Immunizations Not All They Are Cracked Up To Be

GROWING BODY OF SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE SUGGESTS THAT
VACCINES MAY have inadvertently done more than just suppress infectious
childhood diseases.

Vaccine critics point out that the increase in autoimmune and neurological
disorders in the past three decades in industrialized countries coincides
with the addition of new vaccines to the childhood vaccination schedule as
well as rapidly increasing vaccination rates.

Between 1964 and 1992, the U.S. added six new vaccines to the mandatory
vaccination schedule, including five doses of live virus polio; two doses
of MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella); four doses of Hib (haemophilus
influenzae type b, which is a type of meningitis); and three doses of
hepatitis B vaccine, while more strictly enforcing existing laws mandating
five doses of DPT (diphtheria, pertussis - also known as whooping cough -
and tetanus). Vaccination coveraghepatitis B, and Hib vaccines.

Asthma is an autoimmune disorder, an allergic condition that tops the list
of chronic respiratory diseases found in children in Western societies
today. A 1997 study published in Science reported that “the prevalence of
asthma in westernized societies has risen steadily this century, doubling
in the last 20 years. Asthma now affects one child in seven in Great
Britain, and in the United States it causes one-third of pediatric
emergency room visits.” Another study found that between 1964 and 1980,
asthma in children aged six to 11 years increased 50 per cent. In 1995, the
CDC reported that, between 1982 and 1992, asthma increased 52 per cent for
persons between the ages of five and 34 years old, and deaths from asthma
increased 42 per cent.

The 1978 Canada Health Survey found that only 2.3 per cent of Canadians 15
years and over reported having asthma. By 1991, its prevalence was at 6 per
cent. More than 1.5 million Canadians of all ages suffer from asthma.

Even more worrisome, however, are the findings of a large survey of
Canadian school children in 1995-96 that found a 13 per cent prevalence of
asthma. From the early 1970s to the late 1980s, the number of Canadian
patients under 35 years discharged from hospital with a diagnosis of asthma
tripled.

The greatest increase has been in children under four years of age. As in
the U.S., asthma deaths in Canada have climbed along with its increased
prevalence.

Asthma’s economic burden is formidable. According to Canada’s 1994 National
Population Health Survey, the long-term disability costs associated with
asthma, emphysema, and chronic bronchitis in 1993 totalled $1.8 billion,
without counting costs associated with treating asthma in children under 11
years old. In the U.S., the total cost of illness related to asthma in 1990
was estimated at $6.2 billion.

Although public health officials attribute the recorded increases in asthma
to better case diagnoses, more air pollution indoors and outdoors, and
smoking, some scientists find evidence that vaccination and lack of
contagious infectious diseases in early childhood may later encourage the
development of asthma and other allergic conditions.

In 1996, the British medical journal, The Lancet, published Danish and
British findings concerning child health, lung function, and allergy.
Noting that the incidence of early childhood diseases in Britain has fallen
this century while those of allergic diseases such as asthma, hay fever,
and eczema rose sharply, the researchers hypothesized that certain
childhood infections, specifically measles, may protect against allergy.

They compared evidence of atopy (allergy) in two groups of young adults,
aged 14 to 21, in Guinea-Bissau, West Africa. One group had recovered from
measles during a 1979 epidemic (before the measles vaccine was introduced);
the other did not get measles as children and were later vaccinated.

The researchers confirmed their hypothesis: About 26 per cent of the
vaccinated young adults had allergic conditions, twice the rate of those
who had recovered from measles. After adjusting for breast-feeding and
other variables, they concluded that their findings may indicate that
“measles infection prevents allergic sensitization.” Because this was the
first population-based study to relate reduced allergies to a specific
childhood viral infection, they urged further studies in developing
countries, where childhood diseases are still widespread due to low
vaccination rates.

Vaccine promoters point out that measles complications kill one million
children annually, mostly in underdeveloped countries. In Guinea-Bissau’s
1979 measles epidemic, the case-fatality rate in children under 3 was 25
per cent: it is better to have asthma for the rest of your life that die
from measles.

Mass vaccination critics counter that West Africa’s health and living
conditions, which could account for the high death rate, don’t apply to
Europe and North America, where toddlers who get measles usually recover
without complications. Why not eliminate poverty, malnutrition, poor
sanitation, and substandard medical care in developing countries so that
measles-related death rates come down, as in industrialized countries even
before vaccination?

Another study, this time comparing the prevalence of asthma and other
allergic disorders in child populations throughout the world, appeared in
The Lancet in 1998. The authors found that the wealthier, more developed
countries in Western Europe and North America and Australia and New Zealand
had higher incidences of asthma than did the poorer countries in Eastern
Europe, Asia, and Africa.

The authors of the 1997 Science article “Asthma: An Epidemic in the Absence
of Infection?” tentatively answered yes to their own question, concluding
that “childhood infections may, therefore, paradoxically protect against
asthma.” In a 1997 issue of Epidemiology, New Zealand researchers
hypothesized that “it is theoretically possible that immunization may
contribute to the development of allergic disease.” Of 1,265 New Zealanders
born in 1977, 23 received no childhood vaccinations, and none suffered
childhood asthma. Among the 1,242 who got polio and DPT shots, 23 per cent
later had episodes of asthma, 23 per cent had asthma consultations, and 30
per cent had consultations for other allergic illness. Their conclusion
was, “The findings presented here are consistent with the hypothesis that
some component of infant immunization may increase the risk of developing
asthma in childhood.” 


