HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT: The Rôle of Vaccines in Chronic Disease

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HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT:

The Rôle of Vaccines in Chronic Disease

By Moskowitz, M. D.

Introduction.

Thirty-five years of medical practice have convinced me that

all vaccines carry an important risk of chronic disease that is inherent in

the vaccination process and indeed central to how they work. Yet the

growing concerns of parents and legislators and media reports about them

rarely if ever elicit anything beyond automatic denials by medical and

public health authorities alike. Reflecting on this glaring discrepancy is

the main focus of this essay. Writing these lines has also helped me

appreciate how much the invisibility heightens the risk and how intimately

these phenomena are connected, like mirror-images of the same reality,

which makes it imperative to study them together.

Since I am mainly a clinician, I will begin with a story. It

concerns a 12-year-old boy whom I know of solely from his mother’s letter,

but her words are so heartfelt and so congruent with the rest of my

experience that I cannot doubt their veracity:

My son Adam was healthy until his first MMR at 15 months. Within 2 weeks he

had flu and cold symptoms, which persisted for 6 weeks, his eyes became

puffy, and he was hospitalized with nephrotic syndrome. A renal biopsy

showed “focal sclerosing glomerulonephritis,” but he didn’t

respond to steroids. I asked if it could be related to the vaccine, but

they told me it couldn’t, and we accepted that. Over the next 4 years he

was hospitalized repeatedly but then went into remission, seeming normal

and healthy and staying off all medications for 5 years.

When he turned 10, his pediatrician recommended a booster, saying that a

rise in measles cases made it dangerous for him not to be protected. I

checked the PDR and other sources but found no warning for kidney disease

and no listing of it as an adverse reaction, so I agreed to it. In less

than 2 weeks he relapsed, with 4+ proteinuria, swelling, and weight gain,

signs that we recognized immediately. He was admitted in hypertensive

crisis, with blood in the urine, fluid in the lungs, and massive weight

gain. On Cytoxan, massive doses of Prednisone, and three other drugs he

slowly improved, but missed another 7 months of school.

It’s been 2 years since that horrible episode, and he still needs Captopril

for high blood pressure and spills 4+ protein every day. The doctor says he

sustained major kidney damage, will always need medication to control his

blood pressure, and will worsen as he grows, necessitating a transplant

eventually. This time I was convinced that his condition was related to the

vaccine, but still the doctors didn’t take me seriously and told me it was

a coincidence.

I searched for information and even contacted the manufacturer of the

vaccine. Finally they sent me two case reports of nephrotic syndrome

following the MMR vaccine. It’s very difficult for lay people to get

information or even ask questions, since we don’t use correct medical terms

and feel stupid. Please tell me if my ideas are reasonable. I don’t think

my son could tolerate another episode, and I think he’d have normal blood

pressure and kidney function if not for that second shot.

I also have great concern for other children who develop nephrotic

syndrome some weeks after receiving MMR and whose doctors never make the

connection. They could all be at great risk if revaccinated. I realize that

this letter has taken up a lot of your time, and I’d appreciate any help

you can give me. Thank you.1

Like many others who seek my help, this woman honestly believed

that her son had been crippled for life by the MMR vaccine, yet had no

intention of suing the drug company who manufactured it, the doctors who

administered it, or the Government’s Vaccine Injury Compensation program,

as she was entitled to do. Whether she didn’t think she could win, a

conclusion my experience would certainly justify, or simply was not a

litigious person, as seems more relevant in her case, the absence of such

motive only lends further credence to her story. She was writing to me

simply to find a physician to hear and validate the truth of her

experience, which neither the pediatrician who gave the shots, nor the

specialists who treated Adam in the hospital, nor any of the other doctors

she spoke to were willing to do. Although I had very little else to offer

her, it was more than enough to earn her gratitude.

To those inclined to discredit such tales, I reply that the

confidences our patients entrust to us represent the truth as they live it.

Yet when vaccines are involved, such stories are routinely dismissed out of

hand, as if they couldn’t possibly be true or worthy of serious

consideration. That was the reaction of every doctor involved in Adam’s

care, despite compelling evidence to the contrary, even after case reports

were supplied by the drug company itself. Whether a canny strategy to

defeat possible litigation or simply the instinctive shielding of a

cherished world-view from threat of change, this defensive and hostile

stance is so pervasive in the medical profession as to merit careful study

in itself.

Horton, Editor of The Lancet, felt the sting of

censorship himself after publishing an article linking cases of infantile

autism and colitis to the MMR vaccine:

Today vaccines are largely an untouchable subject, their benefits too

obvious to be questioned. Any hint of dissent concerning their clinical

effectiveness and overall social value is met with bitter

rebuttal and resentment. A former President of the UK Academy of Medical

Science actually threatened to get me sacked for publishing work that

raised questions about the MMR vaccine, while at a dinner party years

later, the partner of a government vaccine specialist asked, “Will you ever

be forgiven?” Forgiven for what, I wondered?2

Dr. Horton himself neither believed in the research nor

endorsed its conclusions. His only “mistake,” if mistake it was, lay in

permitting the author, a well-known British gastroenterologist, to publish

his findings without regard for their political correctness. Needless to

say, the snubs and threats he faced for rocking the boat were less serious

than the reprisals exacted against the author, whose work was officially

repudiated without testing it, and whose career at a London teaching

hospital was abruptly terminated.3

Finally, Adam’s misfortune obliges us to ask how

“glomerulonephritis,” “autism,” “encephalopathy,” or any other disease gets

to be identified as a bona fide complication of a vaccine, such that the

victim becomes eligible to receive damages in court. In spite of two

reports of MMR nephritis documented by the manufacturer, renal failure is

still not recognized as an adverse effect of the vaccine, an omission that

undoubtedly helped Adam’s doctors to frustrate his mother’s inquiries.

Exactly similar editing characterizes the Federal guidelines for

compensation of vaccine-injured patients, which would never have been

enacted in the first place without the repeated insistence of their

parents, and which continue to be pared down even further by the determined

opposition of the vaccine manufacturers, the American Academy of

Pediatrics, and other authoritative and influential pro-vaccine groups. As

reflected in the official compensation guidelines, research studies of

vaccine-related injuries are limited to a few extreme reactions to

particular vaccines, because these alone occur often enough to attain

statistical significance in large populations. Such a policy automatically

disquallifies two much larger and partly overlapping classes of phenomena

that my own research has uncovered: 1) exacerbation of the ordinary chronic

diseases of childhood, according to individual susceptibility, often

representing 2) a nonspecific effect of the vaccination process in general,

for which any vaccine will do. Restricting the issue of vaccine safety to

specific effects of specific vaccines is a major reason why the true extent

of vaccine-related illness has always been invisible and will likely remain

so until the question is reframed in a more comprehensive way.

An equally troubling problem with the approved list of

vaccine-related injuries is their restriction in time to acute events

occurring within a few days afterward,4 i. e., soon enough for the vaccine

to be regarded as the necessary and sufficient cause of the reaction, as if

independently of any prior susceptibility. In Adam’s case as in many

others, vague, nondescript symptoms appeared soon after vaccination, but

the full picture of nephritis did not emerge and could not be diagnosed

until six weeks after the first shot and two weeks after the second, by

which time it was no longer an acute or fixed injury, but already a

chronic, self-sustaining illness that has continued to develop and worsen

over the years, so that a claim on his behalf would undoubtedly have been

rejected even if it had been filed.

In what follows I will consider five aspects of the vaccine

issue: 1) specific effects of specific vaccines, as described in the

literature; 2) nonspecific effects of the vaccination process, based on

cases from my own practice; 3) how vaccines actually work; 4) several

individual vaccines; and 5) implications for vaccine and health policy.

1. Specific Effects of Specific Vaccines.

The vaccination literature contains no mention of adverse effects

of the process itself, but only a few documented effects of specific

vaccines, such as encephalopathy, autism, anaphylaxis, and so forth, most

still hotly contested by authorities in the field. Even those officially

recognized as legitimate grounds for compensation under the Federal

guidelines are actually vague, generic terms that are applicable to more

than one vaccine. Anaphylaxis, for example, is compensable not only for DPT

and its components but also for MMR, and will undoubtedly implicate some or

all of the newer vaccines in the future.

DPT Encephalopathy.

This all-purpose diagnostic category was the first adverse

reaction to be identified and made compensable under the Vaccine Injury

Compensation Act of 1986, which it also helped bring about, and is by far

the most extensively documented. Here is the story of a 3-year-old girl

whose mother wrote to me for support of her mother’s pending litigation

against the child’s doctors and the Canadian government:

Our daughter was damaged by her 18-month vaccination, which consisted of

the DPT, HiB, and oral polio vaccines. One week later she had a bizarre

screaming episode, and is now labeled “autistic.” An MRI showed brain

inflammation and demyelination. She had 25 words at 18 months and was ahead

in some developmental milestones as well as being quite social. After her

screaming episode she stopped talking, ignored the neighborhood kids, made

no eye contact, and developed hand-flapping and other repetitive behaviors.

Her pediatrician agreed that she was autistic, and we told the specialist

that she changed abruptly after the vaccine, and showed him a video of her

as an infant and toddler, in which she seemed totally normal. From photos

taken before and after, the damage is obvious: her eyes have lost their

gleam, and she looks sad and alone, but the doctors dismissed it as a

coincidence, and no mention of any vaccine was ever included in their

reports.5

Leaving aside the extremity of her misfortune and the refusal

of her doctors to accept any responsibility for it, I call attention to her

diagnoses, chiefly “encephalopathy,” a synonym for “brain damage,” and the

equally vague term “autism,” which today is linked more commonly with the

MMR vaccine. Both her sad tale and the necessity of fixing a label to it

indicate that these are merely broad, generic, and often interchangeable

categories, referring to conditions that can result from several different

vaccines, rather than being characteristic of any particular one.

Here is another case, from the lawyer who represented him, a

3-year-old boy who reacted badly to his first DPT and suffered permanent

brain damage after the second:

Our firm represents a child who was born normal and healthy in every way.

After the first DPT at 6 weeks, he began falling off growth charts,

exhhibited multiple developmental delays, and was diagnosed as “failure to

thrive,” but then slowly began to recover. At 5 months he received a second

DPT, and his delays became much more extreme. He has never recovered. He is

now 3 years old, with the mental capacity of an infant of a year and a

half. I am convinced that his problems came about as a result of the DPT.

In view of what happened after the first shot, he should not have had the

second, or at least the pertussis component of it.6

This tragic pattern of a warning ignored, of a lesser version

of the same illness with eventual recovery, followed by death or

irreversible brain damage after a repeat vaccination, formed a major

subtext of the exposé DPT: A Shot in the Dark, in which medical historian

Coulter and Barbara Loe Fisher, the mother of such a child,

collected the stories of over 100 little victims.7 The outcry over DPT

encouraged Ms. Fisher and a friend to found the National Vaccine

Information Center, a support and advocacy group for families and friends

of vaccine-injured children.

NVIC still hosts conferences, provides educational materials,

and maintains a data-base and network of local chapters all over the

country. It has kept vaccine issues in the public eye, lobbied and

testified before Congress, and helped to write the Vaccine Injury

Compensation Act of 1986, which created a program for no-fault compensation

of vaccine injuries as an alternative to litigation. Yet Coulter and

Fisher’s book was withdrawn by the publisher soon after its release, while

an influential group of pediatricians still refuses to accept even these

most egregious cases as having any connection with the vaccine. In 1990,

Dr. Mortimer et al. published a review in the Journal of the AMA

which claimed that

No child who was previously normal without a prior history of seizures had

a seizure in the three days following a DPT vaccine that marked the onset

of epilepsy or other neurological or developmental abnormality. Our

negative findings reinforce those of previous investigators that serious

neurological events are rarely if ever caused by DPT.8

In the lead editorial of the same issue, Dr. Cherry,

another leading advocate, cited these data as conclusive proof that DPT

encephalopathy is a “myth,” or coincidence, which should be erased once and

for all from the ever-shrinking list of “genuine” adverse reactions

providing an acceptable basis for compensation:

In recent months three controlled studies examine the risk of seizures and

other acute neurological illnesses after DPT, involving 230,000 children

and 713,000 vaccinations, These studies found no evidence of a causal link

between the DPT and permanent neurological illness. It is not surprising

that physicians tended to blame the vaccine for these events. But these

recent studies show that the major problem has been our failure to separate

sequences from consequences. It is late in the 20th century, and it’s time

for the myth of “DPT encephalopathy” to end.9

His words also tally closely with the official report of the

Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which acknowledged the

opposing claims of parents but then tied them up in a skein of evasions,

equivocations, and government bureaucratese:

Rare but serious acute neurological illnesses, including encephalitis,

encephalopathy, and convulsions, have been reported following the

whole-cell DPT. The National Childhood Encephalopathy Study provides

evidence that DPT can cause encephalopathy. This occurs rarely, but

detailed follow-up indicates that children who had a serious neurological

illness after DPT were significantly more likely than children in the

control group to have chronic CNS dysfunction 10 years later and to have

been given the DPT within 7 days of its onset.

ACIP proposed 3 possible explanations for this association: 1) the

dysfunction could have been caused by DPT; 2) the DPT could trigger events

in children with brain or metabolic abnormalities who might also experience

them if other stimuli such as fever or infection are present; and 3) the

DPT might cause the event in children with underlying abnormalities that

would have become dysfunctional even without it. The data do not support

any one explanation over the others. The evidence was consistent with a

causal relationship, but insufficient to determine whether DPT increases

the overall risk 10 years later.10

But even an innate predisposition to develop such complications

by no means ex-cludes the possibility of a vaccine reaction, since all

illness requires both external morbid influences and an individual

receptive to them. This is the ultimate riddle of all medical practice,

which the emphasis on specific effects for specific vaccines blithely

glosses over.

It is obvious to me and to most parents that a family history of serious

adverse reactions, especially in parents or siblings, places children in a

much higher risk pool and therefore provides valid grounds for exempting

them from vaccinations. Yet even affidavits from Board-certified

pediatricians don’t always suffice:

I am writing about our 3-year-old son, for whom we seek medical exemption

from the DPT, MMR, and HiB. Two older siblings had severe reactions to

these shots, with fever of 105,° sleeplessness, and swelling at the

injection site. Until age 6 both kids had recurrent ear infections, for

which tonsillectomy was proposed, while our youngest has not been

immunized, and has no ear infections. We tried oral polio vaccine as an

infant, which was followed by extreme irritability and insomnia that lasted

for weeks. 6 months ago we repeated it, with the same result. Our

pediatrician has written that he is at high risk for reacting adversely,

but the judge ignored her. By State law, a letter from a licensed doctor

stating medical reasons why he should not be vaccinated is sufficient. But

the city guidelines give the Health Department final say, so we’ve ended up

in court.11

Before their hearing, the mother obtained a second letter from

another pediatrician, which the City Health Department similarly rejected:

The family history indicates epilepsy in the father and extensive allergies

in the mother. The child displays a pattern of nervous system hyperactivity

in response to foods, and was also sick for weeks after oral polio both as

an infant and again recently. I strongly recommend against any further

immunizations for this child, the risks of which outweigh any potential

benefits for him or the general public.12

Since my testimony was never required, I surmise that the

parents eventually won, but their ordeal attests to the draconian spirit in

which vaccination laws are often enforced.

