Thursday, March 28, 2024

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First They Came for the Anti-Vaxxers

Earlier this year I spent a few days at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center with my daughter who was having an EEG done. On our way home, I learned that there had been an outbreak of an antibiotic-resistant bacteria while we were there, that it had infected seven people and killed two of them. My daughter and I were fine—the infection having been limited to people using a particular kind of duodenoscope.

When the story hit the news, I fully expected a nationwide outcry similar to that inspired by the recent measles “epidemic” that began at Disneyland. That outbreak killed no-one, yet set the country on fire with calls for mandatory vaccination and even prison sentences for parents who choose not to vaccinate their children. Drug-resistant “superbugs” kill nearly 15,000 people a year in the U.S. and a recent report predicts that they could kill as many as 300 million people by 2050. Surely this far more deadly health threat would lead to similar widespread outrage and calls for those even remotely responsible to be held accountable.

I expected to see editorials calling for anyone who engaged in theoveruse of antibiotics to be shunned by society; doctors who prescribed them unnecessarily (around 50% of all prescriptions by some estimates) to be censured and perhaps lose their licenses; parents who asked for antibiotics every time their child had an ear infection—despite the fact that the vast majority are not bacterial and are unaffected by antibiotics—to be thrown in jail for endangering the rest of us. But I saw nothing along these lines. Why not?

The manipulation of the conversation around vaccines in the mainstream media has been nothing short of a tour de force. If you read only mainstream publications, you might come away with the impression that outbreaks of measles are the most serious public health crisis since the Black Death. You might think that those who do not vaccinate are uneducated, superstitious, “anti-science” zealots who get their information from daytime talk shows. You might even start to feel outrage at these people who—for no good reason at all—have decided to endanger everyone else by refusing to do what every doctor knows is perfectly safe, effective and the socially responsible thing to do.

The presentation of this issue has been a study in just how easy it can be to generate mass hysteria around a particular threat—even while much more serious threats inspire no such response. It’s as if every mainstream reporter has been given the same playbook to use in putting together their articles about vaccines—a playbook designed to elicit the above response from the public. I’ve tried to imagine what this playbook must look like and I think I’ve come up with a pretty decent facsimile. Here it is, along with my own annotations:

1. Make it clear that parents who choose not to vaccinate their children are only getting their information from Jenny McCarthy, Jim Carey and other celebrities with absolutely no scientific credentials.

Pretend that doctors and scientists who are critical of vaccines—doctors like Dr. Suzanne Humphries, Dr. Robert Sears, Dr. Kenneth Stoller, Dr. Robert Rowen, Dr. Janet Levatin, Dr. Stephanie Cave, Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, Dr. Meryl Nass, Dr. Jay Gordon, Dr. Jane Orient, and many of the members of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, CDC researcher Dr. William Thompson, and all of the doctors and scientists listed here and here—don’t exist. Because really, if you don’t write about them, they don’t.

2. Always equate the views of the CDC, medical journals and pharmaceutical company spokespeople with “science.” Some people will try to tell you that science is a method, not a conclusion, that scientific truths cannot be determined by consensus or by appeal to authority, but you can just ignore them.

As one (self-proclaimed) scientist put it:

In my personal and scientifically backed opinion, the war against disease is a hundred fold more important than the mum-led war against vaccines. Do you want your child to die a slow, painful, agonizing death? If not, then shut the f*** up with your so called ‘facts’ you got from Yahoo Answers and get your kid vaccinated.

I am going to sound derogatory, but if you don’t have formal education in at least biology, you have no role to talk about the way vaccines should be done. (Sic.)

In other words, if you don’t have the same training we do, you don’t get to be part of the discussion. Even when the topic of that discussion is whether or not we get to forcibly inject things into your bodies and the bodies of your children. Just shut up and trust the scientists. But not these scientists—they are all anti-science scientists. Only trust these ones.

3. Remind your readers that, however heart wrenching or tragic, anecdotal accounts are just that. They are not scientific, they don’t say anything about relative risk, and should play no role in influencing your opinion about vaccines.

Until you want to tell them the heart wrenching story of how author Roald Dahl lost his daughter to measles, or about the death of a young girl from rotavirus that inspired Dr. Paul Offit to develop a vaccine for that disease.

Anecdotal accounts of people suffering from vaccine-preventable illnesses are fine. Anything else though is just irrational. Take for example the thousands of stories from parents whosechildren were perfectly healthy until they received one or more vaccines and then suddenly lost the ability to speak, to walk, to feed themselves, or who started having seizures, stopped breathing or died. Many of the parents in these cases report that their doctors insist the vaccines had nothing to do with their child’s injury, even when no other explanation is apparent. Indeed, the vaccine manufacturers and the CDC insist that most such cases are simply coincidences and have nothing to do with the vaccines. But given the well-documented degree of conflict of interest and fraudulent practices within the CDC and the medical research community as a whole, many parents are understandably skeptical of such claims.

