The petition up on WhiteHouse.gov against mandatory vaccinations — the one the White House tried to bury — has, at the time of writing this, reached well over the 100,000 signatures needed by March 6th in order to supposedly garner a response from our president's administration.

The petition is short, sweet, and to the point:

No human being should be FORCED to be vaccinated against their will and/or personal/religious beliefs. I petition against making vaccinations of any kind mandatory. This includes forcing children to be vaccinated to attend public schools, activities, and daycare centers. This also includes adults working in the public or private sector.

The fact that this even has to be petitioned in the first place, however — that the people so fear their government would take away their basic sense of medical freedom — is a sure sign of tyranny.

Doctors write millions of prescriptions a year for drugs to calm the behavior of people with Alzheimer's disease and other types of dementia. But non-drug approaches actually work better, and carry far fewer risks, experts conclude in a new report.

In fact, non-drug approaches should be the first choice for treating dementia patients' common symptoms such as irritability, agitation, depression, anxiety, sleep problems, aggression, apathy and delusions, say the researchers in a paper just published by the British Medical Journal.

The best evidence among non-drug approaches is for those that focus on training caregivers -- whether they are spouses, adult children or staff in nursing homes and assisted living facilities -- to make behavioral and environmental interventions.

The researchers, from the University of Michigan Medical School and Johns Hopkins University, reviewed two decades' worth of research to reach their conclusions about drugs like antipsychotics and antidepressants, and non-drug approaches that help caregivers address behavioral issues in dementia patients.

New cases of the inexplicable disorder, dubbed "Sleepy Hollow," have appeared in Kalachi, the village in Kazakhstan where every tenth villager, including children, has mysteriously fallen asleep in broad daylight, some unable to wake up for days on end.

"The ninth wave of the disease has started," Amanbek Kalzhanov, head of the administration of Esil district, told Interfax. "Yesterday two people - a man and a woman - became sick. Since the outbreak of the disease 120 people have fallen ill."

According to Kalzhanov, the overall situation in Kalachi, a village in northern Kazakhstan, is under control. The local hospital is fully operational, along with a school, attended by about 40 students.

Meanwhile, most of the inhabitants of the village, which used to be home to over 600 residents, have agreed to move to other areas, local official Sergey Kulagin said.

"Of the 218 families, 124 expressed a desire to relocate. Thirty-four families (95 people), including 27 children, have already left the village," he said.

Weeks of investigation by federal and state agencies have failed to uncover how a potential bioterror agent escaped from a Louisiana laboratory four months ago, or how far it has spread.

Since November, four rhesus macaque monkeys and a USDA investigator have been infected. Cultures of Burkholderia pseudomallei somehow got out of the secure facility at Tulane National Primate Research Center in Covington, about 50 miles north of New Orleans, reported USA Today. Officials insist there is no danger to the public.

The bacteria cause meliodosis, a disease with a 50%-fatality rate even with treatment. Because it's resistant to multiple antibiotics, meliodosis has been researched as a potential biological weapon, though the Tulane lab is said to have been working on a vaccine.

Major US news media have presented a grossly distorted and misleading interpretation of vaccines and their relationship to public health since early January. These journalistic organs have suggested the recent measles outbreak in the Western US has been a crisis of monumental proportions.

This flagrant and cynical sensationalism has become a foundation for intense advocacy on behalf of the pharmaceutical corporate and regulatory cartel targeting patient informed consent—a founding principal of modern medical practice and personal freedom. Keeping in mind the close to 300 vaccine products now in the pharmaceutical industry's pipeline,[1] closer analysis of "measles outbreak" press coverage suggests a conscious effort by corporate news media to virtually banish such notions and practices from the public mind. A news media dependent on over $1 billion in advertising dollars from big pharma must almost by necessity indulge their clients' broader agenda.

Throughout U.S. history, certain selected groups of citizens have been subjected to extreme verbal, judicial and even physical abuse at the hands of bigoted oppressors. The historical abuse of African-Americans -- subjected to generations of abusive language and racism that still lingers today -- was villainously summed up with a bigoted hate speech label I dare not utter here.

Gay Americans were similarly subjected to the label of "f-@@-t," a hate-based derogatory slur invoked to demean a human being because of their sexual orientation. It was this campaign of verbal abuse and derogatory hate speech that helped give rise to violence against gays in America.

Importantly, every effort to demean and denigrate a selectively targeted class of citizens -- whether for their skin color, their sexual orientation or their beliefs -- has been preceded by a campaign of verbal abuse intended to dehumanize that targeted group. The invocation and use of bigoted, derogatory labels lays the social and cultural groundwork for not only discrimination but even actual violence committed against the groups being targeted.

Racism and hate speech are wrong. It is morally, politically and socially incorrect to use hate speech labels in a derogatory manner in a civilized society. These terms are hate-based forms of speech meant to emotionally hurt and demean targeted groups of innocent people. Yet, astonishingly, it has now emerged in America that it is socially acceptable to use precisely the same bigoted hate-speech language against another group: children who are damaged by vaccines (and children who are unvaccinated). This group is now being widely and aggressively disparaged with the hate-based term "anti-vaxxers."

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For the past ten years or so, I have felt a deep and growing compunction against giving routine vaccinations to children. It began with the fundamental belief that people have the right to make that choice for themselves.

But eventually the day came when I could no longer bring myself to give the shots, even when the parents wished me to. I have always believed that the attempt to eradicate entire microbial species from the biosphere must inevitably upset the balance of Nature in fundamental ways that we can as yet scarcely imagine. Such concerns loom ever larger as new vaccines continue to be developed, seemingly for no better reason than that we have the technical capacity to make them, and thereby to demonstrate our right and power as a civilization to manipulate the evolutionary process itself.