DPT and SIDS.

For decades the leading cause of death in infants less than one

year old, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome has always baffled pediatricians.

Yet pertinent research on SIDS continues to be ignored in this country

because its conclusions are unpalatable to the small coterie of doctors who

conduct vaccine research, journal editors who publish it, and

manu-facturers who fund it. In 1985, Dr. Viera Scheibner, a research

scientist investigating SIDS in Australia, and Leif Karlsson, an engineer,

developed an electronic monitor that made it possible to follow breathing

patterns of young infants from an adjoining room.13 Designed to sound the

alarm if breathing fell below a minimum rate or amplitude, the device

immediately produced surprising results:

Soon parents were reporting alarms while their babies were deeply asleep,

often in clusters of 5 to 7 within a 15-minute period. These

occurred after the babies were exposed to stress, or a day or before they

developed a cold or cut a tooth. In most cases, the babies were only

breathing shallowly and soon resumed normal patterns Without intending to,

we also noted their breathing before and after vaccination, and the results

were extremely significant. We didn’t know that its merits were being hotly

debated at the time. We saw flare-ups of shallow breathing or apnea for

45-60 days after the DPT. When we showed our findings to pediatricians,

they pointed to the arrow when the shot was given, saying “This is the

cause!” and to the abnormal breathing pattern, saying “This is the effect!”

But when we told them our interpretation of these data, we realized we’d

touched on a very sensitive area.14

In Australia the medical community greeted these findings with a

stony silence, which continues to this day, while the American literature

has never published a single study to try to validate or refute it. An

equally wet blanket has been thrown over the few epidemiological studies

connecting SIDS to the vaccine. In 1979 the Tennessee Health Department

reported 4 cases occurring within 24 hours of the first DPT,15 while in a

study of 70 cases prompted by them, Dr. Torch found that 6.5%

occurred in less than 12 hours after a DPT shot, 13% within 24 hours, 26%

within 3 days, 37% within 7 days, 61% within 14 days, and 70% within 21

days.16 He concluded,

DPT may be a major unrecognized cause of sudden infant death, and the risks

may outweigh the benefits. Re-evaluation and possible modification of

current policy is indicated by this study.17

Further confirmation came from Japan, where 57 encephalopathic

cases and 37 deaths between 1970 and 1974, followed by two dramatic SIDS

deaths in 1975, raised a storm of protest that persuaded the government to

postpone all DPT vaccinations until two years of age,18 and to promote the

development of a safer acellular vaccine. As Dr. Cherry and his colleagues

later conceded, the result of this policy was that “SIDS disappeared when

whole-cell and acellular pertussis vaccinations were delayed until 24

months of age.”19 Yet these same experts never contemplated such a strategy

for our own country, even when the acellular vaccine failed to lower the

risk of brain damage to an appreciable extent.20 Today the United States

is the only industrialized country that requires the DPT vaccine for all

young infants, despite all the evidence against it and the nearly unanimous

opinion of Western European, Japanese, and other foreign medical sources.

MMR and Autism.

First described by the American psychiatrist Leo Kanner in

1943, the neurological condition he called “autism” has never been

satisfactorily explained. Just as it could have been mere coincidence that

his first case appeared very soon after the DPT vaccine was introduced in

1942, no strong evidence for a vaccine link emerged until the late 1990’s.

In 1995 Dr. Wakefield, a British gastroenterologist, compared 3550

adults vaccinated against the measles as infants with 11,400 peers who had

not been, and found that the vaccinated group were three times more likely

than their unvaccinated controls to develop Crohn’s disease later in life,

and twice more likely to develop ulcerative colitis.21

These oddities led Wakefield to study children who reacted

adversely to the MMR, many of whom developed normally during the first year

but then regressed to an autistic state following the vaccine, suffered

from digestive symptoms and food and environment-al allergies, or both.22

Detailed comparison of these children with age-matched controls revealed

inflammatory lesions in the small intestines of autistic children that

microscopic-ally resembled those of Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis;

circulating antibodies in the blood of the autistic children that were

specific to measles, but not to mumps and rubella, the other MMR

components; measles antigens in the lymphoid aggregations of the small

intestine, but none from mumps or rubella; and no antigens of any kind in

the intestines of normal children.23

These findings have since been replicated by Japanese

investigators,24 and the identical combination of autistic symptoms,

enterocolitis, and food and environmental allergies following MMR

vaccination has been reported by parents in the US, the UK, Canada,

Australia, Western Europe, and parts of Asia.25 Further support for

Wakefield’s MMR hypothesis has come from the circumstance that the UK,

which uses the same dia-gnostic criteria for autism as we do, experienced a

similarly dramatic increase in autism cases at the time when the MMR was

introduced in Britain,26 and from the experience of holistic physicians in

Europe and America that alleviating the food and environmental allergies is

proportionately beneficial for the autistic symptoms as well.27

Yet no proof has ever convinced the pro-vaccination forces, who

maintain a seem-ingly unbreakable stranglehold over American health policy.

A few years ago, Rep. Dan Burton chaired Congressional hearings on the

issue when his grandson became seriously ill after his MMR and was

diagnosed with autism. Disregarding the NIH’s own estimate of the incidence

of autism at about 1 in 500 in 1996, an increase of over 400% since the

1960’s,28 Dr. Colleen Boyle of the CDC reaffirmed the official line that

“current scientific evidence does not support a link between vaccination

and autism or any other behavior disorder.”29 Similar denials by Dr.

Offit of ACIP led Burton to respond that Offit’s consultations for Merck,

the vaccine manufacturer, amounted to a conflict of interest that should

have disqualified him from serving on the Committee:

Even if they exclude themselves from voting, people who sit on advisory

panels and are paid by pharmaceutical companies, influence other members.

Are we letting pharmaceutical companies have too great an influence on

decisions that affect the health of our nation?30

Even when it is finally recognized as a bona fide complication

of MMR, “autism” as a diagnostic category is as vague as “encephalopathy,”

is also applicable to DPT cases, as we saw, and will undoubtedly become so

to Hep B, HiB, and other vaccines as well.

Hepatitis B and Auto-Immune Diseases.

The official ACIP verdict on the Hep B vaccine makes it sound

like one of the safest currently available:

Hepatitis B vaccines are safe to administer to adults and children. More

than 10 million adults and 2 million infants and children have been

vaccinated in the US and over 12 million children worldwide. Pain at the

injection site and fever have been among the most frequently reported

side-effects, but no more so than in the controls receiving placebo or DPT.

The incidence of anaphylaxis is low. Large-scale programs in Alaska, New

Zealand, and Taiwan have not established an association with other adverse

events. Any presumed risk that might be causally associated must be

balanced against the expected risk of hepatitis B liver disease.31

In my experience, however, the vaccine carries a major risk of

auto-immune dis-eases of every type, including lupus, thyroiditis, and

major blood dyscrasias, which is also confirmed by a large volume of

anecdotal case reports, and by warnings listed in the PDR by the

manufacturers themselves. As we saw, the main value of the ACIP whitewash

is to guarantee that nearly all private lawsuits and no-fault claims will

fail.

Here is a typical case from my own practice, an 18-year-old

college student who became ill soon after his second Hep B vaccination at

the age of 10:

He remained in good health and developed normally until the age of 10, when

two doses of Hep B vaccine were given, with no ill effects from the first.

A week after the second dose, a swollen lymph node appeared in his neck,

with fever, malaise, joint pains, and other flu-like symptoms, from which

he has never fully recovered. Losing 20% of his body weight, he developed

large subcutaneous nodules near major joints, and.a very high sedimentation

rate. Diagnosing an auto-immune mixed connective-tissue disease, a

rheumatologist kept him on nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs and

Prednisone for 6 years, as a result of which his growth and sexual

maturation were seriously retarded. When I saw him, he had taken no drugs

for 6 months, but his face and eyes were still swollen, his cheeks were

covered by a bright-red rash, and his muscular and sexual development were

those of a puny 12-year-old. Over the past two years, he has improved a lot

under homeopathic treatment, but continues to be chronically ill, seriously

handicapped, and likely to remain so. His parents are certain that Hep B

vaccine was the main cause of his illness, but his medical records contain

no written statement to that effect.32

Here are two claims of Hep B vaccine injury whose medical

records I have studied thoroughly enough to write detailed reports to the

hearing officer. While quite different in the organs and tissues affected,

they resemble each other in their overall flavor and style.

An adolescent girl with type 1 juvenile diabetes was in good health and

stable condition before receiving the vaccine. Within a few days of her

first dose, she developed fatigue and malaise, itched intensely from hives

all over her body, and her skin grew puffy and swollen. In a few weeks she

developed joint pains, and the hives made her scratch to the point of

bleeding. Medications gave temporary relief. Her high sed rate and

anti-nuclear antibody titer indicated an auto-immune illness resembling

lupus, but vigorous treatment did not help, and she developed allergic

reactions to chemicals and food additives that had not bothered her before,

while her diabetes, which had been stable for years, went seriously out of

control.

After several months her mother broke off the treatment, saying, “Before

the shot she was active, full of life, and not allergic to anything. Now

she has to analyze everything she eats, avoids the sun, and has to take

EpiPen wherever she goes. She is allergic to preservatives and food

colorings, but has no idea what else will trigger hives and rashes.” After

4 years, her claim is still pending.33

A previously healthy 31-year-old lab tech developed auto-immune thyroiditis

soon after her second round of Hep B vaccinations. At 24 her doctor gave

her two shots two months apart, as required for her training. 3 months

after the second dose, she developed a cough that lasted for weeks and

cleared up on antibiotics, after which she took the third dose. With no

antibody titer 4 years later, she was thought to be still susceptible to

the disease, so her new employer insisted that she be receive a second

round. Within a few days after the first dose, she developed a sore throat

and cold symptoms, followed by weakness, fatigue, hoarseness, and weight

gain that persisted for months. She took a second dose and grew much worse,

with a more intense version of the cough she had had before, causing

palpitations and anxiety at night. Finding her TSH to be twice normal, her

doctor gave her thyroid, followed by her third dose of Hep B, and her

symptoms and elevated TSH lasted for months with no improvement. Even after

thyroid antibodies were found, she continued to worsen, despite ever-higher

doses of hormone and normal tests. She has since developed a nodular

goiter, difficulty swallowing, and esophageal reflux. In short, this

previously healthy young woman will remain chronically ill for the rest of

her life, needing regular supervision and strong medication. The most

clear-cut of any that I’ve reviewed, her claim was dismissed without a

hearing, based on current Federal guidelines.34

These cases are also recognizably similar to other reports of

auto-immune diseases from Hep B vaccination in the literature, e. g.,

cryoglobulinemia,35 lupus and rheumatoid arthritis,36 Guillain-Barré

syndrome,37 optic neuritis and MS,38 chronic fatigue syndrome,39

vasculitis,40 and diabetes.41 As with the DPT and MMR, many of the same old

diagnoses, such as seizures, autism, and demyelinating diseases, keep

popping up after Hep B as well. As I will presently show, the term

“auto-immune disease” encompasses the whole gamut of non-specific reactions

to the vaccination process per se. As for SIDS, it could follow any

vaccine given early enough, especially Hep B, which is given soon after

birth, as this father learned too late to save his newborn son:

For 12 days, ate and slept well, like any other baby. On the 13th

day he was given Hep B. When I got home from work, he was crying a lot more

than usual, even screaming at times, but we’d just taken him for a checkup

and they told us he was big and healthy. We didn’t know that vaccines can

cause problems. cried on and off most of the night. When I went to

work the next day, he was still crying, and he continued most of the day

and evening. The next morning my wife found him dead in his crib, looking

as if he’d been dead for several hours. An autopsy showed that

had died of SIDS. The pediatrician said he was one of the healthiest babies

he’d ever seen.42

2. Nonspecific Effects of the Vaccination Process in General.

Having questioned the specificity of four well-documented

reactions to particular vaccines, around which all debate has so far been

framed, I will now consider the far more prevalent adverse reactions that I

have witnessed in my practice. For the most part, these represent simple

intensification of underlying tendencies that were already present, and

encompass the full range of common ailments encountered in any pediatric

practice, like ear infections, eczema, asthma, and behavioral and

developmental issues. Although the details of their treatment are

irrelevant, it is significant that these children responded to the same

homeopathic or conventional medicines that would be given in such cases,

whether vaccinated or not. From these strange circumstances, I conclude

that the small number of adverse reactions reported in the literature make

up no more than the tip of an enormous iceberg, the remainder of which lies

hidden, unseen, and invisible, because it blends into the mainstream of

clinical medicine, and because vaccines play a major but by no means

exclusive rôle in causing them.

Making the Connection: Childhood Ear Infections.

As we saw, causal connections between vaccines and chronic

illness are obscured by the usual time lag of two weeks before their

symptoms become diagnosable. Parents and doctors are equally unlikely to

suspect a vaccine if the illness is an aggravated version of what the child

already has or what friends and classmates are also coming down with.

My first definite cases were specific reactions that I managed

to identify from characteristic signs of a particular vaccine or component,

and at times to confirm by the curative effect of homeopathic medicines

prepared from the natural disease. In one such case, I noticed that in

addition to its specific action on the parotid gland and the posterior

auricular lymph nodes, the MMR also had a nonspecific effect on the immune

system as a whole, making the boy more susceptible to other ailments going

around the neighborhood:

I saw a 4-year-old boy for bilateral soreness and enlargement of the

posterior auricular nodes for the previous year, when he also became more

prone to upper-respiratory infections. Over the same period, his mother

also noticed recurrent swelling of the parotids, beginning soon after his

MMR vaccine at the age of three. Because she was pregnant, I decided not to

treat him until after the birth. A year later, he developed acute

bronchitis, and again the nodes were swollen and tender, so I gave him the

homeopathic rubella vaccine. The cough soon subsided, and the nodes

regressed in size. Two weeks later he returned with a hard, tender swelling

in the cheek and pain on chewing or opening the mouth. After one dose of

homeo-pathic mumps vaccine, these symptoms also subsided, and he remained

well.43

As in other cases, the specific reaction to a vaccine helped me

recognize it, but the reaction as a whole was vague and nondescript,

suggesting an underlying tendency that most children do not have. The

rapidly increasing prevalence of childhood ear infections during those

years soon taught me that such nonspecific reactions are the rule rather

than the exception, and provided a large body of evidence that was ready to

hand. Here is a typical example, a 19-month-old girl whose MMR vaccination

was soon followed by ear infections and a flare-up of allergies and eczema,

which she had had only mildly before:

At 19 months of age she had already suffered 5 ear infections and 5 rounds

of antibiotics since her MMR 4 months earlier, with eczema and allergic

rhinitis as well. Although her allergies began soon after birth, they were

mild, while the eczema was confined to a few small patches on the face.

