by Lynne McTaggart

Josie McNally thought she was doing right by her baby son, William. He was a healthy, normal, happy 13-month-old and she wanted to make sure to keep him that way. When her doctor recommended that he come in for his routine measles/mumps/rubella (MMR) jab to protect against these dangerous diseases, Josie thought nothing of it; William had sailed through his infant jabs and, besides, the doctor knew best.

Ten days after William’s shot, something turned horribly wrong. William began convulsing and Josie and her husband had to rush him by ambulance to the hospital. When Josie suggested her son might be reacting to the vaccination, the doctor shook his head. The fit coming after the shot could be nothing more than coincidence; it probably wouldn’t recur. The hospital consultant agreed; the shot appeared to have nothing to do with it.

But the fits didn’t stop, and before long William became gripped by seizures, sometimes 40 a day. He also developed a rare immune-system reaction. Now 13 years old, he’s diagnosed as epileptic, continues to have convulsions uncontrollable by medication, and has the developmental age of a 14-month-old baby – as if his developmental clock stopped on the day he was vaccinated. And not long after he was given it, the vaccine William had was withdrawn. Nevertheless, to this day no one in the medical profession will officially acknowledge the vaccine had anything to do with it. The McNally family has been given no financial assistance by any government body for the considerable medical bills they will face during William’s lifetime.

Most doctors fervently believe that vaccines are one of medical science’s greatest success stories, responsible for wiping out many deadly infectious diseases. In fact, lurking inside most doctors is an altruist who likes to think that the eradication of disease is not only possible but just around the corner. Every so often, the World Health Organization will announce an actual date when it fully expects that diseases such as polio, measles or diphtheria will be wiped off the planet forever.

The ardency of this faith has emboldened the profession to produce ever more shots to combat not only major killers such as polio but also a number of the mostly benign co-passengers of childhood, such as measles, mumps and chickenpox. Counting all multiple boosters in the entire suggested schedule, American children can receive some 34 vaccinations by the time they go to school, most in the first year of life; Britain, with its tuberculosis vaccine offered at birth but no hepatitis B or chickenpox vaccine, ends up with a slightly more modest 25. The US government and the World Health Organization have even sponsored the development of what they imagine will turn out to be a genetically-engineered, time-released ‘Holy Grail’, a super-vaccine containing the raw DNA of up to 40 different diseases at one go, which will be squirted into a newborn’s mouth at birth and sent out booster doses at timed intervals throughout an individual’s life. There have been vaccines being worked on for asthma, earaches and respiratory diseases, AIDS, cancer, and even to prevent pregnancy.

It is with vaccines that the brave-new-world technocrats of medicine have lost all reason about disease and its prevention. So steadfast is this faith in the rightness of their cause that it prevents doctors from acknowledging clear factual evidence demonstrating the dangers and ineffectiveness of certain vaccines, or even cases of a disease in children who have been vaccinated against it. It also turns otherwise reasonable doctors or scientists into bullies and hysterics, shouting down dissenters, using emotional blackmail to bully parents into submission and resorting to emotive appeals, rather than common sense or fact, to argue their point of view. To launch its countrywide campaign to vaccinate school-age children against measles and rubella, the British government once ran stark, emotive black-and-white television adverts suggesting that measles strikes fatally and at random. In the US, parents have been threatened with the withholding of welfare payments if they fail to give their kids the live triple measles/mumps/rubella vaccine. Chicago health authorities once tried to give vaccination a bit of street cred by employing loudspeaker sales pitches mixed in with salsa music to encourage mothers in Hispanic neighborhoods to bring their children in to get their shots.

In one UK campaign to inoculate all British children from 5 to 16 with the measles/rubella jab, parents were given flimsy pamphlets with virtually no mention of the side-effects long accepted by international governmental bodies. Doctors and health authorities badgered parents who’d decided against the jab with letters and phone calls to try and change their mind. And all sorts of medical experts were confidently announcing publicly that this campaign would undoubtedly eradicate measles from these shores for all time.

Britain’s Department of Health pressed ahead with one of the most ambitious immunization campaigns ever seen in an industrialized country, informing parents that side-effects to booster jabs are very unlikely, having been ‘carefully studied by looking at large numbers of children in the United States’. In fact, the evidence on which this claim was based was rather more meager. Before the campaign they received a fax from the US American National Immunization Program officials explaining that the only evidence that boosters were safe was based on questionnaires sent to college students receiving the shots. Medical scientists consider this type of study a highly unreliable and unscientific measure of safety and effectiveness. The real safety or reactions of booster jabs was not yet known as the trial testing had not yet been completed.

What’s worse, the UK’s Public Health Laboratory Service completed a study before the campaign began, demonstrating that children given the measles/mumps/rubella jab were three times more likely to suffer from convulsions than those who didn’t receive it. Two-thirds of the cases of seizures were due to the measles component alone. The study also found that the MMR vaccine caused five times the number of cases of a rare blood disorder over that expected. This study was never mentioned during the campaign, but was only published in the medical literature, and not until four months after the campaign was completed.

More recently, the British government rushed through a brand-new, as yet untested vaccine for meningitis C, offering it to every child and college student in Britain on the basis of short-term tests, lasting at most a few weeks. Although a fifth of the children in one of the British tests was ill, this material was never made available to parents consenting to expose their children to the jab.