A Tripling of Diabetes

DIABETES, A CHRONIC AUTOIMMUNE DISORDER THAT DISRUPTS THE blood’s glucose
levels, afflicts some 125 million people worldwide. That number is expected
to double by 2025.

In the U.S., where 600,000 new cases are diagnosed every year, the number
of diabetics has increased a record threefold since 1958, to nearly 16
million, and millions more may unknowingly have it. Now the fourth leading
cause of death in the U.S., diabetes can cause blindness, kidney failure,
stroke, and heart disease and lead to amputations. In 1992, the U.S. 
National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases estimated
that diabetes cost the U.S. $45 billion for medical treatment plus $47
billion for lost work time, disability payments, and premature death. In
Canada, the Laboratory Centre for Disease Control found that the 1993 cost
burden of diabetes exceeded $1 billion, including $565 million in drug,
physician, and hospital costs and $559 million in mortality-related costs.

As early as 1949, the medical literature reported that some children
injected with the pertussis vaccine had reduced blood glucose levels. The
pertussis vaccine can cause diabetes in mice. In recent decades, scientists
have suggested that viral infections may be a co-factor in causing
diabetes. Because both rubella and mumps infections have been associated
with juvenile diabetes, the introduction of the live virus vaccines for
measles, mumps, and rubella in the 1960s and 1970s also raised questions
about whether live vaccine virus could be a contributing co-factor to the
onset of diabetes.

In the May 24, 1996, New Zealand Medical Journal, J. Barthelow Classen, MD,
a former researcher at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the
founder and CEO of Classen Immunotherapies in Baltimore, reported that
juvenile diabetes increased 60 per cent following a massive hepatitis B
vaccination campaign for babies six weeks or older in New Zealand from 1988
to 1991. In the October 22, 1997, Infectious Diseases in Clinical Practice,
Classen showed that Finland’s incidence of diabetes increased 147 per cent
in children under five after three new vaccines were introduced in the
1970s, and that diabetes increased 40 per cent in children aged 5 to 9
after the addition of the MMR and Hib vaccines in the 1980s. He concluded
that “the rise in IDDM [juvenile onset diabetes] in the different age
groups correlated with the number of vaccines given.”

Classen discounts the conclusions of many vaccine safety trials, especially
48-hour or several-day vaccine reaction follow-ups, which can miss the
development of autoimmune dysfunction that can take years to develop.
According to Classen, “Previous vaccine trials are flawed because they are
not designed to detect associations between vaccination and autoimmune
diseases, such as diabetes. Prospective clinical trials are needed.”

Government health officials dispute Classen’s research, and that of others
concerned about mass vaccination policies. In 1997, U.S. federal health
officials did admit that one of their own studies showed that “the
possibility that hepatitis B vaccination, particularly at older ages, may
increase IDDM risk cannot be ruled out and will require larger more
detailed studies.” Nevertheless, in 1998, they told the public in a report
written to rebut Classen’s findings, “Dr. Classen’s results are not
consistent with current scientific thinking and have not been verified by
other researchers. . . . Comparison of diabetes rates between countries
with different vaccination policies also provides weak evidence because
many factors, including different vaccination schedules, may differ by
country. Many factors, including genetic predisposition and a number of
possible environmental exposures unrelated to vaccines, may influence the
development of diabetes in different countries.”

Last year, after Classen discussed the possible link between diabetes,
certain vaccines, and the timing of early childhood vaccinations on ABC’s
World News Tonight, he was summoned to a closed meeting at Johns Hopkins
University chaired by Neal Halsey, MD, chairman of the American Academy of
Pediatrics Committee on Infectious Diseases, AAP liaison member of the
CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, and Director of the
Institute of Vaccine Safety at Johns Hopkins University. Officials from
NIH, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the CDC, as well as
representatives from several vaccine manufacturers also attended the
meeting. There, they criticized Classen for speaking publicly about his
findings. Later, World Health Organization officials joined U.S. health
officials in berating Classen.

Undaunted, Classen and a colleague appealed to vaccine policy makers in a
letter published in the January 16, 1999, British Medical Journal. “We
believe that the public should be fully informed that vaccines, though
effective in preventing infections, may have long-term adverse effects,” he
said. “An educated public will probably increasingly demand proper safety
studies before widespread immunization. We believe that the outcome of this
decision will be the development of safer vaccine technology.”

Like incidences of asthma and diabetes, the incidence of autism has climbed
dramatically in the past 30 years

OTHER SCIENTISTS RESEARCHING HEALTH PROBLEMS ASSOCIATED WITH vaccines have
also felt the ire of public health officials. In 1998, an unsuspecting
young British gastroenterologist suddenly found himself in the eye of a
hurricane for discovering a possible connection between the MMR vaccine and
autism.

In the February 27, 1998, issue of The Lancet, Andrew Wakefield, MD, and 13
colleagues reported on a new syndrome involving inflammatory bowel disease
and autism in children. Eight out of 12 normal children who developed
severe intestinal disorders soon after an MMR vaccination also became
autistic. Previously, five of those eight children had reacted adversely to
vaccinations.

The team of British scientists, who had inadvertently stumbled upon the
connection while studying Crohn’s disease and other inflammatory bowel
dysfunction in children, emphasized that they had not proved a
cause-and-effect relationship. They called for more studies to investigate
whether persistent viral infection, either from natural disease or live
virus vaccines, can lead to central nervous system damage in some children.

