Vaccination Decisions

Part one: Is it possible to assess vaccine safety?

by Doug Collins

Health information in the WA Free Press should not be construed as medical advice. Always make your own choice regarding medical treatment by seeking multiple sources of information and consulting with your personal physician.

All health professionals, even the officials at the federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC), admit that vaccines can sometimes result in illness, disability, and death. But the real practical question in the public's mind is this: which is more dangerous, the risks posed by the vaccine, or the risks posed by the disease? Unfortunately, there is no clear or easy answer to this question, and any health professional who tells you otherwise is woefully underinformed.

Cloudy safety testing

In fact, the federally sanctioned safety testing for vaccines is one of the primary factors that cloud the issue of safety. The current standard is a short term study, generally two or three days but sometimes as long as two weeks, in which a test group of children is scrutinized for health problems which occur during this short period after vaccination. Results are then compared to health problems which emerged in a background control group of already-vaccinated children (not unvaccinated children, as you might suspect). These sorts of studies are extremely short-sighted, in that they will never uncover side-effects that typically have an onset longer than the short test period. Similarly, such studies will not tend to show the possible cumulative problems associated with an ever increasing number of vaccinations recommended by the CDC (a recommendation that translates into forced vaccination in most states). Such cumulative problems would appear "normal" in the control group of already-vaccinated kids.

The sensible alternatives to questionable "two-day" studies would be 1) to compare the long term health of vaccinated vs unvaccinated children, not just for two days, but for two decades or more, and 2) to conduct standard, straightforward "before-and-after" studies comparing the health of children before and after receiving the test vaccine. A few such studies have been performed in other countries, with disturbing results (see WA Free Press Jan 2003 "Haphazard Health" by Harold Buttram, MD, www.wafreepress.org/61/haphazardHealth.htm or Dr. Buttram's complete report at www.mercola.com/2001/jun/9/vaccine_update.htm).

Unknown chronic side effects

The stakes of not performing long term safety testing are high. Independent research has linked many chronic diseases with vaccinations, including autism, juvenile diabetes, juvenile arthritis, cancers of various sorts, asthma, atopic disorders (such as eczema and allergies), Crohn's disease, and attention deficit disorder. All of these diseases have been increasing among children in the past few decades, some dramatically so. Similar diseases have been increasing in housepets, and all veterinary schools in North America have recently decreased the number of recommended vaccinations for pets, after studies linked pet vaccines with a number of chronic animal ailments, including asthma and cancer (see "Spare Fido the Shots" Reader's Digest, Jan 2002, and www.sheltieclassifieds.com/vaccinations.htm). Unfortunately, many human health organizations are not as vigilant. Human vaccines are typically never even evaluated for long-term risks of cancer or any other chronic illness, yet they are still recommended for general childhood use by the CDC. If you read the manufacturer inserts for any human vaccine, you will probably find the following disclaimer: "This vaccine has not been evaluated for carcinogenic or mutagenic potential, or potential to impair fertility." Since everyone knows cancer can take years to develop after exposure to a cause, this lack of evaluation is not only irresponsible, but also astonishing. This lack of evaluation is another reason that it is impossible for anyone to responsibly compare the safety of vaccinating versus not vaccinating.

Despite glaring omissions in safety testing, a shift in consciousness among most MDs has not yet come. One reason for this is that pharmaceutical companies have a large control over vaccine research, and therefore medical opinion (see "UPI" sidebar this page for information on how pharmaceutical influence works). Official vaccine safety tests, for example, are generally funded by the vaccine manufacturers, in a sort of self-policing arrangement. On top of this, the same companies have a strong disincentive to uncover any environmental causes of chronic diseases like cancer: if the environmental causes are found and eliminated, the companies will lose enormous profits from selling medications for the treatment of such chronic diseases. Furthermore, if research conclusively shows that human vaccines are an environmental cause of such diseases, the same companies will lose even more business from loss of vaccine sales. Profit-driven companies will naturally use their influence to avoid, delay, or counteract such research.

Upsetting the traditional balance

In the case of some diseases, modern vaccination has warped an arguably positive traditional balance we had with nature. It has rendered some diseases more potentially dangerous than before, and has barred us from possible age-old benefits of catching some diseases. Both these factors further cloud the comparative safety question.

Take the example of measles. Before the 1960s, measles was considered a "minor childhood illness" which sometimes had side effects and rarely caused death. Almost everyone contracted measles as a toddler or child. Contracting measles imparted true permanent immunity, and mothers who themselves had had measles would pass on a temporary immunity to any infant they bore, till the infant was about one year old. This "natural" immunization protected the infant during the first year (a time when children are more vulnerable to complications from measles).

In other words, people traditionally caught measles as toddlers or children, when they were less vulnerable to complications from the disease; likewise, people were protected from measles when they were more vulnerable--as infants or adults.