Because vaccines represent the very epitome of modern medicine – the triumph of science over nature – scientific trials are most subject to medical spin-doctoring in order to paint a positive face on a negative result, ignoring any results they don’t wish to hear. In America, the US government requested that the National Academy of Science review all the medical literature and report fully on what were the known and proven dangers, if any, of the various childhood vaccines. In two separate reports the NAS’s Institute of Medicine, which gathered together leading pediatricians and medical scientists for the task, concluded that all nine vaccines had the potential to do serious harm. Although these conclusions were eventually included in lengthy fact sheets given to parents prior to their children’s vaccinations, the National Commission on Childhood Vaccines pushed to have them edited, on the grounds that they ‘confuse’ parents.

In Britain, the Department of Health commissioned a report on the whooping cough vaccine by Professor Gordon Stewart, formerly of the Department of Community Medicine at the University of Glasgow and an adviser to the World Health Organization, who has long studied the vaccine. When his studies showed the risks of the vaccine outweighed the benefits, the DHSS referred the report to the Committee on the Safety of Medicines, which chose not to act on it.

In this zealous climate, amid the rush to ‘conquer’ every possible disease, in which entire reputations rest on defending vaccination at all costs, no one is pausing to examine the possible long-term effects of pumping up to 12 or more different antigens into the immature immune systems of a generation of babies under 15 months. Including the meningitis C vaccine on the standard schedule of infant vaccinations now increases to six the number of vaccines given simultaneously to infants at two months of age.

Epidemiologists have never investigated whether there is an upper limit to the number of jabs a baby can tolerate, after which all sorts of subtle damage – asthma, learning disabilities, hyperactivity, orchronic earache, for instance – come into play. In fact, nobody has done any long-term safety studies at all. ‘We only hear about the encephalitis and the deaths,’ says Dr J. Anthony Morris, formerly a director of virology at the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health. ‘But there is an spectrum of reactions between fever and death, and it’s all those things in between that never get reported.’

At the heart of the logic behind vaccination is the theory of herd immunity – that is, if enough people get vaccinated against a certain disease, it will eventually disappear. Besides an element of wishful thinking in the face of highly complex organisms such as viruses, which constantly mutate and change, the problem with this line of reasoning, of course, is its tyrannical approach: eliminating a disease is more important, in the eyes of medicine, than your child’s health, which might be damaged from a vaccine, or your right to decide what is best for your family. Decide against vaccination for your child and you are considered not only an irresponsible parent but an irresponsible citizen of your community and even the world. In Britain, vaccinating your child is often a requirement for staying on your GP’s list (he is paid a bonus of nearly £3,000 at this writing if 90 percent of the children under two on his books get done. If only 70 percent are vaccinated, that bonus shrinks to £910; any smaller percentage means he gets only a fraction of the total amount.). In the US, in the wake of the Clinton Administration’s Childhood Vaccine Act it is now even more difficult for parents to get exempted from vaccinating their children.

But in Britain we still have a modicum of choice. In many countries all children are obliged to be vaccinated in order to get into school – a policy, particularly in places such as the US, that would seem to fly in the face of a number of constitutional freedoms. In this hysterical climate, the government and the medical community have made it their right to insist on administering a substance to a minor which it cannot guarantee is safe – a right no one has yet attempted to challenge in court.

A BLUNT INSTRUMENT

Vaccination is a blunt and highly imperfect instrument. The main problem isn’t so much that vaccines don’t work, but that they work haphazardly. The premise of vaccination rests on the assumption that injecting an individual with weakened live or killed virus will ‘trick’ his body into developing antibodies to the disease, as it does when it contracts an illness naturally. But medicine doesn’t really know whether vaccines work for any length of time. All that the usual scientific studies can demonstrate (as they are only conducted over the short term) is that vaccines may create antibodies in the blood. What may happen is that a number of vaccines are capable of measurably raising antibodies to a particular infectious illness, but only for a short period of time. Or even if they do raise antibodies indefinitely, this may have nothing to do with protecting an individual from contracting the disease over the long (or even the short) term. In fact, having antibodies in the blood may not be the only way the body recognizes and defends itself from disease. For instance, large numbers of people who have had illnesses such as diphtheria never produce antibodies to the disease.

In one report, for instance, measles antibodies were found in the blood of only one of seven vaccinated children who’d gone on to develop measles – they hadn’t developed antibodies from either the shot or the disease itself. And lately, the Public Health Laboratory in London has discovered that a quarter of blood donors between 20 and 29 had insufficient immunity to diphtheria, even though most would have been vaccinated as babies. This percentage doubled among the 50-to-59 age group.

Live vaccines are made from live pathogens that are attenuated (weakened) so that they won’t cause symptoms of the full disease when administered. This is accomplished supposedly by sending these pathogens through a rather mystifying process called ‘serial passage’, in which the viral strain is passed through up to 50 animal cells on the assumption that this will weaken them.

Not only the process but also the cells selected appear to be a bizarre and arbitrary choice. The polio vaccine has been passed through monkey kidney cells, the measles vaccine through chick embryo cells, rubella virus through rabbit or duck cells, and yellow fever through mice and chick embryo cells. Human cells have also been used: rubella was once grown on the tissue of aborted fetuses, and hepatitis B at one time was made from the blood of homosexual men who’d had the disease. Of course, this passage through animal and human cells invites infection or contamination with other substances, as happened with contaminated polio vaccines.