With no obvious reaction to her DPT’s, she did fine until her MMR, after

which her ears flared up repeatedly, often with high fever, earache, and

listless, clingy behavior, and never cleared up despite 5 rounds of

antibiotics, while her allergies became intense and unrelenting, and the

eczema spread over her entire body. Advising them not to use antibiotics if

she got sick and not to vaccinate for a while, I gave her homeopathic

medicine, and the ears healed promptly, but her eczema and nasal congestion

took a bit longer. Now 12, she has had no more shots, and enjoys excellent

health and normal hearing.44

Occasioned by the MMR more than the DPT or other vaccines, and

not included on any official list, this girl’s reaction consisted of ear

infections, one of the commonest illnesses of her age group, as well as a

recurrence and intensification of the same allergies and eczema she had had

in the past. Here is another typical variant, a girl of 15 months who had

had 11 ear infections and 11 full courses of antibiotics by the time I

first saw her:

Otherwise in good health, a chubby girl of 15 months was brought in for

recurrent ear infections, which had never cleared up despite 11 rounds of

antibiotics. After a healthy pregnancy and labor, her mother didn’t nurse,

and her first ear infection came with a fever of 103° at 2 months of age,

soon after her first DPT, HiB, and polio. All later episodes were afebrile,

with fretting, screaming, and pulling the ear, and were relieved by being

carried about. Twice she seemed fine, but her doctor found some fluid, and

the drugs caused persistent diarrhea both times.

Asking the parents to stop vaccinating her, I gave homeopathic medicines,

and in 2 weeks she developed a replica of her first episode, with fever of

102° and intense screaming. She came through it in a day or so and has been

entirely well since, once catching a cold without ear involvement for the

first time. By then she was thriving, growing, and gaining weight, with

good appetite, sleep, and energy. That was 3 years ago. Since then she’s

had no ear infections and no vaccines.45

In spite of the clear link between her first episode and the

combined vaccines, this girl’s condition became so chronic that later shots

made no difference, except for her last episode, which presented with

fever, just like her first. From such cases I have learned to regard acute

illness as a good prognostic sign, indicating strong vitality and an immune

system that is developing normally, and to worry about children who are

unable to mount a fever or acute response to infection, as the immune

system is programmed to do. My sense is that all vaccines, whatever their

specific effects, tend to reprogram the organism to react more chronically

in general, whatever the illness, as shown by my next case, a girl with

recurrent ear infections of the same type following several different

vaccines:

A baby girl of 10 months was brought in for otitis media with high fever,

intense earache, and loud screaming, her 5th episode since two months of

age, each beginning soon after finishing the antibiotic from the one

before. The cycle began when her mother weaned her to go back to work, she

became fussy, and she developed a rash on milk-based formula. All symptoms

were intensified after her first DPT, HiB, and polio, culminating two weeks

later with high fever and violent earache, as with all later episodes.

After that, she was given the DT, which she didn’t react to in any way,

except that her ear infections continued as before.

With homeopathic medicines, they stopped soon enough, but came back with a

vengeance when her parents separated 6 months later, and her father

insisted on taking her for the MMR. 3 acute ear infections and 3 rounds of

antibiotics followed in rapid succession. Again she responded well to

homeopathic treatment, and remained in very good health overall, despite a

tendency to relapse whenever she visited her father, who indulged her with

dairy and took her to the doctor for her quota of vaccines and antibiotics.

Now a freshman in college, she still gets sick at times, but her ear

infections are gone, and her robust immune system has helped her respond

acutely and vigorously and recover quickly.46

This girl’s almost identical reaction to two different vaccines

indicated a definite predisposition to fall ill in a certain way that was

recognizably her own and already in place when the vaccines were given, the

important and obvious contribution of vaccines being simply to reactivate

and intensify it.

Making Worse What’s Already There: the Common Diseases of Childhood.

From this viewpoint, I began to notice a similar causal link

between childhood vaccines and the usual chronic illnesses, such as asthma,

eczema, sinusitis, behavioral problems, and the like. As with ear

infections, if the condition was already symptomatic prior to vaccination,

a dramatic intensification was observed not long afterward, while if

quiescent it was often reactivated. As before, many children reacted in a

similar way to two or more different vaccines, indicating a peculiar

characteristic of the individual rather than a specific effect of the

vaccine, and often linked with a family history or past history of the same

kind. At times the reaction occurred too long afterward for anyone to

suspect a vaccine until the same pattern was observed from a later dose or

a different vaccine. Moreover, these reactions likewise encompassed the

usual range of ailments seen in any pediatric practice, vaccinated or not,

and were curable by the same group of medicines, homeopathic or not. Unlike

the specific effects of specific vaccines, which are narrowly defined to be

as serious and as rare as possible, these nonspecific reactions are common

enough to be the rule, not the exception, though by no means necessarily

minor or trivial:

A 15-month-old boy was brought in for croup, recurrent colds, swollen

glands, and developmental issues. Born to a diabetic mother, he weighed 8

pounds at birth and spent weeks on a respirator in the Newborn ICU because

of “undeveloped lungs,” with cyanosis and unstable blood sugars. In the

early months he was colicky and had a severe diarrhea that stopped when his

mother eliminated wheat from her diet. At 3 months, soon after his first

DPT, HiB, and polio, he became very restless, with swollen glands and a

sickly pallor that lasted for months and culminated in a prolonged attack

of croup, high fever, and sunken chest that required hospitalization and IV

corticosteroids for relief. When the cough persisted, his mother put off

the second round of shots for months, but even so the croupy cough came

right back, as did the swollen glands and exactly the same symptoms as

before. With a marked fear of strangers, the boy appeared subnormal,

drooling profusely with his mouth hanging open, and hiding behind his

mother. Once I found a good homeopathic medicine that fit his

symptom-picture, the illness cleared up in a few days and never came back.

A month later, his mother was ecstatic. For the first time, in the dead of

winter he had no croup or swollen glands, slept well, and seemed more

alert, more interested in his surroundings, and less fearful around

strangers. That was 6 years ago, and I’ve not seen him since, but his

mother recently called to say that he is still thriving and developing

normally, “like other children his age.”47

In another case, a boy with severe asthma accomplished a

sustained remission with homeopathic treatment, but relapsed almost

immediately after a DPT booster:

Asthmatic since age two and testing positive for a broad spectrum of

allergens, a 4-year-old boy was brought in because a regimen of

bronchodilators and inhaled steroids all year round had not prevented major

flare-ups the previous fall and winter, several requiring oral prednisone

and antibiotics as well. During the first 6 weeks of homeopathic treatment,

he cut his inhaled steroids by half, maintained higher peak flows of 150 or

more, and got through a cold for the first time without developing asthma

or requiring drugs. Emotionally, too, he was calmer and less wild, even

expressing remorse after a fit of rage, which he had never done before.

The following summer, at the peak of his allergy season, he was still doing

well on half-doses of inhaler, and remained healthy and energetic all

spring and summer, with peak flows at record levels of 160-175. That fall

he got a DPT booster before entering kindergarten and quickly came down

with bronchitis, for which he was given antibiotics, and his allergies also

returned in full force. Again he responded to the same homeopathic medicine

as before, and has continued to improve over the past 2 years, without

needing to come back or take it again.48

His mother’s narrative leaves little doubt that the DPT

reactivated and intensified his pre-existing condition, which had been in

almost total remission for many months. Although it is certainly possible

that the DPT and other vaccines may have played a rôle in the origin of his

asthma as well, an underlying predisposition would have been an important

contributing factor in any case. What matters is that he was well on his

way to being cured of his asthma until a DPT booster set him back a lot and

for a long time.

Nonspecific Reactions: any Vaccine Will Do.

As with ear infections, additional evidence of nonspecific

reactions was provided by children who responded in the same way to two or

more different vaccinations. The following case of environmental

sensitivity was so severe and its exacerbation by each vaccine so obvious

that the allergist recognized it and agreed to withhold further doses:

A 2-year-old boy came in for asthma and allergies. Severely allergic

herself, his mother reluctantly agreed to the Hep B at birth and a second

dose at two weeks. After his first DPT, HiB, and polio at two months he

erupted with eczema all over his body, which she knew had been caused by

the vaccines, but the pediatrician ridiculed the idea. After the second

round, his stools became green and watery for 6 weeks, and she weaned him,

but Similac led to apnea, cyanosis, vomiting, and giant hives everywhere.

Finding him highly sensitive to dairy, eggs, peanuts, and animals, the

allergist agreed he should not be vaccinated again, but the familydoctor

insisted on an HiB booster at 18 months, and in two weeks his asthma was

back for real. When I saw him he needed Albuterol daily, all year round. He

too has responded well to homeopathic medicines and is now rarely

asthmatic, although still avoiding vaccines and careful with animals and

foods.49

3. How Vaccines Work: A Preliminary Hypothesis..

In spite of their importance in medicine and public health and

an abundance of detailed knowledge about how the immune system works, a

vaccine still need satisfy only two minimal criteria to be considered

effective: 1) that the incidence of the corresponding natural disease

decline significantly after administering it, and 2) that measurable titers

of specific antibodies be found in the serum of vaccinated individuals for

extended periods of time. These standards are analogous to those of the of

the drug industry as a whole, which expects vaccines and drugs to act

mainly as they are intended to, in that everything else they do is

relegated to the fine print as “side” effects, and often simply forgotten.

In short, the medical system does not seek or even seem to want any broader

conception of how medicines affect the organism as a whole. In search of a

more comprehensive view, I will reflect on how we come down with and

recover from an acute disease such as the measles, and contrast it with

what happens after the corresponding vaccine is administered.

Natural Immunity: Absolute, Qualitative, and Lifelong.

With its affinity for the respiratory mucosa, the measles virus

is dispersed through the air by sneezing and coughing infected droplets and

inhaled by susceptible persons on contact with them. For 10 to 14 days, the

virus multiplies first in the tonsils, adenoids, and accessory lymphoid

tissues of the pharynx, then in the regional lymph nodes of the head and

neck, and finally in the blood, spleen, liver, thymus, and bone marrow, the

major organs of the immune system. Throughout this prolonged “incubation”

period the patient usually feels quite well and experiences few or no

symptoms of any kind.50

With the first signs of illness, circulating antibodies are

already detectable in the blood, in concentrations roughly proportional to

the severity of the disease.51 In other words, the illness we know as the

measles is simply the concerted effort of the immune system to clear the

virus from the blood, largely via sneezing and coughing, the same routes

through which it entered in the first place. This mighty exploit involves a

general mobilization that includes inflammation of already sensitized

tissues at the portal of entry, activation of B- and T-lymphocytes,

macrophages, and the serum complement system, and a host of other

mechanisms, of which the production of specific antibodies is only one,

which depends for its effectiveness upon its collaboration with the system

as a whole.

Such a magnificent effort leaves no doubt that coming down with

and recovering from acute illnesses of this kind are the defining

experiences in the healthy maturation of the immune system. The immunity

resulting from it is specific, to be sure, in that those who recover from

the measles will never again be susceptible to it, no matter how many times

they are re-exposed in the future. But it is also nonspecific, in the

equally important sense of priming the system to respond rapidly and

effectively to other infections it may encounter in the future.

The natural immunity acquired through recovering from acute

diseases represents an enormous net gain for the health of individuals and

their descendants, and thereby also of the community and the race as a

whole. The measles virus kills 20% of populations exposed to it for the

first time, and many centuries of adaptation were required for our own

ancestors to convert it into a routine disease of childhood, such that when

I caught it at the age of six, nonspecific mechanisms were already in place

to help me recover from it with no complications or sequelæ, an achievement

that I credit in no small part for the good health I enjoy today. The

ability to respond acutely and vigorously to infection ranks among the most

fundamental requirements of general health and well-being, a truth so

elementary that merely having to reaffirm it will attest to how far we have

strayed from a saner and more wholesome conception of life.

Artificial or Vaccine-Induced Immunity: Relative, Partial, and Temporary.

When the live, attenuated vaccine virus is injected into the

blood, at most a brief inflammatory reaction may be noted at the injection

site, with no local sensitization at the portal of entry, no incubation

period, no acute illness, and no massive outpouring. Like a conjuror’s

trick, vaccination yields measurable titers of specific antibodies in the

blood, but without any overt illness or inflammatory response, and without

any significant improvement in the general health of the recipients, apart

from reducing their statistical risk of developing the acute disease as we

know it.

But where the virus goes, how it persuades the immune system to

continue producing antibodies against it for years at a time, and what

price we have to pay for the counterfeit immunity that they represent, are

the questions that are seldom if ever asked. Vaccines seem tailor-made to

accomplish through deception what the immune system seems to have evolved

to prevent, giving viruses, bacteria, and other foreign antigens free and

immediate access to the organs of the immune system without any obvious or

easy way of getting rid of them. No mere side effect, the continuing

production of specific antibodies over the long term requires the physical

presence of live viruses and other highly antigenic substances inside the

cells of the immune system on a more or less permanent basis.

In the case of measles and the other live-virus vaccines,

excellent models already exist for imagining how this chronicity might

occur, and for predicting the pathologies that are likely to follow from

it. Many viruses are known for their capacity to survive in latent form

indefinitely within the cells of the immune system without provoking acute

disease, by attaching their own DNA or RNA as extra particles or “episomes”

to the genome of the host cell and replicating along with it, allowing the

cell to perform its normal functions but adding instructions for the

synthesis of viral proteins as well.52

Residing as foreign elements within the cells of the host,

latent viruses of this type would automatically pose a major threat to the

immune mechanism as a whole, which is programmed to destroy and remove them

by every available means. Once viral elements are incorporated into the

genetic material of the host, such attacks have no possible target but the

infected cells themselves. Chronic intracellular parasitism by latent

viruses would appear to insure a rich harvest of auto-immune diseases,

which must also be regarded as “healthy” in that removing the transformed

cells becomes the only way to eliminate the foreign material.

In short, my fear is that vaccinating children against measles

and other live viruses simply reprograms their immune systems to respond

chronically and weakly rather than acutely and vigorously to other

infections, and indeed to antigenic challenges of any kind, a conclusion

amply borne out by the clinical evidence already presented of alarming and

as yet unexplained increases in the chronicity of ear infections, asthma,

eczema, autism, and other common diseases of childhood. It is dangerously

misleading and indeed the exact opposite of the truth to claim that measles

vaccine “protects” us against the disease by obliging us to harbor the

virus chronically instead, so that our immune systems are less capable of

responding acutely, not only to the measles but to everything else as well.

If that is true, then the most major achievement of mandatory

vaccination could be to exchange a few epidemic diseases of the past for

the vastly more prevalent and less curable chronic diseases of the present,

with their suffering and disability amortized at a high rate of interest

over the patient’s lifetime. It is difficult to imagine that most parents

would accept such a devil’s bargain if they were told the truth about it,

let alone open a real Pandora’s box of new diseases and mutations for the

future, through in vivo genetic recombination within the cells of the race.

Vaccine Adjuvants.

Made from killed bacteria, inactivated toxoids, tissue

extracts, and recombinant viruses, the non-living vaccines are also

designed to remain inside the cells of the host and continue to provoke

antibody responses over long periods of time. Though how they do it is also

poorly understood, something in their method of preparation and

preservation must promote similar long-term carrier states within the

antibody-producing cells, presumably by conjugation with host-cell

proteins, which would allow these non-living vaccines to remain highly

antigenic for as long as possible. At least three kinds of chemical

additives are implicated in and indeed deliberately used for such purposes.

