Immunization has long been promoted by health authorities, and the media as the safest option to safeguard you and your family from a range of diseases, with little or no coverage of the potential side effects or alternatives to immunization. What is avoided by medical authorities is the evidence that immunization often offers a protection period far shorter than advertised, and that these immunisations carry risks which vary in extremity and are in some cases worse than what they are meant than the disease they are designed to protect against.

The history of artificial immunzation has been documented and retold to put immunization in the best light. Edward Jenner is widely accepted as the father of vaccination, but of course his ideas were derived from the practices of Druids in both Britain and Northern Europe, and medicinal practises in the Middle Ages. In the late 1600's in Constantinople, there is documentation of a woman physician puncturing the applicant's skin and applying pus from a smallpox victim, claiming that the applicant would be protected. There is evidence of widespread self innoculation methods across Europe at this time.

Edward Jenner, by trade was a chiropodist and a barber. His main idea was developed from the theory of a local farmer that exposure to cowpox meant protection against smallpox for an individual. When he realised that this was not infact true, he proceeded to create a vaccine from horses diseased with horsepox, as these horses had infected cows with their disease. In the 1800's this concept quickly caught the attention of the public, and he was awarded £30,000 by the governement. After an outbreak of smallpox in the latter half of the 1800's it was realised that Jenner's claim of protection for immunized individuals was false. A German outbreak of smallpox saw over one million contract the disease. Out of these people 96% had been immunized.

Later George Bernard Shaw, the Irish playwright (and later Nobel Prize Winner) wrote in The Nation in 1923 that  "When its failure [immunisation] to protect for life could no longer be denied, it was alleged to last for seven years, and re-vaccination was made compulsory in many cases". He goes on to say that "in 1871, when compulsory vaccination was at its height, [took place] the most appalling epidemic of smallpox on record."

After these outbreaks of the smallpox disease, authorities ceased to use vaccination as the main method of disease prevention and control, and replaced it with isolation. With the improvement of hygiene among the population, smallpox gradually declined. The proponents of vaccination claimed that the period in which the vaccination was most widely used corresponded with the general decline in the disease. However the numbers of cases of smallpox deceased all over Europe, not merely in the areas in which vaccines were administered.

Looking back through the natural history of viruses, it is evident that a decline in a virus over time can not necessarily be attributed to vaccinations. Over periods where a strain of virus has declined, it has been when housing, hygiene and nutrition have all improved.

After the failings of Jenner's method of immunization, the work of Louis Pasteur next brought the issue of vaccination back into the public eye. Like Jenner, Pasteur was a chemist, not a doctor. Modern medicine bases practice around Pasteurs theory that a specific organism causes a specific disease, and thus a specific vaccination can offer protection from it's specific disease. As noted by Archie Kalokerions and Glen Dettman in 1977, it was seen that among Aboriginal children administered with a vaccination, some of the luckier ones did not receive protection, but the less forunate died.

It was later found that Pasteur had plagiarised the ideas of his contemporary, Béchamp. He stated that viruses could be reproduced as similar organisms if the specific environmental conditions existed. If the cell, and the organism to which is belongs is healthy, then the virus is less able to replicate and spread. Jay Levy MD noted in Time magazine (November 1986) that having the AIDS virus will not necessarily lead to the person contracting the illness. It is the use of other drugs, poor nutrition, lack of sleep, stress, and other infections which compromise an individual's immune system, making them succeptible to developing the disease. Kalokerinos and Dettman state that "it is the manner in which we live that becomes important."

Dr Max von Pettenkoffer, when demonstrating the importance of hygiene and immunity, consumed samples of pathogenic potentially fatal cholera bacilli, and remained unharmed. Other scientists at the time partook in similar experiments, contracting at worst a mild diarrhoea. This backs up claims by the writer Rene Dubos, that conditions in a laboratory differ to results in the natural environment, as researchers such as Pasteur could not replicate natural conditions. Therefore the solutions that worked in a laboratory environment do not necessarily work when put into the natural environment.

When Pasteur tested his theory of vaccinations he had developed for anthrax, he injected the sheep with a virulent strain of the anthrax bacilli, which was far from the method by which a sheep would contract the disease in the wild. In these unnatural conditions, the vaccination worked, but in their natural environment, sheep are able to survive exposure to anthrax bacteria.

The use of vaccination as a protective measure is solely promoted by global health authorities, and the alternative measures are dismissed without mainstream media attention. Artificial immunization has began to be increasingly regarded by a number of people as a second choice to improved hygiene and nutrition and therefore an improved immune system. We have to keep our minds open to the possibility that future generations will find the idea of bypassing our natural protections and injecting diseased material directly into the bloodstreams of new born babies as fundamentally ridiculous as we now find the idea of using leaches to cure disease.