Vaccinations: Parents’ Informed Choice
By Lynne Born
Because the misinformation surrounding vaccination is so extensive, many parents don’t even question whether or not they should vaccinate their child, overlooking one of the most important decisions a parent can make. Since medical authorities say vaccination is safe, most parents simply go ahead with vaccination, completely unaware of the potential dangers and unable to recognize a serious reaction when it does occur.
And since government health departments and school authorities give the impression that vaccination is mandated for every child in the United States, most parents believe they are legally required to vaccinate their child. But in all 50 states, you are free to decline vaccination entirely, or adopt a partial vaccination schedule, an important decision about the health and welfare of your child.
However, parents face tremendous pressure from doctors, the media, schools and even other parents, to follow the standard vaccination schedule and subject their child to an ever-escalating protocol of multiple injections at various stages of their young lives, even including injections with several vaccines in the same shot.
Misinformation
Because vaccines are used predominately on our precious children, most people assume that the many vaccines have been subjected to thorough trials and rigorous studies proving that vaccines are safe and effective. Parents have been told that mass vaccination campaigns ended multiple epidemics around the world, that vaccines are effective at preventing the illnesses they are targeted against, that side effects are rare and generally consist of sore arms or mild fevers that pass quickly, and that the few serious negative reactions are carefully tracked and monitored, keeping adverse reactions to a minimum.
However, parents who take the time to dig deeper and pierce this veil of misinformation find that these assertions lack solid scientific backing. Not only has there never been a single long-term study comparing the health and welfare of vaccinated to unvaccinated children, multiple examples can easily be found of vaccinated children acquiring the very illness they have been vaccinated against. Furthermore, there is overwhelming evidence that vaccines can be extremely harmful, permanently disabling and even deadly to our children. And the current system for tracking and reporting adverse reactions to the FDA is sloppy, poorly executed and voluntary rather than mandatory, even when a child has been permanently disabled or killed by a vaccine.
Vaccination Prevents
Natural Immunity
When a baby becomes infected with a communicable disease, his immune system responds through a sophisticated web of interlocking reactions that can produce immunity for life to naturally acquired childhood diseases. These miraculous defenses exist, in part, to keep invading microbes and viruses from taking hold in the deeper systems and organs of the body.
But vaccines, which contain both live and dead viruses, killed bacteria, genetically engineered DNA and chemical preservatives, are injected directly into the bloodstream, bypassing the natural immune response. This deprives the body of the ability to naturally develop life-long immunity in all its multifaceted complexity to normal childhood diseases like measles, mumps and chicken pox. Mass vaccination is a manmade attempt to remove the natural infection response from human development and replace it with a series of artificially imposed infections and immune responses determined by the doctor’s vaccination schedule.
So Many Shots
Thirty years ago, children received a total of four vaccines, but today a fully vaccinated child receives a whopping 37-50 vaccines during the early, formative years of life, when his developing immune system is most vulnerable. Even an adult immune system would be challenged by so many vaccines given during such a short period of time. While unvaccinated children will never develop every disease for which children are given a vaccine, their bodies are forced by the Center for Disease Control’s (CDC) vaccination schedule to respond to them all. Furthermore, the DPT vaccine forces an immune response to diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis on the same day, an event that would never happen in real life. Plus, there are virtually no studies or scientific research on the effects of multiple viral and bacterial vaccines given in combination or in close succession, and how they affect the human body.
Evidence of Vaccine Harm
The medical profession is extremely reluctant to acknowledge adverse reactions to vaccination, even when the reaction is instantaneous or occurs within a few hours, and even with adults who can clearly verbalize their negative reactions, which infants are unable to do. And since no studies have ever tracked negative effects that occur over the long term, reactions that occur days, weeks or years later are almost never attributed to the vaccine.
