Monday, September 19, 2011

Is it Time to Reevaluate Vaccination Policy in America?

Up until a few months ago, I held the majority view that a well maintained vaccination program is one of the hallmarks of a highly developed country. The U.S. leads the world with 24 requiredk vaccinations before the end of the baby’s first year: DTaP (3), polio (3), Hib Titer (3), hepatitis B (3), pneumonia (3), rotavirus (3) and influenza (2). We don’t however lead the world in infant mortality rates. Thirty three countries have lower infant mortality rates than we do, and there is a highly significant linear relationship (p < 0.0001) between infant mortality rates and the number of vaccine doses routinely given to infants [1]. Counterintuitively, nations that require more vaccines have higher infant mortality rates.

The autism community has long held the view that vaccines are contributing to their children’s autism. This is something that the vaccine industry vigourously denies. However, the incidence of autism is sharply on the rise over the last decade, and there are now several research articles pointing to a clear correlation between vaccination rates and autism [2, 3]. A 2011 article compared vaccination compliance records from the 50 states in the U.S., and found that a 1% increase in vaccination rates was associated on average with an additional 680 children having autism or speech and language delay in that state [4].

One might argue that, even if it’s true that vaccines cause autism, the price is still worth it – the childhood diseases that these vaccines protect from also carry a significant risk of permanent damage or even death. But supposing it’s also the case that vaccines are the major contributor to the alarming increases we’ve recently seen in food allergies [5], in asthma [6], in sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) [7], and even in the E. coli epidemics? What if vaccines are a major contributor, not only to autism, but also to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), depression, manic depression, schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease? Would it still be worth it? What exactly is the cost to society of preventing the inconvenience of a childhood illness like chicken pox or measles that used to be a right of passage?

My recent studies have led me to believe that we have all been duped by the vaccine industry for a very long time. While Americans for the most part never even question the merit of a vaccination program, population studies have led some experts to argue that diseases can be kept in check more effectively by simply providing clean sanitation and better nutrition. It is not fair that the vaccine industry is not required to prove that its product is “effective.” Fear tactics are enough to convince most people that vaccination is absolutely necessary; that dire consequences would follow if we suddenly terminated the vaccination program.

This quote from the Natural News site’s Mike Adams aptly sums up the dismal situation we all face, with a wry sense of humor [8]:
(Mike Adams on MMR) : ”In layman’s terms, this is what’s known as a ‘scientific circle jerk’ where one group of bought-off scientists quotes another group of bought-off scientists as ‘authorities’ even though they all parrot the same medical quackery of their masters – the pharmaceutical companies.” Mike Adams was referring to the just-released Institute of Medicine (IoM) report which once again declares that the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine is not linked to autism. Mike Adams begs to differ, and offers substantial support for his opinion drawn directly from the IOM report itself.

I am going to focus on Gardasil, the ”new kid on the block” in the vaccine arsenal. The story of the making and marketing of Gardasil is a triumph for both the National institutes of Health (NIH) and Merck, the company that brought the vaccine to market. Researchers at NIH, who patented their ideas and then handed them over to Merck for productization, have already gained enormous financial rewards, as well as formal recognition and high praise for their scholarly achievements.

The vaccine, touted as the first “anti-cancer” vaccine, immunizes against HPV (human papillary virus). The vaccine was rushed through the FDA approval process, and heralded as a magnificent example of what can be accomplished when government and industry work together towards a common, lucrative, goal. Heavy advertising was directed at the general public, priming them to be receptive when the vaccine became available. The governor of Texas, Rick Perry, wasted no time making it mandatory for preteen girls in his state. Mothers are lining up to get their 11 year old daughters vaccinated, hoping to give them one less thing to worry about health-wise in the future. California is even putting into law a bill called AB 499 [9], which would waive parental consent: young girls can make the decision for themselves whether they want to be vaccinated against HPV.

But the fairy tale is beginning to turn into a nightmare. A number of girls in the prime of their life, following a Gardasil vaccine, turned up dead from extremely rare conditions for their age group, like heart failure, deep vein thrombosis, and ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease).

