News From the Author

Monday morning September 15: Coffee with an Author - Sarah Honenberger will air Monday at 11 am with host Naomi Giroux. Here’s the link:

http://www.Blogtalkradio.com/I-just-finished/2008/09/15/Coffee-with-an-Author-Sarah-Honenberger
If you want to call in live and speak with the host or the author, be sure to dial (646)716-9724. You will be placed into the caller queue where you will still be able to hear the show while you are on hold.

I hope to hear from some of my book club friends. And you’ll hear the latest on the next novel, Waltzing Cowboys, due out in January.

Happy readers: The publisher has received the galleys for Waltzing Cowboys. They don’t have the brilliant milk chocolate and red bandana cover, but they’re going out to all those literary reviewers for catalogue entries and reviews. Waiting for this kind of feedback is the toughest couple of months in an author’s life.  

At a recent fundraiser for Mary’s Family, a Virgnia non-profit group for parents who have children with disabilities, many of them Asperberger’s or Autism Spectrum disorders, I spoke about Lacy’s story. These families were well-informed, committed to safety in vaccinations, and intrigued with the idea that audiences were reading about Lacy, a life much like theirs. They shared their concerns and questions, and in several areas educated me on current issues.

Book proceeds from sales of White Lies at the event, and afterwards through the organization, benefit Mary’s Family and its mission to provide respite and political clout to families with injured and challenged children. Additional autographed copies at $20 are available through their web-site administrator, mjtoomey1995@yahoo.com . Mary’s Familiy is inspired and managed by its founder, Martha Toomey, whose son was injured by a vaccine thirteen years ago.

My thanks to all the families who attended on that unbearably hot June day during the heat wave. A second event may follow in the fall, when Cliff Shoemaker, the attorney for Hannah Polling, reschedules. He and I were supposed to be the tag team on June 8, to offer legal perspectives on the compensation fund then and now, but he was unable to attend at the last minute. Polling’s case is the first successful suit for an autistic child before the Compensation Fund’s Special Court of Claims.

Each step, each book, each appearance, each lawsuit, each newspaper story spreads the word about the inequities in the current mandatory vaccination system.

At the Virginia Book Festival, the HooK announced that John Grisham had chosen two of my stories as second and third place winners for their annual contest. It’s never happened before, though two stories are allowed from any author.

Congratulations to the first prize winner, her first short story win, Christy Strick for ‘Moving.’ Grisham noted all three winners dealt with love and loss.   

In response to a New York Times article on March 21 and the Times web site’s posted comments, Barbara Loe Fisher of the National Vaccine Information Center reminds Americans that the call to isolate and punish parents who elect not to vaccinate their children is a position that smacks of the worst of human history. In her passionate and well-spoken essay, she writes: “Holocaust survivor Elie Weisel said “When you take an idea or a concept and turn it into an abstraction, that opens the way to take human beings and turn them, also, into abstractions.” Individuals harmed by vaccines are not abstractions. They are human beings who deserve to be spared a lifetime of suffering rather than being thrown under the bus to prop up forced mass vaccination policies that fail to acknowledge biodiversity within the family of man.” Her point is based on  her years of study of vaccine injuries. Many families have autoimmune genetic differences that place them at risk for the 48 vaccines the government now mandates for American children as their entrance ticket to public education. Many children have been injured by vaccines, at a rate higher even than the drug manufacturers predicted, and some of those injuries have been acknowledged in claims before the vaccine injury compensation fund, set up by the government to assist those statistically anticipated injuries.

Yet the Times readers call the parents of those at risk children ‘abusers’ and the Times readers suggest that those children be removed from their parents’ care. Fisher is right to showcase the historic precedents that show the danger of marking those who are different as less valuable. How far can this idea of eliminating those who are different take us to a Hitler-like state where no one is safe from the ‘majority’s’ decision about who deserves to live and who doesn’t? Shame on the New York Times and shame on Americans who write such vitriolic propaganda.

Here’s the link to the blog of a new internet writing friend, Marta Stephens. Very helpful information for writers who aspire to publication or as reminders for some of us who are partway there.

http://www.murderby4.blogspot.com/

Here’s another comment by the infamous Dr. Paul Offit, frequently quoted in vaccine stories, always telling half truths. Here’s the newspaper excerpt:

“Other federal vaccine advisers sought to portray Hannah Poling as an isolated if not unique case.
She is “not a typical autistic child,” said Dr. Paul Offit, chief of infectious diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a longtime government vaccine adviser. “It’s not a precedent-setting case.”

