Letters: Diseases spread by false propaganda

A photograph from the 1950s of schoolboys receiving polio vaccine. Photo / Mark Mitchell

Philip Weber has written a lot of nonsense about vaccinations. This sort of false propaganda has led us to the state we are in now. Some of us are old enough to remember when all hospitals had an isolation ward full of children with measles, diptheria, polio, etc; some of whom were damaged for life.

Do you remember iron lungs ? Or children with leg calipers? In the worst year for polio 173 people in New Zealand died. Did you know that all NZ schools were closed for months to prevent the spread? You don't hear of polio now because we have an effective vaccine.

Sometimes the Government has to take action to save us from ourselves. You may choose not to wear a seatbelt and risk injury or death (and possibly a fine) but your personal choice should not include your children, and you should definitely not campaign for your friends' and neighbours' children to be at risk.

There is an impressive list of serious diseases no longer a threat and there are thousands of medical professionals in New Zealand working to keep you well. Believe what they tell you.

Just a word on disgraced doctor Andrew Wakefield. His paper in the Lancet was supposed to provide this evidence, but was soon seen as the fake it was when nobody else could reproduce the findings. All of this is available online.

Autism is genetic, from variant genes, and can run in families. So, not caused by injections.
MIKE PHILO
Okoia

Vax by choice
I was horrified and extremely disturbed by the threatening and bullying article in the (Chronicle, September 7) written by Dawn Picken. Her rhetoric is more in line with Communist North Korea. Have we in the future no say over what medications we put into our bodies?

Now she and others (especially the news media) are putting pressure on people and the Government to enforce mass medication of the public, by coercion and blackmail, under the guise of public good, against their informed will.

She mentions a prominent gastroenterologist, Andrew Wakefield, who got struck off the medical register for his study relating to the correlation between some MMR-vaccinated children who developed Crohns disease and other auto-immune diseases.

This has a remarkable resemblance to a Hungarian doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis. He also got struck off the medical register for his study relating to lack of handwashing and the deaths of women from puerperal fever. He was chastised and bullied by his colleagues because they felt he was blaming their simple lack of hygiene as the cause of these women's deaths. He ended up in a mental asylum where he contracted a sepsis and died.

Who is responsible for vaccine safety? We should have the choice of what we put in our bodies and our children's bodies without fear and coercion. Otherwise we are living in a communist society. What other rights will they take from us?
PHILIP WEBER
Whanganui

Govt's priorities
How is it that our Government is funding this huge measles vaccination campaign, yet ignoring the deaths over the past two years caused by legalised synthetic cannabis? How many have also been disabled, committed suicide or had vehicle accidents whilst taking this poisonous substance?

Vaping is also condoned and legal yet is causing deaths overseas. If smokers are dying, how many are becoming ill from vaping?

Is this because all these scenarios are produced by powerful, international corporations? Do those in Parliament fold under their influence and pressure? If so, why? How do these entities influence our servants in the Beehive? Does a little pass under the table to some? Is it directly related to the threats within the wonderfully beneficial (or not) trade agreements which our governments slavishly sign as they kowtow to their international "friends"?

And who signed away rights to drain our aquifers to the Chinese in a much trumpeted trade agreement. Was that Aunty Helen? They are all selling off our country and all that is precious in it. Companies are paying peanuts for our precious underground water. Why are these politicians not held accountable for the damage they do?
DENISE LOCKETT
Whanganui

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