Letter from a Mother

By Helena Hjalmarsson, M.A., C.S.W., L.P., Special to The Kennedy Beacon

Three decades ago, I moved to New York City from the outskirts of a little town in Sweden that no one on this side of the Atlantic has ever heard of. At the time of my upbringing, Sweden was a functional social democracy where only very few were wealthy beyond ordinary life and the rest of us went to the same schools and hospitals with no fear of ending up poor and with no aspiration to become rich. When I moved to America, I was shocked at the savage inequalities and the social-economic differences, the both explicit and obscure racism, and witnessed with big eyes how people lived in cardboard boxes on the street right next to fancy high-rise luxury condos. 

For the first decade in this country, I did not have health insurance and never saw a doctor. When my oldest daughter was born, I had my first personal experience with how greed and corruption can destroy not only people’s right to have their basic needs met, but also their health.

Up until three and a half years old, my firstborn daughter developed wonderfully, ahead of every milestone, and she was a very social, sweet, gentle girl with astute understanding of, and interest in, people around her, and with articulate fluency in both Swedish and English. After her second MMR vaccine, at three and a half years old, she had her first of many seizures, drooled uncontrollably for two and a half weeks, was confused, and lost all resemblance of coherent speech from then on. 

It took me a while to understand what had happened. I also only gradually realized that the fact that my daughter was injured by the vaccines was not a very popular concept. It did not seem to make much of a difference that I could show the blood tests with elevated mercury and aluminum levels, the adjuvants used in vaccines. The idea that the vaccines had anything to do with her condition was “extreme” – even one of my best friends told me so. 

My daughter’s autism, I was generally informed, was most likely genetic. Both my ex-husband and I underwent an impressive list of genetic testing. But no one could establish any conceivable link between our genes and our daughter’s challenges. I went back to the pediatrician who had administered most of my oldest daughter’s vaccines to get her medical records. He spent almost an hour of time he most certainly did not have attempting to convince me that my daughter’s sudden disintegrated state had nothing to do with the vaccines she had just received. That was my first of many experiences of how most members of the medical community do not want to know about adverse reactions to vaccines – even when they happen to our children. 

When I wrote my second book, Finding Lina, about our journey navigating the world of severe autism, and included a chapter called “Safe Vaccines,” an editor at The New York Times contacted my editor to try to convince me to exclude the “Safe Vaccines” chapter if I wanted a review in The New York Times. It was “unnecessary to include this information,” they said, as it would take away from the content of the rest of the book. That was my first personal experience with how unfree the media is in this country. Since when is it unnecessary to include what actually transpired in a nonfiction account of what happened? [Finding Lina was published by Skyhorse Publishing, whose president and founder, Tony Lyons, is co-chair of the American Values 2024 super PAC, which finances The Kennedy Beacon.]

And why does everybody – the medical community, CDC, NIH, FDA, my neighbors, most mainstream media channels, my teenagers’ teachers, part of my family, my best friend – insist that there is no correlation between autism and vaccines? This, despite the fact that the government, in 1986 under Reagan’s administration, came up with the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) that excused the pharmaceutical companies from all liability for adverse reactions to their vaccines, regardless of how severe the injuries were and how directly and indisputably they correlated with the vaccines. Before this law passed, pharmaceutical companies were forced to pay billions to families of vaccine-injured kids. 

The number of vaccines given to children has increased dramatically, particularly right after the NCVIA, from a handful to a total of over 70 vaccines per child. Just thirty-five years ago, most people had no idea what autism was. Since this law was made, autism, ADHD, autoimmune disorders, juvenile diabetes, and many other serious conditions have skyrocketed. Before 1985, the number of kids on the autism spectrum, already then on the rise, was one in 2,500. Today, one in every 34 children and one in every 22 boys is diagnosed with this disorder.

To me, there is overwhelming – however suppressed and denied – evidence that there indeed is an intimate connection between autism and unsafe, untested, vaccines that are preserved with mercury and aluminum and other dangerous substances and that hit undeveloped nervous systems the hardest. Whether it is a popular view or one that most people – influenced by consistent and skillful propaganda – prefer to deny or even ridicule, does not change much for me. In my understanding, corporate power and profit takes precedence over safe medicine and honest, transparent acknowledgment of what is happening to so many of our children. As Mahatma Gandhi said in Young India, “An error does not become truth by any reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it. Truth stands, even if there be no public support. It is self sustained.”

Gandhi, a peaceful protester of anything that threatened his and his people’s freedom, made a statement about vaccines that today appears to have become somewhat of a prophecy:

Vaccination is a barbarous practice and one of the most fatal of all the delusions current in our time. Conscientious objectors to vaccination should stand alone, if need be, against the whole world, in defense of their conviction.

COVID-19 Mandates

In the context of COVID-19, and the subsequent vaccine mandates, I saw that this, in fact, became an alarming reality. Strangely, most Americans are influenced by an approach that does not take into account that the COVID vaccines have not been adequately tested, do not prevent COVID, do not prevent transmission of COVID, and are overwhelmingly proven to be fatal in instances that, according to prior regulations, would absolutely and unequivocally lead to their discontinuation. We now know that President Biden’s promises that the COVID vaccines and the masks would prevent the contracting and spreading of COVID and its variants were unfounded. Why then, did people risk losing their jobs and livelihoods if they decided not to vaccinate?

