Tag: vaccines

Is turnabout not fair play?

Setting aside the absurd and provably unscientific attempt of many vaccine advocates to blame whooping cough deaths on vaccine critics, it is informative to see the difference in the way the media covers the death of a child killed by an infectious disease versus the way it covers the death of a child killed by a reaction to a vaccine:

On March 9, 2009, four-week-old Dana McCaffery’s heart stopped after whooping cough left her tiny lungs unable to breathe…. Little did they know then that Dana’s death from whooping cough, and the media coverage that followed, came to represent a very inconvenient truth to the anti-vaccination lobby – and thus began an extraordinary campaign against this grieving family.

The McCafferys are today breaking their silence on the cyber bullying,the anonymous letters and the cruelty of some members of the anti-vaccination movement.

The couple has been accused of being on the payroll of drug companies; they have had their daughter’s death questioned and mocked; they have even been told to “harden the f . . . up” by an opponent of vaccination.

“The venom directed at us has just been torture and it’s been frightening, abhorrent and insensitive in the extreme,” says Toni, who has not had the strength to talk about this until now.

First, let’s do what the Australian Telegraph article failed to do and address the facts.  The child’s death from whooping cough was not likely the result of anti-vaccination campaigns or unvaccinated children.  The increased incidence of whooping cough in the United States, and therefore the death of Dana McCaffery, is primarily due to the reduced effectiveness of the current pertussis DTaP vaccine, which replaced the more effective, but less safe DTP vaccine in the 1990s.

As evidence, I again cite Science magazine to prove that the scientists, unlike the vaccine advocates, believe that it is the vaccines and not the anti-vaccination campaign that is responsible for what is described as “the return of the disease”.

Whooping cough, or pertussis, has exploded in the United States in recent years. A new study confirms what scientists have suspected for some time: The return of the disease is caused by the introduction of new, safer vaccines 2 decades ago. Although they have far fewer side effects, the new shots don’t offer long-lived protection the way older vaccines do.

Pertussis bacteria colonize the upper airways, causing a severe cough and shortness of breath that can be fatal in babies. The disease seemed to have mostly disappeared from the United States by the late 1970s—in fact, scientists believe, it continued to spread, undiagnosed, among adults—but over the past 2 decades the disease has bounced back with a vengeance, with strong outbreaks among school-aged children in 2010 and last year, when the United States reported 40,000 cases. Many European countries have also seen increases.

Researchers have long suspected that new vaccines might have something to do with it….  Physicians at Kaiser Permanente of Northern California compared the protective effects of these vaccines with the old ones when included in a four-dose series of shots called DTP (for diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis), given to children before the age of 2. They studied children born between 1994 and 1999, years in which Kaiser Permanente gradually introduced the new vaccines. As a result, some children had received only the old-style shots, some only the new ones, and some a mixture of both. Of the 1037 children included in the main part of the study, 138 got pertussis during a massive epidemic in California in 2010 to 2011.

Children who had received only the acellular vaccine were more than 5.6 times more likely to get sick than those who received the old, whole-cell vaccine, the team will report next month in Pediatrics. Those receiving one or more of each type had an intermediate risk.

The results confirm other recent research. In August, a study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association found that acellular vaccine-vaccinated children in Australia were six times more likely to get sick than those receiving the old vaccine. And a study of another California population, published online in March by Clinical Infectious Diseases, showed an eightfold increased risk of illness associated with the new vaccine.

“We’re now finding out that the acellular vaccine’s doesn’t offer protection for as long,” says the first author of the new study, pediatrician Nicola Klein. “It does work well in the short term. But there was definitely a tradeoff in phasing out the whole-cell vaccine.”

Now, it is certainly impolitic to criticize, even by implication, grieving parents.  But that impolity and lack of respect for parental grief has been an aspect of the vaccine debate for years thanks to the vaccine advocates viciously attacking parents who have lost children to vaccine reactions.  Moreover, the media’s dishonest reaction to the McCaffery child’s death, including the linked Telegraph article, demonstrates that the vaccine critics were entirely correct to express their doubts about the child’s death and attempt to get more detailed information on it.

As the head of the Australian Vaccination Network stated: “To my mind, while an entire community of conscientious objectors
were being victimised by the government and the media and being blamed
for the death of a child who was too young to be vaccinated, I had every
right to ask for this information.”