Nevertheless, in the same issue of The Lancet, CDC officials Robert Chen,
MD, and Frank DeStefano, MD, charged in an editorial that “vaccine safety
concerns such as that reported by Wakefield and colleagues may snowball”
when the public and the media “confuse association with causality and shun
immunization.” Other CDC officials discounted the study’s importance,
saying that the children’s health problems were “coincidental” and not
caused by vaccination.

Soon after, a Reuters newswire story quoted Johns Hopkins’s Halsey saying
it was “highly inappropriate” for Wakefield and his colleagues to discuss a
possible connection between the children’s health problems and measles or
MMR vaccines. Wakefield was later called before the Medical Research
Council where British, U.S., and WHO health officials criticized his report
for unnecessarily scaring the public.

In contrast, autism experts defended Wakefield.Bernard Rimland, who has a
PhD in experimental psychology and is founder and director of the Autism
Research Institute in San Diego, said, “It is ludicrous to claim that the
link between many causes of autism and vaccination is just coincidental.
Dr. Wakefield’s group has greatly expanded our understanding of one
possible mechanism. The blunt truth is that some children are harmed by
vaccinations. Research, not denial, is the proper response to this report.”

Portia Iverson, founder and president of CAN, the Cure Autism Now
foundation in Los Angeles, also took issue at the government-led criticism:
“Approximately one-half of the hundreds of parents who call our office each
month report that their child became autistic shortly after receiving a
vaccination. Isn’t it the responsibility of the government to take a
pro-active position on behalf of these children rather than a defensive
one?”

Although the medical literature identified only a handful of cases in the
1940s, by the mid-1960s, after the DPT vaccine had been widely used and the
measles vaccine introduced, autistic children began flooding doctors’
offices. (Parents in the U.S. and Canada who report vaccine-associated
autism most often mention that their children’s autistic behaviors followed
DPT or MMR vaccination.) Today, 1 in 1,000 children are diagnosed as
autistic, making autism more prevalent among children than cancer, multiple
sclerosis, or cystic fibrosis. A recent California study put the figure at
1 in 312 children, a 273 per cent increase between 1987 and 1998. 

Hepatitis B Vaccine Takes a Hit 

CANADIAN PHYSICIANS HAVE ALSO FACED CRITICISM FROM GOVERNMENT HEALTH
officials who dismiss vaccine side effects. Byron Hyde, MD, chairman of the
Ottawa-based Nightingale Research Foundation and an internationally
recognized authority on myalgic encephalomyelitis (chronic fatigue
syndrome), has accumulated data on several hundred cases of serious immune
and neurological dysfunction following hepatitis B vaccination. His first
case reports, in the early 1990s, came from Quebec nurses who reported a
constellation of autoimmune symptoms, including pain, fatigue, and mental
dysfunction, and were unable to work.


Hyde, a vaccination advocate, spoke out publicly about the side effects in
September 1997 at the First International Public Conference on Vaccination
sponsored by the National Vaccine Information Center in Washington, D.C. He
told more than 500 parents and doctors that in the early 1990s, both the
vaccine manufacturer and the Canadian health authorities repeatedly
rebuffed his requests for an investigation into signs of demyelinating
disease, measurable loss of IQ, loss of stamina, intractable pain,
blindness, skin lesions, and other problems affecting health care workers
following their hepatitis B vaccinations.


Hundreds of cases later, he has concluded that “almost all of these people
who had adverse reactions after the first immunization, after the second
immunization were individuals who had immunological side effects and who
told their physicians, and the physicians did nothing about it but
continued to proceed with immunization. . . . I think part of the problem
is the pharmaceutical companies and the governments themselves have
attempted to say, ‘Here, take this sugar pill, it is danger-free, it is a
wonderful thing, it has no risk, no problems,’ and doctors have become lazy
and actually believed this dangerous philosophy put out by the
pharmaceutical companies and the governments.”


Researchers like Hyde are at the centre of a growing controversy about the
recombinant DNA hepatitis B vaccine licensed in the U.S. in 1986. Although
health officials estimate that more than 300 million people worldwide have
chronic hepatitis B, both Canada and the U.S. have historically had among
the world’s lowest rates, even before the vaccine was introduced. Unlike in
parts of Asia and Africa, where the disease often affects 5 to 20 per cent
(and sometimes more) of the population, in Canada and the U.S., less than 1
per cent have hepatitis B, and about 95 per cent of those infected recover
and get permanent immunity. However, health officials emphasize that those
who become chronically infected suffer dire consequences: poor health,
liver disease, and sometimes liver cancer.


Unlike whooping cough, a respiratory disease that can kill babies and small
children, which the pertussis vaccine was designed to prevent, hepatitis B
is not a childhood disease. Spread through infected body fluids, primarily
blood, it is most prevalent in high-risk adult populations such as
intravenous drug users, prisoners, individuals with multiple sexual
partners, those undergoing blood transfusions, and health care workers
exposed to infected blood. Doctors reported about 10,000 hepatitis B cases
in the U.S. in 1997 with only 306 occurring in children under 14.


The only babies at risk are those born to hepatitis B-infected mothers, but
because few hospitals screen pregnant women for hepatitis B infection, in
1991, the CDC recommended vaccinating all newborns before discharge from
the hospital nursery. The CDC maintains its recommendation despite this
1997 admission: “Hepatitis B continues to decline in most states primarily
because of a decrease in the number of cases among injecting drug users
and, to a lesser extent, because of a decline in cases associated with both
male homosexual practices and heterosexual practices.”