Purely from the viewpoint of our own species, even if we could be sure that the vaccines were harmless, the fact remains that they are compulsory, that all children are required to undergo them, without sensitivity or proper regard for basic differences in individual susceptibility, to say nothing of the values and wishes of the parents and the children themselves.

I read with great interest the recent 'measles epidemic' articles that addressed the vaccine debate from the point of view of a cancer parent. My interest is the result of being a cancer parent myself - my little girl has been battling leukemia on and off for the past 10 years. I read these articles, and I became angry. Very, very angry. Once again, the government and drug companies are exploiting the plight of children stricken by cancer to achieve a profit-driven end without actually helping them. In fact, this profitable end could cause great harm, even increasing the rates of pediatric leukemia, if their obvious goal of a federally mandated vaccination protocol is achieved. I am a seasoned Momcologist, a term the research-driven cancer parents call themselves. We are the cancer equivalent of Thinking Moms, critical thinkers. I have done extensive reading on the etiology of leukemia, its connection to autoimmune disease, and how vaccines and natural disease may influence these sorts of childhood illnesses. Come connect the dots with me.

Clearly, I empathize with the raw fear the parents in these articles have that their immunocompromised children may contract an illness that could be devastating. I have walked for years in their shoes. I get it. However, the parents in these articles are either grossly misinformed, or their comments have been edited with bias. Let's get some facts straight about cancer treatment and infection. One of the first things we were warned about after my daughter's diagnosis was live-virus vaccination. No one in the family was to receive a live-virus vaccine while my daughter was on treatment because these viruses can and do shed (1, 2, 3, 4), some for as much as four weeks (5), potentially infecting the immunocompromised patient with disastrous results. That includes the measles vaccine (MMR II and ProQuad), the intranasal flu vaccine, and the chicken pox shot. In fact, my other children were able to get medical waivers not to receive vaccines because of my daughter's illness. I know my child is much more likely to encounter a peer at school who has been recently vaccinated with a live-virus vaccine than she is to encounter natural disease from an unvaccinated child'

If my child were at a stage of treatment in which she was very immunocompromised, she would not be in school. My daughter missed most of fourth grade and a good portion of fifth, not because she was so sick, but because others were sick. Despite a nearly 100% vaccine compliance rate at our school, there were regular outbreaks of shingles, occurring after chicken pox vaccine boosters, influenza and other illnesses. Please note that, even in areas in which vaccine compliance is extremely high, there are still outbreaks of disease that are not caused by the unvaccinated (6).

The most deadly threats for a child during intensive cancer treatment lie right within his or her own body. Immunocompromised pediatric cancer patients are far more likely to die from opportunistic infections that originate from overgrowths of fungi, mold and bacteria(7) than they are from vaccine-related viral infections. When I searched to find the last recorded incidence of a child dying of measles (because that is the hated disease du jour) while undergoing cancer treatment, well, I couldn't find one. I did, however, find at least one death in the immunocompromised from the measles vaccine (8), with no indication of when it or they occurred. There hasn't been a recorded death in the U.S. from measles in the past 10 years. (9) In fact, measles infection may actually be curative of some blood cancers (10, 11), presumably by initiating normal immune system defenses. The measles virus as an actual treatment has also been explored in other malignancies (12, 13).

There is evidence that the "hygiene theory" of the immune system may have some relevance to to vaccines. It has been found that more "hygienic" populations, i.e. kids who have had fewer exposures to everyday germs, are at higher risk for some illnesses. The idea being that the immune system needs to "learn" how to respond appropriately by coming in contact with common bugs in order to develop properly. Industrialized countries that have a decrease in infectious burden over less developed nations nevertheless show an increase in allergies and autoimmune disease. "The leading idea is that some infectious agents — notably those that co-evolved with us — are able to protect us against a large spectrum of immune-related disorders." (14) Are we trading benign, transient illnesses that were once considered normal childhood rites of passage, illnesses that appear to be protective for more serious disease, for a lifetime of chronic illness, even death?

BBC newsman Malcolm Brabant says yellow-fever vaccination led him to believe he was the Devil

Malcolm Brabant's face - round, ruddy, full-featured, and crowned by a bald dome - is immediately recognisable. For 30 years he has been an award-winning member of the BBC's team of foreign correspondents, bringing wars, natural disasters, political stand-offs and occasionally something a bit more cheerful into our living rooms on the evening news.

If the countenance is familiar, though, his current location isn't. His usual on-screen sign-off is ringing in my ears — "Malcolm Brabant, BBC News, Athens" - but today he is welcoming me into his home in Copenhagen.

He is, he explains, currently living in exile from the Greek capital, and thereby "missing one the biggest news stories of my career". The reason is the biggest personal story of Brabant's 58 years. As he puts it with what I quickly learn is characteristic bluntness: "I went bonkers."

In April 2011, he attended an Athens clinic for a routine vaccination against yellow fever before an assignment in the Ivory Coast. As well as reporting from Athens, he has also travelled the globe to cover international stories, winning a coveted Sony award in 1993 for his reporting from a besieged Sarajevo at the height of the Bosnian crisis.

His reaction to the vaccine, however, was anything but routine. "It fried my brain," he states simply. Overnight a previously sane man developed severe psychosis. An agnostic, Brabant became so convinced he was the Messiah that he telephoned his bemused fellow correspondent, Allan Little, to appoint him "first disciple" and ask him to record his words of wisdom.