First, vaccines prepared from toxoids and cellular extracts are

precipitated onto adsorbents, usually aluminum hydroxide, both to preserve

them and to enhance their anti-genicity.53 There is reliable evidence that

vaccines prepared without them are much less toxic, as in recent studies of

an aluminum-free pertussis vaccine.54 Also used in cookware and other

products, metallic aluminum and its salts have been implicated in a broad

array of auto-immune, allergic, and neuropathologic states, including

Alzheimer’s disease and encephalopathy.55

Second, some vaccines prepared from live microörganisms or

their toxins are first killed or inactivated with formaldehyde, which also

fixes and preserves them in that form, much as in embalming the dead. An

efficient and well-known carcinogen,56 even in tiny amounts,57 formaldehyde

is the last thing we would want injected into the bloodstream of our

children, let alone to trap already dangerous vaccines inside them.

Third, several vaccines are sterilized, denatured, and

preserved with Thimerosal, an inorganic sulphur-mercury salt which prevents

bacterial overgrowth. Already linked to a broad ramge of toxic and

auto-immune reactions, from allergies to renal failure and dementia,58

mercury salts and Thimerosal in particular have been studied and publicized

so widely in recent years that the vaccine manufacturers themselves have

been scrambling to develop or discover alternatives to it.

Clinical and Epidemiological Studies of Vaccine Efficacy.

The best evidence that vaccines really work dates from the

introduction of the Salk polio vaccine in the 1940’s and the measles

vaccine in the 1960’s, after which the dreaded polio epidemics disappeared

from the developed world, while the annual incidence of measles plummeted

from over 400,000 to less than 10,000 cases in the United States.59 Yet

the disturbing possibility that vaccines act in some other way than by

producing a genuine immunity is implicit in the circumstance that measles,

like other such diseases, has continued to break out even in heavily

vaccinated populations, while in such cases the observed differences in

incidence and severity between the vaccinated and unvaccinated children

have been much less dramatic than expected.

In 1985, 157 cases of measles were reported in Corpus Christi

and nearby Nueces County, Texas, over a 3-month period, notwithstanding a

vaccination rate of over 99% and supposedly “immune” antibody titers in

more than 95%.60 In 1989, one Illinois high school similarly reported 69

cases in 3 weeks despite verified records of vaccination for 99.7% of the

students.61 Although both reports oddly omitted the actual numbers of

vaccinated and unvaccinated cases, they effectively discredited the common

prejudice that unvaccinated children, assumed to be the main reservoir of

the disease, pose a threat to their vaccinated classmates, a fear widely

exploited by health departments to shame reluctant parents into compliance.

In fact these outbreaks suggested the opposite, that the immunity conferred

by the vaccine can’t be genuine, or the unvaccinated kids would only be a

threat to themselves.

These inconvenient facts were dismissed easily enough by the

official explanation that artificial or vaccine-mediated immunity is only

partial and temporary, and wears off with increasing age, leaving the child

presumably unaffected and just as susceptible as before. Indeed, this

assumption is the main rationale for revaccinating with “booster” doses at

a later date. But other studies indicate that this assumption is false. In

1980, when the disease seemed to have been all but eradicated in the United

States, Dr. Cherry, whom we’ve met before, found that children

previously vaccinated against the measles whose specific antibody titers

had fallen below supposedly immune levels responded to a booster dose only

minimally and for an unacceptably short time:

In the booster vaccinees, there was only a modest initial rise in titer,

and after a year the level was almost back to where it had been before the

booster. In addition, we noted a lack of “take” in 14 other children, most

of whom had probably been immunologically stimulated before. In short, the

data suggested that another booster dose might not have any lasting effect

on waning immunity.62

Both the outbreaks of measles in supposedly highly immune

populations and the failure of Cherry’s simple booster shot to remain

effective for a prolonged period of time cast doubt on the conventional

wisdom that immunity is a purely quantitative variable, that the specific

antibody titer accurately measures it, and that by applying sufficient

force it can be ratcheted up more or less at will. Within a few years, when

major outbreaks like those just cited generated intense pressure to do

something about them, Cherry’s suddenly inconvenient research was

discreetly forgotten, and the MMR booster was duly mandated for all

children and remains in force to this day.63

Another suggestive finding emerged from a sustained outbreak of

235 measles cases reported in Dane County, Wisconsin, over a nine-month

period in 1986.64 In add-ition to the usual cases, only 6% of whom were

unvaccinated,65 the authors identified a subset with so-called “mild

measles,” consisting of a paler rash, no fever, and minimal discomfort or

systemic involvement.66 To their surprise, they also discovered that this

syndrome was much commoner in previously vaccinated kids without specific

antibodies than in either unvaccinated kids or those with high levels of

antibody, both of whom were more likely to develop the full-blown disease:

36 of the 37 unvaccinated patients, or 97%, had rash illnesses that met the

CDC clinical definition of measles, but 29 of the 198 vaccinated patients,

or 15%, did not, primarily because of low-grade or absent fever. Of 122

patients with sero-confirmed measles, 10 patients, all previously

vaccinated, had no detectable measles-specific IgM antibodies and

significantly milder illness than either vaccinated or unvaccinated

patients with IgM-positive serum.67

This paradoxical result suggested a kind of latent viral

activity that was undetected and indeed belied by routine serological

testing, echoing Dr. Wakefield’s original finding that children receiving

the MMR vaccine were much more likely to develop inflammatory bowel disease

later in life than their unvaccinated controls. The inescapable inference

is that artificial, vaccine-mediated immunity is both counterfeit and

dangerous, culminating in a broad range of auto-immune diseases, as we have

seen.

4. Some Individual Vaccines.

With this as background, I will re-examine a number of

individual vaccines, all of which illustrate the basic issues that have

already been discussed, yet differ significantly in the seriousness and

impact of the corresponding natural diseases. Since I have already written

about DPT, MMR, and polio in the past,68, 69 I will focus on vaccines of

more recent vintage.

Hæmophilus Influenzæ B (HiB).

Originally developed against outbreaks of bacterial meningitis

in infants and pre-school children in large day-care centers, the HiB

vaccine has been adapted to a broader and more ambitious agenda in a

sequence that has become typical in the industry and raises pertinent

economic and political issues that I have referred to only in passing.

The first vaccine to be prepared against an organism that

resides in the healthy throat, HiB was directed against the B strain of

Hæmophilus influenzæ, which has at times been associated with serious

invasive diseases, such as otitis media, sinusitis, meningitis, pneumonia,

laryngitis, epiglottitis, and endocarditis. Since bacterial meningitis can

be fatal or leave permanent brain damage in spite of the most vigorous

antibiotic treatment, the vaccine establishment saw no downside in

attempting to prevent these outbreaks by vaccinating children of two years

and older who were being cared for in crowded public facilities. After a

small pilot project of this kind, the vaccine was eventually mandated for

all children at 18 months, and is now administered with the DPT at 2, 4, 6,

and 18 months, often in the same preparation.

Since it began in the late 1980’s, the campaign to promote HiB

was accepted by nearly all pediatricians without a murmur, and has in fact

produced moderate reductions in the incidence and severity of all systemic

diseases involving this organism,70 including ear infections,71 which by

then had become an intractable problem in its own right. Yet this seemingly

glorious triumph for the vaccination concept has upstaged the obvious risk

of new, less friendly species occupying the vacancy it left behind, or

otherwise altering the normal ecological balance of the pharynx as a whole,

possibilities that do not seem to bother or even have occurred to these

experts. In addition to its documented side effects, such as Guillain-Barré

syndrome,72 thrombocytopenic purpura,73 and invasive HiB disease in the

first two weeks after vaccination, associated with very low levels of

specific anti-body,74 this reckless tampering with complex,

well-established homeostatic mechanisms to achieve limited, short-term

goals gives ample grounds for advocating a moratorium on HiB vaccination

until more comprehensive studies are carried out.

Hepatitis B.

Introduced in the early 1990’s, the Hep B vaccine raises a

different set of issues. Widespread but only infrequently fatal, Hepatitis

B presents acutely, chronically, or both, and occasionally leads to

irreversible liver damage and cirrhosis, which carry high risks of liver

cancer and death. Transmitted primarily through contaminated blood and to a

lesser extent by sexual contact, the disease has long been an important

source of ill health among IV drug users. In the 1980’s, the medical system

belatedly took notice when Hepatitis B and C, AIDS, and other blood-borne

diseases began to appear as contaminants in donated blood, a scandal that

pressured the blood banks into more rigorous screening procedures.75

Because the clandestine subculture of IV drug use has always

remained beyond the reach of the medical system, campaigns of selective Hep

B vaccination aimed at these high-risk groups have never been effective. In

1991 mandatory vaccination was finally introduced as a last resort for

exerting some degree of leverage over this more and more intractable

problem. The desperate and improbable strategy adopted was to vaccinate all

newborns in the hospital, so that even those who become drug addicts in

their teens and twenties would be a little less likely to get the disease,

while the blood supply would also be protected to that extent at least.

Sound far-fetched? Most pediatricians thought so, at least in the beginning:

“I don’t see what the rush is,” said one pediatrician at a UCSF conference,

and neither did his audience. Only about a third of the 400 attendees said

they were giving the vaccine routinely to infants. “We’re trying to prevent

a disease 25-30 years from now,” he added. Others felt that children

receive too many vaccines in the first year, that each injection is a

disagreeable experience which may adversely affect compliance.76

Letters of protest began pouring in, many of them dubious that

the vaccine would last long enough to do any good, and predicting that

boosters would also be needed later:

The patient handout falsely assures parents that that the protective

effects will last throughout the child’s life, while the article admits

that antibody levels decline over time, and booster shots may be needed.

Since adolescence begins the period of greatest exposure, immunizing them

might be more effective, and compliance would be higher.77

Nevertheless, most pediatricians remained strongly committed to

vaccination as a general strategy for fighting disease, and by the

mid-1990’s the majority were actively on board with the Hep B campaign just

as reports of adverse auto-immune reactions began to appear in large

numbers, and as usual it became their task to launder and sanitize them.

Among the first of its kind, the Hep B vaccine is a product of

bio-engineering, a genetically recombinant form of the virus that is

allegedly no longer capable of replicating itself and to that extent no

longer “alive.” Ignoring the ultramicroscopic realm of epi-somes and

intracellular viral fragments, this purely semantic rationale is widely

invoked to defeat compensation claims for Hep B-related auto-immune

diseases, as I have said. While such facile word games may have postponed

another major scandal for a little while longer, even the polite objections

of ten years ago are more than enough to predict a noisy failure for this

hare-brained scheme of vaccinating all newborns against a disease of young

adults that very few of them will ever come into contact with.

Rotavirus.

While quickly smoothed over and all too easily forgotten, this

mini-disaster and the peculiar mentality that engendered it should both be

kept under glass as a specimen of what undoubtedly lies ahead. In 1996, the

AMA Journal published a CDC report which advocated mass vaccination against

rotavirus, a major source of infectious diarrhea:

Rotavirus is the most common cause of severe diarrhea among young children

in the US. Of children up to five years old, approximately 70% will become

ill with rotavirus, of whom 1 in 8 will see a physician and 1 in 80 will be

hospitalized. Though it causes few deaths in this country, it causes 50,000

hospitalizations and $550 million in direct medical costs annually. Safe

live oral vaccines have been developed that will prevent 50-60% of the

diarrhea and 70-100% of the severest cases. The decision to implement a

national vaccination program will be based on the expected reduction in

severe outcomes and its cost-effectiveness. A previous study found it would

yield net savings of $80 million in health care costs and $465 million in

social costs, based on a price of $20 per dose.78

By their own math, however, the authors calculated a saving of

only $300 million in social costs and a net loss of $100 million in health

care costs that could only be offset by lowering the price of the vaccine

to the break-even point of $9 per dose.79 Entitled “When Is Too Much Too

Much?” an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine took up the same

issue and concluded that the program would be extremely effective in the

developing world, where rotavirus and other infectious diarrheas pose an

enormous and urgent public health problem, but affordable and profitable

only in affluent countries like our own:

Diarrhea is no longer a serious threat in the United States. It remains

common, but its severity has diminished to about 300 deaths per year. On

the other hand, the vaccine is safe and can prevent nearly half of all

infections, 80% of the severe episodes, and virtually all of the

dehydration. An effective program of vaccination would significantly reduce

mortality, hospitalization, and other medical costs, estimated at $500-600

million annually, as well as the indirect costs, including lost wages for

parents and the cost of child care. When is too much too much? One hundred

preventable deaths per year are too many, and $500 million in direct

health care costs is too high. Hence a safe and effective vaccine,

even at $30 per dose, can be recommended for routine use in the US and

developed countries.80

Recommended by ACIP, the vaccine was mandated in 1998 for all

infants, even though 5 cases of intussusception, a life-threatening form of

intestinal obstruction, had already been reported in the trial population

of 10,000 children, a risk of about 0.05 per cent.81 In the first eight

months of the program, many new cases were discovered, and the vaccine was

quietly withdrawn pending further investigation, which did establish “a

strong, temporal, and specific causal association” between the vaccine and

this dangerous complication that was much more prevalent than the trials

had indicated.82 The vaccine was then hastily recalled and the whole

affair hushed up as if it had never happened.

For the moment I will leave aside the narrowness of the

cost-benefit calculation, which ignores the possibility of chronic,

non-specific effects like those I’ve described, and the fascinating process

by which vaccines are rubber-stamped for general use with at most nominal

regulation and oversight. The rotavirus vaccine fiasco could not have

happened without the zealous, crusading attitude, usually left unstated but

here made explicit, that even the tiniest number of preventable deaths are

unacceptable, and that mass vaccination is always an appropriate strategy

to consider for eliminating them.

In a land so notoriously ruled by dollars and cents, these

supremely un-economical ideas both assume 1) that vaccination is inherently

safe, and indeed an unmixed blessing for the health of individuals and

nations alike, and 2) that whatever adverse effects an individual vaccine

or batch may have, there is never anything cumulative about them, so that

it is perfectly OK and indeed of great benefit to pile on as many as we

wish. Even in the absence of other reasons, the enormous bulk of

nonspecific reactions I have described would be quite sufficent to prove

both assumptions false. With the new biotechnology companies now capable of

manufacturing vaccines against viruses and bacteria almost as fast as they

can identify them, the obvious unwisdom of giving away our public health

and welfare to private, for-profit enterprises is an issue that is already

ubiquitous and becomes ever more threatening with each new campaign.

Chickenpox.

Many of the same issues are illustrated even more pointedly in

the history of the chickenpox or varicella vaccine, which although first

developed by Merck in the 1960’s, was never used on a large scale until the

Clinton years, when official enthusiasm for all vaccination programs

attained such dizzying heights that a plausible rationale could at last be

invented for marketing it. Even then it was not an easy sell, since the

chickenpox is an illness so innocuous that the AMA Encyclopedia of Medicine

described it as “a common, mild infectious disease” to which “all healthy

children should be exposed at an age when it is no more than an

inconvenience.83 Even the American Academy of Pediatrics, which yields to

no one in its righteous enthusiasm for vaccines, affirmed in a 1996

brochure that

Most children who get chickenpox and are otherwise healthy experience no

complications from it. When adults get it, the disease usually lasts longer

and is more severe, often developing into pneumonia. Adults are almost 10

times more likely than children under 14 to need hospitalization for the

disease and more than 20 times more likely to die from it.84

Bucking these traditional, common-sense attitudes, the

manufacturers’ successful campaign to win a government mandate for

universal vaccination represents a brilliant coup for them and the

industry, clinched by exclusive “sweetheart” contracts with state health

departments and Federal agencies guaranteeing millions of doses at their

own chosen price. How did they pull it off?