Among the childhood vaccines, the live vaccines include the tuberculosis (BCG), measles-mumps-rubella (MMR), the oral polio vaccine and the chickenpox vaccine. Many vaccines are made with live antigens because the killed versions haven’t worked. The main concern with live vaccines is that the disease the vaccine is supposedly protecting against has a small chance of reproducing and spreading in the recipient.

Killed vaccines are made of components of the disease – whole cells, toxins, synthesized molecules, for instance – that have been rendered inactive with heat, radiation or chemicals. The Salk polio jab, the diphtheria-whooping cough (pertussis)-tetanus (DPT), hepatitis B and Haemophilus influenza b (Hib) meningitis are all among the most common killed vaccines.

The killed vaccine is supposed to preclude the possibility of the antigen being reproduced in the person receiving the vaccination – it is simply supposed to stimulate the circulation of antibodies to the antigen through the body. However, it’s not quite as clear-cut as this – serious problems with killed vaccines have defied their supposed inability to reproduce in the recipient.

MYTH NO 1: DISEASES HAVE BEEN ELIMINATED PURELY AS A RESULT OF VACCINATION

The success of vaccination is based entirely on assumption. Because the incidence and death rate of many infectious diseases have radically declined, with improved sanitation and hygiene, housing, better nutrition and isolation procedures, at coincidentally the same time that vaccines have been introduced, medicine has assumed that vaccination is entirely responsible for the eradication of these diseases. Many medical textbooks lead off with the boast that one of medicine’s great achievements is the eradication of smallpox through vaccination. However, if you actually examine the epidemiological statistics, you discover that between 1870 and 1872, 18 years after compulsory vaccination was introduced, four years after a coercive four-year effort to vaccinate all members of the population was in place (with stiff penalties for offenders), and at the point where 97.5 percent of the population had been vaccinated, England experienced the worst smallpox epidemic of the century, which claimed more than 44,000 lives. In fact, three times as many people died from smallpox at that time as had in an earlier epidemic, when fewer people were vaccinated.

After 1871, the town of Leicester refused vaccination, largely because the high incidence of smallpox and death rates during the 1870 epidemic convinced the population it didn’t work. In the next epidemic of 1892, Leicester relied solely on improved sanitation and quarantines. The town only suffered 19 cases and 1 death per 100,000 population, compared with the town of Warrington, which had six times the number of cases and eleven times the death rate of Leicester, even though 99 percent of its population had been vaccinated.

The World Health Organization has pointed out that the key to eradication of the disease in many parts of West and Central Africa was switching from mass immunization, which was not working very well, to a campaign of surveillance, containing the disease through isolation procedures.

Sierra Leone’s experience also demonstrates that vaccination wasn’t responsible for the end of smallpox. In the late sixties, Sierra Leone had the highest rate of smallpox in the world. In January 1968 the country began its eradication campaign, and three of the four largest outbreaks were controlled by identifying and isolating cases alone, without immunization. Fifteen months later, the area recorded its last case of smallpox.

Polio

More than any other, the polio vaccine is pointed to with pride by every government as definitive proof that mass vaccination programs work. The US government is quick to note that during the plague years of polio, 20,000–30,000 cases per year occurred in America, compared to 20–30 cases a year today. Nevertheless, Dr Bernard Greenberg, head of the Department of Biostatistics at the University of North Carolina School of Public Health, has gone on record to say that cases of polio increased by 50 percent between 1957 and 1958, and by 80 percent from 1958 to 1959, after the introduction of mass immunization. In five New England States – Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont – cases of polio roughly doubled in 1954 and 1955, after the polio vaccine was introduced. Nevertheless, in the midst of the polio panic of the 1950s, with the pressure on to find a magic bullet, statistics were manipulated by health authorities to give the opposite impression.

One such way was to give the old disease a new name – ‘viral or aseptic meningitis’ or ‘cocksackie virus’. According to statistics from the Los Angeles County Health Index, for instance, in July 1955 there were 273 reported cases of polio and 50 cases of aseptic meningitis, compared with five cases of polio and 256 cases of aseptic meningitis a decade later.

In the early part of the last century, over 3,000 deaths were attributed to ‘chickenpox’, and only some 500 to smallpox, even though authorities agree that chickenpox is only very rarely a fatal disease.

Martha, from Sheffield, recently experienced this sort of fast-shuffle name-change with whooping cough:

Not long ago, after our two year old developed full-blown whooping cough, I took her to our GP, prepared to face a reprimand for neglecting to have her vaccinated. However, the doctor diagnosed asthma and prescribed Ventolin. I was so unconvinced by this diagnosis that I consulted another GP within the practice. To my amazement he insisted that whooping cough no longer exists (due to mass vaccination) and confirmed the diagnosis of asthma. I then pressed for a sputum test to prove or disprove the existence of whooping cough.

I later received a patronizing phone call, following my doctor’s discussion with our local consultant microbiologist. ‘They do not test for whooping cough because it does not exist’, I was told. I then asked, should the condition clear up in a few weeks, presumably asthma would have been an unlikely diagnosis? To which he replied: ‘We now have a new condition called viral asthma which is similar to whooping cough’. He said they see many children with this condition. He added, ‘Since they stopped testing for whooping cough there have been no recorded cases in our area.’