Widely touted as almost risk-free, health care workers in the U.S. and
Canada were among the first to get this, the first genetically engineered
recombinant DNA vaccine. Soon after, nurses and doctors in both countries
reported postvaccination symptoms like those described by Hyde, ranging
from rashes and fevers that come and go, debilitating fatigue, muscle
weakness, joint pain, and memory loss to paralysis and death. Many were
diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, lupus, and other
autoimmune disorders, although most often they did not suffer from classic
forms of these diseases. As the U.S. passed laws and Canada recommended
children get three vaccine doses or be barred from school, children began
to report the same reactions.


Recombinant hepatitis B vaccine is also being challenged by Bonnie Dunbar,
PhD, professor of Cell Biology, Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, who
has spent most of her 25-year career in academic and laboratory science in
new vaccine development. After reactions to hepatitis B vaccinations
disabled both her brother and a research assistant, she intensively
investigated the vaccine.


With several other U.S. scientists, Dunbar is investigating whether the
genetically engineered hepatitis B vaccine “tricks” the immune systems of
genetically susceptible individuals into attacking their own bodies,
causing debilitating autoimmune and brain dysfunction. Recombinant
hepatitis B vaccines contain polypeptide sequences similar to those present
in human brain tissues such as myelin while viral polypeptides can induce
autoimmune diseases resembling multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis.


“The drug companies report safety studies that monitored children and
adults for only four or five days after vaccination,” said Dunbar. “It
takes weeks and sometimes months for autoimmune disorders such as
rheumatoid arthritis to develop following vaccination. In fact, a study
group on hepatitis B vaccine with members from the CDC, WHO, NIH, Merck &
Co., SmithKline Beecham, Pasteur
Mérieux Connaught, and Pasteur-Merieux, MSD Joint Venture reported that ‘a
reasonable time limit to use for the onset of MS postvaccination is about
60 days.’”


Dunbar is most critical of the science: “No basic science research to
determine the biological mechanism of vaccine injury or long-term studies
into the side effects of this vaccine have ever been conducted in babies or
children. In adults, only limited follow-up has been carried out in
genetically restricted populations.”


Dunbar and her colleagues have applied twice for government funding to
investigate the role that genetic factors may play in hepatitis B vaccine
reactions or in vaccine failures. Their goal of identifying high-risk
markers to screen susceptible children and adults out of the mass
vaccination program will have to wait. The NIH has twice turned them down.

To continuing reports that the hepatitis B vaccine negatively affects
children and adults, U.S. government officials respond, “there is no
confirmed scientific evidence that hepatitis B vaccine causes chronic
illness, including multiple sclerosis, chronic fatigue syndrome, rheumatoid
arthritis, or autoimmune disorders. . . . Surveillance of adverse events in
the United States after hepatitis B vaccination have shown no association
between hepatitis B vaccine and the occurrence of serious adverse events
including Guillain-Barre syndrome, transverse myelitis, optic neuritis and
seizures.”

The CDC insists on vaccinating all newborns and young children on the
grounds that they may act irresponsibly later in life. “While most
hepatitis B vaccine infections occur among older adolescents and young
adults, vaccination of persons in high-risk groups has generally not been a
successful public health strategy.”


Yet the vaccine manufacturers themselves don’t know how long
vaccine-induced immunity will last. Merck & Co. stated in its 1996 product
insert, “The duration of the protective effect of [the vaccine] in healthy
vaccinees is unknown at present, and the need for booster doses is not yet
defined.”


Government officials have also been on the defensive since last October,
when France became the first country to end hepatitis B vaccine
requirements for schoolchildren. France’s health minister acted after
numerous reports of arthritis- and multiple sclerosis-like symptoms.
Pending citizen lawsuits against SmithKline Beecham and Pasteur-Merieux,
which make and sell the hepatitis B vaccine, may also have influenced the
French decision. In addition, attorneys representing 15,000 French citizens
are suing government health officials for understating the vaccine’s risks
and exaggerating its benefits.

The day after France withdrew the vaccine mandate, a dismayed World Health
Organization stated that “the decision taken yesterday may lead to loss of
public confidence in this vaccine, and decisions by other countries to suspend or
delay introduction of hepatitis B vaccine. . . . WHO strongly recommends
that all countries already using hepatitis B vaccine as a routine vaccine
in their national immunization programmes continue to do so, and that
countries not yet using the vaccine begin as soon as possible.”
Canadian parents take on the establishment

IN CANADA, THE HEPATITIS B VACCINE CONTROVERSY IS ALSO HEATING UP. Although
only three provinces (Manitoba, Ontario, and New Brunswick) actually
mandate vaccines for school entry, parents can refuse on medical,
philosophical, or religious grounds. Even with these informed consent
protections, Mary James, co-founder of the Association for Vaccine Damaged
Children (AVDC) in Winnipeg, points out that “vaccination is never
presented as a choice to parents. Most parents are told that their child
must be vaccinated. Since most parents are not aware of vaccine risks or
their rights, they comply without questioning.”


When parents were told last year that their children had to get three doses
of the new hepatitis B vaccine, James and her AVDC co-founder Leona Rew
fought for a court injunction to stop the program, arguing that Winnipeg
public health officials were inadequately informing parents of potential
risks. Although they lost their bid to stop the program, members of AVDC
joined members of Parents for Informed Consent and the Eagle Foundation in
Winnipeg to raise their objections through television and radio appearances.