Although nobody claimed that the disease was serious or even

required medical attention in most cases, the Clinton Administration’s

oft-repeated boasts about the cost-effectiveness of vaccination as a

favored health strategy enabled manufacturers to argue that the huge

savings in social costs, chiefly in lost wages and extra day care, would

make the vaccine a bargain for parents, as alleged in this handout from the

American Academy of Family Physicians, designed to be distributed to

parents as their kids were offered up:

Why is a vaccine needed? Chickenpox is usually a mild illness, but can

cause problems like brain swelling, pneumonia, and skin infections. It may

be very serious in infants and adults. Because it is so contagious,

children shouldn’t go to school or day care until all the sores have dried

or crusted. Many parents miss work during the illness, because of which the

lost pay can be a significant cost to them.85

As with Hep B, many physicians were lukewarm to the program in

the beginning, and compliance was very low. Here is a letter from 1997,

expressing the worries that have actually materialized in the case of MMR,

the waning immunity in adolescents and young adults, associated with more

severe illness and a higher risk of complications:

Chickenpox has been a benign disease of preschool- and school-aged

children. Although immunization is supposedly axiomatic for public health,

vaccinating all kids against chickenpox is a bad idea. It is unknown

whether long-term immunity arises from an attack of the disease, or from

the virus repeatedly boosting it in our communities, or how long immunity

will last after vaccination. Over time, mass vaccination will eradicate

most naturally occurring varicella and its booster effect. If the immunity

of vaccinated kids wanes with age, and unvaccinated kids escape disease

because contagion is rarer, life-threatening outbreaks may occur as these

kids grow older. Since morbidity and mortality are increased in fetuses and

after childhood, an ever-expanding population of adults with unboosted or

waning immunity, including pregnant women, may be created.86

As expected, these hesitations and warnings were drowned out by

special pleading from the vaccination establishment. In a JAMA editorial

entitled “Just Do It!” two Yale pediatricians concluded their pep talk with

the following exhortation:

Do the benefits of universal immunization outweigh the risks? Many studies

show the risk of complications from varicella in normal children, and there

is evidence that they have been underestimated. Others show that the

vaccine is cost-effective. Why would we deny children protection from this

unpleasant rite of passage when the evidence is so favorable? It’s time to

stop procrastinating, and JUST DO IT!87

Pneumococcus.

Similar in many ways to HiB, the Pneumococcus vaccine raises

many of the same issues. A sometimes pathogenic strain of Streptococci,

the “pneumococcus,” or Strepto-cccus pneumoniæ, shares capsular

polysaccharide antigens with Hæmophilus influenzæ, which are also the basis

of its virulence and the source of the vaccine. The organism also occupies

a similar niche in the normal flora of the pharynx and has been implicated

in the same diseases: otitis, sinusitis, pneumonia, meningitis, and

endocarditis.

Long before HiB, the pneumococcal vaccine was introduced during

the 1970’s to prevent bacterial pneumonia in the elderly, especially in

overcrowded nursing homes and residential facilities, where pneumococci

were the species most frequently isolated. But the vaccine proved only

marginally effective in this already debilitated population, as in this

study of ambulatory but high-risk middle-aged and elderly patients in the

VA system:

We conducted a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial to test

the efficacy of a pneumococcal polysaccharide vaccine in 2295 high-risk

patients with one or more of the following: age over 55, diabetes,

alcoholism, chronic cardiac, pulmonary, hepatic, or renal disease. We were

unable to prove any efficacy of the vaccine in preventing either pneumonia

or bronchitis in this population.88

As a result of such studies, the vaccine was not very popular

with either the target population or their doctors, who continued to use it

without much enthusiasm. So matters stood until the Clinton years, when

the war on childhood ear infections reached its climax and the conventional

strategy of aggressive antibiotic treatment was exposed as a dismal

failure. In the late 1990’s, the vaccine was recycled for pediatric use

when it was found to be moderately effective in preventing otitis media, in

which the pneumococcus plays a major rôle.89 Here at last was the marketing

strategy that everyone had been waiting for, and the vaccine is now being

promoted aggressively, not only for young children, but also for

adolescents, young adults, mature adults, and even middle-aged

fifty-somethings of the AARP set,90 as if it might eventually be

refashioned into a panacea for everyone and hopefully need to be repeated

throughout life.

Yet a sizeable number of pediatricians and other critics have

continued to resist this steamroller. In 2001 the Finnish Otitis Media

Study reported that a new vaccine was effective in preventing ear

infection, but several letters quickly punched gaping holes in it:

The vaccine manufacturer concludes that the new vaccine is effective for

prevention. But the data do not support this conclusion. As the authors

admit, the treated group could have had more episodes than the controls. In

1999 these same data were presented to the FDA, which rejected the use of

this vaccine in otitis media. But the most interesting results are

ecological. In a short time the predicted sero-type replacement, as

observed with other bacterial vaccines, was realized. With this clear

warning sign, it is ecologically perilous to push this vaccine.91

The most telling criticism came from a pediatrician in Holland,

where ear infect-ions are common but rarely medicated or even considered a

major public health problem:

According to the protocol, all infants received 4 vaccinations, which led

to the prevention of only 6% of cases. More could be gained by changing our

attitude toward acute otitis media, which in the Netherlands is seen as a

self-limiting disease. Often parents do not take their children to the

doctor for it, and antibiotics are only moderately effective anyway. As has

been shown, educating parents and doctors will lead to a decrease in

antibiotic prescriptions.92

Despite considerable evidence that it is ineffective and

unsafe, the pneumococcus vaccine continues to be promoted aggressively, and

I have no doubt that it will eventually be mandated, at least for children,

once these technical scruples are swept aside.

Influenza.

Prepared from live influenza viruses that are attenuated in a

medium of chick embryo cells, the influenza vaccine is inactivated by

formalin, split with hydrocarbon ethers into antigenic fractions, and

preserved with Thimerosal. Its unique challenge and profitability lie in

the fact that annual flu epidemics involve different subtypes of the virus,

which cannot be known with certainty in advance, so that it has to be

recreated and marketed anew every year, before the epidemic, based on

extrapolation from possible animal reservoirs, i. e., on guesswork, and is

apt to be only partially effective, despite some degree of cross-reactivity

between various strains.

Like the pneumococcus, influenza vaccines were originally

designed to prevent pneumonia in the elderly, especially debilitated

patients in nursing homes and assisted living facilities. But careful

studies of this high-risk population yielded at best mixed results and at

times no results at all,93 while serious adverse reactions, like the

dreaded Guillain-Barré polyneuritis, were also reported with some

frequency. In the 1978-79 season, the highly-touted “swine flu” epidemic

never materialized, but over 40,000,000 people were given the vaccine, and

several hundred cases of severe polyneuritis were officially confirmed

within 10 weeks of receiving it, representing a five- or six-fold increase

over its baseline prevalence in the unvaccinated,94 while unofficial

reports suggested a rate much higher than that. As ever, authoritative

studies quickly appeared to discredit any causal link, but a large volume

of legal claims were settled on the quiet by the manufacturer.

The annual flu shot nevertheless remained a popular ritual with

many doctors and their elderly patients and continues to be heavily

promoted, but as with the pneumococcus, the “hard sell” for mandating it

had to wait until the Clinton years, when vaccination came to be seen as

the strategy of last resort against health problems that seemed intractable

and unresponsive to other solutions, like otitis media, influenza

epidemics, and AIDS.

Building on the example of the chickenpox vaccine and its

narrowly economic rationale, the respected and influential American Academy

of Family Practice took the lead by recommending that annual flu shots be

offered to all adults aged 50 or older.95 In an interview with Family

Practice News, Dr. H. F. Young, AAFP Director of Scientific Affairs,

emphasized the major economic benefit of preventing absenteeism from

work,96 while Dr. Poland of the National Coalition for Adult

Immunization cited the increased probability of complicating risk factors

like heart disease, asthma, emphysema, cancer, and diabetes in this age

group.97

The economic argument was soon recycled for vaccinating all

schoolchildren on a yearly basis, which a 1999 study claimed would save

hundreds of millions of dollars in lost wages and eliminate the major

reservoir of the disease.98 Facing no real opposition, the same program was

eventually extended to healthy young adults in the work force,99 and even

to pregnant women, in order to protect their newborns from the risk of RSV

and bronchiolitis, according to one imaginative CDC scientist.100 As with

pneumococcus, the influenza vaccine is clearly being groomed for mandatory

use on a yearly basis, with no recognition of even the possibility of a

serious downside to the idea.

Anthrax and Bioterrorism.

Mandated for all U. S. military personnel serving in the Middle

East from the time of the first Gulf War in 1991, the anthrax vaccine has

been controversial from the start. First, there was speculation about its

possible rôle in “Gulf War syndrome,” an assortment of still unexplained

diseases reported by many veterans and downplayed or covered up by

officials of both Clinton and Bush Administrations. As reported in the

Boston Globe, this account of one such veteran was typical of many:

Sgt. Landry’s chest has been hurting a lot. He can’t ride a bike,

climb stairs, or play with his children. He wheezes even with medication,

sleeps propped up on three pillows, and suffers from diarrhea and stomach

pain. The worst of it is, he doesn’t know what’s wrong. He left in perfect

health two years ago, to serve in the Gulf War as a specialist in nuclear,

chemical, and biological weapons, and he returned coughing up phlegm and

too short of breath to resume his job, as well as dropping from 150 to 128

pounds,. Landry is one of many Gulf War veterans who report a variety of

mysterious ailments, such as joint pain, hair loss, skin lesions, bleeding

gums, asthma, and digestive disturbances. They don’t know what causes them,

but Landry’s best guess is a reaction to the anthrax vaccine. He’d never

had lung problems before, and within an hour of receiving it he began to

wheeze, and felt as if his chest were filled with water. He’s never been

well since.

He can’t work, and accepts $1000 a month in food stamps and Aid to

Dependent Children, because he has two kids, his wife has a bad back, and

they’ve sold most of their possessions. Meanwhile, the Government denies

that his problems are service-related and has reclassified him as fit for

duty. Despite what happened, he’s not bitter about the Army. He volunteered

knowing the risks: “they gave me a life and education. I was illiterate and

got my GED because I couldn’t be promoted without it.” No diagnosis has

been made. All he knows is that he can’t breathe, can’t work, and can’t

support his family. And he’s only 29 years old.101

A recent survey reported that more than 230,000 of the 600,000

troops serving in the Gulf War have sought medical care, and that 185,000

have filed disability claims as a result of their ailments, a shockingly

high percentage, while almost 10,000 of them have died, and no official

explanation of their illnesses has ever been offered.102

So matters stood until the late 1990’s, when in its enthusiasm

for vaccines the Clinton Administration required that all military

personnel receive the anthrax vaccine, whether on active duty or not, and

the vaunted discipline of the Armed Forces began to crack. By 1999 several

hundred officers and enlisted men from all branches had accepted

dishonorable discharges rather than submit to the shots, as the Army

reluctantly admitted in a Boston Globe cover story:

In Maine, where he grew up, Zack didn’t have a reputation for civil

disobedience. He was so law-abiding and laid back that his parents called

him “Mr. Light ‘n’ Easy.” But the 22-year-old Naval airman faces a

court-martial because no threat of biological weapons, or a jail sentence,

or even of the loss of the GI Bill he planned to use for college could

persuade him to take the anthrax vaccine. Ten Marines were court-martialed

in California last month for the same reason. An Army spokesperson says

that over 300,000 military personnel have had at least one shot, and 175 to

200 people have refused, too few to affect battle-readiness. But Mark Zaid,

an attorney representing the 10 Marines, said, “Some Air National Guard

units have lost a third of their flight crews and can’t be deployed any

more.” He estimates the number of refusals at 300 to 500.103

In a related story from the New York Times, the Surgeon-General

of the Army acknowledged the seriousness of the problem:

The happy military career of Bettendorf ended abruptly Wednesday. A

senior airman with an untarnished record, Bettendorf was dishonorably

discharged for refusing to take the anthrax vaccine, because he believed

that the Pentagon had never proved its safety or effectiveness. Facing

rebellion from a growing number of cases, the Pentagon dismissed them as

insignificant, but stopped counting how many had refused. “It speaks to an

undercurrent of distrust of the Government and the military,” said Lt.

General Blanck, Surgeon-General of the Army, which oversees the

anthrax program. “We have a credibility problem.”

The Marine Corps in particular has been hit hard. Resisters note that

there is no way to test the vaccine against the anthrax used in weapons,

and they criticize the lack of follow-up research on those who did receive

it during the Gulf War. They also point to two FDA reports critical of the

manufacturer, Michigan Biologic, a state agency which was sold last year to

Bioport, a private company. One month later, Bioport was awarded a $29

million contract to produce the vaccine for the Pentagon, which insists

that the program is safe and effective.

But reassurances are not enough for Marine Lance Cpl. Austin, who

read that the vaccine can cause sterility and refused to take it with four

others in his antitank missile platoon and now faces a court-martial. While

their numbers are small, they can upset the readiness of their units,

notably in the Reserve and National Guard, whose members can resign more

easily than those on active duty. In January, nine A-10 pilots with the

Connecticut Air National Guard, a quarter of the squadron, quit rather than

be vaccinated. At AFB in California, where Airman Bettendorf

served, 11 of 40 reserve pilots in his Squadron refused to take the

vaccine, leaving them short-handed just before heading to the Persian Gulf.104

As news of these refusals and disciplinary actions spread,

high-ranking officers began hearing the concerns of the men and women under

their command. Appointed Commander of an F-16 Fighter Squadron, Lt. Colonel

Heemstra, a decorated combat veteran of 20 years’ experience,

decided to investigate the vaccine independently, and was outraged by what

many personnel had endured, including disrespect, ridicule, and inadequate

medical care. As told in his book, Col. Heemstra invited Dr. Meryl Nass, a

government consultant who had raised serious doubts about the vaccine, to

address his pilots.105 Including firsthand accounts by three Michigan

National Guardsmen who were disabled by the vaccine and treated harshly by

their superiors, her lecture persuaded all twenty pilots who attended to

refuse the vaccine, as a result of which they were cashiered, including the

Colonel himself.106 The same fate befell Major Sonnie Bates, another

highly decorated combat pilot of long experience who later testified before

Congress on a wide variety of auto-immune complaints observed in military

personnel after taking the shot.107

As the scandal spread through the ranks, investigators

discovered that many Gulf War syndrome patients who developed auto-immune

diseases after the anthrax vaccine showed antibodies to squalene, a

fat-soluble substance that was still being used by BioPort as an

experimental adjuvant in the vaccine, despite strong FDA warnings in the

past and solemn assurances by the Pentagon that they had abandoned the

practice.108 In part to counter the bad press, Admiral Crowe,

ex-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was named to BioPort’s Board of

Directors and given a 13% stake in the company in return for blessing the

anthrax venture.109 Ironically, he had previously brokered the sale of

weapons-grade anthrax to Saddam Hussein by Rumsfeld, President

Reagan’s special emissary, for later use against the Iranians and Kurds.110

Only a few weeks after the attacks of September 11, 2001, and

the official Bush Administration “Declaration of War” against Terrorism

worldwide, spores of weapons-grade anthrax made their way through the

Postal Service to the offices of Democratic Congressional leaders and CBS

Television News, resulting in 22 cases of cutaneous and pulmonary anthrax

and five deaths. Although the perpetrators of these crimes have not been

identified and the results of an extensive Federal investigation have never

been made public, it leaked out that the material had been manufactured in

the U. S. Army Biological Warfare Laboratories, as the country trembled

with the realization that even such minute amounts were enough to infect

and kill people, and that the Government is essentially powerless to stop a

large-scale biological attack by a determined enemy. These fears were

assiduously cultivated by the Administration to win support for the public

health agenda of the Patriot Act and the vast Homeland Security bureaucracy

created to administer it, but fantasies of vaccinating the general

population brought back the aftertaste of the military’s incestuous

relationship with BioPort and the ominous signs of its complicity in the

Gulf War syndrome, and the plan never got off the ground.