4. Remind your readers that “correlation is not causation.

To listen to the mainstream media, one would think that measles was a deadly affliction on a par with Ebola or the plague. Vaccine advocates distort the dangers of measles by pointing to adverse effects experienced by populations in underdeveloped countries, where even the mildest of diseases can be deadly due to things like poor nutrition and sanitation.

By the 1950s in the United States though, measles was considered a mild childhood disease that nearly everyone caught before adulthood and lived through with no serious consequences. Says Dr. Donald Miller:

With good sanitation and nutrition, the pre-vaccine mortality rateof measles in the U.S. was less than 1 in a million (compared with 14 deaths per 100,000 in 1900); seizures occurred in 1 in 3,000 people; and encephalitis, 1 in 100,000, with full recovery in 75 percent of those cases.

It is also worth noting that the CDC’s statement that “for every 1,000 children who get measles, one or two will die from it” relies on reported cases of measles. A more accurate estimate puts the death rate at closer to 1 out of 10,000 cases.

Meanwhile, in the past ten years there have been only a handful of measles deaths in the US, but VAERS data report 109 deaths associated with the measles vaccine since January of 2004, and the US Court of Federal Claims has settled 111 claims related to harm from the MMR vaccine in that same time.

Not only is measles a relatively benign illness for healthy people living in developed countries, contracting and surviving the disease confers benefits to the immune system—as well as strengthening herd immunity—in ways that vaccines cannot.

Far from protecting the most vulnerable demographic groups, widespread vaccination has increased the risk of serious harm from measles in some of these populations: Infants and very young children, as well as adults. Normally, measles wouldn’t appear in these age groups—but now it does, thanks to the vaccine. As Lawrence Solomon reported in the Financial Post last year:

In the pre-vaccine era, when the natural measles virus infected the entire population, measles—‘typically a benign childhood illness,’ as Clinical Pediatrics described it—was welcomed for providing lifetime immunity, thus avoiding dangerous adult infections. In today’s vaccine era, adults have accounted for one quarter to one half of measles cases; most of them involve pneumonia, one-quarter of them hospitalization.

Also importantly, measles during pregnancies have risen dangerously because expectant mothers no longer have lifetime immunity. Today’s vaccinated expectant mothers are at risk because the measles vaccine wanes with time and because it often fails to protect against measles.

… The danger extends to babies, whose bodies are too immature to receive measles vaccination before age one, making them entirely dependent on antibodies inherited from their mothers. In their first year out of the womb, infants suffer the highest rate of measles infections and the most lasting harm. Yet vaccinated mothers have little antibody to pass on—only about one-quarter as much as mothers protected by natural measlesleaving infants vulnerable three months after birth, according to a study last year in the Journal of Infectious Diseases. [Emphasis mine.]

Factors such as these increased the death rate for adults and the very young, helping to reverse the decline in deaths seen in previous decades, according to a 2004 study in the Journal of Infectious Disease, authored by researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

As discussed below, childhood illnesses like measles and mumps can help to develop the immune system in ways that help to protect against things like asthma, autoimmune disease and even cancer. So the proposition that eliminating measles—rather than simply reducing its deadliness—is a worthy public health goal is a questionable one.

5. Whenever possible, present the debate as if there are no legitimate reasons to choose not to vaccinate—only “personal beliefs” and “irrational fears.

The reality is that there are legitimate and documented concerns about vaccine safety. Nobody denies this—all that is in dispute is the magnitude of the harm caused by vaccines. Vaccine manufacturers and their institutional supporters of course insist that any harm from vaccines is minuscule and easily outweighed by the benefits. However this claim is suspect for a number of reasons, not least of which is the stunning degree of conflict of interest and outright fraud within the world of medical research. Leaving aside these issues though, there remain good reasons to distrust the manufacturers’ claims.

Numerous studies fly in the face of the manufacturers’ claims, showing connections between vaccines and autoimmune disease, asthma, allergies, cancer, encephalopathy, and yes, autism. And even assuming integrity in the clinical trial process, these are not sufficient to demonstrate vaccine safety, as they typically only look at reactions that occur within a few weeks of vaccination, and only compare the adverse events experienced with one vaccine against those experienced with another vaccine—not against an unvaccinated sample. Even the Cochrane Review of the literature on the MMR vaccine, for example, came to the conclusion in 2012 that “the design and reporting of safety outcomes in MMR vaccine studies, both pre- and post-marketing, are largely inadequate.”