To better monitor vaccine risks, the federal government’s Laboratory Centre
for Disease Control operates a vaccine reaction reporting system called
Vaccine Associated Adverse Events (VAAE). Although most doctors are not
required to report health problems following vaccination (except in
Ontario, where AVDC activists got a law passed), the system does receive
about 4,000 to 5,000 voluntary reports every year. Laboratory Centre for
Disease Control officials stress that these reports only reflect “any event
that is felt to be temporally related to the administration of an
immunization but not necessarily absolutely causally related.” They state,
“Over 12 million doses of vaccine are distributed every year and very few
concerns arise despite intense searching. Until diseases are eradicated,
immunization remains our best defence.”

Rew disagrees: “Doctors and nurses still do not report adverse reactions.
We need a reporting system that has some teeth in it so that doctors are
compelled to do their job and report serious health problems that occur
after someone gets vaccinated.”

James, whose five-month-old daughter was partially paralyzed and died in
1984 following two polio vaccinations, and Rew, whose infant son had bouts
of high-pitched screaming and a seizure within hours of a DPT shot,
emphasize that AVDC does not advocate banning vaccines. Says James, “The
vaccines should be available like any other health care product, but
parents should know the risks as well as the benefits and be able to make
an informed choice. Right now, they are just getting one side of the story
- the one that the government and drug companies want everyone to believe.”
American protest forces acknowledgment

CANADA’S GRASSROOTS MOVEMENT RESEMBLES ITS U.S. PREDECESSOR. In 1982, a
television documentary, DPT:
Vaccine Roulette, prompted a handful of parents, whose children had been
injured by or died from the DPT vaccine, to found an organization known
today as the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC). Soon after,
manufacturers threatened to stop producing vaccines unless they were immune
to lawsuits. 

Although most vaccine injury lawsuits were then either won by drug
companies or settled on the courthouse steps by weary, cash-poor parents
(with all evidence sealed from public view), plaintiffs had won large
enough punitive damages in the late 1970s and early 1980s to worry vaccine
producers about their liability.

The U.S. Congress immediately began writing legislation for a vaccine
injury compensation system and asked physician organizations, vaccine
manufacturers, and the co-founders of NVIC to present their concerns. The
physicians and manufacturers wanted Congress to remove all liability and to
guarantee protection from lawsuits for vaccine injury and death. Congress’s
final decision required parents to first file for federal compensation by
suing the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. But
parents won the right to sue vaccine manufacturers or negligent physicians
if vaccine-injured children were offered too little financial support for
their catastrophic vaccine injuries or were turned down entirely - although
bringing a lawsuit would then be more difficult. Parents also retained the
right to sue for unlimited punitive damages where manufacturers engaged in
“fraud or intentional wrongful withholding of information relating to the
safety or efficacy of the vaccine,” or engaged in “other criminal or
illegal activity relating to the safety and effectiveness of vaccines.”

Government health agencies opposed the proposed federal compensation
legislation, maintaining that vaccinated children who developed serious
health problems had an “underlying genetic disorder” or a health problem
that would have spontaneously occurred even without a vaccination. It was
only after the book DPT: A Shot in the Dark (Coulter and Fisher, Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1985) was published and parents held public
demonstrations at the CDC in Atlanta and in front of the White House the
following year, that President Ronald Reagan signed the National Childhood
Vaccine Injury Act into law in 1986. (Pressure by parents eventually led to
the FDA licensing of a purified pertussis vaccine in 1996, which has been
associated with fewer reactions.)

Today, parents of vaccine-injured children and their lawyers criticize the
law’s implementation because three out of four applicants are turned away.
With government lawyers and health officials fighting every claim, more
than $1 billion lies idle in a vaccine injury trust fund. Still, under the
act, more than $1 billion has been paid to 1,000 families whose members,
the U.S. Court of Claims in Washington, D.C., has judged, were harmed by
routine vaccinations. The majority of the awards have been for DPT-vaccine
related brain damage or death, with a lesser number for MMR and polio
vaccine reactions. (NVIC’s web site, www.909SHOT.com, describes some of the
vaccine injury cases.)


The 1986 law, which mandated the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the
prestigious National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to review the medical
literature for evidence that vaccines can cause injury and death, was
historic societal acknowledgement that vaccines can be harmful. In 1991 and
1994, NAS published the evidence in three landmark reports.


One high-level physician committee examining the medical literature wrote,
“the lack of adequate data regarding many of the adverse events under study
was of major concern. . . . The committee encountered many gaps and
limitations in knowledge bearing directly or indirectly on the safety of
vaccines.” Nevertheless, the IOM did find enough scientific evidence to
confirm that the DPT vaccine can cause acute brain inflammation and
permanent brain damage that ranges from learning disorders to severe and
profound retardation; the DT (diphtheria and tetanus) vaccine can cause
Guillain-Barre syndrome, including death, as well as brachial neuritis; the
rubella vaccine can cause acute and chronic arthritis; the live oral polio
vaccine can give polio to the person being vaccinated or to someone who
comes into contact with that person’s body fluids; and the MMR vaccine can
cause shock as well as a potentially fatal infection from a vaccine strain
of measles virus.


Because scientific studies did not exist, physician committees could not
properly evaluate a long list of other vaccine-associated health problems,
including some of the chronic autoimmune and neurological disorders - such
as diabetes and multiple sclerosis - at the centre of the vaccine safety
controversy. The big news, though, was that the medical community had told
the public that vaccines can injure and kill. While health officials
stressed anew that “the benefits [of vaccines] outweigh the risks,” parents
of healthy children better understood the cry of parents of vaccine-injured
children: “When it happens to your child, the risks are 100 per cent.”