After September 11, the abortive campaign to vaccinate everyone

against smallpox was even more revealing. Amid the tragedy, confusion, and

heroism displayed at Ground Zero, the whole country began taking seriously

the possibility and indeed the likelihood of nuclear, chemical, and

biological attacks in the future. Because anthrax cannot be transmitted

from person to person, each intended victim must be targeted individually

and be brought into direct physical contact with the spores, whose range is

therefore limited to the environs of a large city. Smallpox, on the other

hand, evokes deep mythic and historic fears of plague and pestilence,

because it is highly contagious and capable of propagating itself to

populations far beyond the target area, so that many authorities

entertained the idea of reintroducing vaccinia, or cowpox, the original

vaccine that had been used for 200 years and had in fact eliminated

smallpox from the world. Yet when the Administration attempted to obtain

large quantities of it, and President Bush made a photo-op of rolling up

his own sleeve to receive it, the public remained surprisingly cool to the

idea. Even when a scaled-down plan was made optional and offered to

doctors, nurses, firemen, and other emergency personnel, very few of them

actually took it,111 and the predicted adverse reactions were widely

publicized.112

Given the almost universal propensity to ignore or overlook the

adverse effects of vaccinating not only our children but indeed everyone

else against a host of other diseases both great and small, this sudden

show of solicitude and cold feet regarding a vaccine that had seemed so

familiar and effective is utterly fascinating to me. How these same people

can then resume taking their annual flu shots and bringing in their babies

for one disease after another without a murmur has to rank with the great

unsolved mysteries of our time.

In any case, there is plenty of good sense in it, for it means

either that the actual threat of the vaccine is perceived to be greater

than the hypothetical threat of the disease, or that the public simply does

not believe that any vaccine can reliably stop a determined enemy from

doing us harm. In my view, both reservations are well taken. Larry

Brilliant, M. D., a veteran epidemiologist formerly with WHO, said it

better than anyone:

If Saddam has smallpox, he might use it if he were about to be killed, but

he also has the capacity to alter the virus to make it vaccine-proof. Why

would he use a virus that we have a vaccine against? It makes no sense. If

Al Qaeda has it, I don’t believe they’d use it either. They want victory

for a people, a culture, a religion. Smallpox is the ultimate boomerang. If

released at Chicago-O’Hare, it’s only a matter of days before it hits Mecca

and Medina. It’s not a weapon for war unless one seeks the destruction of

both civilizations.113

Prof. Rosner of Columbia gives another argument for the same conclusion:

Smallpox is the only disease to have been eradicated through human

intervention. Yet we saw in it the chance to create a new and better weapon

of mass destruction. Both the U. S. and Russia kept the virus in storage

awaiting the opportunity to terrorize the world. Both made it immune to the

vaccine that had eradicated it by genetically altering the virus. Even if

smallpox could be used as a weapon, the fear of it is being used to make

fundamental changes in public health. Mundane but indispensable activities

like making sure our water is safe to drink, our air isn’t too polluted to

breathe, and our food isn’t too spoiled to eat are being sacrificed for

fear of smallpox, which plays into Bush’s strategy of militarizing public

health.114

5. Implications for Health Policy.

In conclusion, I will apply the broader, more comprehensive

viewpoint I have sketched out to identify some underlying themes of our

present vaccine policy, correct some of the inadequacies, and resolve some

of the contradictions and that follow from them.

The More, the Merrier.

The sequence whereby vaccines originally intended for a limited

purpose or target population are awarded a larger and larger market share

logically culminates in the prized government mandate enforcing them on

everyone. As we saw, such universalization pre-supposes a deep, abiding

faith that vaccines are inherently beneficial and in no sense a major

public health risk, which makes it look acceptable to promote all vaccines

to the fullest extent possible and achieve maximum compliance with each new

mandate.

Writing in medical journals and news magazines, prominent

advocates routinely exhort physicians to improve their vaccination rates,

offer practical tips for overcoming patient resistance, and downplay the

risks and contraindications that parents continually worry about, and that

still crop up in the literature. Part pep talk and part sales pitch, such

motivational efforts have long since reached out beyond any narrowly

defined pediatric constituency to target other age groups as well.

In “Adult Immunizations: How Are We Doing,” a typical example

of the genre, a leading infectious disease specialist calculated the number

of lives that could be saved by vaccinating adults with the same zeal and

thoroughness that we bestow on our children:

30,000 lives could be saved yearly if adult immunization recommendations

were implemented. Between 50,000 and 70,000 adults die each year from

influenza, pneumococcal infection, and hepatitis B. This exceeds the number

of automobile deaths, and far outweighs mortality from these diseases in

children. Those for whom vaccines are contraindicated are fewer than those

who fail to be immunized because of the following, which are not

contraindications but often thought to be:

1) local reactions to past vaccines, with fever less than 104º; 2) mild

acute illness, with or without fever; 3) antibiotic treatment or

convalescence from recent illness; 4) household contact with a pregnant

woman; 5) recent exposure to infectious disease; 6) breastfeeding; 7)

history of allergies, including to penicillin or most other antibiotics;

and 8) family history of allergies, adverse reactions, or seizures.115

In other articles, similar concern is expressed for adolescents

and young adults, who have been equally neglected by our narrow preference

for infants and small children:

Vaccination programs focusing on infants and children have decreased the

occurrence of many vaccine-preventable diseases. But many adolescents and

young adults are still being attacked by hep B, chickenpox, measles, and

rubella, because our vaccination programs have not focused on these age

groups. All not previously or adequately vaccinated should be updated with

Hep B, MMR, DT, varicella, and pneumococcus. Influenza and Hep A should be

offered to all at high risk.116

The most convincing proof for the universality of the concept

is its extension to pregnant women, who have always been considered exempt

and inviolate, out of concern for the safety of their unborn that the new

imperative bids fair to render obsolete:

Adult immunization rates have fallen short of goals because of

misconceptions about the safety and benefits of vaccines. This danger is

magnified during pregnancy, when physicians are hesitant to give vaccines

and patients to accept them. Routine vaccines that are safe to give during

pregnancy include DT, flu, and Hep B. Meningococcus and rabies may be

considered. Contraindicated are MMR, varicella, and BCG. Others have not

been adequately studied.and must be weighed individually. But inadvertent

use of any of these is not grounds for termination.117

Ironically, it is widely agreed that mandated childhood

vaccination programs have not only achieved but often outstripped their

stated goals. According to the CDC National Immunization Survey, all

recommended vaccine targets were met or exceeded by 1995:

95% of children aged 19 to 35 months received at least 3 doses of DPT; 92%

received at least 3 doses of HiB; 90% received the MMR; 88% received polio;

and 68% the Hep B. In fact, the 1996 goals were reached in 1995.118

Even in California, where alternative medicine is widely

popular and a thriving subculture openly questions traditional medical

practices, vaccination rates have reached extremely high levels, as shown

in a 2001 study by the state Health Department:

The California Department of Health examined school immunization records

for all children in the state. In the fall of 2000, personal belief

exemptions were listed for 0.77%, or 4000 of the 526,000 attending

kindergarten. Seventh-graders have higher exemption rates, probably because

of the Hep B requirement. Of 500,000 seventh-grade students, 1.3% recorded

personal belief exemptions.119

In fact these levels are far in excess of what is necessary to

prevent sustained out-breaks of even the most highly contagious diseases,

like chickenpox and measles, both of which attack nearly 100% of the people

exposed to them for the first time. A study of 1000 Milwaukee-area children

with measles found that

Modest improvements in low levels of immunization among 2-year-olds confer

substantial protection against measles outbreaks. Coverage of 80% or less

may be sufficient to prevent sustained outbreaks in an urban community.120

While these campaigns all tacitly assume that it is permissible

and even desirable to add on as many different vaccines in as many doses as

we think fit, the preponderance of evidence points to exactly the opposite

conclusion, as we saw. If all vaccines tend to promote, intensify,

activate, or reactivate whatever chronic disease tendencies already exist,

then the risk of adverse reactions is not rare or incidental, but

inseparable from the process, and indeed, I fear, in direct proportion to

the total number of vaccinations given.

Whether unaware of or simply untroubled by this possibility, in

January 2004 the ACIP updated its Recommended Childhood and Adolescent

Immunization Schedule:

3 Hep B shots in the first 24 months, beginning at birth;

3 DPT at 2, 4, and 6 months, and a 4th 5-24 months;

3 HiB at 2, 4, and 6 months, and a 4th at 12-18 months;

2 injectable polio at 2 and 4 months, and a 3rd at 6-24 months;

One MMR at 12-18 months;

One chickenpox at 12-24 months;

3 pneumococcus at 2, 4, and 6 months, and a 4th at 12-18

months; and

One influenza yearly, beginning at 6 months.121

This means 22 different vaccinations for ech child in the first

2 years, many with two or more components, and that’s only the beginning.

For ages two through 18,

Influenza vaccine annually [another 16 from 2-18 years of age];

3-4 Hep A shots recommended, from 2-18 years;

DPT booster at 4-6 years, followed by DT at 11-12 years;

Injectable polio booster at 4-6 years;

MMR booster at 4-6 years; and

Chickenpox booster at 4-6 years.122

This makes 25 more mandatory or recommended vaccinations

between 2 and 18, a total of close to 50 by the time they enter college,

not to mention whatever new vaccines lie in store for them in the future.

Moreover, as young adults they will become eligible for yet another series

of boosters to carry them into old age. Thus slowly, incrementally, and

inexorably, purely as a matter of policy and without any real public health

emergency, vaccination has become the normal, acceptable means for reducing

the incidence of any identifiable acute infectious disease whatsoever,

often simply to save money or time lost from productive work, a strategy

which now involves every individual in every age group and necessitates

repeated doses throughout life.

To stop this juggernaut, I would assign top priority to

reducing the total vaccine burden borne by our population, especially

infants and young children. In my view, this should be done, first of all,

by postponing vaccination as long as possible, at least until two or

ideally three years of age, to give young immune systems ample opportunity

to develop in a wholesome and natural way, by learning how to mount fevers

and other vigorous, acute responses to infection, before reprogramming them

more chronically.

Second, we should preserve the clear distinction between

diseases that represent a clear and present threat to life and limb, such

as DT and polio, and others that originate from organisms in our normal

flora, like HiB and pneumococcus, or are nuisances that we elect to

vaccinate against for economic or other policy reasons, such as influenza,

MMR, and chickenpox, or problem diseases that we feel helpless to influence

in any other way, like Hep B and undoubtedly AIDS on the horizon.

With no urgent medical need for it, the MMR was brilliantly

successful as a public relations stunt, proving that vaccination could work

as a general strategy by nearly erasing three ubiquitous acute diseases as

a simple demonstration of its validity. Yet it is wholly counterproductive

to impose the MMR on populations like ours, which through centuries of

adaptation had already tamed these viruses into routine diseases of

childhood that most kids in reasonably good health would benefit

substantially from coming down with and recovering from.

In industrialized countries like the United States,

recommending vaccination for all children could make a little bit of sense

for DT and polio, while the other vaccines could still be made available to

those who request them. As for pertussis, I cannot support large-scale use

unless a vaccine is developed with a much better safety record than any we

have now. Since the pressure to vaccinate early derives mainly from the

risk of pertussis in young infants, dispensing with that vaccine will also

encourage waiting longer before giving DT and polio. In my opinion, the

MMR, chickenpox, and Hep B vaccines have no legitimate use on a mass scale

and should not be recommended. Vaccinating the whole population in advance

of bioterrorist threats like anthrax and smallpox is useless, since

weaponization renders these organisms impervious to vaccines, and also

unnecessary, since the likelihood of their use remains vanishingly small.

A Sacrament of Modern Medicine.

Just as vaccinating everybody against everything at every

possible opportunity satisfies the ideal requirements of an enormously

profitable venture for manufacturers, the aggressive marketing strategies I

have described are not so different from what successful businesses often

do to maximize their bottom line. As we saw, their sweetheart deals with

state health departments, foreign governments, and federal and

international agencies, involving millions of doses guaranteed at their

chosen price, along with the famous “hard sell” of doctors and patients

that accompanies them, entail nothing more mysterious or unfamiliar than

old-fashioned crony capitalism getting a free ride.

The rotavirus debâcle was all about greed. Luckily, the vaccine

was never made available to the poor countries that might have benefited

from it, because its $30 unit price was far beyond their reach, while the

U. S. government, which never tried to persuade the manufacturers to lower

it, gladly provided easy access into the domestic market. In like manner,

the anthrax vaccine controversy ended in scandal because the government

policy of requiring it of all military personnel resulted in too many

high-profile casualties and defections for the company’s shoddy practices

and the Pentagon’s condoning of them to be kept hidden any longer.

Thus unrestrained even by market forces, abetted by corporate

welfare at the tax-payers’ expense, and rubber-stamped by their allies in

government, the thriving biotech industry has amplified these problems

exponentially by creating new vaccines against any desired viruses or

bacteria as fast as they can identify, isolate, and propagate them, often

for no better reason than their technical capacity to do so. In short, we

can expect a rich harvest of new vaccines in the future, some on the

drawing board, others already in stock and awaiting only a convenient

opportunity and marketing strategy to launch them:

While its incidence has declined in the past decade, hepatitis A is still

responsible for nearly 60% of acute viral hepatitis in the United States.

It seems unfortunate that outbreaks continue to occur in one of the most

affluent countries in the world, given that a highly immunogenic, safe, and

effective vaccine is available. Routine vaccination in early childhood

would lead to a dramatic reduction in the infection within a decade. The

failure to begin such a program is a missed opportunity.123

However ubiquitous they may be, corporate greed and worldly

ambition are only the most familiar and obvious side of the story, the

motives that many industries share. In degree if not in kind, vaccines are

uniquely blessed and indeed sanctified above all other industrial products

by their extraordinary triumph at the mythic or unconscious level, as a

veritable panacea for a health care system that seems embattled and in deep

trouble almost everywhere else.

No purely financial or commercial motive can account for the

sincere and nearly universal veneration accorded to the idea of vaccination

by doctors and patients alike, which not only exempts vaccines from the

ordeal of criticism that every new scientific discovery must rightly

endure, but also makes the mere hint of disapproval seem disloyal or

sacrilegious, and even inspires the physicians who administer them to

volunteer their own children for the latest experiments.