Humanity Project, a research center that is part of Phinance Technologies in Portugal, stated that COVID-19 vaccines, since 2021, have injured 26.6 million Americans, disabled 1.36 million, and killed more than 300,000. These findings bring new life to Gandhi’s statement that “Fear of illness is killing more men than the disease itself.” The callous shaming, and the vilifying efforts to quiet those who attempted to ask questions about how best to protect oneself and others from COVID that deviated from the main approach of isolating, masking, and multiple and ongoing vaccinations, were consistent and skillful. Whenever and wherever a government systematically quiets viewpoints, questions, experiences, and research that challenge the main narrative, one must wonder what is being hidden. There has been a more dramatic redistribution of wealth during this pandemic, with the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, than at any time in history.

And our children are more vulnerable than ever, not to COVID, but to the vaccines that the pharmaceutical companies and all the governmental agencies make an impressive profit out of selling. No one at CDC can come up with a single example of a healthy child dying from COVID. And yet, six-month-old babies became next in line to cope with a vaccine that has proven to be very dangerous to children’s hearts, nervous systems, and lives. Doctors who speak up against this dangerous and unnecessary practice are losing not just their platforms, but also their jobs, licenses, and reputations.

None of this is unique to COVID. History shows us that heavy censorship is almost always sustained through fear and is consistently a coverup of something that is not in the public’s best interest. The COVID pandemic showed me how willing most people were to give up critical thinking and autonomy because of fear and pressure. To stop asking questions because a government official, a boss, a teacher, a doctor, or a friend told us that alternative views are “extreme” and “dangerous.”

As Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis concurred in Whitney v. California, “Fear of serious injury alone cannot justify oppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burnt women on stakes. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fear.”

There are those who stand up for the rights of the public to know the truth, regardless of consequences. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is one of many brave warriors of our time. For as long as he worked relentlessly on saving our waterways from mercury and other pollution, he was a hero. When he started to speak out about the mercury, aluminum, and other toxins that were injected into immature nervous systems and destroyed children’s lives, he became a villain. Most of us generally agree with Gandhi that what is good and true is worth fighting for, and “Every good movement passes through five stages: indifference, ridicule, abuse, repression, and respect.”

Kennedy accepted the pushback and persevered. He spoke up about how the corruption of organizations like the EPA and the Bureau of Land Management that led to a failure to protect the environment from polluters and extractors was the same corruption within CDC, FDA, and NIH that endangered the well-being – and often the lives – of innocent children. As soon as he understood the way that governmental agencies, not just within the area of environment, but in finance and public health as well, had become business partners with the very corporations they were there to critically analyze in order to protect the public, he made it official. And now he is running for president. He is not afraid to talk about any of it. His view of democracy reminds me of the socioeconomically just democracy I grew up in.

Somehow, despite the extreme state of censorship and one-sided views that support and protect big corporations more than looking after the most vulnerable in our society, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is making headway. While many of his interviews are continuously being censored, and he was all but forced out of the party of his father and uncle, Kennedy’s numbers as an independent candidate are on the rise. Maybe, deep inside, people are getting tired of being told what to believe. Maybe most people have had enough experiences of ineffective and dangerous vaccines that, even though they are afraid to say so, they are hoping for someone to protect them from the increasing insanity that arises in any situation where censorship prevents people from making good decisions. As former US senator Christopher Dodd stated, “When the public’s right to know is threatened, and when the rights of free speech and free press are at risk, all the other liberties we hold dear are endangered.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the first politician that I have encountered since I came to the US who fully embodies the civil duty described by Maajid Nawaz in the Daily Beast: 

If Liberalism is to mean anything at all, it is duty bound to support without hesitation the dissenting individual over the group, the heretic over the orthodox, innovation over stagnation, and free speech over offense.

I do believe that the correlation between increasing corporate power and censorship, as well as escalating restrictions on individual freedom, is becoming a little more obvious to the average American. The way the media relates to Kennedy illustrates what happens to someone who criticizes how governmental agencies are placing public wellness, health, and safety on the periphery while partnering up with big corporations. Kennedy is ridiculed and censored, misquoted and disparaged. There is a long tradition in this country of silencing those who speak truthfully rather than strategizing for power.

As President John F. Kennedy said, “A nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s brave advocacy for the most vulnerable, whether vaccine-injured children, people without even the most basic resources, those wrongfully or unnecessarily imprisoned, or simply those without access to critical information regarding their physical health, gives me renewed hope that maybe, one day in the future, people will become more important than profit and power. That one day, we will all be free to talk about our experiences and voice our questions and opinions without being shamed and silenced. And that, in the not-too-distant future, we can live in a world that is more motivated by love than by fear, by transparency and authenticity rather than censorship and increasingly authoritarian measures.