Studies that purport to demonstrate the safety of vaccines are similarly flawed and limited in their scope. Indeed, of the list of 42 studies put forward by the American Academy of Pediatrics, with an invitation to parents to “examine the evidence”, none compare vaccinated against unvaccinated populations, and most look only at either the MMR vaccine or at Thimerosal.

Meanwhile, because of a law that removes any liability from the makers of vaccines for any harm caused by their products, the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) has paid out nearly $3 billion in damages to the families of those who claim they have been injured by vaccines since its inception in 1988. This is despite the elimination by the DHHS of most of the original adverse events from the “Table of Compensable Events”, and what NVIC President Barbara Loe Fisher calls “… a highly adversarial, lengthy, expensive, traumatic and unfair imitation of a court trial for vaccine victims and their attorneys.”

And every year, around 30,000 reports are made to the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) which records adverse reactions immediately following vaccination, as reported by doctors, other medical professionals, pharmaceutical companies, patients and parents. Thirteen percent of these are classified as “serious” (including death).

Of course these numbers don’t mean very much without a comparison to the background rate of such adverse events in the general population, not immediately following vaccination. Some studies have shown no increased adverse events after vaccination as compared to the general population. Other studies (including some that use post-vaccination data for other vaccines for comparison, rather than population-wide background rates) show higher rates of adverse events immediately post-vaccine.

Vaccine proponents argue that the VAERS numbers are not an accurate reflection of vaccine damage, because each case reported has not been conclusively proven to be caused by a vaccine. It is a legitimate point—and is largely due to the fact that in most cases there is no way to confirm vaccination as the cause of the event.

The much bigger problem though is the degree to which the VAERS numbers suffer from significant underreporting. Says president of the National Vaccine Information Center and advocate for parental choice regarding vaccines Barbara Loe Fisher:

There have been estimates that perhaps less than 5 or 10 percent of doctors report hospitalizations, injuries, deaths, or other serious health problems following vaccination. The 1986 Vaccine Injury Act contained no legal sanctions for not reporting [via VAERS]; doctors can refuse to report and suffer no consequences.

Indeed, one study found that while 68% of cases of vaccine-associated polio were reported, only 4% of MMR-associated thrombocytopenia were reported. An earlier study found that only 1% of adverse events following prescription drug use were reported. And in 1994, a survey found that only 18% of 159 doctors’ offices made reports when children suffered serious health problems following vaccination. In New York, this number was one out of 40.

Some argue that adverse events are also over-reported to VAERS, presumably by distraught parents, but this charge is less credible. All the evidence shows that doctors and other healthcare providers are extremely reluctant to report events to VAERS. Healthcare providers account for 36% of all reports to VAERS, with vaccine manufacturers accounting for another 37%. Vaccine recipients and their parents or guardians account for only 7% of reports.

So what is the real risk of overall vaccine injury? The only honest answer is that nobody knows. The number of genuine vaccine injuries is likely much higher than what is reported in VAERS, but how much higher nobody can reliably say. The science on vaccine safety is conflicted, it is insufficient and it is badly corrupted by special interests. It is anything but “settled.”

But there’s more.

There is evidence that vaccines may cause harm well beyond what would show up in an adverse events report—harm that may manifest over many years, rather than in the days and weeks immediately following vaccination. Vaccines have been connected to increased rates of cancer, severe allergies and autoimmune disease:

As Dr. Donald Miller explains:

Measles helps a child’s immune system grow strong and mature.

Once past the immunologic barriers of skin and mucosa, our (2-trillion-cell) immune system has two components: An innate system, which all animals have; and an evolutionarily more recent adaptive system that vertebrates have. The childhood diseases—measles, mumps, rubella, and chickenpox—play a constructive role in the maturation of the adaptive immune system. Two kinds of helper T-cells (Th) manage this system:cellular T-cells (Th1); and humoral T-cells (Th2), which make antibodies. The Th1 cellular T-cells are especially important because they attack and kill cells in the body that run amok and become cancerous. And they also kill cells that become infected with viruses.

Measles (and other viral childhood diseases) stimulate both the Th1 and Th2 components. The MMR vaccine stimulates predominately the Th2 side. Overstimulation of this part of the adaptive immune system provokes allergies, asthma, and auto-immune diseases. Since the Th1 side thwarts cancer, if it does not get fully developed in childhood a person can wind up being more prone to cancer later in life. Women who had mumps during childhood, for example, have been found to be less likely to develop ovarian cancer compared with women who did not have mumps.

(The study can be found here.)