Quasi-religious sentiments of this kind are evident in the

writings of Dr. Offit, the aforementioned Merck consultant who

recently claimed that young infants are capable of generating protective

humoral and cellular responses to many vaccines simultaneously, perhaps as

many as 10,000 at a time, by what he calls a “conservative estimate.”124 In

this sense, the vaccination project must also be understood in mythic and

spiritual terms, as a kind of baptismal initiation into the religion of

modern medicine.125 Whichever of these motives seem uppermost in any given

case, the result is the same: compulsory vaccination has promoted a kind of

self-righteous fanaticism that is often invoked to justify various abuses

and infringements of the rights of parents, children, and the public at large.

From the 1940’s through the Reagan years, compliance with

vaccination laws was achieved mainly by intense social pressure to conform

that doctors, school boards, friends, neighbors, and relatives brought to

bear against deviant parents, whose unvaccinated kids were regarded as the

chief reservoir of the few diseases at issue and therefore a substantial

threat to the vaccinated kids and everyone else as well. In the

mid-1980’s, as we saw, this simplistic rationale was demolished by the

large measles outbreaks in highly vaccinated populations, where most of the

cases had been vaccinated, and parents wondered how, if the vaccine were

any good, unvaccinated kids could threaten anybody but themselves.126

During the Clinton years, as both the number of required

vaccinations and the public resistance to them began to multiply, the

government and public health authorities began implementing a tracking

system for identification and surveillance of noncompliant parents, based

on computerized government databases that raised widespread alarm and fears

of “Big Brother” overriding personal privacy, notwithstanding official

denials and reassurances to the contrary:

Community- and state-based immunization registries are computerized systems

that contain data about children’s vaccines, a tool to maintain high

vaccination coverage. Such registries consolidate records from different

providers, provide generate reminder notices, and produce an official

record. Remaining challenges include balancing the need to protect privacy

with gathering and sharing information to benefit the public and

individuals. $178 million in Federal funds has so far been awarded to state

and local health departments to develop such registries.127

With the added impetus of President Bush’s “War on Terrorism”

and the Home-land Security bureaucracy created in its name, the threat to

civil rights began to frighten eminent legal experts and health activists

all over the country, as in the following “News Release” that was sent to

me over the Internet and gave only a phone number as its source:

Attorneys for the CDC have advanced legislation that suspends civil rights

in case of a declared biological emergency. The Emergency Health Powers Act

gives governors and public health officials the power to arrest, transport,

quarantine, drug, and vaccinate anyone suspected of carrying a potentially

infectious disease. An article by Prof. Lawrence Gostin of town that

tried to balance the need to control disease with protecting individual

rights was removed from the Boston Globe website. The law gives state

public health authorities dictatorial powers with scant legal recourse for

internees. Its definition of a public health emergency is highly

subjective. Once it is declared, most civil liberties are suspended, with

states declaring ownership of private property. Persons refusing to submit

to medical exams and tests are subject to misdemeanor charges and forced

isolation. If authorities suspect that they have been exposed to

infectious diseases or pose a risk to public health, detention may be

ordered for them. If an attack is carried out or even suspected, thousands

could be held in camps, and physicians assisted by police be required to

perform medical tests and exams. Individuals may be forcibly vaccinated or

medicated, and those refusing would be guilty of a crime and subject to

arrest, isolation, or quarantine, while the state and public health

authorities are exempt from liability associated with the death or injury

of detainees or damage to their property.128

In a sizeable number of divorce and/or child custody hearings

and lawsuits that have come to my attention, the plaintiff, almost always

the husband or ex-husband, seeks to win or regain physical custody of his

children on grounds that his wife or ex-wife was negligent or unfit as a

parent by failing to comply with vaccination laws, even if he had

acquiesced in her position and failed to challenge it for all the time they

were together.129

Even in Canada, where vaccinations remain optional but are held in

comparable esteem by the medical establishment, the Québec College of

Physicians revoked the medical license of Dr. Guylaine Lanctôt, a physician

who strongly opposed routine vaccination,, simply for espousing ideas that

they found “derogatory to the honor and dignity of the medical profession,”

and for disseminating information to the public that they proclaimed to be

“inaccurate, deceptive, inappropriate, and contrary to accepted medical

science.” 130

Vaccination has also lurked behind the scenes in the criminal

prosecution of some parents for “shaken-baby syndrome,” a form of

encephalopathy secondary to traumatic brain injury. In an infamous case

from Florida, the father served 8 years of a life term for murder in the

state penitentiary, and recently won his release only when the Medical

Examiner’s testimony that convicted him proved to have been falsified in

several key respects,131 while my own review of the baby’s medical

records, corroborated by several other physicians, found them consistent

with the possibility of an encephalopathic reaction to the DPT vaccine,

which he had received only a few days before.

But my favorite illustration of the sacramental power of the

vaccination concept lies in the voluntary and largely instinctive

self-censorship practiced in its favor by the news media, which almost

never make statements or issue opinions of their own that vaccines actually

hurt anybody, apart from those attributed to interested parties such as

parents or medical experts. The only exception to that rule that I know of

was this article from the Boston Globe that let the cat out of the bag just

this once:

INOCULATIONS PUT ASPIN IN D. C. HOSPITAL. Defense Secretary Les Aspin was

in “clearly improved” condition but remained in the Intensive Care Unit of

town University Hospital yesterday after suffering breathing

difficulties triggered by routine inoculations. “He’s definitely on the

road to recovery,” the spokesman said, but would remain in the ICU to be

monitored, because he has a history of heart problems, and fluid collected

in his lungs. He entered the hospital because of shortness of breath

aggravated by a “mild, pre-existing heart condition,” the Pentagon said. He

became ill the day before, after receiving a number of immunization shots

in preparation for overseas travel.132

Although Aspin’s hospitalization remained newsworthy for

several days, there was no further mention of his vaccinations, and readers

who had missed the original story were given the impression that he merely

suffered a flare-up of his pre-existing heart condition, which was true

enough, thus superbly illustrating the theme of invisibility that furnished

the basic subtext and starting point of this inquiry.

To dispel the aura of sanctity that hallows the vaccination

concept and protects it from closer scrutiny, it is enough to show that

vaccines are no panacea for the health care system, to see them for what

they are, instruments of medical science with power to do harm as well as

good, like any other drug or procedure, and to hold them to the same

standards of safety and efficacy, by obliging them to run the same gauntlet

of lively criticism and open debate.

Who Decides?

I have always wondered who decides that a particular disease

represents such a grave or urgent threat to the public health that everyone

has to be vaccinated against it, whether they want to be or not. Yet simply

asking the question is enough to remind us of what on some level we already

know, that these important deliberations invariably take place behind

closed doors without any public input or oversight. The fantasy scenario

that immediately springs to mind cannot be far from the truth: a government

conference room where officials of the CDC, the FDA, and the American

Academy of Pediatrics meet the vaccine manufacturers themselves, to decide

which vaccine to recommend or mandate next, and to devise a suitable

marketing strategy for promoting it. Whatever the out-come, this “good ol’

boy network” rarely seems to meet a vaccine that it doesn’t like.

I can easily imagine a real emergency where swift actions need

to be taken for the public good that people of conscience might disagree

with. But that is not the issue here. Whether because or in spite of the

vaccinations that have been mandated in the past, or perhaps for other

totally unrelated reasons, no vaccine-preventable disease now poses any

urgent threat to the health of the nation, and most of the vaccines now in

use are marketed largely from motives of policy, as we saw, whether to save

lost wages, to gain access to a group that would otherwise be elusive, to

eradicate a disease that has been a problem in the past, or simply to make

a lot of money for the manufacturer.

Like many other physicians, I believe it is neither wise nor

legitimate to privatize our health system to the extent of surrendering

decisions in the public domain that clearly affect the health and welfare

of everyone to private corporations that are devoted mainly to turning a

profit. In conformity with the laws of all other civilized countries, I

consider health to be a basic human right of everyone, not merely a

privilege of the few who can afford to pay whatever the providers feel

entitled to charge for it, as our own President and Congress still

adamantly insist. The issue of vaccination is too important to be decided

in backroom deals behind closed doors, and must be opened to public

discussion and debate at every level and at every stage.

I do not believe and have never maintained that all vaccines

are wholly bad or evil and to be avoided under all circumstances. In all my

writings, I have simply tried to show that there is a major downside to

their use that needs to be acknowledged frankly, studied carefully, and

factored into all future deliberations about them. To that end I advocate a

basic pro-choice position, that under most circumstances, and in the

absence of any public health emergency, it should be left to the free and

informed decision of the parents about which vaccines, if any, are given to

their children.

Toward a More Comprehensive Model of Biomedical Research.

Devising adequate vaccine policies will also require more

comprehensive studies of their adverse effects and actual mechanisms of

action than any previously undertaken, and to succeed they will have to be

designed in a new and radically different way. In the first place, they

will need to look well beyond the narrow focus of our present studies on

the reduced incidence of the typical acute disease and the titers of

specific antibodies, our only available standards of vaccine “efficacy,”

both of which correlate very imperfectly with true immunity, as we have seen.

Secondly, estimating the safety of vaccines and identifying

adverse reactions to them must include learning to recognize their

non-specific effects, as we have seen. To render these phenomena more

visible, three major changes in research methodology will suffice. First,

it will be necessary to investigate the full range of adverse effects of

each vaccine and vaccine combination, involving every organ and tissue of

the body, as well as more global measures of health and functioning, such

as neurological development, school performance, sensory-motor integration,

mental and emotional maturity, and suffering and disability from other

diseases. These investigations must also be carried out for enough time to

reveal significant chronic patterns, i. e., for years or decades at least.

Finally, the overall health status of the children receiving

vaccines has to be com-pared with that of those who do not receive them, an

obvious requirement which assigns special priority to finding the

unvaccinated children. Far from being “spoilers,” as they are often

regarded, this control group, along with the parents who choose not to

vaccinate them, must be sought out and protected as our last, best hope for

enabling such studies to be carried out, to whom society as a whole and

even the parents who choose to vaccinate ironically owe a major debt of

gratitude.

Owing to the profusion of different vaccines and combinations,

it is impossible at present to study each individual vaccine one by one.

Therefore, I propose the simplest kind of survey to begin with, to compare

the overall health picture of those vaccinated according to the official

schedule with those minimally vaccinated at age three with tetanus and

polio alone, and with those not vaccinated at all. If what I have said

proves to be true, as I fear it will, then the lightly vaccinated and

unvaccinated children should turn out to be substantially healthier, freer

from chronic disease, more alert mentally, and more stable emotionally than

the fully vaccinated ones, and to outperform them in school, with fewer

absences, higher test scores, and the like. That is my prediction and my

deepest concern. If any can prove me wrong, let them come forward, and I

will thank them from the bottom of my heart.

Vaccine Laws and Exemptions.

Achieving even these modest reforms also involves rethinking

our present vaccine laws and the allowable exemptions from them. Under our

federal Constitution, which leaves to the states all residual powers not

explicitly assigned to the central government, vaccination and the practice

of medicine generally fall within the authority of each state, with some

important local and regional differences. Regarding mandatory vaccination,

all states recognize a medical exemption, based on recommendations from

Board-certified pediatricians or other licensed physicians, but these are

only valid for one vaccine at a time, and for one of its approved effects,

and has to be renewed regularly or even yearly. Because of these

limitations, medical exemptions rarely do justice to the feelings of my

patients, and even when they do, are by no means uniformly successful, as

we saw.

Almost half the states also recognize a so-called “religious”

or “philosophical” exemption, based on membership in some Church or

denomination which is on record as being opposed to vaccination, such as

Christian Scientist or Jehovah’s Witnesses, or in the most liberal

interpretation, simply a deeply-held“philosophical” conviction that opposes

the practice. In Massachusetts, where I practice, the law as written

includes the narrower word “religious,” but the courts have interpreted it

very liberally to extend into the purely personal realm of the individual

conscience.

Much closer to the actual beliefs, attitudes, and special

circumstances I typically encounter in my practice, the religious exemption

has generally been honored whenever my patients have claimed it, but

serious difficulties remain that it does not address. Even in this most

liberal interpretation, the religious or philosophical exemption is an

absolute, across-the-board rejection of the concept of vaccination per se,

designed to accommodate a dogmatic belief system in the “abolitionist” or

“conscientious objector” mold. In other words, the law protects the right

of any citizen to dissent from established beliefs by being equally rigid

and inflexible on the other side. It doesn’t allow parents to make

intelligent medical decisions for their children, such as choosing some

vaccines but not others. While this “pro-choice” position is respected by

open-minded physicians, nurses, and school boards in some areas, such

wording has yet to be written into the laws of any state, and draft laws

proposing such changes have so far been rejected by every state legislature

which has considered them, although by smaller and smaller margins each year.

As the biotech industry continues to crank out new vaccines at

without limit or restraint, and new and ever-broader applications are being

found for the old ones, the widespread belief that the total number of

vaccinations does indeed matter provides the best guarantee that the

optional or pro-choice position will eventually prevail. As their ultimate

strategy for circumventing even this modest ceiling on their profits, the

vaccine manufacturers are busy at work developing a single vaccine

containing a dozen or more individual components and administered in a

single dose, whether injected, ingested, or perhaps even inhaled, to be

repeated at rare intervals, and thus presumably arousing less public outcry.

Cost-Benefit Analysis and the “Bottom Line.”

With that in mind, I want to consider the ultimate claim of the

advocates of compulsory vaccination, which its critics have so far ignored,

its alleged effect on reducing the bottom-line costs of health care. As we

saw, this viewpoint attained its peak of inflence during the Clinton era.

Borrowing the newly popular “cost-benefit analysis” from the economists who

used it to analyze the Federal budget into a list of allegedly dis-crete

“line items,” vaccination advocates 1) estimated the number of additional

cases of any acute disease to be expected in an unvaccinated population; 2)

multiplied it by the cost of caring for each case, including doctor and

hospital fees and time lost from work, to obtain the total cost saved by

the health care system; and then 3) divided it by the cost of vaccinating,

i.e., the unit cost per vaccination times the number of doses given, to

compute the “benefit-cost ratio.”

In 1992, before President Clinton took office, Dr. s of Brown

made the economic case for mandatory vaccination, based on its high

benefit-cost ratio:

One of the most important medical developments in the 20th century has been

the control of once-common childhood infectious diseases by the

administration of highly effective vaccines. With the exception of safe

water, no other modality, not even antibiotics, has had such a major effect

on mortality reduction and population growth. Of particular importance in

the current era of escalating health care costs is the fact that effective

childhood vaccines are highly economical and thus represent an efficient

use of society’s resources. A highly favorable benefit-cost ratio -- the

ratio of the reduction in the cost of disease to the cost of the

vaccination program -- has been substantiated by many studies in the United

States. For example, the MMR program led to savings of nearly $1.4 billion

in disease costs in 1983, with a benefit-cost ratio of 14.4:1. By a similar

analysis, for each dollar spent on pertussis vaccine, $2.10 is saved in

health care costs.133

While these soon became the favored calculations for arguing on

behalf of child-hood vaccinations and for silencing effective opposition to

them, they uniformly ignore the rampant but still largely unseen epidemic

of nonspecific effects that I have described, including ear infections,

asthma, eczema, allergies, ADD, autism, auto-immune diseases, and the whoe

spectrum of common diseases of childhood, each of which contributes its own

enormous chunk to those same exorbitant costs that vaccinations are

supposed to be keeping down. To give one familiar example, this study of

childhood ear infections was published in 1982, fully ten years earlier:

Otitis media is the most frequent diagnosis made by physicians who care for

children. It has been estimated that approximately $2 billion is spent

annually on medical and surgical treatment of this disease in the United

States. This figure includes expenses for the estimated 1 million children

who receive tympanostomy tubes and over 600,000 who yearly undergo

tonsillectomies and adenoidectomies, which are mainly for the prevention of

such infections.134

These figures would of course have been much higher had they

been calculated at the time of Professor ’s study, not to mention

comparable figures for asthma, autism, allergies, and the other ailments we

have been discussing, all of which have attained truly epidemic proportions

in the twelve years since 1992. I have never claimed that vaccines are

solely responsible for creating these diseases, and cannot estimate with

any degree of accuracy the percentage of their total medical and social

costs that are attributable to the adverse reactions I have described. But

merely to recognize that such reactions occur with the kind of frequency

that I see in my practice, coupled with the fact that vaccines are required

of every child, is sufficient to establish that this hidden factor is

enormous in size, and that the benefit-cost ratio will look shockingly

different once we factor it in.

