Vaccines Need a Closer Look

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http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=14786

Vaccines Need a Closer LookHarold Buttram, Washington Free Press

December 16, 2002

Note: This is the first of a two-part article that was originally published in

Washington Free Press, Seattle. The second article is available here. A full

version of the report with numbered references is available upon request. --Ed.

 

 

This article is an attempt to express a minority view and position that is

contrary to current government, public and majority medical opinion on the

subject. However, whatever position on the vaccination decision one chooses to

adopt, we feel the 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.

 

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, 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 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.

 

 

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. 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, and smallpox may have been eliminated worldwide. [For

information on history of smallpox eradication, the nature of the disease, and

the side-effects of the vaccine, see the article " Don't Fear a Smallpox

Outbreak " by Dr. Sherri Tenpenny.]

 

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.. 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.. were diphtheria, pertussis (whooping cough), scarlet

fever, and measles. However, by l945 the combined death rates from these causes

had declined by 95 percent, before the implementation of mass immunization

programs. 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 hosts, 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 ago.

 

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 potentially toxic mercury

(though mercury-free types have recently been produced in response to safety

concerns). With growing public concerns about potential adverse reactions on the

immature immune systems of children, it is reasonable to ask ourselves what is

already known about such reactions.

 

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

membranes. 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 severity.

 

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 controls. 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, " 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 this 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

 

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, a

recent news item stated that ADHD has increased from 900,000 in l99l to nearly 5

million today. 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 11 years.

 

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, a protein strongly correlated to measles

antibodies (almost all of the children had been immunized with the MMR vaccine,

and none had had these diseases).

 

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, Crohn's disease

of the bowel, and autism.

 

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

cultured. Furthermore, protein sequences in the measles virus have been found to

have similarities to those found in brain tissues. As a result, once this

foreign genetic material is introduced into the child by a vaccine, it may set

in motion an immunologic attack on brain tissues, 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 11

African green monkeys imported for production of the polio vaccine.

 

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 ordinarily would induce immune

responses from the host. 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, U.S. 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 vaccine has been the only remaining source of polio cases in

the U.S.A since l979.

 

Damage May Yet Escalate

 

As another concept, it is highly pertinent that many of today's children are

second-generation vaccinees; 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. 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 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.

 

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.

 

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. 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 was published in a

foreign publication, Czechoslovakia Pediatrics. 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?

 

Harold Buttram is an author and physician at the Woodlands Healing Research

Center in Quakertown, Penn.

 

 

 

 

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