The complaints of the mother, “they were just tearing apart everything we had just witnessed and lived through”, are totally misplaced.  She lost her right to private grief the moment that she permitted her child’s death to be used as pro-vaccine attack propaganda.

Every family, the McCafferys included, have the right to private grief so long as their grief remains private.  It does not have a right to use their grief as propaganda without expecting skepticism and criticism, much less to hide behind the emotional rhetoric of their child’s death to avoid legitimate, science-based criticism of their spurious attacks on vaccine skeptics.

And it is the height of hypocrisy for pro-vaccine advocates to object to the use of their very arguments against parents actively campaigning for vaccines:

Like the McCafferys, he went public to raise awareness about vaccination. In 2010 he did three television interviews and he left his phone number with each network for other parents to get in touch.  Soon after, he received a call from a woman who claimed she was from the AVN. He does not recall her name.

She accused him of doing the community a disservice, saying he should not be promoting immunisation.

“Then she went on saying my son was obviously weak and the weakest of the herd are not meant to survive, I should just get over it,” he says. Kokegei was gobsmacked. “I didn’t think someone could be that cold, to belittle what happened to my son in such a heartless way,” he says.

And yet, is this not the very argument that pro-vaccine arguments implicitly make when they argue that it is worth permitting some children to die in the interest of herd immunity?  For every sob story the vaccine advocates have to offer, the anti-vaccine advocates can cite a dozen that are equally rhetorically effective.  And they will never be won over, because all the statistical studies in the world will never convince a parent who has seen, with his own eyes, an infant scream and slump unconscious in immediate reaction to a vaccine injection.

Don’t blame Jenny McCarthy

It’s not the unvaccinated causing the increase in the incidence of whooping cough, it’s the vaccines:

Whooping cough, or pertussis, has exploded in the United States in
recent years. A new study confirms what scientists have suspected for
some time: The
return of the disease is caused by the introduction of new, safer
vaccines 2 decades ago. Although they have far fewer side effects, the
new shots don’t
offer long-lived protection the way older vaccines do….

Researchers have long suspected that new vaccines might have something
to do with it. Until the 1990s, children routinely received a so-called
whole-cell
vaccine, made from pertussis bacteria, Bordetella pertussis,
that were killed by exposure to formalin or other chemicals. These
vaccines were known to contain a toxin that can provoke powerful
side effects. Most vaccinated infants had fever and severe pain at the
injection site,
sometimes accompanied by febrile seizures or fainting fits in which
the infant turned pale, unresponsive, and “floppy.” 

Strange that while researchers “have long suspected” the new vaccines, the vaccine advocates writing in the media have constantly pointed at Hollywood actresses and vaccine skeptics.

Hair of the dog?

In which a vaccine for autism is posited:

A first-ever vaccine created by University of Guelph researchers for gut
bacteria common in autistic children may also help control some autism
symptoms. The groundbreaking study by Brittany Pequegnat and Guelph chemistry professor Mario Monteiro appears this month in the journal Vaccine.

They developed a carbohydrate-based vaccine against the gut bug Clostridium bolteae. C. bolteae is known to play a role in gastrointestinal disorders, and it often shows up in higher numbers in the GI tracts of autistic children than in those of healthy kids.

More than 90 per cent of children with autism spectrum disorders suffer from chronic, severe gastrointestinal symptoms. Of those, about 75 per cent suffer from diarrhea, according to current literature.

Thus raising the obvious question, how does C. bolteae manage to inordinately get itself into the intestinal tracts of autistic children?  It’s customary, at this point, to ritually denounce Andrew Wakefield and Jenny McCarthy. But ask yourself this question: if as much as 50 percent of the studies published in academic science are, to put it kindly, flawed, what are the chances that the oft-cited surveys funded by the vaccine manufacturers, (who, you will recall, are one of the very few industries that are not legally responsible for their products), are not?

To reiterate, I am not a “vaccine denier”.  Based on past discussions, I appear to understand the science and financial issues involved considerably better than most vaccine enthusiasts, including some medical doctors. I even got a tetanus vaccination myself only a few years ago. However, to understand that some vaccines are appropriate in some situations is very different than blithely assuming that all vaccinations are safe and appropriate in all circumstances.

It certainly fits with the break it and charge to fix it model that is presently so popular in the big business of modern medicine.