Mark Blaxill, who manages the “Age of Autism” web site, has written an astonishing 3-part article [10] detailing the dirty secrets behind Gardasil, and the much larger story of how the government, the media, and the drug companies have established an incredibly profitable revolving door arrangement that makes sure that only the public at large loses out. What amazes me most is the naivety of both the general public and the medical practioners, and their unfounded faith in the idea that vaccines are safe and effective, given the obviously huge confict-of-interest problems in the vaccine approval process. In the second installment of his article, Blaxill points out the audacity that the industry exhibits in designing severely flawed safety trials and getting by with it. A glaring loophole is that the so-called “placebo” administered to the control group does not have to be inert, and often the details of the contents of the placebo are not even revealed to the public, or are kept hidden in a terse description on page 303 of a long and wordy document. But Blaxill was able to discover that the placebo used in four out of five Gardasil trialscontained aluminum, as did the vaccine itself. And in these same fourtrials, the placebo group had many more adverse reactions than the one placebo group without the aluminum. Since Gardasil had only slightly more adverse reactions than the “placebo,” it was considered safe. Left unstated was the fact that the placebo itself was unsafe.

One admirable move that the U.S. government has done is to make the reports of vaccine adverse reactions available to the public for automatic download from the Web. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control have posted a large database of adverse events related to vaccines dating back to 1990, and I have downloaded this database and studied some of its characteristics [11]. It contains over 330,000 instances of recorded events, with information about which vaccine(s) were administered, the age of the person at the time, the symptoms encountered, relevant history, and whether death was an outcome.

I have thus been able to take a look for myself at Gardasil, comparing the frequency of various adverse reactions to the frequency observed in an age-matched control group of people receiving all other vaccines. It is mathematically very straightforward to use a log-likelihood ratio computation to determine the likelihood that a given count distribution could have occurred by chance [12].

Selected results we obtained, shown in Table 1 below, are astonishing. Some really severe reactions like seizure, loss of consciousness, and death, as well as a spontaneous abortion (miscarriage) for pregnant women obtaining the vaccine, are far more likely in the Gardasil data than in the random comparison set. Cynthia Janak, a freelance journalist, has produced a compellinganalysis of the dangers of Gardasil on the website, Renew America .



























Table 1: Counts of the number of adverse events where the vaccine was Gardasil, compared to a sampled age-matched control set of events where the vaccine was not Gardasil, along with the associated p-value, indicating the likelihood that this distribution could have occurred by chance.
Seizure 538 150 0.00010
Loss of Consciousness 393 119 0.00046
Depression 109 11 0.0029
Fatigue 351 167 0.0042
Miscarriage 97 12 0.0044
Anxiety 170 56 0.0058
Asthma 142 49 0.0095
Death 35 7 0.040


She too points out the dangers of the aluminum in the vaccine, which contains 225 mcg of aluminum as amorphous aluminum hydroxyphosphate sulfate adjuvant. I was able to find several web pages providing detailed accounts of the ingredients in various vaccines, such as this one, and I then did a study on the VAERS data comparing all thealuminum-containing vaccines I could confidently identify with vaccines that don’t contain aluminum, i.e., generalizing the experiments with Gardasil to include additional data: males as well as females, and over a much broader age range, since the flu vaccine, administered typically to the elderly, contains aluminum. Several of the adverse reactions that are statistically significantly associated with Gardasil are also statistically significantly associated with the other aluminum-containing vaccines that I identified, namely, DTaP, Hepatitis A and B, PREVNAR, and ANTHRAX. Some of the most significant adverse reactions showing up in all aluminum-containing vaccines are shown in Table 2.















Table 2: Counts of the number of adverse events where the vaccine contains aluminum, compared to a sampled age-matched control set of events where the vaccine does not contain aluminum, along with the associated p-value, indicating the likelihood that this distribution could have occurred by chance.
Seizure 2965 2161 0.0009
Depression 231 85 0.0050
Fatigue 1435 745 0.00016
Death 464 284 0.012


It’s not as though it’s not known that aluminum is toxic to health. No known biological system makes use of aluminum for any purpose. People with end-stage kidney disease suffer from severe dementia after sufficient accumulation of aluminum in their brain, accidentally supplied to their blood stream from aluminum-containing water in the dialysis fluids [13]. If you ingest aluminum, only a quarter of a percent of it actually gets through the lining of the gut. But if you inject it in a vaccine, 100% goes directly into the blood stream.

You must be asking yourself at this point why on earth they’d be putting aluminum into vaccines in the first place. The vaccine industry is, quite frankly, caught between a rock and a hard place. Either they use live (weakened) pathogens in the vaccine (such as in MMR) or they use dead pathogens, but add some so-called ”adjuvants” to disrupt the immune response and make sure that the body will react sufficiently well for the vaccine to ”take.” With live pathogens, the vaccine can and does cause actual disease in susceptible individuals – it infects the person with the disease it’s trying to vaccinate against. But, with adjuvants like aluminum, you can get by with dead viruses, and you can get by with a lot fewer dead viruses in each vaccination, thus increasing the yield and saving money. However, and this is a huge consideration, the vaccine can add to an accumulated aluminum build-up in the brain, directly contributing to autism and Alzheimer’s disease.

