WARNING SIGNS: Robert Alex Atkinson, Former Investigative Journalist and Head of Americans for Informed Drug & Vaccine Choices
Excerpt from "COVIDsteria: An Oral History of America's Great Reset" - see https://covidsteria.substack.com/p/covidsteria-table-of-contents (NOTE: This post may be too long for some email providers)
The traditional big pharma and medical research hubs of New Jersey and Boston were devastated by the Great Die-Off. Given how few survivors there were among the overeducated workforces in those regions, most pharma and medical research work has shifted to Houston.
I flew to Houston to catch up with Robert Alex Atkinson, a former investigative journalist and the head of Americans for Informed Drug & Vaccine Choices. He is now considered the foremost and most trusted medical commentator or pundit in the country...
I began my career as an investigative journalist who practiced old school journalism long before the days of 24-hour cable news cycles, the Internet, and social media. In those days, we had two mantras:
Never trust or believe the first answer anyone told you.
If your gut tells you to have some doubts, do some digging to check things out.
As an investigative journalist, I was supposed to be skeptical of everything. I was also supposed to ask difficult or uncomfortable questions to search for the truth, and it did not matter where it might lead.
During my career, I investigated the collusion between big pharma, regulators, and public health bureaucracies. And my stories got my name removed from all the cocktail party invitation lists in Washington DC! But I did not care about that because I loved the work I was doing!
When journalism began to change thanks to the 24/7 cable news cycle, the Internet, and social media, I left the profession to become an activist who questioned drug and vaccine dogma. I chose this line of activism due to the growing number of reports from parents about perfectly normal children experiencing both cognitive and physical declines after being vaccinated.
Despite many reports, the public health bureaucracies, big pharma companies, and almost all of my former colleagues in the media continued to parrot the official line that vaccines were “safe and effective” and to “trust science” because vaccines were "settled science." Any evidence to the contrary was always labeled “widely debunked” without citing any actual scientific or medical evidence or study to back that claim up.
Anyone who dared to question any vaccine dogma got labeled an anti-vaxxer – including myself. Keep in mind that all of my children have taken vaccines my wife and I felt were safely manufactured and appropriate for them to take.
What were your specific scientific or medical concerns about vaccines?
My initial concern of a possible link between vaccines and disorders like autism was due to a mercury-based preservative called Thimerosal. 1 It was developed in the 1920s and used in vaccines and other medicines or medical products. However, public health agencies and big pharma did not realize until 1999 that they had never calculated the cumulative amount of mercury exposure children received thanks to the growing childhood vaccination schedule.
Instead of recalling and destroying all existing inventories of vaccines containing Thimerosal, the government allowed big pharma companies to save money by continuing to jab American children with their stockpiles. It was not until 2003 that the vaccines given to American children were free of Thimerosal.
By then, the public health authorities had added a flu vaccine containing mercury or Thimerosal to the childhood vaccination schedule. Fortunately, flu vaccines without any mercury component would become more widely available in later years. However, some doctors refused to use them as they could be inconvenient or too expensive to order.
But the autism story did not end there. In 2008 in a case that received widespread attention, a family was awarded compensation for autism due to vaccine injury. According to the expert witness from the government, a metabolic overload triggered by vaccines caused the child's autism. However, the court ordered all medical records and details about the case to be sealed from the public.
That did not stop more court cases from being filed. The US government has since paid hundreds of millions of dollars to dozens of other vaccine-injured children with autism diagnoses. [He pauses in thought.]
Autism issues aside, when I looked deeper into the secret history of both US military and public health vaccination programs and vaccine development, I became deeply troubled by what I found.
Few Americans even know that between 1941 and 1942, tainted vaccines caused as many as 330,000 American soldiers to get infected with hepatitis B. 2 It was the biggest outbreak ever recorded and blamed on a tainted yellow fever vaccine made with human blood serum contaminated with hepatitis B. About 1 in 7 of those exposed became sick. It is also normal for 5 to 10% of those infected to carry the virus in their bodies throughout their lives.
Then you have the troubling secret history of the polio vaccine. 3 4 When Jonas Salk first developed his Polio vaccine, he did not use human tissues like the scientists who won a Nobel Prize for first growing poliovirus in tissue cultures had done. Instead, Salk used minced-up rhesus macaque monkey kidneys because they were more efficient poliovirus factories for growing Polio at galactic speed to use some recent vaccine or public health terminology.
Despite manufacturing or quality control problems that left at least six children with paralyzed arms and despite concerns about contamination with unknown wild simian viruses, the vaccine shots were declared safe and effective after field trials. The following year after approval by government regulators, free Salk vaccine shots were made available throughout the USA by public health officials.
By 1960, scientists and vaccine manufacturers knew that rhesus macaque monkey kidneys were literal sewers filled with simian viruses because such contamination often spoiled their vaccine cultures. Then a government researcher who worked on vaccine safety began injecting hamsters with cell cultures from rhesus monkey kidneys. The hamsters subsequently developed tumors which she ground up and injected into still more hamsters. Those hamsters also developed cancers. However, she could not isolate what she suspected to be a simian virus as the root cause of these cancers.
When this researcher presented her findings to her public health boss, a well-known polio vaccine champion, he became livid. Her findings were a threat to his career in public health and threatened the government's most important public health initiative.
However, there is one thing that I have consistently encountered through all my years of investigative journalism. That is the code of silence or omertà within the medical community and especially among public health authorities. This omertà is stronger than the ones practiced by the mafia or members of the news media. You do not break the public health authority omertà. If you do, it always leads to vendettas and reprisals.
But this researcher did break the public health omertà. She tried to get the word out to her colleagues, but the public health authorities quickly muzzled her by stripping her of vaccine regulatory duties and her laboratory. There were no changes to how the vaccine got made, and the American public still received it along with booster shots. However, other researchers using her initial work were able to identify a rhesus virus later named SV40 as the suspected cancer-causing virus culprit that had eluded her.
In 1963, the USA finally switched to much safer to use African green monkeys, which are not natural hosts of SV40, to produce their polio vaccines. The kidneys of this species of monkey are now widely used to make other vaccines. By the time this happened, almost 100 million Americans were vaccinated and exposed to SV40. Investigators have subsequently found SV40 DNA in biopsy specimens obtained from patients with lung, bone, and lymph node cancers.