Vaccine Nation–In the Tradition

My new thriller, Vaccine Nation, is a fast-paced action thriller designed to entertain, but it also explores the very real issues in the current debate over vaccine safety in the mandatory U.S. National Immunization Program.  The book is now available on Amazon for pre-order for delivery November 22nd.  Please click on the book cover to order.

In Vaccine Nation, Dani North is a filmmaker who just won at the Tribeca Film Festival for her documentary, The Drugging of Our Children, a film critical of the pharmaceutical industry.  She’s also just started work on a new documentary on autism.  When a pharmaceutical industry vaccine researcher hands her smoking gun evidence about the U.S. National Immunization Program seconds before he’s murdered right in front of her, Dani finds herself implicated and pursued by the police.

Dani realizes what she’s been handed could have crucial implications on upcoming hearings by a Senate committee.  A key issue the Senate committee will consider is whether Congress should continue the immunity it granted in 1986 to the pharmaceutical industry for claims by parents on damage to their children from the U.S. National Immunization Program. That puts Dani on the run in a race to understand and expose the evidence.  That is, before the police can grab her, or Grover Madsen, a megalomaniacal pharmaceutical industry CEO, can have her hunted down by his hired killers.  Madsen knows exactly what Dani has and how explosive it is for the pharmaceutical industry: it has the potential to make the tobacco industry’s lawsuits and subsequent multi-billion dollar settlements seem like routine slip-and-fall cases.  Madsen uses all his company’s political and financial resources to track Dani.

The book’s pace is intended to be reminiscent of Six Days of the Condor (and the film it spawned, Three Days of the Condor), or Hitchcock’s North by Northwest.  The action of Vaccine Nation occurs over four breathtaking days.

The current debate in the U.S. on vaccine safety portrayed in the novel is real.  My primary inspiration for writing Vaccine Nation was my exposure to the vaccine debate through my fiancé’s work as a documentary filmmaker in the health-related field, including films on ADHD and related drugging of children, and on vaccines and autism.  The facts in Vaccine Nation are accurate, based on my exposure to them through Manette’s films and my own research.  People will find some of them shocking.  For example, in 1986, Congress granted immunity to the pharmaceutical industry for liability related to their vaccines for the National Immunization Program.  Vaccines in the childhood vaccination schedule contain toxic substances like aluminum, formaldehyde and the chemical compound in anti-freeze.  The flu shot still contains thimerosal, a preservative that is 49.6% mercury.

The controversy represented in Vaccine Nation surrounding the safety and side effects of vaccines, and vaccines’ suspected relationship to the autism epidemic are still real.  The debate on vaccine safety is ongoing and increasing: recent CDC statistics show that 10% of parents (up from 2% to 3%.) are avoiding or delaying vaccinating their children because of concerns about vaccine safety.

As such, Vaccine Nation is a dramatization of this debate, presented in the form of a thriller that will hopefully both entertain you and make you think.

Read first chapter of Vaccine Nation

Buy Vaccine Nation:  Buy US   Buy UK 

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