Of all the anti-vaccine lies; of all the perfidy of the anti-vaccination movement; of all the direct threats to public health they pose; those who argue against the administration of neonatal Vitamin K are right up there amongst the most heinous.
In 2012 an Australian infant died because her parents refused Vitamin K. From The Courier Mail, January 10 2013:
A BABY girl died from vitamin K deficiency bleeding just 33 days after her parents gave instructions that the newborn child was not to be given any injections or medication, a coroner has found.
Deputy State Coroner Christine Clements has supported a pathologist’s recommendation that future siblings of the baby receive vitamin K, which can prevent bleeding problems in infants.
An investigation into the death of the girl – born in a regional Queensland hospital last year – heard that the mother, 30, wanted an entirely natural birth for her first baby.
Ms Clements said in her findings: “As part of the birthing plan and, in accordance with her parents’ spiritual beliefs, the baby was not administered vitamin K after her birth, or any other medications.”
The parents had made that decision despite being given information at an antenatal visit that newborn babies required vitamin K to prevent bleeding problems in the first few months after birth, the coroner said. She said the pregnancy was uneventful and the baby was born 10 days early in hospital.
The baby was not given vitamin K – nor was she vaccinated for Hepatitis B – before the mother and baby went home a day after the birth. A month later, the mother noticed her baby had been sleeping a lot and was not feeding as much as usual.
In the early hours of the next morning the mother saw the baby was limp and an ambulance was called.
The baby was taken to the nearest hospital and then airlifted to Brisbane’s Mater Hospital, where a CT scan revealed the child had bleeding on the brain, the findings said.
The baby was given plasma and vitamin K, but she died the next day.
After an autopsy a pathologist concluded the cause of death was haemorrhages due to late onset vitamin K deficiency bleeding.
In her December 3 finding, Ms Clements concluded the baby died after suffering extreme bleeding in the brain over a month, due to a lack of vitamin K in her system.
“The baby’s mother had a detailed labour plan and a considered position declining various medications and interventions in the birth process,” she said.
“This included a specific direction not to administer vitamin K to their baby.”
HIDDEN HAZARD FOR BABIES
THE Australian National Health and Medical Research Council recommends that all newborn babies receive vitamin K after birth.
Vitamin K helps the blood to clot and is considered essential for the prevention of bleeding problems in newborn babies.
Babies generally have a low level of vitamin K in their blood, as it is poorly transferred across the placenta. Breast-fed infants are at most risk of developing bleeding through vitamin K deficiency unless supplementary vitamin K is given to them, usually by injection.
Late vitamin K deficient bleeding occurs from eight days to six months after birth, with most affected babies between one and three months and it is almost completely confined to fully breast-fed infants.
On what couldn’t be a more appropriate date – Friday November 13 2015 – University of Wollongong PhD student Judy Wilyman shared a YouTube video from the delusional conspiracy site, Infowars – yes, Alex Jones’ Infowars – on her official Facebook page, Vaccination Choice. The YouTube video is a 20 minute segment taken from Alex Jones’ Prison Planet newscast:
The segment features an interview between a former pharmaceutical company salesperson – a former salesperson – Brandy Vaughan, who has founded an anti-vaccination organisation for which she is seeking donations – Council for Vaccine Safety – and Prison Planet host, Lee Ann McAdoo.
Look, the whole segment is your stock-standard conspiratorial anti-vaccine screed; replete with the obligatory call for funds, at the end. But, there is one section of the embarrassing segment on which I want to focus: anti-Vitamin K activism.
Here is the video, starting at 4:40. My good friend at Diluted Thinking has very kindly transcribed the pertinent section:
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Remember, as we go through this section: the person who promoted this execrable video has submitted a PhD thesis on immunisation policy under the tutelage of Professor Brian Martin, at the University of Wollongong. Although I’m pretty sure I don’t need to remind the reader how well this has gone for UoW, here is a snippet from an earlier blog post:
The University of Wollongong’s perennial anti-vaccine PhD student, Judy Wilyman, is the great, big hope of Australian anti-vaccinationism.
Does she say “the science” a lot? Tick.
Does she say “the research” a lot? Tick.
Does she vilify bereaved parents with slurs of kickbacks? Tick.
Does she refer to these bereaved parents’ deceased babies as “anecdotes”? Tick.
Does she and her cabal of thugs organise anti-vaccine protests under the disingenuous facade of “pro-choice”; the same thugs having followed her example of vilifying bereaved parents; some of the thugs even claiming that the bereaved parents’ baby did not even exist, as some kind of Big Pharma agenda, a thinly masked sales pitch? Tick.
Does she resent the tag “anti-vaccine”; whilst only providing information which is against vaccination, a lot? Tick.
