Vaxxed leaves viewers vexed

A controversial documentary currently touring New Zealand – with material potent enough to incite doctors to leap on stage in objection and trigger TV presenters to label watchers ‘stupid’ and ‘looney’ – recently made its way to Kaiwaka.

Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe screened at the town’s Community Hall on June 18, attracting a group of more than 20 inquisitive locals, keen to find out for themselves what all the hype was about, despite the Sunday night wet weather.

Although the movie has been sensationalised by critics as an anti-vaccination movie, Vaxxed is more accurately about the alleged distortion and destruction of safety studies on the Measles, Mumps and Rubella [MMR] vaccine, by a number of senior employees at the U.S Centre for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC].

Ambassador for VAXXED and WAVESNZ [Warnings about Vaccine Expectation], Tricia Cheel along with member Sue Dick and others, have largely self-funded their tour around the country since April, determined to allow communities the opportunity to draw their own conclusions about the film and how it relates to the provocative and often highly emotional subject of childhood vaccinations.

Cheel has experienced her own tragedy involving a vaccine and says she just wants parents to have access to all the necessary information so they can make a fully informed decision before vaccinating their families.

“I don’t want anyone else to live with the regrets I do, let alone the trauma of seeing their children regress into autism,” she says.

“WAVES started in 1988 as the Immunisation Awareness Society and I just wish they’d been around 20 years earlier so I may have avoided a smallpox vaccine that destroyed all hopes of a happy family for me.”

Vaxxed unfolds through the recorded conversations between CDC senior scientist and consequential whistleblower, Dr. William Thompson – who discloses he was part of a cover-up and now wants to set the record straight – and father of an autistic child, biologist Dr. Brian Hooker.

The film also features Dr Andrew Wakefield, the gastroenterologist who was discredited and criticised for provoking fear about vaccinations after co-authoring the denounced 1998 Lancet study, a research paper showing a possible link between MMR and autism.

Wakefield clarifies he has never been against vaccinations, but was instead urging pharmaceutical companies to consider separating the MMR into single-ingredient doses, as the research himself and colleagues had conducted identified that the combination of the three vaccines could possibly be a factor in causing autism.

A range of professionals including politicians, doctors and medical journalists also contribute their knowledge and experience as well as parents of children whose personalities and characters changed dramatically after the MMR shot, bringing raw emotion to the film and reminding the viewer of what is at stake in this exceedingly complex issue – the well-being of innocent children.

Whether you are pro or anti vaccinations or align somewhere in-between, the movie provokes a range of big questions including why does CDC no longer provide parents the option of being able to choose single-dose vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella, claiming it ‘decreases the chance of delays in protection’, when separate injections would help to ease a lot of people’s fears and possibly ensure vaccination levels?

“The only way we can avert the looming catastrophe from this cover-up at the CDC is for enough people in New Zealand to see VAXXED and realise what is at stake and demand the necessary changes to avert it,” Cheel says.

n WAVES has called on government funding for a study of Vaxxed vs non-Vaxxed children. Keep up-to-date with all the rapid developments at wavesnz.org.nz.

MAKING WAVES: Sarah Cox with the ‘wall of hearts’. Accompanying Vaxxed on its travels, the hearts are an ever-growing testimony by parents whose children have suffered a severe and often irreversible reaction to a vaccine.