(This story by Kayla Collier was published in the Stowe Reporter on May 25, 2017.)
[A] lot of heat preceded a controversial autism summit held Saturday at Stowe High School, but it produced no combustion.
Just in case, seven state troopers and four Stowe police officers were stationed at the Hope and Healing for Autism and Neuro-development Disorders seminar. “First of all, I want to say it is an honor to be here at the Vermont police convention,” joked Del Bigtree, one of the speakers. “I want to thank them for keeping people safe, and I’m sorry to have to bring them away from their families on a Saturday, because a medical discussion causes fear.”
Ultimately, the fear was kept at bay, not by the police, but by the would-be-protesters themselves. Critics of the event decided to have a bake sale in front of The Alchemist instead of a protest — preferring to ignore the seminar just up the hill.
“When faced with noise that isn’t helpful to the community, you have to turn your backs, put in earplugs, and block the noise,” said Emily Rosenbaum, one of the bake sale organizers. “We are here to bake America great again. The Stowe community exercised its First Amendment rights today with butter.”
Julia Rogers, the other bake sale organizer, said a lot of people came out to support the cause, giving nearly $2,000 to the three charities the bake sale was supporting — $385 to Seeds of Change, $579 to Autistic Self Advocacy Group and $1,015 to Doctors Without Borders.
“We estimate that a couple of hundred people stopped by the sale over the course of four hours,” Rogers said, but the true testament to the bake sale’s success was the 40 community members who donated baked goods.
“It astounds me that people were moved enough to get in their kitchens and roll up their sleeves to protest for what they believe in. Baking takes love and hours of time, so that number really says it all,” Rogers added.
At the sale, Rogers and Rosenbaum asked people to write down anonymously why they decided to support the bake sale. Answers included: “We support modern medicine; vaccines are safe and save lives” and “Herd immunity protects my daughter.”
One woman said she had a friend diagnosed with polio — a preventable disease.
“This is what we like,” said Stowe police officer Jimmy Sawyer. “Everyone can come and listen to what they want to without conflict.”
On vaccines
What some local people worried was a thinly veiled anti-vaccination summit turned out to be just that.
In the last two months, event organizer Bradley Rauch, a Stowe chiropractor, maintained that vaccines were only a small part of what was on the agenda for the event — “maybe 5 percent or so,” he said — but in fact, every speaker had something to say about what they see as the harms of vaccinating children.
“We’ve been lied to. ‘Vaccines Are Safe and Effective’ is a great slogan, but it doesn’t actually happen to be true,” Bigtree said. “Our own Supreme Court ruled vaccines are unavoidably unsafe.”
Bigtree claimed that the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention knew that vaccines increased a child’s chances of developing autism, but tried to bury the study.
“Children are seven to eight times more likely to develop autism if given the (mumps, measles and rubella) vaccine between 12 to 18 months of life instead of after three years,” Bigtree said. “That’s huge, and the study took four years to come out.”
Jennifer Mink, a Morristown resident, believes vaccines could have contributed to autism in her child. She said she has nothing to gain by coming forward, because her child already has autism, but she can help other parents avoid what she’s had to go through.
“I’m a chiropractor in New York City, and I am unvaccinated. The truth can be scary to people,” said Josh Handt. “We are told our bodies are not intelligent and they need chemicals, but never has poison equaled prevention. It’s eye-opening.”
The debate about whether vaccines harm children has been circulating since the early 1990s, when Andrew Wakefield, who was supposed to speak at Saturday’s seminar but dropped out last week, stated in a study that the mumps, measles and rubella vaccine can be linked to autism.
In the study, Wakefield and a group of British scientists stated that they could not demonstrate a causal relationship between the vaccine and autism, and recommended that the triple-virus vaccine be suspended in favor of single-antigen vaccinations, given separately over time.
But reactions to the publication lead to parents delaying or completely refusing vaccination for their children.
“I am not for freedom of choice. I am anti-vaccine,” said Jack Wolfson, a cardiologist who spoke at the event. “Or if you don’t want to be anti anything, I’m pro-natural immunity.”
Wolfson believes the country does not need to inject kids with neurotoxins; it needs to provide them healthy food and chiropractic care.
He pushed the audience to make chiropractors their primary care physicians, because they are “doctors of cause,” and drugs are not their first line of defense.
“Children are born healthy, until we screw them up,” Wolfson said.
Another speaker, filmmaker Jeff Hayes, told the audience there are steps people can take to start their own anti-vaccine movement in their community.
“You can’t walk up to a mother and tell her she’s poisoning her child. She may be, but there’s a better way to get them to listen,” he said. “Meet people where they are, and start by being kind.”
Sherri Tenpenny offered legal advice, stating that since there is no way to get reimbursements from the doctors giving vaccines for the harm they have caused, there is nothing people can legally do. Parents sign a liability waiver at the doctor’s office before any vaccines are given. But they can stop vaccinating.
She spoke mostly about the “flawed” studies around vaccines, and how even the placebo group is given a vaccine, so rather than comparing unvaccinated children against vaccinated, scientists are comparing one vaccine’s side effects to another.
Despite all the anti-vaccine rhetoric by his speakers, Rauch held fast to the claim that the event was not anti-vaccine.
“I was getting pounded by the media, because the other side labeled this an anti-vaccine event,” he said. “This is not anti-vaccine, it’s pro-life. … People think drugs heal, but go to a morgue, find a corpse and put drugs in it. It will not heal, because life heals.”
When asked about his motivation for hosting the event, Rauch said he’s heard that, by 2032, one in 32 kids will be on the autism spectrum.
A lumber supplier also had a hand in the motivation, because in 2006, Rauch and his wife purchased wood from that company for their new home in Stowe. His wife was pregnant soon thereafter and after nine months had a homebirth. His daughter was stillborn. Years later, Rauch said, he found out that the lumber supplier had treated its wood with levels of formaldehyde that were six times higher than the level considered safe.
“We did everything right, but we didn’t know we had been breathing in toxic chemicals,” Rauch said.
A black-and-white photo of Rauch’s stillborn child, with blood on the swaddling blanket, was projected on the screen behind him, eliciting tears and sniffles from the audience. It stayed up until the end of his speech.
“We may be depicted as being evil, but they can say what they want about us. We just live our lives in alignment with natural law,” Rauch said.
Rauch and the other speakers hope to hold the same event next year, but asked every audience member to bring at least 10 more people with them.