Vaccine “safety” and the swine flu vaccine

I find it tragically unsurprising how even with more than 800 confirmed cases of something as rare as teenage narcolepsy staring them in the face, the vaccine providers are still staunchly holding to their usual position of “no causal link”:

Emelie is one of around 800 children in Sweden and elsewhere in Europe who developed narcolepsy, an incurable sleep disorder, after being immunised with the Pandemrix H1N1 swine flu vaccine made by British drug maker GlaxoSmithKline in 2009.

Finland, Norway, Ireland and France have seen spikes in narcolepsy cases, too, and people familiar with the results of a soon-to-be-published study in Britain have told Reuters it will show a similar pattern in children there.

Their fate, coping with an illness that all but destroys normal life, is developing into what the health official who coordinated Sweden’s vaccination campaign calls a “medical tragedy” that will demand rising scientific and medical attention.

Europe’s drugs regulator has ruled Pandemrix should no longer be used in people aged under 20. The chief medical officer at GSK’s vaccines division, Norman Begg, says his firm views the issue extremely seriously and is “absolutely committed to getting to the bottom of this”, but adds there is not yet enough data or evidence to suggest a causal link.

Perhaps, as supposed to be the case with the increase in autism, what we’re seeing here is nothing more than a sudden increase in the parental awareness of narcolepsy…. What one always has to keep in mind when hearing the pro-vaccine parrots squawking “no causal link, no causal link” is that the standard they use for a causal link would eliminate the link between “being shot in the head” and “death” in the vast majority of lethal shootings.

In most cases, unless someone keels over dead after receiving a vaccination while still in the doctor’s office, the vaccine propagandists will claim that there is no link between the administration of the vaccine and the resultant harm that has been suffered by the individual receiving it.  Of course, having personally witnessed an individual collapse unconsciousness within two seconds of receiving a vaccine and hearing the doctor exclaim “oh, no”, I tend to have a considerably more skeptical outlook concerning the purported safety of vaccines and the vaccine schedule than the average individual.

The undeniable fact of the matter is that vaccines are not entirely safe, nor as they as safe as the vaccine advocates claim they are.  The precise degree to which they are unsafe is completely unknown, by either side, because no real and replicable scientific experiments have been performed concerning the current U.S. vaccine schedule.

Furthermore, we also know for an absolute fact that the vaccine manufacturers cherry-pick their statistical studies purporting to demonstrate the safety of the products they are selling.  The only rational position one can take concerning the safety of vaccines is a cautiously skeptical one, particularly in light of the legal immunity granted to those who manufacture, sell, and administer them.

To be clear, I am not against all vaccines.  I even received a tetanus shot when my kneecap was torn open on the soccer field a few years ago.  But it is also perfectly clear to me that not all vaccines are equally safe, or equally necessary.

The gun, she smokes

One of the main reasons I am a vaccine skeptic is that the organizations which vaccine advocates repeatedly cite in their attempt to claim vaccine safety are caught concealing information that indicates the opposite:

 Documentation received from the National Coalition of
Organized Women (NCOW) states that between 2009 and 2010 the
mercury-laden combined flu vaccinations have increased Vaccine Adverse
Events Reporting Systems (VAERS) fetal death reports by 4,250 percent in
pregnant women. Eileen Dannemann, NCOW’s director, made abundantly
clear that despite these figures being known to the Centers for Disease
Control (CDC), the multiple-strain, inactivated flu vaccine containing
mercury (Thimerosal) has once again been recommended to pregnant women
as a safe vaccination this season….

Despite evidence that the CDC knew of the 4,250 percent increase in
fetal death reports in 2009/2010, in order to ensure the continuance of
the vaccine program for pregnant women, the CDC published a study in
AJOG authored by Dr. Pedro Moro of the CDC in the fall of 2010. The
study articulated that there were only 23 miscarriages caused by the
single flu vaccine in 19 years between 1990 – 2009, an average of 1.2
miscarriages per year. This study formed the basis of a CDC worldwide
publicity campaign that the flu shot was safe for pregnant women by
willfully and strategically excluding the 2009 pandemic data, which was
available to them.

For those who blithely argue that all vaccines are developed scientifically and therefore safe – a fascinating approach from a logical perspective – and insist that the CDC should be considered more reliable than other government regulatory agencies such as the BEA or the SEC, I wonder how they can defend the notion that the CDC data is trustworthy when it is confirmed that the organization is making knowingly false statements concerning the safety of vaccines known to cause adverse effects.