Perfect! Wilyman is perfect. And the added bonus with Wilyman is that she appears to have the ongoing imprimatur of the University of Wollongong; who in turn would appear to have had the word “disrepute” erased from all of its libraries’ dictionaries.
In 2012 Judy Wilyman’s ugly behaviour, ably supported by Meryl Dorey and Dorey’s anti-vaccine cabal – the disgraced Australian Vaccination-skeptics Network – even made the front page of the local paper, The Illawarra Mercury:
UOW researcher targets grieving parents
I don’t need to add anything to the following transcript, so I won’t. It really is that bad. The lead-up to the anti-Vitamin K section featured this image:
Lee Ann McAdoo (host): And you mentioned the vitamin K which I think is sort of a new thing that all of a sudden now this is something that children on their first day of birth – when they’re born – they need to have this now, all of a sudden. Your son wasn’t given it there in Holland, they didn’t even know about it, so you hadn’t even done a lot of research into why this is being given. But it was interesting here because Rob Dew, our producer, he just had his fourth child, a little girl, and so they wanted to give this vitamin K and he said, “well, talk to me about it, I want to read the insert”. And what they were saying was it’s 100% vitamin K, it’s completely fine, safe and effective – it’s that same talking point, safe and effective – and you actually brought some pretty interesting news to us. So go ahead and talk to us about what was actually going on with this vitamin K.
Brandy Vaughan (Council for Vaccine Safety): Right. Well, luckily it was kind of a random – although I think nothing is random in the world – a conversation with Rob, and I had a nurse send me, just last week, a photo of the box of the vitamin K injection that they give, and then also a different company, she sent a picture of the vial. And this is things that we would never see when we actually go into the doctor’s office, we don’t see, they don’t tell us in the hospital.
Lee Ann McAdoo: It’s just natural, it’s vitamin K.
Brandy Vaughan: Right. Well, on the box, on one of them [this image shown]…
[Vaughan continues] – ’cause there are two different companies that make it, umm, three, but anyway, this was two of them – the main active ingredient is polysorbate 80 and there are strong links to infertility, to autoimmune issues. Polysorbate 80 is banned in a lot of countries – especially in injectibles – and that’s the main active ingredient in one of the vitamin K solutions. In the other one, on the vial it says, “contains no more than 100 mcg/L of aluminium” [this image shown]…
[Vaughan continues] And you combine that with the hepB shot, which is 250 mcg/L of aluminium, on day one our children are getting 350g, if not more, and this is just unheard of. It blows my mind because aluminium has no place in our body [this image shown]…
[Vaughan continues] it’s a known neurotoxin. it’s a heavy metal, it’s incredibly difficult to detox from and we’re injecting these into the bloodstream, so it goes straight to the vital organs. It’s not like when you ingest something and 60% of it is filtered out through the kidney and the natural detox process. It goes straight to vital organs. And this is happening on day one. So it’s not surprising that the US leads the developed world in infant mortality rates and day one mortality rates. And we seem to think that we have the best healthcare protocol in the world and you’re not seeing these type of things in other countries. And people need to start questioning this because what I’ve really learned during my research is this is all about profit; it’s not about our health. I mean, how can we believe that it’s about our health when we have the sickest children, we have the sickest generation of children in our country at the moment. You know, things like peanut allergies, peanuts are no longer allowed in schools. You know, all the food allergies, the gut issues, the autoimmune diseases, all of these things that I mentioned. I mean, that is the true epidemic in our country are those diseases and that childhood level of poor health that we have.
Lee Ann McAdoo: And the cognitive dissonance of the American people to just continue on and say, “well, the doctor says it’s safe and effective.”
Brandy Vaughan: Right.
Lee Ann McAdoo: …I’ve got to go ahead and just do what the doctor says…
In her recent submission (number 468) to the No Jab No Pay Senate Inquiry, Wilyman concludes that “references can be obtained from my doctoral thesis submitted at the University of Wollongong.” If I was this university I would be trembling behind a rock at the thought that the name “Dr Judy Wilyman” will be forever wed to the University of Wollongong’s name, just like she is doing underneath every single one of her recent newsletters. As if she hasn’t brought enough permanent disrepute to the university.
Maybe when Wilyman has real blood on her hands the University of Wollongong might take this a bit more seriously.
Digitally altered image courtesy of my Super Shooper friend
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Update November 15 2015
This post on Brandy Vaughan’s Facebook profile – from the time of her Infowars interview – shows us how much she knows about pharmaceutical manufacture. Vaughan is nothing but a conspiracy theorist who doesn’t understand her topic, so she makes it up:
…some great callers that talked about how toxic the vaccine manufacturing plants are and how full suits are worn even by the janitors that work in the facility…
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