It seems that the industry is well aware that they had better not combine both aluminum and live pathogen in the same vaccine, as the resulting adverse reactions would probably keep the vaccine from ever making it through safety trials. However, they don’t seem to mind injecting children with two vaccines simultaneously – one containing aluminum and the other containing live toxin. This is exactly the situation with DTaP and MMR, where DTaP contains aluminum and MMR contains live pathogens for measles, mumps and rubella. I suspect the combination wreaks havoc on the system of the immune-compromised child.

If you think that aluminum in vaccines is not a big deal, then you should read the paper called, simply, ”Aluminum Vaccine Adjuvants: Are they Safe?” by Tomljenovic and Shaw [14], which appeared just this year in the journal, Current Medicinal Chemistry. It is an eye-opener! They point out that the number of officially scheduled vaccines for U.S. children has increased sharply from 10 in the 1980s to 32 in the late 2000s, and that 18 of these vaccines contain aluminum adjuvants. Newborns in the U.S. and other developed countries receive 14.7 to 49 times more than the FDA safety limits for aluminum, just through their mandatory vaccines. They point out the very clear association between aluminum exposure and dementia in dialysis patients that I already mentioned earlier. In experiments with mice, injections of vaccine aluminum adjuvants showed up in the brain tissues a couple of days later, demonstrating that aluminum can cross the blood-brain barrier. Rabbits given aluminum phosphate experienced nerve degenration and neurofibrillary tangles similar to those that are characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease. Animals given dietary aluminum routinely show learning and memory deficits, along with confusion and repetitive behaviors, similar to those in autism. This is despite the fact that dietary aluminum is so poorly absorbed through the gut. These authors also reference several articles where vaccine safety tests were conducted by doping the so-called placebo with aluminum, sometimes in amounts in excess of the amount in the vaccine itself.

Although aluminum is probably the biggest problem with vaccines, it is not the only problem. I came across a web page proposing that the egg and peanut allergies, currently affecting 1-2% of the U.S. population, might be caused by vaccines, and then I started to explore all the other foods that show up in vaccines, finding, to my astonishment, that every one I checked had extensive hits in a web search in association with allergies. I then came upon an article written by Barbara Feick Gregory , who had done a far more extensive search than I had done, confirming much more exhaustively what I had suspected. The reason that small amounts of food in vaccines cause an intense allergic reaction is that the body develops a memory of the food in association with the toxin that’s also in the vaccine. The body is fooled into believing that the egg that the flu vaccine pathogen is grown in is somehow part of a strange new species, and it develops a response to the egg as well as, or perhaps even instead of, to the flu virus.

So this then explains the adverse reaction report #403192, which described the child’s reaction as follows: “Large welts and extreme itching in skin from the waist down, which are the typical reaction that he receives when he eats eggs.” This report concerned a5-year-old autistic child’s reaction to a flu shot. It was surely an earlier vaccine that had primed him for this kind of reaction. It’s surprising how many foods besides eggs and peanut oil show up in vaccines, including gelatine, lactate, yeast, glycine (soy), and lectin (wheat). It’s possible that most of these are intentionally added precisely because they are substances to which the body can build an immune response – this may make them useful as adjuvants toincrease the likelihood of the creation of a permanent memory of the pathogen, i.e., a protective response.

The recent major E. coli epidemic in Europe has led me to wonder whether these E. coli epidemics might also be due directly to vaccination. E. coli epidemics were unheard of until vaccines started to be routinely administered. If the body can overreact to foods in vaccines, then it stands to reason that it might also overreact to E. coli infection as a consequence of previous exposure to E. coli membranes in vaccines. E. coli cell membrane fragments are in fact another substance that is often put into vaccines, as a well-known effective adjuvant. E. coli are essential bacteria in our guts, helping with digestion and generally not causing any trouble. But I can easily imagine that our bodies can be fooled into believing that certain strains are toxic if they’re injected directly into our blood stream thoroughly mixed in with some severely toxic pathogen. While I was unable to trace the strain that caused the recent European outbreak directly to a vaccine adjuvant, I did determine that several strains of E. coli have been added to vaccines for the sake of their adjuvant properties, including strains known as 0111, 0127, 026, 055, and F583 (Vaccine Adjuvants) . Several mentions of an outbreak related to strain 0111 can be found on the web, such as this one in Oklahoma .

