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Vaccine
Scene 1999: Overview & Update
Article
courtesy
of the Woodlands Healing Research Center
Quakertown, PA
Updated
12/01/1999
Introduction:
We are frequently asked our opinion and position
on vaccination in both children and adults. This lengthy monograph is an
attempt to express a minority view and position that is contrary to
current government, public and medical opinion on the subject. However,
whatever position on the vaccination decision one chooses to adopt, we
feel the under riding, most important point is Parental Choice!
Therefore, we ardently believe the best approach to this very
controversial subject is to present both the pro and con, good and bad,
known and unknown about immunizations and then help guide the patient or
parents to choose what is best for them or their children. This is
termed "informed consent" and should be the basis of every
medical test or treatment; vaccinations being no exception.
Consequently, our Healing Research Centers honor and respect the
patient's or parent's choice in this matter and will immunize or not
immunize accordingly.
Any
medical therapy must balance the "effectiveness" versus the
"safety" of its actions on the human body. For instance,
aspirin therapy is effective in preventing a second heart attack after
having a first heart attack and it is quite safe, only having a very
small incidence of stomach or intestinal bleeding as a potential
long-term side effect. As you read the following monographs, please keep
these key points in mind in terms of "effectiveness" versus
the "safety" of vaccinations:
-
Scientific
evidence does support the effectiveness of immunizations. They do
prevent infectious diseases; some better than others, but this point
is not disputed.
-
Scientific
evidence does not support the safety of immunizations.
-
Safety
studies on vaccinations are limited to short time periods only:
several days to several weeks. There are NO (NONE!) long-term
(months to years) safety studies on any vaccination or
immunization.
-
There
is small but increasing scientific evidence of long-term side
effects from immunizations that need much more study.
In
early August of this year Congressional hearings were held in Washington
D.C. dealing with questions of vaccine safety. Congressman Dan Burton,
Chairman of the U.S. House Government Reform Committee, called the
hearings. On the weekend of October 2nd and 3rd, 1999, an autism
conference was held at Cherry Hill, New Jersey, sponsored by the Autism
Research Institute of San Diego, California. Over l,000 people were in
attendance, the great majority of whom were parents of autistic
children. At one point in the meeting, when those parents who thought
their child's autism was caused by vaccines were asked to stand, a large
majority of the audience stood. With these and other indications of
growing public concerns about current childhood immunization programs,
it is hoped that this review will be of timely interest.
Inadequate Proof of Benefit of
Vaccines
It is true that there may be situations where
extreme measures may be justified to preserve life and health as the
lesser of two evils. The basic question, therefore, is whether the
benefits of current childhood vaccines outweigh the harm, or whether the
reverse is true. As to the benefits of vaccines, polio has been
eliminated from the Western Hemisphere; smallpox may have been
eliminated worldwide, although there are disturbing reports that it is
still to be found in parts of the Far East.
Vaccine
proponents would have us believe that vaccines have been largely
responsible for controlling virtually all of the former epidemics of
killer diseases in the U.S.A. With the exceptions cited above, the facts
do not bear this out. According to the records of the Metropolitan Life
Insurance Company, from 1911 to l935 the four leading causes of
childhood deaths from infectious diseases in the U.S.A. were diphtheria,
pertussis (whooping cough), scarlet fever, and measles. However, by l945
the combined death rates from these causes had declined by 95%, before
the implementation of mass immunization programs1.
By far the greatest factors in this decline were sanitation through
public health measures, improved nutrition, better housing with less
crowded conditions and the introduction of antibiotics. Also, the
virulence of microorganisms tends to become weakened or attenuated with
the passage of time and serial passages through human hosts2,
one example of which is whooping cough (pertussis) which is clearly a
much milder disease today in Western nations than it was l00 or so years
ago3.
Safety
Not Proven
It should be pointed out that today's children
receive 22 or more vaccines before school age, whereas today's senior
citizens received only one, the smallpox vaccine. Some of these vaccines
contain mercury, although the impact of this potentially toxic metal
remains unknown as concerns the vaccines. With growing public concerns
about potential adverse reactions of these heavy burdens of foreign
immunologic materials on the immature immune systems of children, it is
reasonable to ask ourselves what is known about these reactions.
A
small but growing minority of physicians and scientists are becoming
aware that safety testing for the various vaccines has been woefully
inadequate. As one of many examples, a l994 special committee of the
National Academy of Sciences published a comprehensive review of the
safety of the hepatitis B vaccine. When the committee, which carried the
responsibility for determining the safety of vaccines by Congressional
mandate, investigated five possible and plausible adverse effects, they
were unable to come to conclusion for four of them because they found
that relevant research had not been done4.