Now this traditional balance has been upset. Because most new mothers have been vaccinated for measles, they do not impart the traditional one-year immunity to their infants. Toddlers are now vaccinated for the disease around the age of 14 months (infants are not vaccinated, because the measles vaccine is generally considered to be unsafe for them). The vaccine sometimes causes side effects and rarely causes death, even by the admission of the CDC. Unfortunately, the duration of the vaccine protection is unpredictable. Because a large portion of people who now contract measles are adults who have been fully vaccinated, some researchers postulate that the immunity from the vaccination may wane over time (see The Vaccine Guide, Randall Neustaedter, OMD, 2002, p203).

As a result of our medern practices, nowadays when the rare outbreak of measles occurs, it is more often among infants and adults, both of whom are at higher risk than children for complications from the disease.

The problems of measles vaccination are compounded when one considers that at least three studies have shown that catching natural measles as a child may be linked to immune benefits in later life, for example in the prevention of asthma (see WA Free Press Nov 2002 "Vaccines, Think Again" by Harold Buttram, www.wafreepress.org/60/vaccinesThink Again.htm).

In other words, federal vaccination policy--by successfully limiting measles--may in fact be contributing to the large increase of asthma in recent decades, a disease which is deadly for many, uncomfortable for millions of other sufferers, and costs Americans billions of dollars per year.

Under-reported reactions

Still another problem with judging vaccine safety is the lowball reporting of reactions after vaccinations. The federal government has set up the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), which receives roughly 13,000 reports per year of hospitalizations, injuries, and deaths following vaccinations. Doctors are supposed to report all such events to VAERS, but evidence suggests only about ten percent of doctors comply with this, so the true number of adverse events may be 90 percent underreported (see The Consumer's Guide to Childhood Vaccines, Barbara Loe Fisher,1997, p32). Incidentally, parents should report adverse events independently if their doctors do not. See the National Vaccine Information Center website at www.909shot.com for details.

Convenience culture

It is obvious that given current research policies and our current limited knowledge, no one can responsibly say that it is healthier to vaccinate or not to vaccinate. As various critics have quipped, vaccines are truly "a shot in the dark" for anyone who has carefully analyzed the unknowns. This begs the question: why do most Americans simply conform unquestioningly to CDC requirements for ever more vaccines, without raising any fuss for better research? One problem is that in the mainstream media, the topic of vaccine safety is rarely raised, and when it is, critics seem to be portrayed as anti-government cranks, medical quacks, or religious zealots. But I believe there are also cultural and economic reasons for our inattention.

My wife is Japanese, and like most other Japanese of her age, she didn't receive many vaccinations. She and I were talking one evening about why more Japanese have recently made the transition into vaccinating their kids (though it is still completely a matter of parental choice there). She suggested that when she was a kid, her mother did not work, so taking care of a child with measles for a couple weeks was not a great inconvenience. When she caught measles, she remembers that her mother explained that every generation before her had had measles. As a result, measles seemed to be like a coming-of-age ritual. (Incidentally, my wife is much more immune to colds and flus than I am, a fact which is perhaps explained by research indicating the immune benefits of catching natural measles).

Nowadays in Japan, increasingly both parents are working full-time--American style--and many modern Japanese parents opt for vaccinations simply for the convenience of not having to disrupt their work schedules to stay home with an affected child. Vaccination becomes a sort of quick convenience fix. In America we can see the same dynamic at work. The chicken pox vaccination, which a few years ago joined the CDC's recommended list, is an obvious example. Even just a few years ago, chicken pox was universally considered nearly harmless for any normally healthy child, yet now most American kids are getting the vaccination, apparently for the sake of national worker productivity statistics. This is no joke: researcher P.A. Brunell found that the chicken pox vaccine was being marketed by its manufacturer as "reducing the loss of parental income" (see "Chickenpox: Examining our options" New England Journal of Medicine, 1991, vol 325, pp1577-1579).

Quick fixes rarely have integrity. My wife says she hears a lot more in the last ten years about Japanese children with food allergies that were unknown when she was a child. It doesn't surprise me. Just as in the US, the increase of food allergies seems to parallel the use of more vaccinations.

Certainly no one can deny the positive effect of our vaccination policy: for example, measles now is rather uncommon--usually only around a hundred cases per year in the US. Such statistics are easy to compile and cite. But history shows that what appears to be an easily measurable success may have severe consequences that are hard to foresee. For example, in Mao-era China, peasants were ordered by a national campaign to preserve the rice crop by killing birds that eat rice grains. When most of the birds were dead, mosquitos and other insects flourished, causing a host of worse problems. The increase in chronic diseases in our society could be just such a consequence of our vaccination policy. Until we answer this question, it is unforgivable that such vaccines are forced on millions of American children each year.

Continued next issue.

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