Under the 1986 law, the federal government also set up an improved vaccine
reaction reporting system, which, like Canada’s reporting system, depends
on physicians’ reports. The U.S. Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System
receives between 12,000 and 14,000 reports of hospitalizations, injuries,
and deaths following vaccination every year, but as in Canada, parent
groups claim that less than 10 per cent of doctors report
vaccine-associated health problems and that the government does not
adequately follow up.
A Matter of Law UNLIKE CANADA, HOWEVER, EVERY U.S. STATE LEGALLY REQUIRES
vaccinations, and public health officials vigorously enforce these laws.
Refusing to vaccinate one’s children can result in denial of an education,
including enrolment in day care, elementary school, high school, college,
and graduate school; denial of health insurance; denial of employment; and
threatened denial of government benefits for poor children, including food
and medical care. In addition, parents who don’t comply with vaccination
laws have been charged with child medical neglect and threatened with
having their children taken from them.
All 50 U.S. states provide a medical exemption to vaccination laws that
doctors licensed to prescribe drugs can write. All but two states allow
exemptions for religious beliefs, but some states require that parents
belong to a religion that has a written tenet opposing vaccination (several
state high courts have found this requirement unconstitutional). Some 16
states provide for philosophical or “personal belief” exemption, but most
parents are unaware of these exemptions and fewer than 1 per cent in most
states exercise them.
Although American vaccine laws fall under state, rather than federal,
jurisdiction, as soon as the CDC licenses a new vaccine and recommends it
for “universal use,” state health officials automatically make it
mandatory. So, while state health officials only required children to show
proof of smallpox vaccination to enter school in 1949, in 1999, most states
require children to be injected with 33 or 34 doses of nine or 10 different
vaccines. 

Tracking system to enforce vaccination

TO ENCOURAGE HIGH VACCINATION RATES, FEDERAL OFFICIALS GIVE GRANTS and
other financial incentives to state health and education agencies, or
withhold them. In 1993, the Clinton administration launched an
“Immunization Initiative,” and Congress authorized more than $400 million
for states that enforced mandatory vaccination by using social security
numbers to track children from birth. Simultaneously, a grant program
rewards state health departments with up to $100 for each fully vaccinated
child.

The government eventually plans to link state vaccine tracking systems
together to create a government-operated centralized electronic database
monitoring everyone’s medical records, including vaccination status, from
birth. One federal proposal would link a national ID “smartcard” to
obtaining a driver’s license and other societal privileges, such as health
care or getting a job. Individual legislators, at both the state and
federal levels, have already proposed tax penalties for citizens who don’t
fully vaccinate their children.

As of January 2002 News entities announce that this is just about in place! 

In addition to government grants, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
(Johnson & Johnson) has awarded nearly $10 million to states to set up
vaccine tracking systems to enforce vaccine laws. In 1989, Johnson &
Johnson joined with Merck & Co., the U.S. manufacturer of the MMR, chicken
pox, and hepatitis B vaccines, to form Worldwide Consumer Pharmaceuticals
Company, with the goal of becoming “one of the premier worldwide consumer
products companies.” By 1997, Merck’s vaccine sales had reached $1 billion.

Tracking System Would Eventually Become Global

A NUMBER OF PRIVATE COMPANIES AND ORGANIZATIONS ARE ALREADY WORKING with
governments around the world to ensure “the integration and harmonization
of immunization registries” through the promotion, standardization, and
acceptance of computerized patient records systems that would monitor the
health status of every citizen.

The Children’s Vaccine Initiative (CVI), launched in 1990 at the World
Summit for Children in New York City, wants to develop global strategies
for “the development and utilization” of vaccines by all the world’s
children. Headquartered in Geneva, CVI receives money from the United
Nations Children’s Fund, the United Nations Development Programme, the
World Bank, WHO, and the Rockefeller Foundation. CVI is also financially
supported by the world’s largest manufacturers and marketers of vaccines. 
To conform to CVI goals, in 1994, CDC health officials developed a National
Vaccine Plan for the U.S., which “provides a framework in which diverse
domestic and international, public and private-sector activities in
immunization and vaccine development can be effectively coordinated” and
“describes the way in which the United States should promote immunization
to protect the health of all people, including “accelerating the
development and use of promising new and improved vaccine candidates.”
An HIV vaccine for children?

IN A FEBRUARY 12, 1997, MEETING OF THE CDC’s Advisory

Committee on Immunization Practices, which makes vaccine policy for the
U.S., committee member Neal Halsey reminded HIV vaccine researchers and
developers that the government plans to target preteens for universal
application of an HIV vaccine. Halsey told them, “One of the things that’s
happened in the past with vaccines is that sometimes the manufacturers have
developed them and tested them primarily in an age group or a population
which may not be the final target population that this committee has
considered. . . . We really see age 11 to 12 as the target age for
introduction of vaccines for prevention of sexually transmitted diseases. .
. . It would be nice if there were studies that were planned in parallel
when you move another step in the direction of actually having a candidate
vaccine, realizing where we think we would want to use universal
application of such a vaccine.”

As the number of reported AIDS cases in the U.S. continues to drop (about
58,000 in 1997 compared with 103,691 in 1993) and the number of AIDS cases
in the Third World veers out of control, vaccination supporters have
accelerated their push to put an AIDS vaccine on the market. In 1997,
President Bill Clinton challenged scientists and industry to make an AIDS
vaccine available within 10 years and added more money to the yearly $150
million already committed to this purpose. The U.S. media compared his call
to President John F. Kennedy’s challenge to American scientists to put a
man on the moon.