The
clear implication of this and other revelations5
concerning a general deficiency of safety testing in the vaccine field,
especially as concerns possible long-term side effects, is that adverse
reactions may be taking place on a large scale without being recognized
as to their true nature.
There
is a school of thought that the so-called minor childhood illnesses of
former times, including measles, mumps, rubella (German measles) and
chicken pox), which entered the body through the mucous membranes,
served a necessary and positive purpose in challenging and strengthening
the immune system of these membranes6.
In contrast, so the theory goes, the respective vaccines of these
diseases are injected by needle directly into the system of the child,
thereby bypassing the mucosal immune system. As a result, mucosal
immunity remains relatively weak and stunted in many children,
complications of which may be the rapid increase in asthma and eczema
now being seen, both in terms of frequency and severity7.
This
concept tends to be confirmed by four controlled studies, widely
separated geographically, in which vaccinated children were found to
have significantly more atopic disorders than controls8,
9, 10, 11. In commenting on the increased incidence of
asthma and other atopic disorders in the United Kingdom in the article,
"Measles and atopy in guinea-Bissau," cited above, the authors
made the following comment:
"The
rise of allergic disease among children in the UK over the past 30
years remains unexplained. One hypothesis is that infections in early
childhood prevent allergic sensitization, and that successive
generations of children have lost his protection as their exposure to
infectious disease in early life has declined. Consequently the
prevalence of atopy and concomitant allergic disease has risen."
It
is true that in former times there were occasional serious complications
from these childhood diseases, but this is an area in which nutritional
approaches and homeopathy traditionally have been at their best. If
these approaches were made widely available, it is probable that most of
these complications could be eliminated. No one wants to see serious
complications in our children, but the vaccine route may in time prove
to be the worst possible choice that could have been made, as concerns
the minor childhood diseases.
Threat of Brain damage from the
Vaccines
Perhaps the greatest concern with vaccines today
rests with their possible causal relation to the growing epidemic of
childhood autism, developmental delay and attention deficit
hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Regarding the latter, recent news item
stated that ADHD has increased from 900,000 in l99l to nearly 5 million
today 12.
Parenthetically, statistics may be open to question, but one cannot
question the observations of veteran elementary school teachers who, in
our experience, unanimously and emphatically report a marked increase in
this disorder in recent years. Regarding autism, a recent survey
mandated by the California state legislature found an increase of 273
percent in California in the past eleven years13.
Reports from education departments of several states and reports to the
U.S. Congress on the rapidly increasing needs of classrooms for
developmentally delayed children reflect comparable changes throughout
the nation14.
At
present primary suspicion for this epidemic of neurobehavioral disorders
rests with the MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) vaccine. Although scientific
evidence has not yet reached the standards of scientific proof, one
pioneer researcher in this area, Dr. Vijendra Singh with the Department
of Pharmacology, University of Michigan, has published the report of a
study in which he found that a large majority of autistic children
tested had antibodies to brain tissue in the form of antibodies to
myelin basic protein. He also found a strong correlation between myelin
basic protein antibodies and antibodies to measles (almost all of the
children had been immunized with the MMR vaccine, and none had had these
diseases)15.
This
study tends to confirm the results of a similar study published in The
Lancet in l998 by Dr. Andrew Wakefield and coworkers of the Royal Free
Hospital in London, indicating a possible link between MMR vaccination
and Crohn's disease of the bowel and autism16.
If
the MMR vaccine were causing an autoimmune reaction involving the brains
of autistic children, what would be the mechanism? Although research in
this area is in its infancy, we do know some things. Both the measles
and mumps fractions of the MMR vaccine are cultured in chick embryo
tissue. As purely genetic material, viruses are highly susceptible to
the process of "jumping genes," in which they may incorporate
genetic material from tissue in which they are cultured17.
Furthermore, protein sequences in the measles virus have been found to
have similarities to those found in brain tissues18.
As a result, once this foreign genetic material is introduced into the
child, it may set in motion an immunologic battleground, a process,
which the work of Dr. Singh would tend to confirm.
Stealth
Virus
A similar process may have taken place with the
oral (Sabin) polio vaccine, which is cultured in monkey kidney tissue.
Years ago Dr. John Martin, then serving as director of the viral
oncology branch within the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, found
foreign DNA in contemporary polio vaccines. He later learned that a
simian (monkey) cytomegalic virus had been found in all of the eleven
African green monkeys imported for production of the polio vaccine19.
After
leaving the FDA Dr. Martin took a position as professor of pathology
with the University of Southern California. There he tested blood
samples from patients with chronic fatigue syndrome, autism and other
nervous system disorders. This work led to his discovery of unique
cell-destroying viruses that were not recognized by the immune system.
