I married a beautiful woman from Malaysia in the late ’80s. We had a son about a year later. We are still married after all these years.
At the time, I was working as a Design Engineer for a pharmaceutical company. As part of the job, I accepted a position to do technology transfer from Ann Arbor, MI, to a manufacturing plant in Ponce, PR.
My son was a year old at the time, developing normally and meeting all his milestones as a toddler. He was able to recognize objects, point, and interact with other toddlers in games of hide-and-seek.
Before we left the U.S., Keith was one year old and got caught up on his MMR and boosters. As typical parents, we were, of course, informed by the pediatrician that Puerto Rico could harbor some dangerous pathogens.
When we arrived there, it took a few months to even find a home near my place of work, and we finally settled in a neighboring town called Yauco, about 10 miles from my workplace.
We bought a house, and of course, there were a lot of adjustments due to the fact that they spoke Spanish there, and the culture was different. Getting oriented to the new environment and job took some time.
Everything was going well for the first few months, but then we started noticing odd behavior in my son Keith. He seemed to have lost his ability to interact with the other young kids who came over to our house to play. He also started engaging in repetitive behavior, like opening and closing closet doors repeatedly. He no longer made eye contact with us.
One time, we let him wander on his own to see when he would look for Mom and Dad to come and get him. He just kept wandering further and further, unlike a normal toddler. He was in his own world and seemed to be cut off from recognition of parental affection and attention.
A neighbor who was a veterinarian even gave us a cat. My wife hoped that a pet would help, but it did not do any good. We checked his hearing in a lab, and it tested out okay. We took my son to a psychologist, and she diagnosed Keith as autistic because he would not make eye contact or follow her finger when moved from left to right.
We spoke with my mom about Keith’s behavior and filled out a multiple-choice questionnaire from Bernard Rimland, who founded the Autism Society of America. The results indicated that our son was autistic.
At that point, we had been in Puerto Rico for only a year, but we knew we had to get back to the U.S. as the treatment for autism, a relatively rare illness, was not very good in that small country. We moved to the Minneapolis area, where we had family, and it was relatively easy to find a job for a technical person like myself. There were also a lot of programs for autism there.
While back in MN, Keith was officially diagnosed as autistic, and we started him on a “Behavioral Therapy” program, considered the best practice for helping to “overcome” autism. We complied, as little was known about autism then, and websites listed it as genetic in origin, etc.
There were many other parents at the time with children of varying degrees of autism that we met in a parents’ support group.
We moved close to the University of Minnesota and engaged college students to help train Keith. His therapy consisted of training him first to come when called and to sit in a chair for at least a minute or two to do his exercises.
Keith was doing as well as a severely autistic person could do and was able to understand directions and speak in groups of 3 or 4 words in a sentence at a time. He had the typical issues of an autistic child, such as an extended belly, picky eating, poor sleep habits, tantrums, and jumping up and down while flapping his hands. He also enjoyed watching videos, mainly of kids singing and dancing, as his favorites.
He started going to kindergarten, eventually grade school, and was “mainstreamed” in the classroom but had someone who could bring him to a breakout room if he became too disruptive.
It was around the age of 4 that rumors started spreading that vaccines caused autism. I did not think this could be true, as all the websites at the time said vaccines had nothing to do with autism.
While in grade school, they actually gave Keith additional vaccines as part of the school immunization program. Keith started having grand mal epileptic seizures around the age of 10. We were quite frightened. The web and doctors told us that puberty could trigger seizures in autistic children, so we did not consider any possible association with additional childhood vaccines.
Fast forward to today, Keith is a 33-year-old adult who still lives at home with his parents. We have been reducing his medications to minimal amounts over the past few years with good results, as many of them had increased his appetite. Now he is at a reasonable weight and in excellent health. He eats a pretty good diet compared to most people his age.
It has been really tough for us all these years, dealing with situations where Keith would go several nights without sleeping. He also had very poor immunity for most of his younger life, with severe constipation, frequent asthma, and very poor eating habits. Most of these are resolved now.
I retired right before the COVID pandemic. I could not believe what I was seeing with all the doctors getting decertified and censored for having a different opinion from the “official” narrative. That rang alarm bells for me, and as a Technical Analyst, I started digging into what was really going on.
I read The Real Anthony Fauci and Turtles All the Way Down during that period to get a better understanding of what was happening. I was heavily engaged in debates on Facebook as I had become very “Pro-Natural Immunity” at that point. I was stunned that Facebook was censoring me, vaccine-injured individuals, and shadow-banning the anti-vax group I belonged to.
I left Facebook and joined a social media site called “MeWe” (little to no censoring).
I started a few groups there and have been posting to other groups as well on the dangers of vaccines. A big part of the problem is the gaslighting and brainwashing of the public. I have been including many of Chris’s postings from VaxCalc. I also have other groups and individuals posting to my group and vice-versa—it is a great way to learn.
I happened upon the VaxCalc site and am a programmer/database developer like Chris. Our mindset is to understand the details and how they fit into the bigger picture. I like the community involvement and the sincerity of Chris in breaking through the barriers that exist in the public’s minds. I think the ability to engage people in real-time in a community setting is what is needed, especially for young parents looking for an unbiased source of information.
At this point in my life, I am retired and looking forward to supporting young parents, especially so they don’t have to go through what we went through. Young parents are especially vulnerable to the “pro-vaccine” message as they want to do the right thing for their children but are led down the wrong path by the establishment.
One other major issue is that the search engines online are useless when it comes to obtaining unbiased information on vaccines. Per Turtles All the Way Down, these sites get their information from the corrupt Big Pharma publication process. That is why we need sites like MeWe and VaxCalc to help get the sword of truth to those who thirst for it.
As Charles Spurgeon so eloquently argued in his 1876 sermon on the topic of overcoming evil with good: “You must either be overcome of evil, or you must yourself overcome evil; one of the two. You cannot let evil alone, and evil will not let you alone. You must fight, and in the battle, you must either conquer or be conquered.” The means of “fighting” in our case is to present the truth and help people make decisions for the benefit of their families and loved ones.