Diseases such as polio operate cyclically. The great polio epidemics occurred in the 1910s, the 1930s and the 1950s; then cases sharply dropped off down to nearly zero. But at the height of the fifties epidemics, after the vaccine was introduced, as author Welene James says, quoting another writer, ‘the vaccine took the credit instead of nature.’ American medical critic Dr Robert Mendelsohn once noted: ‘Diseases are like fashion, they come and go.’ Many vaccine programs claim the credit for what is simply the tendency of illnesses to wax and wane. Far from science having anything to do with finally stamping out polio or tuberculosis, both diseases decided, a number of years ago, to take a breather and are now making a comeback – tuberculosis in many Western countries, polio in many parts of Canada, and diphtheria in Russia and the East.

Tetanus, Diphtheria and Whooping Cough

The incidence and number of deaths from diphtheria were declining long before the vaccine was introduced, as they were from tetanus, largely because of increased attention to wound hygiene. Among all the soldiers of the Second World War, only 12 cases of tetanus were recorded – a third of which occurred among soldiers who were vaccinated. The great decline in deaths from whooping cough (some 80 percent) occurred before the vaccine was introduced.

Measles

A similar pattern occurred with measles. The death rate from measles plummeted to greater than a 95 percent decline (to .03 deaths per 100,000) 20 years before the vaccine was introduced.

Nevertheless, in the late 1990s, despite the fact that the UK had the triple measles/mumps/rubella vaccine in place since 1988, and enjoyed an extraordinarily high coverage of vaccination among toddlers, cases of measles went up – by nearly one-fourth.

In the 1990s, the US suffered from a steadily increasing epidemic of measles – the worst for decades – despite the fact that the measles vaccine in its various forms has been in effect since 1957, and the combined shot since 1975. Although the government targeted 1982 as the date of the virtual elimination of the disease, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta reported a provisional total of 27,672 cases of measles in 1990, which represents a virtual doubling of reported cases in 1989, which were double the number of cases reported in the year before that.

Although the number of measles cases fell by one quarter (to 63,000) the year the vaccine was introduced, and bottomed out at 1,500 reported cases in 1983, the numbers suddenly swelled by 423 percent at the end of the 1980s and then rose sharply, with the worst-hit areas of the US being Houston and Los Angeles County.

After the great resurgence of measles during 1989–91, cases of measles began to drop drastically. The Centers for Disease Control attributed this to the tremendous push given the measles and combined vaccines at the height of the epidemic; vaccine coverage increased from an average of 66 percent in the years before 1985 to 78 percent in 1991.

However, a few statistics confuse this optimistic assumption. First of all, the CDC estimates that, based on retrospective surveys of coverage, approximately 800,000 to two million babies and toddlers who hadn’t got their shots should have been susceptible to measles. In reality, however, only 9,300 cases were reported among this age group in 1992. Although the average age of children catching measles dropped (from a median age of 12 in 1989, at the beginning of the epidemic, to an average afterwards of 4.9), nearly half of all reported cases were still among children over 5 – most of whom should have been protected.

The CDC admitted that the sudden drop in cases could have something to do with ‘an overall decrease in the occurrence of measles in the Western Hemisphere’. It also may have something to do, they say, with the cyclical nature of the disease.

Hib Meningitis

The UK Government boasts that Haemophilus influenza b (Hib) meningitis has been eliminated, largely due to the jab, introduced in the UK in 1992. This form of bacterial meningitis, caused by the haemophilus influenza type b bacteria, mainly strikes preschoolers, with the peak incidence between six and 15 months of age. The jab was supposed to combat the most common cause of meningitis in children under five. Nevertheless, a pro-vaccine study group extolling the virtues of the Hib vaccine conceded that a ‘substantial’ fall also occurred in children who hadn’t been vaccinated – from 99.3 to 68.5 per 100,000. Furthermore, many of the only cases of Hib meningitis occur among those who have been vaccinated.

MYTH NO 2: THE DISEASES YOU ARE VACCINATED AGAINST ARE DEADLY

Increasingly, the rationale for vaccination has shifted from control of deadly disease to control of nuisance diseases such as mumps or chickenpox. In fact, a large number of the illnesses we now vaccinate against are no longer life-threatening in well-nourished children with healthy immune systems.

Measles

The zeal behind the various measles campaigns is founded on the belief that measles can be a life-threatening condition, and it seems to be one that is getting more dangerous by the year. When the Department of Health ran one of its major vaccine drives in 1989, Dr Norman Begg, consultant epidemiologist of the Public Health Laboratory Service, cited the then-official statistics that one in 5,000 children contracting measles will develop acute encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain, and one in 5,000 of those will develop SSPE (sub-acute sclerosing panencephalitis), an almost inevitably fatal progressive disease which causes hardening of the brain.

Five years later, when one columnist encouraged parents to have their children re-vaccinated in the countrywide measles campaign, the percentage of measles victims who might go on to develop encephalitis had shrunk to one in every 500. One in 10 of these would die and one in four would suffer permanent brain damage, the columnist maintained. As the campaign intensified, other newspapers had magnified the danger even further. By November it seemed that one out of every 17 cases of measles would turn into a case of encephalitis.