Termed "stealth viruses," some of which he thought had clearly
originated from the simian cytomegalic virus, these viruses were missing
specific genes, which, if expressed, would induce immune responses from
the host20,
21. It should be admitted that this work is preliminary. No
definitive conclusions can be drawn from it, but the need for further
intensive investigation should be apparent.
Overdue
in the opinion of many, on June l7, l999 US government officials voted
to withdraw their recommendation for the use of the live oral polio
vaccine and to recommend exclusive use of the inactive (Salk) polio
vaccine, because the former has been the only remaining source of polio
cases, though rare, in the USA since l979.
In
summary, it is possible that either the MMR or the oral polio vaccines,
by mechanisms described above, may induce a process of encephalitis or
brain inflammation, which may be highly prevalent but as yet rarely
recognized for its true nature.
Genetic Implications of
"Live Virus" Vaccines
In a letter-to-the-Editor of Science magazine in
October l967, Joshua Lederberg, Department of Genetics, Stanford
University School of Medicine, warned about live-virus vaccines:
"In
point of fact, we (are practicing) biological engineering on a rather
large scale by use of live viruses in mass immunization campaigns
Crude
virus preparations, such as some in common use at the present time,
are also vulnerable to frightful mishaps of contamination and
misidentification.22"
With
this sobering warning, made over 3 decades ago, it may sadly prove to be
prophetic for what we are seeing today.
Damage May Yet Escalate
As another concept, it is highly pertinent that
many of today's children are second-generation vaccines; that is, they
are born to mothers previously vaccinated with the measles, mumps,
and/or rubella vaccines. It is possible that the reaction rates in the
second-generation vaccines may be happening on a much large scale due to
previous sensitization of mothers from their vaccines, this
sensitization being transmitted in turn to the fetus during pregnancy 23.
If this process is taking place, something we cannot know until
appropriate research is done, there predictably will be additional
increases in autism beyond that already taking place, should the process
be continued into yet another, a third generation.
Time
may prove that vaccine programs went awry when they deviated from the
most basic of all medical ethics, the right of parents to accept or
reject vaccines for their children. Freedom-of-choice provides a system
of checks and balances now lacking. At the very least, this would
provide the parents the power to compel better safety screening of
vaccines. The remedy? Parents should be allowed the right of informed
consent, or the right to accept or reject vaccines for their children
based on full and uncensored disclosure of pros and cons.
Today
we have a system in which vaccine production by the pharmaceutical
companies is largely self-regulated. Naturally these companies are
interested in profits from their products which, in itself, is not
wrong. However, when arbitrary decisions in the mandating of vaccines
are made by government bureaucracies, who are highly partisan to the
pharmaceutical companies, with no recourse open to parents, we have all
the potential ingredients for a tragedy of historical proportions.
Conclusion
In closing, it may be appropriate to cite an item
which, though seemingly small in itself, may be indicative of the
problems with which we are faced. In January l993 a scientific journal
published the results of a study of 89 children with adverse clinical
reactions following administrations of various combinations of vaccines 24.
Detailed case histories were taken and blood tests were done to examine
various parameters of cellular and humoral immunity. It was found that
children with adverse reactions had marked increases in abnormal blood
parameters as compared with children who had had no reactions.
The
first study of its kind as far as we are aware, perhaps the most
striking and significant feature of the report is not the results of the
tests, which might have been anticipated, so much as the fact that it
came from a foreign country, Czechoslovakia. American science has been
foremost in the development and promotion of vaccines. That it should be
laggard in basic safety testing, of which this study may represent one
of the modest beginnings, is a sad reflection on the American scientific
community. Do we not have a right to expect better?
Woodlands Healing Research Center |
Family, Environmental &
Preventive Medicine |
5724 Clymer Rd. Quakertown, PA
18951 |
215-536-1890 800-517-9545 |
Fax 215-529-9034 Email: foffice@woodmed.com |
Web Page- http://www.woodmed.com
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1Dublin,
L. Health Progress, l935-l945, New York: Metropolitan Life Insurance
Company, l948, Page l2.
2Diodati, CJM,
Immunization: History, Ethics Law an Health, Integral Aspects
Incorporated, Windsor, Ontario, l999, pp. 104-l06.
3In
the text,Vaccination, l00 Years of Orthodox Research Shows that Vaccines
Represent a Medical Assault on the Immune System, by Vera Scheibner,
Ph.D.,l993, available from New Atlantean Press, PO Box 9638-925, Santa Fe,
NM 87504, pp. 33-46. (The Swedish experience with pertussis exemplifies
the relative mildness of this disease today in Western nations compared
with earlier times. In l979 Sweden banned the pertussis vaccine because of
a return of the disease in fully vaccinated children and also because of
unacceptable side effects, including brain damage. In spite of this ban,
which remains in effect today, Sweden has one of the lowest infant
mortality rates in the world. Pertussis remains mildly endemic in Sweden,
but complications remain uncommon and virtually unchanged since l979.