In closing, I want to return to Gardasil, to mention yet another severely problematic aspect of this vaccine that has just become public knowledge. Recently, it has been discovered that Gardasil contains contaminants in the form of HPV recombinant DNA, even though the vaccine label states clearly that it does not. A young girl developed juvenile rheumatoid arthritis the day after she received her last Gardasil vaccination, and the vaccine batch she received was then analyzed for contaminants. The Milford Hospital pathology laboratorywhere the tests were conducted found the recombinant DNA, and then tested several other batches of the vaccine from around the world, finding the contaminant to be present in every batch they tested. Dr. Sin Hang Lee, a pathologist at the Milford Hospital laboratory, has this to say about recombinant HPV: “Based on medical literature and some of the FDA/Mercks own publications, adventitious(coming from an outside source) DNA in an injectable protein-based vaccine may increase the risk of autoimmune disorders and gene mutation which may lead to malignancies.” [15] So these are just some other health problems we can look forward to as we increase our bodies’ vaccine load.

It is long past the time when we should be taking a hard look at the American vaccination program, to rigorously assess the risks and benefits of vaccines in the same way that we routinely do for drugs. It may be expedient to simply trust the industry; to blindly believe that the down side of vaccination is more than adequately offset by the up side. But this is not good science. Canadians have walked down this new path already, as eidenced by a thoughtful and rational article discussing a risk/benefit analysis for Gardasil [16]. Vaccines are costing us a great deal more pain than we realize, and it’s time to take stock.

References

[1] N.Z. Miller and G.S. Goldman, “Infant mortality rates regressed against number of vaccine doses routinely given: Is there a biochemical or synergistic toxicity?” Human and Experimental Toxicology, published online 4 May, 2011.

[2] A.J. Wakefield, “MMR vaccination and autism,” The Lancet 354:9182 949-950, Sep 11 1999; doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(05)75696-8

[3] O.M. Gallagher and M.S. Goodman, “Hepatitis B vaccination of male neonates and autism diagnosis, NHIS 1997-2002,” J Toxicol Environ Health A. 73(24):1665-77, 2010.

[4] G. DeLong “A Positive Association Found Between Autism Prevalence and Childhood Vaccination Uptake across the U.S. Population,” Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, Part A, 74:903916, 2011; DOI: 10.1080/15287394.2011.573736.

[5] http://barbfeick.com/vaccinations/allergy/951vaccine allergy.htm

[6] vactruth.com/2011/07/11/research-shows-vaccinations-are-causing-surge-of-asthma-in-children/

[7] A.M. Walker, H. JICK, D.R. PERERA, R.S. Thompson, and T.A. KNAUSS, “Diphtheria-Tetanus-Pertussis Immunization and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome,” AJPH 77(8):945-951, Aug 1987.

[8] P.F. Louis, “BMJ had secret financial ties to Merck during publication of articles attacking Wakefield,” NaturalNews, Wednesday, September 07, 2011; http://www.naturalnews.com/033516 BMJ financial ties.html

[9] www.catholicsun.org/2011/september/02/california-gardasil.html

[10] Mark Blaxill, “Rick Perry and the Conflicts of Government Licensed Corporate Profit: Merck and Gardasil,” Age of Autism Web site: http://www.ageofautism.com/2011/08/rickperryandtheconflictsofgovernmentlicensed-corporateprofitmerckgardasil.html

[11] CDC. Surveillance for safety after immunization: Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS)United States, 19912001. MMWR Surveill Summ. 52:124, 2003.

[12] T. Dunning,”Accurate methods for the statistics of surprise and coincidence,” Computational Linguistics 19(1):6174, 1993.

[13] M.R. Wills and J. Savory, “Water Content of Aluminum, Dialysis Dementia, and Osteomalacia” Environmental Health Perspectives 63:141-147, 1985.

[14] L. Tomljenovic and C.A. Shaw, “Aluminum Vaccine Adjuvants: Are they Safe?” Current Medicinal Chemistry 18:2630-2637, 2011.

[15] L.C.Botha, “SANE Vax Inc. Discovers Potential Bio-hazard Contaminant in Mercks Gardasil HPV 4 Vaccine,” http://sanevax.org/sane-vax-inc-discovers-potential-bio-hazard-contaminant-in-merck.

[16] A. Lippman, R. Melnychuk, C. Shimmin and M. Boscoe, “Human papillomavirus, vaccines and womens health: questions and cautions,” CMAJ, 177(5):484-487, 2007.