According to the CDC, food allergies in children increased by about 50% between 1997 and 2011. Asthma rates have also been on the rise, with an increase of 28% between 2001 and 2011. And childhood cancer rates have been increasing since the 1970s. The National Institutes of Health reported in 1996 that the incidence of childhood cancer had increased by 10% between 1973 and 1991, and a 1999 report in the International Journal of Health Services said that:

From the early 1980s to the early 1990s, the incidence of cancer in American children under 10 years of age rose 37 percent, or 3 percent annually. There is an inverse correlation between increases in cancer rates and age at diagnosis; the largest rise (54 percent) occurred in children diagnosed before their first birthday.

There are no definitive explanations for these dramatic increases in potentially life-threatening conditions among children, and in all likelihood there is no single cause responsible for any one of them. However parents have good reason to be concerned about harmful environmental factors, including vaccines. Indeed, several studies show increased rates of immunological problems associated with vaccination.

A study in New Zealand found a higher rate of asthma among those who had been vaccinated (Kemp et al, 1997); Data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Study in the US showed that children vaccinated with DTP or Tetanus vaccines were twice as likely to develop asthma as unvaccinated children (Hurwitz and Morgenstern, 2000), and another study showed that the MMR vaccine can cause human white blood cells to develop IgE antibodies – one of the main characteristics of asthma (Imani and Kehoe, 2001). A 2008 study found that delaying DPT vaccination was associated with reduced risk of childhood asthma.

Other studies have found a link between vaccines and allergies and autoimmune disease. A 1996 study in Africa found higher rates of allergies among those who had been vaccinated against measles than among those who had survived the disease. The study concluded that “measles infection may prevent the development of atopy in African children.”

A 2001 study confirmed “A causal association between measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine and idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura (ITP)…”; A study in 2014 found a strong correlation between hepatitis B vaccination and higher rates of multiple sclerosis; a 1999 study in Japan found that “… gelatin-containing DTaP vaccine may have a causal relationship to the development of this gelatin allergy”; and in 2009, a Japanese study that gave mice repeated immunizations with antigen found that “systemic autoimmunity appears to be the inevitable consequence of over-stimulating the host’s immune ‘system’ by repeated immunization…”

In the journal Autoimmunity, Vared Molina and Yehudi Shoenfeld write “Vaccines, in several reports were found to be temporally followed by a new onset of autoimmune disease. The same mechanisms that act in infectious invasion of the host, apply equally to the host response to vaccination. It has been accepted for diphtheria and tetanus toxoid, polio and measles vaccines and GBS. Also this theory has been accepted for MMR vaccination and development of autoimmune thrombocytopenia, MS has been associated with HBV vaccination.”

Those who would force vaccinations on the rest of us are fond of repeating bromides like “your right to be sick ends where public health begins.” But who gets to decide what constitutes “public health”? Who decided that the eradication of every childhood illness is in the best interests of “public health”? Why are not increased rates of childhood cancer and life-threatening allergies relevant to “public health”? Why can I not demand that everyone else stop vaccinating their children because doing so directly threatens the ability of mine to contract childhood diseases which might help strengthen their immune systems?

6. If you must acknowledge that critics of vaccines have actual reasons for their concerns, restrict the discussion to the fear that vaccines may cause autism, and be sure to stress that the only basis for this concern is the retracted 1998 study by Andrew Wakefield.

You can also mention some of the studies that “prove” there is no causal link between vaccines and autism. Just be sure not to mention any of the ones that do show a connection, like this one, this one or this one. Be especially careful not to mention this one, this one, or any of these, these or these.

At all costs, never ever mention any of the concerns listed in “4.” above.

For bonus points, see if you can create the impression that the only potential problem with vaccines is thimerosal, and then declare that thimerosal has been removed from all vaccines. (It hasn’t.)

7. When in doubt, pepper your stories with some of the following affirmations. Remember: The more you say them, the truer they become: “Vaccines save lives”; “parents who don’t vaccinate are selfish” (“ignorant”, “anti-science” and“hippies” all work well too.); and above all: “the science is settled.

You may have to repeat this last one many many times before your readers come to understand and accept it.

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3 Responses

  1. This is one of the best articles I’ve read in the 7 years I’ve been anti-vaccine. I have -LITERALLY- heard every one of these arguments from friends, family, and pro-vax trolls on the internet. It is so horribly frustrating to try and convince people that you REALLY have sat in front of a computer and books and searched and searched for answers and info on vaccines. It never occurred to me that vaccinating my kid was dangerous, until my 2 month old sons life was ruined for 6 years by his one and ONLY set of vaccines. I will never vaccinate again. Ever. Thank you for this article. It is so amazing.

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