I therefore propose the appointment of a bipartisan government

Commission to investigate the medical and social costs of the leading

childhood diseases, with the help of a panel of medical economists whom

they would select, and with the understanding that its deliberations be

conducted in a public forum and its final report include a wide range of

testimony from the medical and public health community and all sectors of

the general public. In particular, the Commission should be directed 1) to

calculate the total medical and social costs of the common problems that

all pediatricians commonly deal with, such as asthma, autism, allergies,

eczema, ear infections, pneumonia, sinusitis, ADD, learning disabilities,

behavior problems, and the like; 2) to try to measure the fraction of them

that should be ascribed to vaccine-related causes; and 3) to multiply the

first by the second to obtain the real cost of giving children all

recommended vaccines on the approved list.

If we estimate the vaccine contribution at 20% of the total

cost of each of these diseases, which I fear is much smaller than the true

figure, it is evident that these hidden factors exceed by several orders of

magnitude any conceivable savings that even the most rabid vaccine

advocates have ever claimed for them. Far from being a bargain, I would

argue that vaccines are in fact exorbitantly expensive on every level, and

must bear an important share of responsibility for the skyrocketing costs

of the present health care crisis as a whole, over which representatives of

the government, the insurance industry, and the medical profession merely

shake their heads in confusion and disbelief. In short, they provide a

splendid example of what CFOs refer to as a “hidden cost center.”

Finally, even if vaccination programs could be proven effective

in achieving their stated goals, the goals themselves may be of dubious

value. As René Dubos once aptly warned, in words sounding even more

prophetic today,

The faith in the magical power of drugs often blunts the critical senses,

and comes close at times to a mass hysteria involving scientists and laymen

alike. Men want miracles as much today as in the past. If they do not join

one of the newer cults, they satisfy this need by worshipping at the altar

of modern science. This faith in the magical power of drugs is not new. It

helped give medicine the authority of a priesthood, and to recreate the

glamour of ancient mysteries.135

The idea of eradicating measles, polio, and the rest has come

to seem attractive to us because the power of medical science makes it seem

technically possible: we worship each victory of biotechnology over Nature

as a bullfight celebrates the triumph of human intelligence over brute

beast. Yet it is absurd to suppose that, even if we managed to eliminate

measles, polio, and all other acute diseases of mankind, we would be any

the healthier for it, or that other even more serious ailments would not

quickly rise up to fill their place. From a medical no less than an

economic viewpoint, trading off the epidemic diseases of the past for the

ubiquitous chronic diseases of today hardly seems like a good bargain, at

least in the industrialized world, where major infectious diseases were

already in rapid decline owing to basic improvements in hygiene,

sanitation, air and water quality, and so forth.

In that sense, the quasi-religious fervor of the vaccine

establishment offers an appropriate metaphor for the privatization and

commercialism of the American medical enterprise as a whole, with its

uncritical and idolatrous worship of biomedical science and technology, its

identification, expropriation, and commodification of every available life

function for the sacrosanct twin purposes of mastery and profit. The deeply

irreligious and infinitely hazardous myth that technical solutions can be

found for illness and all other authentic human problems seems seductively

attractive because it bypasses the problem of healing, which is a genuine

miracle in the sense that it requires art and caring and individualized

attention and therefore can always fail to occur.

Notes

1. Unpublished letter.

2. Horton, R., “Vaccine Myths,” in Health Wars, New York Review Books,

2003, pp. 207-208.

3. Ibid., p. 206.

4. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report in Journal of the AMA 260:198,

April 8, 1988.

5. Unpublished letter.

6. Unpublished letter.

7. Coulter, H., and Fisher, B., DPT: a Shot in the Dark, Harcourt Brace

Jovanovich, 1985.

8. Mortimer, E., et al., “The Risk of Seizures and Encephalopathy after

Immunization with the DTP Vaccine,” JAMA 263:1641, March 23, 1990.

9. Cherry, J., “Pertussis Vaccine Encephalopathy: It’s Time to Recognize

It as the Myth That It Is,” JAMA 263:1679, March 23, 1990.

10. “Update: Vaccine Side Effects, Adverse Reactions, Contraindications,

and Precautions,” Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, MMWR 45:22,

September 1996.

11. Unpublished letter.

12. Unpublished letter.

13. Scheibner, V., Vaccination: a Medical Assault on the Immune System, New

Atlantean Press, 1993, pp. xiii-xv, passim.

14. Ibid.

15. Bernier, R., et al., “DTP Vaccination and Sudden Infant Deaths in

Tennessee,” Journal of Pediatrics 101:419, 1982.

16. Torch, W., “DPT Immunization: a Potential Cause of SIDS,” Neurology

32:169, 1982.

17. Ibid.

18. Noble, G., et al., “Acellular and Whole-Cell Pertussis Vaccines in

Japan,” JAMA 257:1351, 1987.

19. Cherry, et al., Report of Task Force on Pertussis ands Pertussis

Immunization, Pediatrics 81:939, Supplement, 1988.

20. Noble, op. cit.

21. Wakefield, A., et al., “Measles Vaccine: a Risk Factor for Inflammatory

Bowel Disease?” Lancet 345:1071, 1995.

22. Wakefield, et al., “Ileal-Lymphoid Nodular Hyperplasia, Nonspecific

Colitis, and Pervasive Developmental Disorder in Children,” Lancet 351:637,

1998.

23. Ibid.

24. Wakefield, “MMR, Enterocolitis, and Autism,” Lecture, NVIC

International Conference on Vaccination, November 2002.

25. Ibid.

26. Ibid.

27. Megson, M., “Genetics, Vaccine Injury, and Getting Well,” and Cave, S.,

“Vaccine Injury Therapy,” NVIC Conference Presentations, November 2002.

28. Family Practice News, May 15, 2000, p. 49.

29. Ibid.

30. Ibid.

31. ACIP Update, 1996, op. cit., pp. 7-8 passim.

32. Unpublished case.

33. L. K. vs. Secretary of HHS, No. 99-624V.

34. T. O. vs. Secretary of HHS, No. 99-635V.

35. Mathieu, E., et al., “Cryoglobulinemia after Hep B Vaccination,”

Letter, New England Journal of Medicine 335:356, August 1, 1996.

36. “Hepatitis B Vaccine,” The Vaccine Reaction, NVIC Special Report,

September 1998, p. 7.

37. Ibid.

38. Ibid.

39. Ibid.

40. Ibid.

41. Ibid.

42. Ibid., p. 9.

43. Moskowitz, R., “The Case Against Immunizations,” Journal of the

American Institute of Homeopathy (JAIH) 76:7, March 1983, p. 13.

44. Unpublished case.

45. Moskowitz, Resonance: the Homeopathic Point of View, Xlibris, 2001, pp.

177-178.

46. Moskowitz, “Childhood Ear Infections,” JAIH 87:137, 1994.

47. Moskowitz, Resonance, op. cit., pp. 209-210.

48. Ibid., pp. 215-216.

49. Unpublished case.

50. , B., et al., Microbiology, 2nd Ed., Harper, 1973, p. 1346.

51. Ibid.

52. Ibid., p. 1418.

53. Neustaedter, R., The Vaccine Guide, Revised Ed., North Atlantic, 2002,

pp. 69-74.

54. Ibid., pp. 70-71.

55. Ibid., pp. 71-72.

56. Ibid., pp. 76-77.

57. Ibid.

58. Ibid., pp. 74-76.

59. Cherry, “The New Epidemiology of Measles and Rubella,” Hospital

Practice, July 1980, p. 49.

60. Gustafson, T., et al., “Measles Outbreak in a Fully-Immunized Secondary

School Population,” NEJM 316:771, March 26, 1987.

61. Chen, R., et al., American Journal of Epidemiology 129:173, 1989.

62. Cherry, “Measles,” op. cit., p. 52.

63. National Vaccine Advisory Committee, “The Measles Epidemic,” JAMA

266:1547, September 18, 1991.

64. Edmondson, M. et al., “Mild Measles and Secondary Vaccine Failure

During a Sustained Outbreak in a Highly Vaccinated Population,” JAMA

263:2467, May 9, 1990.

65. Ibid.

66. Ibid.

67. Ibid.

68. Moskowitz, “Immunizations,” op. cit.

69. Moskowitz,“Vaccination: a Sacrament of Modern Medicine,” The Homeopath

(UK) 12;137,1992.

70. , W., “Decline of Childhood Hæmophilus Influenzæ B Disease in the

HiB Vaccine Era,” JAMA 269:221, January 13, 1993.

71. Family Practice News, October 1, 1997, p. 9.

72. “Adverse Events Associated with HiB Vaccine,” WHO Printout,

www.who.int/vaccines_diseases/safety/infobank/hib

73. Ibid.

74. Daum, R., et al., “Decline in Serum Antibody to H. Influenzæ B Capsule

in the Immediate Post-Immunization Period,” Journal of Pediatrics 114:742,

1989.

75. Boston Globe, June 11, 1991, p. 9.

76. FP News, August 1, 1992, p. 23.

77. Pevsner, J., Letter, American Family Physician, January 1994, p. 47.

78. Tucker, A., et al., “Cost-Effectiveness Analysis of a Rotavirus

Immunization Program for the United States,” JAMA 279:1371, May 6, 1998.

79. Ibid.

80. Keusch, G., and Cash, R., “A Vaccine Against Rotavirus: When Is Too

Much Too Much?” Editorial, NEJM 337:1228, October 23, 1997.

81. , T., et al., “Intussusception Among Infants Given an Oral

Rotavirus Vaccine,” NEJM 344:564, February 22, 2001.

82. Ibid.

83. AMA Encyclopedia of Medicine, 1989, quoted in “Chickenpox: the Disease

and the Vaccine,” Massachusetts Citizens for Vaccination Choice handout, E.

Arlington, MA.

84. American Academy of Pediatrics brochure, 1996, quoted in MCVC, op. cit.

85. “The Vaccine for Chickenpox,” American Family Physician 53:652,

February 1, 1996, Patient Information handout.

86. Spingarn, R., and , J., Letter, NEJM 338:683, March 5, 1998.

87. Shapiro, E., and LaRussa, P., “Vaccination for Varicella: Just Do It!”

Editorial, JAMA 228:1529, November 12, 1997.

88. Simberkoff, M., et al., “Efficacy of Pneumococcal Vaccine in High-Risk

Patients,” NEJM 315:1318, November 20, 1986.

89. Eskola, J., “Efficacy of a Pneumococcal Conjugate Vaccine Against Acute

Otitis Media,” NEJM 344:403, February 8, 2001.

90. FP News, April 15, 2000, p. 1. .

91. Cantekin, E., Letter, NEJM 344:1719, May 31, 2001.

92, Damoiseaux, R., Letter, Ibid.

93. Medical World News, April 14, 1986.

94. Hurwitz, E., et al., “Guillain-Barré Syndrome and the 1978-1979

Influenza Vaccine,” NEJM 304:1557, June 25, 1981.

95. FP News, June 1, 1999, p. 1.

96. Ibid.

97. Ibid.

98. FP News, August 15, 2002, p. 30.

99. Nichol, K., et al., “The Effectiveness of Vaccination Against Influenza

in Healthy Working Adults,” NEJM 333:889, October 5, 1995.

100. Family Practice News, August 15, 2002, p. 30.

101. Boston Globe, August 25, 1992, p. 57.

102. Heemstra, T., Anthrax: a Deadly Shot in the Dark, Crystal

Communications, 2002, p. 46.

103. Boston Globe, August 3, 1999, p. 1.

104. New York Times, March 11, 1999, via Internet.

105. Heemstra, op. cit., pp. 31-35.

106. Ibid., p. 64.

107. Bates, S., “Anthrax Vaccination in the Military: One Pilot’s Story,”

NVIC Conference Presentation, November 2002.

108. Matsumoto, G., “The Pentagon’s Toxic Secret,” Vanity Fair, May 1999,

pp. 82-98.

109. Heemstra, op. cit., p. 107.

110. Ibid.

111. FP News, July 15, 2002, p. 10.

112. FP News, loc. cit., May 1, 2004, p. 41.

113. Quoted in Moskowitz, ed., “Smallpox,” AIH Bioterrorism Report, JAIH

96:121, Summer 2003.

114. Ibid.

115. Eickhoff, T., “Adult Immunizations: How Are We Doing?” Hospital

Practice, November 15, 1996, p. 107.

116. Averhoff, F., et al., “Immunization of Adolescents,” American Family

Physician 55:159, January 1, 1997.

117. Sur, D., et al., “Vaccinations in Pregnancy,” American Family

Physician 68:299, July 15, 2003.

118. FP News, April 1, 1997, p. 2.

119. FP News, loc. cit., September 1, 2001, p. 2.

120. Schlenker, T., et al., “Measles Herd Immunity,” JAMA 267:823, 1992.

121. ACIP Childhood and Adolescent Immunization Schedule, FP News, January

1, 2004, p. 9.

122. Ibid.

123. Koff, R., “The Case for Routine Childhood Vaccination Against

Hepatitis A,” Editorial, NEJM 340:644, February 25, 1999.

124. Offit, P., et al., in Pediatrics 109, January 2002, abstract by Sherry

Tenpenny, D. O.,, “Expert Believes Infants Can Tolerate 10,000 Vaccines,”

March 27, 2002, www.mercola.com.

125. Moskowitz, “Vaccination: a Sacrament,” op. cit.

126. Moskowitz, “Unvaccinated Children,” Mothering, Winter 1987, p. 34.

127. MMWR, reported in JAMA 283:2381, May 10, 2000.

128. www.publichealthlaw.net, quoted in “News Release,” No. 71_DITA,

November 26, 2001,

129. Private communications with the author.

130. “The Vaccine Reaction,” op. cit., January 1996, pp. 3-5.

131. Orlando Sentinel, August 28, 2004, p..1.

132. Boston Globe, February 23, 1993, p. 1.

133. , G., “Childhood Immunizations,” NEJM 327:1794, December 19, 1992.

134. Bluestone, C., “Otitis Media in Children: to Treat or Not to Treat?”

NEJM 306:1399, June 10, 1982.

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