But the report of the journal geared specifically for the study of the fatal illness being worried over, the SSPE Registry, concluded that the measles-induced form of this disease is ‘very rare’, occurring in 1 per million cases. This rare disease also doesn’t appear to be so random. A study of people with SSPE concluded that environmental factors other than measles, such as serious head injuries or exposure to certain animals, played an important part in the onset of the disease.

Measles can be a killer, but it doesn’t strike as randomly as medicine would have us believe. In the US in 1990, at the height of a measles epidemic when 27,000 cases were reported, 89 died. But many deaths occurred among children of low-income families, where poor nutrition played a part, as did failure to treat complications. In Africa, where children are markedly deficient in vitamin A, measles does kill. However, as study after study demonstrates, even third-world children with adequate stores of vitamin A or those given vitamin A supplements are overwhelmingly likely to survive.

Death due to measles is not common in developed countries. The year before the MMR vaccine was launched there were six such deaths in the UK, even though there were 42,165 reported cases of the disease.

Furthermore, in the five years between 1989 and 1994 there were only six deaths among children aged 0–19, even though there was a total of 59,263 cases of measles during this time – an average of one death a year. This represents an incidence of approximately one death for every 10,000 cases, which is almost half the incidence during 1979–1983, when 83 children died out of 467,732 cases of measles, or about one death for every 5,600 cases.

However, this lowered death rate doesn’t have any bearing on the vaccine, according to Dr Richard Nicolson, editor of the Bulletin of Medical Ethics, but reflects the fact that doctors better understand how to treat measles. Since 1988 most deaths have occurred among adults although, again, there are only a handful every year. In Japan, most measles deaths have occurred in babies too young to be given the jab.

Norman Begg has written that deaths from measles are ‘directly related to poor vaccine coverage’. In Italy there were only 10 deaths from measles between 1989–1991, even though they had only a 40 percent coverage from the vaccine. In the following two years, coverage from the vaccine grew but deaths nearly tripled to 28, suggesting that vaccine coverage had absolutely no bearing on numbers of deaths.

Mumps

Whatever the present party line, mumps has never been considered a global killer. The vaccine was only developed because of the rare complications of mumps: orchitis (testicular inflammation), aseptic meningitis, encephalitis and deafness. Children who get mumps usually suffer a swelling underneath the ear, headache, fever, vomiting and muscle aches. Besides the testicles, the female ovaries and breasts can also swell. Symptoms are usually gone in less than a week, although they may last for up to 10 days.

Whooping Cough

As WHO adviser Dr Stewart has written: ‘The lesson of history – not just medical history – is that infectious diseases change in pattern, severity and frequency through time. Whooping cough was once a serious threat to life and health in all young children. Now it is no longer so, though it is often a distressing disease and dangerous in some infants.’

During the whooping cough outbreaks of 1978–9 in Glamorgan, Glasgow and Surrey, in ‘low-risk’ areas – that is, areas of adequate nutrition – there were no cases of permanent brain damage or death among any children, nor among any babies (who are considered most at risk).

Polio

Even polio is not the virulent mass killer it is always made out to be. Largely because of the 1950s epidemic (following four terms of the most highly publicized victim, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt), polio is popularly thought to cut down healthy young people at random. In fact, most cases of polio are harmless infections. The current statistics estimate that only 10 percent of people exposed to polio will contract it, and only 1 per cent of those will come down with the paralytic variety – or 0.01 percent of those exposed to the disease in the first place. Medical homeopath and noted vaccine critic Dr Richard Moskowitz has termed the propensity of an individual to develop paralysis from this ordinarily harmless virus a ‘special anatomical susceptibility’.

Meningitis C

Although all British children now receive the meningitis C vaccine, rather than simply individual groups at high risk, children between five and fifteen are at virtually no risk of contracting meningitis C. In the five-year period between 1994 and 1999, before the vaccine was introduced, group C meningococcal disease killed approximately 20 babies under one, 21 babies aged one, 18 two-year-olds, approximately 15 three-year-olds, a handful of four-, five- and six-year-olds, and almost no other pre-adolescent children.

After babies are a year old they develop active immunity by being exposed to a non-pathogenic form of meningococcus.

Casualties do not pick up again until the age of 15 through 20, the so-called highest cluster. In this age category meningitis killed some 12 15-year-olds, approximately 30 16-year-olds, 12 17-year-olds, about 18 18-year-olds, about 18 19-year-olds, and 10 20-year-olds over five years. So, in total, the disease killed approximately 200 young children, or an average of 40 children a year (70 a year in 1999).

While no one wishes to denigrate the tragic loss of these lives, in strictly epidemiological terms the death rate of this form of meningitis is small potatoes. It rates well behind many accidents as conditions which account for appreciable numbers of childhood deaths. For instance, a baby is five times more likely to drown in his bathtub and 86 times more likely to die of cot death than to die from meningitis C. Six times as many children and young adults get knocked over and killed by cars than die of meningitis C. British traffic deaths of all varieties among children represent the highest fatalities among this age group in all of Europe, claiming the lives of 1,309 children and young adults every year – more than 32 times the rate of meningitis deaths.

As Heikki Peltola, professor of infectious diseases and pediatrician at the University of Helsinki and the Hospital for Children and Adolescents, comments, ‘In no country is there an epidemic of this disease … Generally speaking, the incidence of meningococcal disease is too low to indicate vaccinations for the whole population, or even children, but some risk groups and epidemics are important exceptions.’

