Paying off the National Debt with Water

By Gene Franks

I read a clip from an engineering magazine about a Canadian inventor named Roy Jomha who has invented a toilet attachment called Econo-Flush. Mr. Jomha says that Econo-Flush can save 68% of the water that is sucked down toilets, and since 43% of the average home’s water goes down the toilet, he calculates that if every U.S. home had an Econo-Flush, the savings could take a big chunk out of the national debt in just a few years. 
This may be a good idea, but I got an even better one from the familiar medical slogan, “If we spend just one dollar on childhood immunization, we save $10 in later medical costs.” This could be the answer to the national debt, sickness care costs, and even world hunger. All we have to do is start spending $1 trillion or so per year on vaccinations, and with the $10 trillion per year we save in medical costs we can soon pay off the national debt and begin feeding the world.

I was pleased to see recently that the Centers for Disease Control, where they have lots of money to study such things, arrived at a similar conclusion about gonorrhea and the price of beer. I’ll let the Alternet  staff writer who calls him- or herself Mad Dog explain:

Somehow the scientists [at CDC] discovered that when alcohol taxes go up, gonorrhea goes down. They explain this by saying that the cheaper beer is, the more of it teenage boys can buy. The more they buy, the more teenage girls drink. And the more teenage girls drink, the more often they go down, which in turn sends the gonorrhea rate up. To put it in Einsteinian terms, beer equals sex and sex equals gonorrhea, therefore beer equals gonorrhea. No one can accuse CDC scientists of being overly complex.

They concluded that we can curb gonorrhea by raising the tax on beer. According to them, adding twenty cents to the price of a six-pack would reduce gonorrhea by about nine percent. This comes to just over two pennies a percent. If that’s the case, why stop there? Why not slap a $2.00 tax on a six-pack and stamp out gonorrhea completely?

Plans like these seem wonderful in the slogan phase,  but when you start applying them to reality you run into problems. Like whose money is being saved? And where does this money go? And doesn’t putting money in Paul’s pocket of necessity entail taking it out of Peter’s?

As a measles “victim” of the 1940s, I can’t remember a lot of expense involved with the illness. I had to miss school a few davs and suffer the inconvenience of having a blotchy face and hiding my comics from my mother. (Reading when you had measles was supposed to be bad for your eyes.) Probably my dad laid out $1.90 or so at the drug store for whatever was the placebo du jour. Apart from the $1.90, which wasn’t really a loss to the national economy since it was a gain for the drug store, and the per diem allowance that the school lost for my non-attendance but the taxpayers saved by not having to pay the school, I’m not aware of any great economic impact that resulted from my measles. Seems like about a break-even transaction to me. Similarly, when I had pertussis, which people called whooping cough in those days, I think not much expense was involved. It happened before I started to school, so there was no lost or saved per diem, and since my mother didn’t work, my illness didn’t slow the wheels of industry by keeping her off the assembly line or anything.

Most of us don’t give much thought to the purpose of measles, mumps, chicken pox and the other childhood diseases we’re always being asked to spend an additional several million a year nationally to “conquer.” Observation has convinced me that the human body, as part of the natural process, operates with an economy that precludes meaningless activities. The “common cold”, despite the lore promoted by doctors and legal drug dealers, isn’t a disease in need of correction, but a highly effective and essential cleaning exercise, initiated and carried out by the body. We owe our well being to orthodox medicine’s repeated failure to “cure” it. Cancer, in one view, is the result of the body’s inability to have a good cold.

When I had pertussis and later asthma, the doctor’s explanation was that pertussis “left me with asthma.” With the advantage of hindsight, my own view is that pertussis, with all the heaving and whooping it involves,  prepared my developing respiratory system to survive the intense asthma attacks that my lifestyle was leading me toward. They should do a study, though they won’t, comparing the life-long respiratory health of pertussis victims with that of children who were “protected” by having pertussis symptoms suppressed by vaccination. I had pertussis and I’ve also had indestructible lungs.

Measles isn’t really something the body “catches” but something the body “does.” No one seems to give much thought to what measles is. What is the body’s purpose for this brief and mildly unpleasant event that, before it was medically upgraded to a life-threatening dilemma, used to visit children once in their life and leave them, but for rare exceptions, all the stronger for the experience?

Dr. Richard Moskowitz, an M.D. and a practicing homeopathic physician, says that “the process of mounting an acute illness like the measles, no less than recovering from it, involves a general mobilization of the entire immune system.” The immune system, contrary to the cartoon version we are usually given, consists of far more than antibody production. Measles exercises the protective tissues at the portal of entry (the respiratory system, in this case), leukocytes and macrophages, the serum complement system, and “a host of other mechanisms, of which the production of circulating antibody is only one, and by no means the most important.” The purpose? Dr. Moskowitz continues:

Such a splendid outpouring leaves little doubt that such illnesses are in fact the decisive experience in the normal physiological maturation of the immune system as a whole in the life of a healthy child. For not only will the child who recovers from measles never again be susceptive to it; such an experience also cannot fail to prepare the individual to respond even more promptly and effectively to any infections he may acquire in the future. The ability to mount a vigorous response to organisms of this type must therefore be reckoned among the fundamental requirements of general well-being.

The practice of immunization, which is essentially an effort to trick the body into producing antibody by introducing a bogus version of the infective agent deep within, not only deprives the immune system of this “decisive experience” in its “normal physiological maturation,” but leaves it burdened for life with foreign contaminants it has no way of expelling.Gazette columnist Tiger Tom has said that vaccination is an initiation rite to lifelong servitude to the great modern Church of Medicine.

Beware of politicians who come to us, paying their debts to the Church of Medicine, with outstretched palms and tearful pleas for a wonderful vaccination revival that will enrich the poor and alleviate their suffering. Their crusade is really against that most feared heretic, the unvaccinated child. The “healthcare is warfare” dogma that drives the Church of Medicine supports itself on faith in the sacrament of vaccination. What the Church can least afford is a large control group of happy, healthy, unvaccinated children.