It is a little-known fact that not a single study exists to prove that vaccines are safe over the long term. “It would be such an easy study to organize. Use three groups of children—the first group fully vaccinated, the second group partially vaccinated, and the third group no vaccinations. Then follow them for up to 10 years and we would be able to see the kinds of problems that are manifesting from these vaccines,” says Barbara Loe Fisher, President of the National Vaccine Information Center.1 However, evidence of vaccine harm is not really a secret— hundreds of published medical studies have documented both vaccine failure and vaccine harm, even though most pediatricians continue to vaccinate and most parents remain completely unaware of these studies.2
One well known example of a long term negative vaccine reaction occurred with the polio vaccine used in the late 1950s into the early 1960s. This vaccine was later found to be contaminated with a monkey virus, SV40, which had tainted the vaccine during production. And even though the virus was discovered in 1960, the contaminated vaccine continued to be given to American children for three more years with the full knowledge of government health authorities, until it was withdrawn in 1963. Thirty years later, SV40 has been isolated in bone, brain and lung cancers of disabled and deceased adults. The SV40 vaccine debacle proves a direct connection between a vaccine and a slow-growing cancer which developed decades after the vaccine.3 Unfortunately, authorities made no effort to find and track adult recipients of the vaccine, study and catalog their health status, or note their rate of cancer, even though a clear opportunity exists to study long term effects of a vaccine in a very direct and concise way.
Delayed negative reactions have also been confirmed by the work of Dr. Viera Scheibner, who developed a baby monitor in an effort to prevent Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). Her monitor sounds an alarm if the baby stops breathing or shows patterns of stress breathing during sleep. In designing the monitor, she had no preconceived intention of specifically tracking vaccination reactions, as she had never conceived of the fact that vaccinations were in any way problematic or harmful.
In due course of tracking infant breathing at night, she recorded the breathing patterns of babies following the DPT injection. She found that the vaccine caused babies a great deal of stress and that this stress showed a remarkable uniformity, with stress flare-ups immediately following the vaccine on day 2 or 5, or delayed reactions on the 15-16th or 20-25th day in babies who recovered and those who subsequently died from SIDS. Scheibner’s monitor proved that death from the vaccine sometimes occurs weeks after the injection, in correlation with the stress patterns it identified. However, the longer time frame gives doctors and health authorities every excuse not to attribute it to the DPT shot.
Adverse Events
Not Reported Or Tracked
One of the great dangers of the current pro-vaccine mentality is the fact that negative vaccine reactions are very rarely reported to the adverse event reporting system, a system rife with problems. When a vaccine is released onto the market, post-marketing surveillance is supposed to track any negative reactions from the millions of people taking the newly released vaccine. However, not only is the adverse reporting system entirely voluntary, 90 to 99 percent of all adverse reactions are never reported, according to David Kessler, head of the FDA for most of the 1990s.4 And no oversight of any kind ensures that reports made directly to the pharmaceutical companies are then forwarded to the FDA—the process is run entirely by the “honor system.”
A very clear example of the poor adverse event documentation occurred during President Bush’s recent Smallpox Vaccination Program of 2003. Before the program, the public was repeatedly told to expect death rates from the vaccine of one to two per million. In fact, there were three deaths (that we know of) among the approximately 36,000 civilians and few hundred embedded reporters who were vaccinated.5 This makes the actual death rate 80 times higher than that which the CDC told the public to expect. Serious adverse reactions such as brain swelling, heart inflammation, heart attacks, uncontrolled ulceration of the skin, among others, were one in 583, seven times higher than the CDC’s original guesstimate of one in four thousand. And yet medical authorities and mainstream news continue to use the old, inaccurate numbers rather than update the risk estimate as they should.
Even worse, these numbers were probably vastly underreported since, just as with childhood vaccination reactions, reporting adverse reactions during the smallpox vaccine was not mandatory and was also limited to an arbitrary and ill-defined time frame of 2-4 weeks. What was the rate of death and injury from the vaccine over the next few months and years? All of these important risks should have been studied and tracked for an honest assessment of the true risk of this vaccine, but researchers missed this valuable opportunity due to the usual shoddy and incomplete tracking system that reflects the poor science behind vaccine development.