At least three dozen different experimental HIV vaccine trials are underway
in the U.S., using numerous approaches. Pasteur Mérieux Connaught has
created one vaccine from a weakened, genetically engineered canarypox virus.

Researchers are testing it as an injection, and it also will be swabbed or
dripped onto the genital and urinary tracts and nose and throat. Another
experimental vaccine uses a new strategy based on genetically engineered
salmonella bacteria.

In 1998, the Chicago-based International Association of Physicians in AIDS
Care called for use of an experimental live HIV vaccine, although physician
advocates admitted that a live HIV vaccine could theoretically mutate into
an AIDS-causing strain. A report on monkey tests from the 12th World AIDS
Conference last July confirmed that many monkeys or their offspring died or
developed AIDS symptoms after receiving live HIV vaccines.

Last June, the FDA gave VaxGen, Inc., a San Francisco biotechnology
company, permission to start Phase III human clinical trials of a
genetically engineered vaccine containing recombinant forms of two HIV
strains. VaxGen, which “is committed to making an HIV vaccine for worldwide
use,” is testing its vaccine on 5,000 volunteers in Thailand and North
America, including cities such as Philadelphia and Los Angeles.

Most HIV-negative volunteers who get an HIV vaccination in experimental
AIDS vaccine trials will test HIV-antibody-positive for life. In New York
City, technicians now ask those getting blood drawn if they have
volunteered in an AIDS vaccine trial - stark acknowledgement of a new
generation of vaccine-induced HIV positives who, researchers insist, are
not HIV infected.

As public health officials increasingly define disease control in global,
rather than national, terms, mass vaccination proponents and vaccine makers
must find ways to finance delivery of newer and more expensive vaccines to
poor countries. They accomplish this by first making the vaccinations
mandatory in rich countries, as HIV vaccine developer Stanley Plotkin, MD,
of Pasteur Mérieux Connaught explained in 1996: “The keystone of the
[global mass vaccination] system is that the research costs [of drug
companies] are recouped in North America and Europe, and the vaccines are
sold in the developing world at much, much lower margins. . . . The
relatively high rate of childhood vaccination seen lately in most parts of
the world is the result of that system.”

Just last year, the CDC illustrated this funding formula by recommending
that all American babies under six months receive three doses of the newly
licensed live rotavirus vaccine for diarrhea. Although a serious health
problem in the Third World, where 870,000 babies lacking adequate nutrition
or medical care die from dehydration caused by severe diarrhea every year,
most American and Canadian babies fully recover from bouts with rotavirus
and are left with permanent immunity. About 20 to 40 babies die of
rotavirus infection in the U.S. every year.

Vaccine production problems and new epidemics

THE ROTAVIRUS VACCINE, WHICH WILL cost $40 a shot in the U.S., is the first
rhesus-human reassortment vaccine, created by co-cultivating rhesus monkey
rotavirus strains with human rotavirus strains to create a genetic
human-monkey hybrid strain of rotavirus. This production process, while
more sophisticated, recalls the use of rhesus monkeys to produce the
original Salk polio vaccine.

In the rush to put a polio vaccine on the market in 1955, polio vaccine
pioneer Jonas Salk unknowingly used rhesus monkey kidney tissues
contaminated with monkey viruses. In the late 1950s, after lab technology
advances could screen for monkey viral contaminants, scientists identified
simian virus 40 (the 40th monkey virus identified in the vaccine). SV40
was found to cause cancer in lab animals in 1959, but by then, some 98
million American children had already received the vaccine. Today, Michele
Carbone, MD, a molecular pathologist at Chicago’s Loyola University Medical
Center, and other researchers around the world are culturing out SV40 from
cancerous brain, bone, and lung tumors in adults and children in an effort
to understand the inexplicable rise of these rare cancers.

After they discovered the SV40 contamination, polio vaccine makers in the
U.S. switched from the rhesus monkey to African Green monkey kidney tissues
to produce live polio vaccine. However, African Green monkeys can be
infected with simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) and not appear sick.

In 1992, Walter S. Kyle, whose article “Simian retroviruses, polio vaccine
and origin of AIDS” was published in The Lancet, hypothesized that SIV
contaminated both experimental and general use oral polio vaccines using
African Green monkey kidney tissues. “There could have been multiple
crossovers of the SIV virus from monkeys into the human population at
different points in time where, in humans it took the form of HIV,” he
wrote. “This may explain why different populations have been affected at
different times with HIV during the past 30 years” - a time span that
correlates perfectly with the dates that those populations were vaccinated
in their respective countries during different phases of the worldwide
polio vaccination campaigns.

At the 1996 Eighth Annual Houston Conference on AIDS in America, a
retrospective scientific analysis by California microbiologist Howard B.
Urnovitz, PhD, supported the thesis that SIV, which is highly similar in
genetic structure to HIV-2, may have contaminated experimental live oral
polio vaccines. In some African children given this contaminated vaccine
in the Congo between 1957 and 1959, says Urnovitz, SIV could have
recombined with their own normal genes to create the monkey-human hybrid
now known as HIV-1.

There is no scientific consensus on HIV’s origin. Earlier this year,
Beatrice Hahn, MD, and Anthony Fauci, MD, pointing to chimpanzees that
Congolese were slaughtering and eating, announced that they had solved the
mystery. Hahn reported that three West African chimps were infected with
SIV strains that very strongly resembled three HIV subgroups.

