McDowell Triplets in Michigan all With Autism After Shots

Video Transcript:

I don't presume to tell you what to do, whether to vaccinate or not to vaccinate. But I do presume to tell you that you have to take responsibility for that decision. You have to do your own research, you have to make your own decision, you have to be strong, and you have to be fully responsible for that decision because you will be fully responsible for the consequences of that decision, whatever it is. Hi, I'm Brenda McDowell. I'm Dave McDowell. Well, we have beautiful triplets. We had two boys and a girl. And September of 2006, and we were completely normal development. I carried them for 36 weeks. They were about five pounds each. I was huge. And we decided to really postpone our vaccines and even consider doing one at a time. Our doctor was fine with that. So we were going in June 25th, 2007. We were nine months and four days. And to get one new mocockle vaccine. And there's the shot record. We went in for a 10 a.m. appointment. They did Claire first. And she got a really big red mark almost immediately on her legs. She started screaming. But that screaming kind of never really went away. We went ahead and not knowing how they cried. It's a shot. And we did the boys. And that was 10 a.m. by noon. We watched Claire. The only way we could describe it was for soul was sucked out of her body. She was literally the shell of a little person that we used to know. Her personality, gone. All her reflexes were gone. Is what I've noticed I'm an educational audiologist. So she stopped blinking. She stopped coughing, sneezing, yawning. Her suck reflex was just gone. Everything was gone. She had a hard time taking her little Bubba. And she acted deaf and blind. You can go in your her and there was nobody home. All she wanted to do was stare at the ceiling fan in our dining room. And so that was noon. And I knew what I was witnessing. I've worked with autistic children before. I just didn't know how bad it would be and how long that would stay or if it would kind of she would come back. But at two o'clock that day we lost Richie. We watched our first boy shut down. And he was really silly. Bubba. Everything was funny. Silly. We were living a party. They were engaging. They had full blown eye contact. They knew each other. They held hands. They held hands constantly. Everything was a big giggle fest. And we watched him shut off. And the same thing happened. All of his reflexes disappeared. He acted like he couldn't hear. Completely stopped responding to their name. And or even their favorite songs and music. Every all of us, the jingling, the sound we tried, everything. I had dropped a phone book on the floor. On the hardwood floor, while they were sitting the other way, no startled. And nobody even turned at all. I mean, I did it several times. Nobody even acknowledged that this noise was happening behind them. And I knew we had a second hit when he started staring at the ceiling fan. The only way I can describe it as an educational audiologist is I now had two children. Sorry. With like failure to thrive instant. And I was like, OK. So. And then we moved on to all eyes. We're on Robbie. We were like, come on, little buddy. He hang on. And you could see his smile disappear. But he was still looking at us, still responding to his name. And by 5 o'clock that night, we watched Robbie support. So sorry. It was so hard. We were in shock. Everybody are nanny, my family. We have many friends that are doctors, speech pathologists, sister-in-law's occupational therapist. We all knew what normal was. We had normal, fully developing children that morning. And we now have three severely injured children that night. We called immediately to report it. We brought them into the doctor's office. They did not file the report. We find out later that there was no reports of any injuries with this vaccine. We received a phone call a week and a half after the shot saying it was recalled for sterilization issues. But we were not to find out until seven years later what that actual contamination was in the shot. Yeah. And a friend of ours who was a doctor was able to look up the shot and did find out that a two-year-old died from the lot number we got. And they didn't want that to be public knowledge. So it wasn't something I could find out. It was only something a doctor was able to look up. And still to this day, it says no reported injuries to this vaccine. They just were doing their job by pulling it off the market because of the sterilization issue that was. If it wasn't something that would harm them, why wouldn't they come out right away and tell us what it was? They would have at least known what cause what we're now feeling today. It's like an autoimmune encephalitis. Massive inflammation in the cerebellum, which explains why they could barely stand after they got hit. And the white matter of the brain just inflamed. We were just lucky that autonomic nervous system didn't shut off and stop breathing. There's absolutely no doubt in my mind that the vaccine was 100% the cause of them shutting off. And nothing else that day. We did nothing before, nothing after it. And all the neurologists we've seen since then, all the doctors we've seen, said it's just massive inflammatory response to obviously in this case an environmental trigger. We did see geneticists afterwards because some doctors pointed to us that it's genetic. And they said it was a 1 in 4 million chance that you would have two boys and a girl genetically shut off all on the same day with an hours of each other. It was 100% environmental. And in our case, vaccine. We were, we were let go by our family practice because we were no longer going to continue vaccinating. So we were, we were broken up with a nice breakup letter. We had to start seeking other people who had a vaccine in their child or an autistic child and we just started from there. Every time we heard no, we looked, it made me work harder. That first specialist told us if I were you had invested in a group home. Anyone wanted to put his back on vaccinations? Anyone? Start the vaccination. That's all he cared about. It's really important for us to be part of Michigan for vaccine choice. One thing it does is, you know, empowers us a little bit. This is just another venue for giving us some control over our lives.