Furthermore, according to the Department of Health’s own ‘fact-sheet’, group C meningococcal disease accounts for only 40 percent of cases of meningitis contracted in Britain and elsewhere.

Although meningitis C is the major cause of meningococcal death among teenagers, the B version is far more deadly to babies and small children, representing at least two-thirds of all meningococcal deaths in this age group.

Nevertheless, says Wyeth, who developed the meningitis C vaccine, thus far producing a vaccine for the B strain has proved elusive.

Rubella

Rubella, like mumps, is a benign illness in children which appears not much worse than a case of flu. However, it can be dangerous to the developing fetus if a pregnant woman contracts the disease in the first trimester of pregnancy. In that case, her baby risks being born with congenital rubella syndrome, which can produce major birth defects including blindness, deafness and even limb defects.

Once again, medicine’s solution to this small risk is to attempt to wipe out the illness altogether by vaccinating all children, male and female. Indeed, exposure to rubella may be less risky to pregnant women than first thought. In one study of 24 pregnant women who’d contracted rubella, as confirmed by a blood test, none of their babies were born with congenital defects.

MYTH NO 3: VACCINES WILL PROTECT YOU AGAINST THESE DISEASES

The big argument put forth by apologists of vaccines, particularly of those vaccines known to have substantial side-effects (such as the jab for whooping cough) is that, imperfect as they may be, the benefits are worth the risk. The problem with this argument is that it assumes that vaccines actually work.

Whooping Cough

During outbreaks of whooping cough, half or more of the victims had already been fully vaccinated. Professor Stewart reported that, in a study of whooping cough cases for 1974 and 1978, and in 1974 in the US and Canada, a third to a half of all children who’d caught it had been fully vaccinated. When he studied close to 2,000 babies who’d got whooping cough, two-thirds of the time they’d caught it from their fully vaccinated siblings. To Dr Stewart’s mind, ‘no protection by vaccination is demonstrable in infants’, despite the fact that this is the very population the vaccine aims to protect – the only lives usually threatened by a nasty but otherwise mostly benign disease.

‘The effect of the present vaccination program is to leave the only high risk group, the infants, at risk of both the [side-effects of the] vaccine and the infection,’ Dr Stewart concluded.

In his view, the risk of a baby’s contracting encephalitis with permanent brain damage as a result of whooping cough (1 in 38,000) is comparable to the risk of brain damage (1 in 25,000) after vaccination with the jab.

During a nationwide American epidemic of whooping cough in 1993, a group of researchers from a children’s hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio, discovered that the epidemic mainly occurred among children who had completed the full course of DPT vaccines.

About 30 percent of the children had hospital stays, although the epidemic did not claim any lives. As many of the children who contracted the disease were aged between 19 months and six years, and so would have been vaccinated relatively recently, even scientists have begun to agree that the whole-cell pertussis vaccine doesn’t offer long-term protection.

Doctors are fond of pointing out that when the whooping cough vaccine was discontinued in the early seventies in Britain for a time, the number of severe cases shot up. After a US documentary criticizing the DPT vaccine, the number of children being immunized fell. Health officials then claimed that cases of whooping cough rose as a result of vaccine levels falling.

But when former Food and Drug Administration virologist Dr J. Anthony Morris analyzed 41 cases of so-called whooping cough, only five had true pertussis, and all those victims had been vaccinated. The same occurred in Wisconsin. Most of the patients didn’t have whooping cough, but those who did had been vaccinated.

In Britain, cases rose to ‘almost unprecedented heights’, wrote Professor Stewart, during the 1978–9 epidemic. This figure was also interpreted as having to do with the drop in vaccination following adverse publicity. But the number of cases reported increased in all age groups, even those for which a high percentage of immunization had been achieved.

Even at the best of times, when the whooping cough vaccine does work, it has only been shown to be between 63 and 93 percent effective – an extraordinarily large potential difference. The latest research from Sweden and Italy has shown that the vaccine is effective in just 48 percent and 36 percent of cases, respectively. Despite take-up vaccination rates of 95 percent or higher, whooping cough is resurfacing as an epidemic in many Western countries, particularly among very young babies. In the US, whooping cough cases have more than trebled; in the UK, cases among children under a year old have increased by 29 percent. This is despite the fact that the vaccine is touted as being 88 percent effective among children 7–18 months old.

The re-emergence of whooping cough in the US is hardly a new trend. After the vaccine was launched in the 1940s, cases of pertussis declined to an historic low in 1976. But, since the early 1980s, the incidence of whooping cough has increased cyclically, peaking every three to four years independently of vaccination.

In November 2001, the UK Department of Health (DoH) modified its booster schedule to include another dose of the whooping cough vaccine after admitting that whooping cough is still a source of considerable illness and death among babies, who are catching whooping cough from their vaccinated older siblings or parents. This dose, given as a new ‘acellular’ version of the whooping cough vaccine (where the whooping cough toxin is inactivated by glutaraldehyde or hydrogen peroxide, or genetically modified – supposedly to make it safer) hasn’t fared much better, either.

In Sweden, where it was tested on a group of infants, one fifth went on to develop whooping cough, even after they’d been given three shots. At best the vaccine was judged to work less than three-quarters of the time. In the US, scientists working on the vaccine at the Mayo Clinic have explained that they don’t really understand how much pertussin toxin is necessary to protect children; even those with high levels of antibodies in their blood seem to go on to get whooping cough.