Mandatory guinea pigs

The AMA contemplates “compulsory involvement in vaccine studies“.  From a paper entitled “Should Participation in Vaccine Clinical Trials be Mandated?”

“If progression of promising vaccines from the lab to the clinic is to remain unaffected and financial inducement is an ethically unacceptable solution to the recruitment shortage, other strategies need to be considered. Compulsory involvement in vaccine studies is one alternative solution that is not as outlandish as it might seem on first consideration. Many societies already mandate that citizens undertake activities for the good of society; in several European countries registration for organ-donation has switched from “opt-in” (the current U.S. system) to “opt out” systems (in which those who do not specifically register as non-donors are presumed to consent to donation, and most societies expect citizens to undertake jury service when called upon.”

It goes without saying that this is monstrous.  But the fascinating thing here should be the response of those vaccine advocates who have repeatedly argued that the only reason there are no serious double-blind studies of any approved vaccine series is that it would be unethical to use people in such scientific experiments because they would not know if they had received placebos or the actual vaccines.  I’m curious to see if they will suddenly pivot and start arguing that while giving placebos – which are by definition harmless in themselves – is unethical, forcibly giving test vaccines to unwitting human lab rats is perfectly acceptable.

We already know they’re morally and logically bankrupt, I’m mostly interested in learning how far down into the abyss they are willing to plunge.

Watch what they do

And not what they tell you to do.  It’s intriguing to see that most health-care workers refuse to get the vaccinations they so religiously administer to everyone else.

In August, B.C. became the first jurisdiction in Canada to legislate
mandatory flu shots for doctors, nurses and any other healthcare worker
who may come into contact with patients. In previous years, the rate of
inoculation for the province’s health-care workers had been below 50%,
one of the lowest in Canada….

In a November op-ed, University of Toronto bioethics researcher Ross
Upshur maintained that eschewing a flu shot fundamentally violates the
credo of “do no harm.” If healthcare workers “are vectors of disease for
hospitalized patients, they are putting patients at risk for increased
harm,” he said.

It is “disheartening” to see how few Canadian professionals are
getting the flu shot, even if they work with children and the elderly,
said Maher El-Masri, a nursing professor at the University of Windsor.
“I think we have a responsibility to protect our patients.”

It would be fascinating, and I suspect extremely informative, to know if health-care workers are similarly disinclined to vaccinate their own children according the current recommended vaccine schedule.

Cancer-free sterility

On the plus side, with Gardasil, young women are theoretically protected from a few of the many strains of HPV, which can, but usually doesn’t, result in cervical cancer.  On the con side, it appears that it can render teenage girls sterile.  How fortunate for the manufacturers that Congress has rendered them immune to civil liability for their defective products.

The BMJ has published the case report of a healthy 16-year-old
Australian girl whose womanhood appears to have been stolen by Gardasil
vaccinations. She has been thrust into full-fledged menopause, her
ovaries irrevocably shut down, before becoming a woman. The
authors, Deirdre Therese Little and Harvey Rodrick Grenville Ward,
draw direct attention to the fact that, though the girl has been
thoroughly examined and tested, there is no known explanation other than
the series of three Gardasil vaccinations she had.

 The potentially damning information is here:

 “It is not known whether this event of premature ovarian failure is
linked to the quadrivalent  HPV vaccine. More detailed information
concerning rat ovarian hist-ology and ongoing fecundity post-HPV
vaccination was sought from the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA). Although the TGA’s Australian Public Assessment Report for Human
Papillomavirus Quadrivalent Vaccine, February 2011, does report on the
histology of vaccinated rat testes and epididymides, no histological
report has been available for vaccinated rat ovaries.”

Translation: Neither Merck nor the TGA ever tested for ovary-related problems, in rats or in humans.  This is why the “vaccines are safe” arguments are so inherently vacuous.  The various studies purporting to “prove” their safety do absolutely nothing of the kind, most of them aren’t even relevant to the primary risk factors.  It is certainly too soon to say that Gardasil sterilizes girls, but on the other hand, it is also too soon to assert that it doesn’t.  If it is true that Gardasil causes premature ovarian failure, this is likely to be the biggest medical scandal since thalidomide was shown to be a teratogen.

