have taken every award from every hospital I have gone to, including awards, honors, and recognitions that were previously only ever given out to Social Workers and Doctors. It gives me a certain level of immunity from persecution, and that gives me the ability to speak the truth, even if it costs the hospital money. Because I’m too valuable as a P.R. piece.
So you want the truth from the inside? There you have it, from probably one of only a handful of people you are ever going to hear it from.
Know the risks. Acknowledge that IF you do it, you roll the dice. And YES, your child’s number CAN come up. You are NOT immune.
I can’t predict why some kids are susceptible and others aren’t. I don’t know why it is this why. I wish I did. No one does in this field.
It is actively covered up. It is known. This is real. Vaccines do help. They do have risks. As a parent, you have to make that choice on your own and live with it.
But think about this hypothetical situation. You come in and see me and ask me to vaccinate your child, I hand you a stack of papers an inch thick and tell you to start reading, and in in twenty minutes I’ll be back with 100 sided dice (yes, they make them, from the role playing game days of dungeons and dragons).
It’s a simplification, but it is a profound one that makes the situation real. I’ll hand that 100-sided dice to you and tell you to roll it.
If it comes up on number 1, your child is going to have a seizure and possibly suffer potential neurological harm, but if it comes up on any of the other 99 numbers, your child is fine.
If you can take the dice in hand and own that potential outcome, then I will inject your child. But you have to KNOW and ACCEPT the risks before I am going to do it.
I really just believe in standing up for my patients. I don’t know what happened to this industry, but, it is supposed to be the nurses job to stand between the patient and the system, to protect them from the system.
I guess I’m getting fed up with nurses and doctors just “going along” to get along. There is no big secret to any of this. I read the journals of infectious diseases, toxicology, pediatrics, emergency medicine, BMJ, Lancet, etc., and I research on PubMed through the NIH.
Everything I’m saying is public domain knowledge.
It’s stuff we SHOULD be telling you.
I am sorry we are not.
I try to take a stand where I can, but at the end of the day, I’m only one nurse.”
RN, CEN, EMT
Highly commended and credentialed EMT and Nurse with 6 years emergency department experience across multiple hospitals and former police officer