Tetanus and Diphtheria

The same seems to hold true for diphtheria and tetanus. A US-sponsored vaccine review has even concluded that the diphtheria vaccine ‘is not as effective an immunizing agent as might be anticipated’.

The effects of the diphtheria vaccine seem to wear off in adulthood. In London, a quarter of blood donors between the ages of 20 and 29 have been found to have insufficient immunity, while half of those between 50 and 59 have lost their immunity. And in the new states of the former Soviet Union, the vaccine has not proved protective in curbing epidemics of diphtheria. More than 86 percent of people given a combined diphtheria-tetanus jab went on to contract diphtheria a year after their first booster.

As for tetanus, the US panel reviewing vaccines noted that the degree of potency of the vaccine ‘can vary considerably from preparation to preparation’. The panel also concluded that, as the vaccine has been purified and made safer in order to prevent reaction to it, so its protective ability has diminished.

Measles

The medical establishment has attempted to place the blame for the epidemic of measles that occurred at the end of the 20th century on clusters of the unvaccinated, particularly among poor, non-white populations – but the statistics again prove otherwise. According to the Government’s own 1989 statistics, half the college-aged victims had been previously vaccinated. And between 1985 and 1986, more than three-quarters of all measles cases occurred in children who had been properly vaccinated.

All that the measles vaccine has done has been to transform into adult diseases what were once exclusively the domain of children. In the pre-vaccine era, 90 percent of all measles patients were five to nine years old. Once the measles vaccine was introduced, however, 55–64 percent of measles patients were older than 10. The average age of patients during the measles outbreak at the University of California at Los Angeles during the recent US epidemic was 22.

Significant numbers of these cases occurred among college-aged students, particularly those born between 1957 and 1967, when the vaccine was introduced. Students at many universities now have to provide proof they’ve recently been vaccinated before they are allowed to register for classes. A few years ago, the US government estimated that between 5 and 15 percent of all students were susceptible.

America has tried at least four strains of the measles vaccine, and all four – including the Schwarz strain now being employed in Britain – have significant failure rates. Study after study in the medical literature points unerringly to clusters of vaccinated children who nevertheless contracted measles.

For instance, in a 1986 outbreak of measles in Corpus Christi, Texas, 99 percent of the children had been vaccinated. In 1988, 80 percent of cases of measles occurred in children who had been properly vaccinated at the appropriate age. The year before that, 60 percent of cases occurred in those who’d been vaccinated.

Even if booster shots are offered, they often don’t work, either. In a group of individuals whose measles vaccination hadn’t worked, only half given booster shots ended up with antibody levels raised to a level considered protective.

Mumps

Mumps also has a spotty success rate. In numerous instances a large percentage of fully vaccinated children have gone on to contract the disease. For instance, in Switzerland, six years after the MMR vaccine was introduced the incidence of mumps shot up sharply, mostly among the vaccinated. Similarly, in the US state of Tennessee, a large outbreak occurred among students, 98 percent of whom had been vaccinated.

Rubella

In terms of effectiveness, the rubella vaccine, usually included in the MMR triple vaccine, hasn’t fared much better either. In one 1970s study at the University of Pennsylvania of adolescent girls given the vaccine, more than one-third lacked any evidence whatsoever of immunity. Because viruses easily mutate, the vaccine may only protect you against one strain of a virus, and not any new ones. A more recent Italian study showed that 10 percent of girls had been infected by a ‘wild strain’ of the virus, even within a few years of being given their shot.

All that vaccination accomplishes is to increase the incidence of the disease. A few years after the countrywide measles and rubella vaccination campaign of 1994, where all school children between the ages of 5 and 16 received the double jab, the number of cases of rubella in Scotland climbed to a 13-year high. Most occurred in children and young adults aged between 15 and 34, who’d been given preschool jabs and whose immunity to rubella had worn off. Young women are therefore at their most susceptible to the disease at the point in their lives when they are most likely to get pregnant and expose their developing child to rubella.

A similar pattern – where the illness suddenly became an adult one – occurred in Finland in 1982, following a mass immunization program. Furthermore, children with congenital rubella syndrome had been born to mothers who’d received their full vaccination quota against rubella.

HIB Meningitis

The Hib vaccine is pointed to as a modern medical success story and credited with a 15-fold decline in the incidence of the disease since the vaccine was introduced. Nevertheless, medical science has yet to produce a version of the Hib vaccine that actually works.

The first vaccine introduced in the US in 1985 was a ‘polysaccharide’, used in children over 15 months old. The vaccine soon began to lose credibility after doctors reported that children were getting meningitis right after they’d been vaccinated. One Minnesota study showed that the shot increased a child’s risk five-fold of contracting the disease.

Once the older version was discredited, several companies came up with a ‘conjugate’ vaccine – one that would marry the Hib portion with the tried and tested diphtheria vaccine (PRP-D), the diphtheria/pertussis/tetanus vaccine (PRP-DPT), or even the Neisseria meningitidis group b outer membrane protein complex (PRP-OMPC). The idea behind all this gobbledygook of initials was that attaching the new vaccine onto a substance known to produce antibodies would nudge the body to come up with an antibody to the Hib bug as well. In 1993, the US FDA approved Tetramune, a combination of the DTP vaccine and Hib vaccine.