The total safety of vaccines

Of course, nothing like this unfortunate little incident of gene-swapping viruses could ever possibly occur with human vaccines. Because scientists have performed all sorts of scientific experimentsstatistical reviews and so they can assure you that no vaccine has ever been scientifically proven to harm anyone ever.

Three vaccines used to prevent respiratory disease in chickens have swapped genes, producing two lethal new strains that have killed tens of thousands of fowl across two states in Australia, scientists reported on Friday. The creation of the deadly new variant was only possible because the vaccines contained live viruses, even though they were weakened forms, said Joanne Devlin, lead author of the paper published in the journal Science….

The viruses emerged in 2008, a year after Australia started using a European vaccine along with two very similar Australian vaccines to fight acute respiratory disease in poultry. The illness causes coughing, sneezing and breathing difficulties in birds, normally killing 5 percent of them. The two new strains, however, were far more harmful, and since they were created have killed up to 17 percent of chicken flocks across Victoria and New South Wales, the two main chicken rearing states in Australia.

Of course, if these Australian scientists utilized the system presently used by the U.S. vaccine reporting system, their reports would show that twelve chickens had died for reasons that were inexplicable, but definitely had absolutely nothing to do with the vaccines they received the previous day.

Scientists claim vaccine fraud at Merck

It appears there may still be a few legitimate scientists working in the deeply corrupt vaccine industry:

This is the story of the MMR vaccine and two Merck scientists who filed a lawsuit in 2010 over Merck’s efforts to allegedly “defraud the United States through Merck’s ongoing scheme to sell the government a mumps vaccine that is mislabeled, misbranded, adulterated and falsely certified as having an efficacy rate that is significantly higher than it actually is.” Merck allegedly did this from 2000 onwards in order to maintain its exclusive license to sell the MMR vaccine and keep its monopoly of the US market….

In the complaint, the scientists outline in great detail exactly how Merck manipulated the efficacy results in order to be able to say they had a 95% effective vaccine so that they could meet the fairytale goal of vaccine-induced “herd immunity by 2010.” Well, it turns out that the vaccine could not meet the goal that CDC projected to eradicate mumps by 2010, BECAUSE the vaccine, in its current state cannot reliably confer immunity, and is in fact a dilute version of what it once was when Maurice Hilleman invented it using the virus of his five year old daughter. The same viral mumps strain has been in use in every mumps or MMR vaccine Merck has made since 1967. In order to make the live vaccine virus non-infective the virus has to be “passaged” through different cells or animals. In that passaging, mutations take place and have altered the antigenicity, or the antibody-stimulating capacity of the virus. When testing was performed to show the efficacy (neutralizing antibody provoking potential) of the forty-year-old virus strain, for use in the newer combination mumps vaccines, Merck’s scientists could not produce a 95% efficacy rate….

If what these scientists claim is true, the net result of Merck’s questionable activity was epidemics and outbreaks. It is known that the mumps component of all MMR vaccines from the mid 1990’s has had a very low efficacy, estimated at 69% (Harling 05). The outbreaks started in UK and Europe in 1998. USA’s outbreaks began in 2006.

These mumps outbreaks have already been proven NOT to be the result of failure to vaccinate, but vaccination failure … and now it looks to all be a result of Merck’s cooked books, used in order to maintain a commercial monopoly to generate increased revenue from increasing numbers of boosters.

Now isn’t this interesting? As I have long suspected, the science is not on the side of the vaccine manufacturers even though the scientists are well-paid to ensure that they are. Once more we see the utility of observation and pattern recognition versus published professional science, which due to its increasing corruption, is intrinsically unreliable. This is why the constant appeals to various statistical studies and the occasional experiment in defense of vaccine safety are logically invalid; absolutely none of it can be trusted.

And don’t fall for the defensive and deceptive claims of the vaccine apologists that the known corruption in their limited field of science means that all other fields are necessarily corrupted to the same extent. While the potential for the same problem certainly exists in other fields, few of them are as observably and demonstrably as corrupt as vaccine industry science.

Can anyone doubt that if this case is dismissed for some reason, the same people who claimed the Italian court’s finding that an MMR vaccine caused a case of autism were immaterial will loudly proclaim how it proves that Merck’s vaccines are safe? Or that even if the scientists’ case is confirmed, that those who have loudly accused the unvaccinated for causing the various outbreaks since 1998 will fail to admit they were wrong and point their fingers at the faulty vaccine?