Kyle and Urnovitz both challenge these findings. “They have been eating
monkeys in Africa for thousands of years,” said Urnovitz. “Why did HIV only
crop up in the late 1950s? The buffet theory of the origins of HIV just
doesn’t hold any water. . . . There are many confounding theories being
forwarded, but they all come back to contaminated polio vaccines.” Adds
Kyle, “Hahn’s discovery could as easily be explained by the fact that
chimps also eat African Green monkeys.”

A Brave New World IN 1997, CDC OFFICIAL WALTER ORENSTEIN, MD, TESTIFYING
BEFORE THE U.S. Congress, painted a picture of the future in his annual
appeal for more vaccine funding. “On the horizon are vaccine technologies
that would have been considered science fiction just a decade ago but are
now reported at scientific meetings,” he said. “Snippets of synthetic DNA
have worked as experimental vaccines in animals. Edible plants have been
bioengineered to become vaccine factories. . . . Vaccines have been
enclosed in microscopic capsules, permitting them to be released slowly
over time.” Vaccine researchers are seeking $500 million from all the
world’s governments to create a genetically engineered “supervaccine” that
will be given orally at birth. This supervaccine - the CDC and CVI call it
the “Holy Grail” - will contain raw DNA from 20 to 30 viruses, parasites,
and bacteria that will insert itself directly into the cells of babies. 
The vaccine will be time-released over several months.

Disease organisms scheduled to be included in the supervaccine, many
containing multiple strains or types of each virus, bacteria, or parasite,
are pneumonia (three viruses), AIDS (two viruses), dengue haemorrhagic
fever (four viruses), diarrheal disease (several viruses and bacteria),
diphtheria, hepatitis, malaria (two parasites), measles, meningitis (six
viruses and bacteria), polio (three viruses), schistosomiasis (one
parasite), tuberculosis, typhoid fever, and pertussis. 

In all, vaccine manufacturers and U.S. government researchers are
developing more than 150 different viral and bacterial vaccines. A nasal
spray flu vaccine targeting children will be ready by the fall of 2000;
adhesive skin patch vaccines and high technology jet guns will deliver
vaccines designed to prevent ear infections, strep throat, asthma, genital
herpes, gonorrhea, stomach ulcers, and even cancer and the common cold. If
the microbe fighters have their way, the “Brave New World” of the future
will truly be infection-free.

Or will it? In 1993, scientists at the American Society of Microbiology
annual meeting reported that diseases such as tuberculosis, meningitis, and
gonorrhea have become resistant to antibiotics because of their overuse in
the past decades. One study shows that pediatricians are prescribing
antibiotics to 44 per cent of children with common colds. In 1998, evidence
of penicillin-resistant strep bacteria caused worry that more people will
suffer or die from severe pneumonia, bacteremia, and meningitis.

Last year, a U.S. Public Health Report warned that the overuse of
antibiotics in animals, which transfers resistant microbes from livestock
to humans through the food chain, is producing resistant bacteria,
including antibiotic-resistant salmonella, enterococci, and E. coli. Health
officials warn food producers that antibiotics should never substitute for
“inadequate hygiene.”

Now there are signs that viruses and bacteria, eager to survive, may be
outsmarting vaccines. A 1998 British Medical Journal study found that B.
pertussis infection (whooping cough) is occurring in vaccinated populations
in the Netherlands, Norway, and Denmark despite vaccination rates as high
as 96 per cent. Among other causes of the whooping cough outbreaks,
scientists have found an increasing incidence of strains of B. pertussis
with a mutated surface protein.

Last year, a CDC study identified eight distinct genotypes of a wild-type
measles virus in populations around the world, possibly because the vaccine
put pressure on the virus to mutate. In January of this year, the CDC
reported a 1998 measles outbreak in Alaska in which 51 per cent of the
children had received one or more doses of measles vaccine. Will health
officials add yet another booster dose, as they did during measles
outbreaks in the late 1980s when they realized that one dose failed to do
the job?

While the global village gets smaller and smaller, our health officials
warn parents that terrible diseases killing children in the Third World are
“just a plane ride away.” The only way to protect yourself and your
children, say the doctors, is to do what we say and use all the vaccines we
have created to keep everyone safe.

Yet some parents and doctors, concerned about the future, are looking
beyond the present. “What we forget is that millions of years of evolution
have taken place on this planet, and up until the last 100 years, humans
have lived in relative harmony with microbes. Yes, there have been epidemic
infectious diseases in history, but they have always resolved themselves,”
said Richard Moscowitz, MD. “I don’t think there is any real appreciation
for what we may be doing by using so many vaccines to try to eradicate so
many organisms.”

If we stay the present course, will mankind be free from infectious disease
but crippled by chronic disease? Will eradication of feared diseases, such
as AIDS, through mass vaccination be one of man’s greatest triumphs or will
we live in fear of deadly mutations of microbes that have outsmarted man’s
attempt to eradicate them? We may look back at the crossroads we are at
today and wish we had decided to make peace with nature instead of trying
to dominate it.

Whatever government and industry decide to do, public support for mass
vaccination programs may continue to erode if public policy precedes
science and individual health is dismissed as less important than the
public health. Perhaps the peace we need to make is not as much with
nature, as with ourselves.

To comment, write to mailto:BarbaraLoeFisher@nextcity.com  Ms. Fisher is
co-founder and president of the National Vaccine Information Center.