Hepatitis B Vaccine At Birth
Let’s look at the hepatitis B vaccine as a way to examine problems with the development and introduction of any new vaccine.
Hepatitis B is primarily an adult disease transmitted through blood and body fluids. High risk populations include drug users, heterosexuals and homosexuals with many sexual partners, health care workers exposed to blood, and babies born to infected mothers. In 1996, 270 children under the age of 14 were infected with hepatitis B, with only 54 cases reported in the 0-1 age group.
In spite of the low risk for children in general, and in spite of the ability to target at-risk children by specifically testing their mothers before birth, the CDC added the hepatitis B vaccine to the recommended vaccination schedule in 1991, with the first of three doses to be administered on the very day of birth before leaving the hospital.
In 1986, Merck & Co. began marketing the first genetically engineered hepatitis B vaccine. A flagrant example of the poor science behind vaccination development, the FDA approved the vaccine for use after only 1636 doses of Recombivax HB were administered to only 653 children who were subsequently monitored for only 5 days after each dose.6 Since the vaccine is recommended for the first day of life, Merck was asked for safety data on newborns. They replied, “We have none. Our studies were done on 5- and 10-year-olds.”7 Further, Merck admitted in 1996 that no data is “available for the simultaneous administration of Recombivax HB with other vaccines” even though children are routinely given other vaccines along with Recombivax HB vaccine.
Since the introduction of this vaccine, there have been hundreds of reports in the medical literature (mostly published in international medical journals outside of the United States) citing central nervous system diseases, multiple sclerosis, Guillain-Barre syndrome, arthritis, severe rashes, fever, chronic fatigue, and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) as a direct result of the vaccine. Parents have filed tens of thousands of adverse event reports with the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, including emergency room visits, hospitalization and deaths. A study in New Zealand reported a 60 percent increase in juvenile diabetes after a massive campaign to vaccinate babies from 1988 to 1991 with the hepatitis B vaccine.8 Even Merck itself admits to systemic complaints such as fever, joint pain, fatigue and weakness in up to 17 percent of all hepatitis B injections. And perhaps most telling of all, over 50 percent of the doctors surveyed in the UK refused to take the hepatitis B vaccine themselves, citing the known dangers from the vaccine, even though as medical professionals working in hospitals, they belong to a high risk group exposed to blood products and needles in the daily course of their work.
But most disturbing is the fundamental question of why this vaccine was recommended for infants in the first place. In 1996, there were 1,080 reports of adverse reactions among 0-1 year olds from the vaccine, including 47 deaths. If only 10 percent of the true deaths and injuries are being reported—an extremely conservative estimate—this means that there were actually over 10,800 adverse reactions and 470 deaths from the vaccine. Yet in that same year, there were only 54 cases of the disease reported in the 0-1 year old group. This frightful equation reveals that for every child that acquires hepatitis B, the vaccine kills 9 babies and injures 200.
Why subject tens of millions of infants to the known dangers of this vaccine when the few babies actually at risk for the disease can be identified by simply screening the mother?9 And finally, even if parents opt to include this vaccine in their child’s vaccine schedule, why is the vaccine given on the day of birth? Parents need time to get to know their child first, so they can compare the baby’s health status before and after vaccination, so any harm can be noticed, tracked and treated.
In addition to problems with genetically engineered vaccines, many vaccines—notably the MMR, chickenpox and Sabin polio vaccines—inject live viruses into the body. Various stabilizers and preservatives are added including formaldehyde, lead, aluminum and MSG. Unknown amounts of RNA and DNA from animal and human cell tissue culture have been found as well. And even though concerned parent groups have fought for the removal of the mercury-based preservative thimerisol from childhood vaccines, the pharmaceutical industry still uses mercury in flu vaccines, a new addition to the recommended yearly vaccination schedule for children starting at age 6 months. Additionally, the medical industry has continued to use old lots of thimerisol-containing vaccines until supplies are exhausted, rather than pull them from the market immediately, as they should.
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