Offit, you will recall was quoted a year ago in the Gardasil vaccine controversy coverage as saying that he didn’t know what all the fuss was about over vaccine injuries, the FDA had approved the safer acellular version  of the DPT vaccine in 1991. What he leaves out, ever so cleverly, is that the government did not require that safer version until 1998. I wrote about this at the time of his deceptive statement.

Now he would have families of vaccine-injured children believe that this approval of the Poling’s claim is not significant. if it wasn’t relevant to other pending claims, why were the records sealed? The whole truth would be nice. And the families of vaccine injured children who have accepted the government’s mandate have the right to the whole truth.

The news of the government’s concession in this first autism case is heartening but let’s get the facts straight. Kevin Conway, a Boston lawyer who handles compensation fund cases, may have been misquoted, but he’s definitely wrong. According to the Associated Press, he said, “It shows to me that the government has conceded that it’s biologically plausible for a vaccine to cause these injuries. They’ve never done it before.”

IN FACT many families have recovered from the vaccine compensation fund since it’s inception in 1988. I handled one of the early cases and won. That story of a mother who was not told that the vaccine caused her son’s injuries until we won her case 25 years later is chronicled in my novel White Lies. This newest case is the first concession that a vaccine could cause injuries that fall within the autism spectrum. Please don’t wipe out 20 years of struggling for truth in vaccinations that quickly. Those pioneers, like Lacy and Jean, in White Lies, and hundreds of other families who had to wait sometimes as long as five years for decisions in their cases, made it possible for this family to win their claim.  Just as this win will help the families who go forward now to ask for help.  And to ask for the truth from the doctors and drug companies.

Without the help of writers who have told the stories of those early families and pushed for over two decades, the media might never have realized the extent of the deceptions from drug manufacturers and the government. The real scandal is that parents have paid a  surcharge to fund these awards and the government has paid less than 30 percent of the claims made despite the fact that the vaccine manufacturers have not paid a dime into the fund, they are granted full immunity for these injuries under the fund.

Ah-hah. This just came through on my vaccine alert.

“Seven months after vaccination, the patient was diagnosed by Dr. Andrew Zimmerman, a leading neurologist at the Kennedy Krieger Children’s Hospital Neurology Clinic, with “regressive encephalopathy (brain disease) with features consistent with autistic spectrum disorder, following normal development.” The girl also met the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) official criteria for autism.

In its written concession, the government said the child had a pre-existing mitochondrial disorder that was “aggravated” by her shots, and which ultimately resulted in an ASD diagnosis.

“The vaccinations received on July 19, 2000, significantly aggravated an underlying mitochondrial disorder,” the concession says, “which predisposed her to deficits in cellular energy metabolism, and manifested as a regressive encephalopathy with features of ASD.”

Well, well, well. Sounds a little like the concession of the government to the link between Agent Orange and birth defects after two decades of deny, deny, deny.

Here’s the premise of my new book.

Daniel Solstice Landon is almost 16, discovers Holden Caulfield about the time he’s diagnosed with AML, leukemia, what Daniel calls The Disease. His parents, hold-over hippies, move the family to a houseboat to avoid the dangers of public germs. Opposed to the drug manufacturers’ stranglehold on the medical establishment, Daniel’s parents search for an alternative remedy. But Social Services charges them with neglect. Daniel can’t make it through a whole school day, so he’s home and missing out on the high school social life he’s been hearing about from his perfect older brother Joe. When he falls for Meredith Rilke, a twin who’s just moved to his sleepy little river town, he feels the pressure to make decisions for himself.

Holden is his hero, the friend he admires and worries about because he doesn’t want to confront the issues in his own life. As he tries to understand Holden’s bravado and despair, he sees parallels with his own future. Daniel says, “Dying IS the long run. So it matters.” During the Landon’s appeal of their conviction, friends of the family spearhead a fight to change the law to allow a minor to consent to his own medical treatment. As Daniel struggles to separate himself from his parents, he discovers there is joy in endings as well as beginnings.

Dear Readers, please let me hear from you. Do you want to hear that story?