4Stratton,
KR, CJ Howe, and RB Johnston, Jr., Editors, Adverse Events Associated
with Childhood Vaccines; Evidence Bearing on Causality, Institute of
Medicine, National Academy Press, Washington, DC, l994, pp. 2ll-236.
5Buttram, HE,
The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act: A Critique, The Townsend
Letter for Doctors and Patients, Oct. l998, pp. 66-68.
6Incao, Philip,
Supporting children's health,, Alternative Medicine Digest, Issue l9,
pp. 54-59.
7One survey
showed a 46% increase in death rate nationwide from asthma between l977
an l99l (Phildelphia Inquirer, December 8, l994, A22). In some areas,
the incidence of asthma has increased 200% in the past 20 years (The
Human Ecologist (National HEAL), fall l992, (55):6.
8Shaneen, SO et
al, Measles and atopy in Guinea-Bissau, Lancet, Vol 347, June l9, l996,
pp. l792-l796.
9Odent, MR,
Pertussis vaccination and asthma: is there a link? J Am Med Ass'n,, Vol
27l, l994, pp. 229-23l
10Alm, JS et al,
Atopy in children of families with an anthroposophic lifestyle, Lancet,
Vol 353, May l, l999, pp. l485-l488.
11Kemp, T et al,
Is infant immunization a risk factor for childhood asthma or allergy?
Epidemiology, Vol 8(6), Nov. l997:pp. 678-680.
12Lisa Jennings,
Increasing Ritalin doses in school children questioned, The
Intelligencer (newspaper, Doylestown, PA), September 2l, l998, pp.
Dl-D2.
13Changes in the
Population of Persons with Autism and Pervasive Developmental Disorders
in California's Developmental Services System: l987 through l998, a
Report to the Legislature, March l, l999, Department of Developmental
Services, l600 North Street, Room 240, Sacramento, CA 958l4.
14Assessment,
Evaluation and Support Unit, Special Education Division, California
Department of Education.
Total Enrollment and Percent of Pupils with
Disabilities by Federal office of Special Education Programs, New Jersey
State Department of Education.
Illinois State Board of Education Report
(8/20/98). Rhode Island Department of Elementary and Secondary
Education, annual Statistical Reports.
Sixteenth through Twentieth Annual Reports to
Congress on the implementation of The Individuals with Disabilities
Education Act,
<http://www.ed.gov/offices/OSERS/OSEP/OSEP94-98AnlRpt/>
15Singh, V &
Yang, V. Serological association of measles virus and human herpes
virus-6 with brain autoantibodies in autism, Clinical Immunology and
Immunopathology, Vol 88(l):l998, pp. l05-l08.
16Wakefield, AJ
et al, Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and
pervasive developmental disorder in children, The Lancet, Vol 35l, Feb.
29, l998, pp. 637-64l.
17Kumar, S &
LK Miller, Effects of serial passage of Autographa California nuclear
poly hedrosis virus in cell culture, Virus Reseach, Vol 7, l987: pp.
335-349.
18Jahnke, U et
al, Sequence homology between certain viral proteins and proteins
related to encephalomyelitis and neuritis, Science, Vol 29, July l9,
l985, pp. 242-284.
19Horowitz,
Leonard, DMD, MA, MPH, Emerging Viruses, AIDS and Ebola, tetrahedron
Publishing Group, Rockport, MA, l997, pp. 488-493.
20Martin, WJ et
al, African green monkey origin of the atypical cytopathic "stealth
virus" isolated from a patient with chronic fatigue syndrome,
Clinical and Diagnostic Virology,Vol 4, l994, pp. 93-l03.
21Martin, WJ et
al, Stealth virus epidemic in Mohave Valley, I: Initial report of virus
isolation, Pathobiology, Vol 65(l), l997, pp.35l-356.
22Lederberg,
Joshua, Letter-to-the-Editor, Science, Oct. 20, l967, p. 3l3.
23Gupta S et al,
Dysregulate immune system in children with autism, beneficial effects of
intravenous globulin on autistic features, J of Autism and Developmental
Disorders, Vol 26(4);l996, pp. 439-452. (In this article on page 450 it
is stated, "We theorize that the high titers of rubella antibody
presented
in mothers of children with autism would be transplacentally transferred
and may persist for a prolonged period in the child. When such a child
gets MMR immunization, rubella antigen may complex with preexisting
antibodies, and such complexes might play a role in pathogenesis of
autistic features.")
24Immunologic
findings in children with abnormal reactions after vaccination,
Czechoslovakia Pediatrics, Vol 48(l), January, l993, pp. 9-l2.
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