The latest evidence shows that, far from increasing the effectiveness of the Hib jab, the addition of the diphtheria toxin actually decreases its effectiveness.

In addition, the science on which the Hib vaccine success story is based is decidedly suspect. New evidence shows that the incidence of the disease has been widely under-reported, largely due to the fact that the surveillance system which tracks the cases has declined by 23 percent. All the vaccine may have done was to turn Hib meningitis into an adult disease; the average age of victims, which used to be a year old, is now 25.

‘Trying to eliminate microorganisms and diseases is comparable to squeezing a balloon,’ remarks naturopath Harald Gaier. ‘You push in one side and it only makes the other side bulge.’

Polio

As for polio, scientists are beginning to concur that one of the central premises for giving the live vaccine isn’t true. In true cases of polio, the virus lives in the intestine, creating what is ordinarily a harmless infection. Problems start if it travels to the bloodstream and makes its way to the nervous system, where it can cause paralysis. The killed virus, originally developed by Jonas Salk, is injected under the skin and is supposed to travel to the bloodstream and create antibodies there which will ‘block’ the virus before it reaches the nervous system. However, the killed polio shot does not give you ‘gut immunity’ – that is, doesn’t raise antibodies in your intestines. That means that, while you won’t get paralytic polio, the wild virus could live on in your gut and you could theoretically pass it on to someone else. Furthermore, the original Salk vaccine required three or more boosters every five years.

When first administered, the Salk vaccine was deemed a terrific success – until the polio-victim rate went up in the 1960s. Coming so hard on the heels of the double-digit victim rates of the fifties, this new development was greeted as proof that the Salk vaccine didn’t work, particularly amid all the hysteria to find a ‘cure’.

The live oral (OVP) vaccine, developed by Sabin, virtually replaced the Salk vaccine in the sixties, because it not only supposedly confers life-long immunity on its recipient, but stops him from becoming a carrier of the wild virus. And because recipients can excrete the vaccine virus for a number of weeks through the mouth and feces, the theory is that you can pass on immunity to non-vaccinated individuals, thus raising the ‘herd immunity’. In other words, the live oral vaccine became the vaccine of choice largely so that you or your children could act as an immunizing force for other, unvaccinated individuals.

Scientists now realize that there is little evidence that the live vaccine actually does achieve this ‘back door’ immunity among the unvaccinated. This was the conclusion of a scientific study group after an outbreak of polio in Taiwan, where up to 98 percent of young children had been immunized. Even the US FDA has acknowledged: ‘We now know that secondary spread of vaccine virus to susceptible contacts plays very little part in population immunity.’

There’s also plenty of evidence that the polio vaccine fails. Many of today’s outbreaks occur more among immunized than un-immunized populations. In 1961, for instance, Massachusetts had a polio outbreak, with more paralytic cases among the vaccinated than the unvaccinated. Furthermore, even if the vaccine ‘takes’, you may not be adequately protected against a certain strain of the virus. During a major outbreak of hepatitis A infection in Glasgow, blood serum of 24 of the victims were also tested for antibodies to polio. Only one-third of the group had an acceptable level of antibodies against one strain of the virus.

Tuberculosis (BCG Vaccine)

The Heaf test is used by most school districts to measure tuberculin sensitivity. Unlike most sensitivity tests, a negative result is supposed to mean that a child does not carry antibodies to the tubercle bacillus. However, the test is notoriously inaccurate; even the American Academy of Pediatrics warns its members that the test carries the possibility of false-negatives and false-positives. Furthermore, no one is really sure anymore what a positive test really means. It could mean that someone is immune to tuberculosis, or had prior infections, or it could mean that someone is simply allergic or sensitive to the test.

In one study of British school districts, where 92 percent were using the Heaf test, most districts agreed on what to do with a 0 grade, which showed very little reaction (recommend immunization) or a grade 3 or 4, which indicated pronounced reaction (refer to a chest clinic for special evaluation before having the jab). The disparity occurred with those scoring grade 2. Around one-third of the districts recommended no immunization, and approximately two-thirds recommended referral to a chest clinic for special examination before going ahead with the jab. Only a single district recommended immunization at this level of sensitivity to the test.

Besides the lack of agreement about which groups should or should not receive the live tuberculosis vaccine, substantial doubts exist about its effectiveness. In 10 randomized controlled trials from around the world since the 1930s, the ability of the BCG vaccine to protect you has ranged from 80 percent to 0.74. On average, the shot only protects about two-thirds of children from TB.

The problem is that BCG vaccination can only limit the multiplication and spread of the tubercle bacteria; it cannot prevent infection in people exposed to the germ. In fact, there’s increasing evidence that BCG vaccines offer greater protection against leprosy than tuberculosis, particularly in Third World countries, where TB is still rife. A huge African study of 83,000 people in Malawi concluded that half were protected against leprosy, but none had significant protection against tuberculosis.

The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, which conducted a special analysis, found that the vaccine is just 22 percent effective in Kenya and 20 percent effective in some areas of India. Overall effectiveness ranges from 0 to 80 percent around the world, possibly due to strain variations, genetic or nutritional differences, or environmental influences.

Excerpt from What Doctors Don’t Tell You

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