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Vaccine Epidemic: Book Review Part Two

  • Teaser: The review continues to explore the personal impact of vaccines, their use by the military, the increasing numbers of vaccines given to children and the case of Dr Andrew Wakefield in the UK. It summarizes the medical politics behind vaccine policy and the societal problems this brings up. 

Part II of the book begins with a recommendation to read Ursula La Quinn’s book “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” It then follows in Chapter 11 with a mother’s story of how two of her children became autistic and the heartache that ensued. The great increase in Autism Spectrum Disorder cases has developed into a whole industry of supporters needed to cater for the educational and developmental needs of an increasing population of children diagnosed as autistic. Her heart breaking story then develops into an analysis of the failure of American society to produce healthy kids, where the massive increase in vaccines given to young children in the 1990’s may account for a large number of chronic ailments afflicting children today and where the number of children suffering from “asthma, autism, diabetes, Crohn’s disease, epilepsy, life-threatening food allergies, obesity, ADHD, learning and behavioral disorders, and suicide is much higher today than in the 1980’s when many fewer vaccines were given”.

Chapter 12 is titled, Pediatrics: Sick is the New Healthy. It describes different pediatricians and their relationship to vaccines and how difficult it is in the USA for any working pediatrician to even question that vaccines are absolutely safe and have nothing to do with autism or other conditions. It questions how most doctors simply accept without question what they are being told and how little questioning is being done regarding the increasing chronic diseases afflicting children today. It also relates the experience of the author, whose baby nearly died of the Hepatitis B vaccine given at birth, when a world famous surgeon who had married into her family, agreed with her concerns regarding a vaccine like Hepatitis B being given at birth. She contemplates the consequences of a medical culture now where questions on subjects like vaccines cannot be asked.

Chapter 13: A mother describes the devastating consequences on her daughter after the HPV vaccine (Gardasil) and how the medical profession refused to accept that the vaccine could have anything to do with the condition that developed, leading to convulsions and having to be put on a ventilator. She now lives at home, breathing through a tracheotomy permanently and needing around the clock care. She is but one of many children affected by the vaccine. (http://truthaboutgardasil.org). In spite of increasing evidence of the danger of this vaccine, the CDC advisory committee on Immunization practices is now recommending that 6th grade boys should get the vaccine. The author quotes that “as of November 17, 2010, there have been 20,978 adverse HPV vaccine reactions reported. There were 89 deaths associated with the vaccine.”

Chapter 14 shares the personal story of a mother and child and how the child developed autism after routine vaccines. The boy, now 13, has since been treated by biomedical means and no longer has autism and he describes his own journey of healing. In Chapter 15, two retired air force officers discuss the use of anthrax vaccine for military personnel and how the military have been used as test subjects for vaccine research for many years. One example was that, in 1994, after the 1st Gulf War, the U.S. Senate released a report titled, “Is Military Research Hazardous to a Veteran’s Health.” It outlined the unethical use of serviceman and women as test subjects, not putting the research into their medical records and preventing them getting appropriate follow-up care. The authors state that 1 in 4 of the 697,000 veterans in the 1st Gulf War experience Gulf War Illness (a wide range of health disorders, including chronic fatigue, joint pain, neurological problems, memory loss etc). Although they admit that other factors may also contribute to some of these symptoms, soldiers from other countries who were not given the anthrax vaccine showed much less incidence of this illness. However, British soldiers who were given the vaccine also show a significant incidence. They document how the Pentagon has misled Congress and the American people about this situation, a shocking indictment of the Pentagon in their responsibility to the servicemen serving their country. They then further document the use of troops in experimental vaccine research and the difficulty in challenging this from within the military. One dispute was the use of an unlicensed and experimental adjuvant in the anthrax vaccine, called “Squalene” or MF59, an adjuvant with potentially devastating health consequences. They warn that Squalene could next be used in civilian vaccines.

Part III of the book topics covered include the business of vaccines, mercury and autism, the law and our children.

In Chapter 17, titled The Vaccine Bubble and the Pharmaceutical Industry, Michael Belkin writes that “When my five week old child, Lyle, died hours after receiving her hepatitis B vaccine, the New York medical examiner was more concerned about examining our apartment for evidence of child abuse than about the possibility that a vaccine caused her death. The medical examiner initially told us, our pediatrician, and an investigating pathologist that Lyla’s brain was so swollen that it led to her death. After consulting with Merck (the manufacturer of Lyla’s hepatitis B vaccine), the medical examiner left me, a devastated father who just lost his precious first-born child to an avoidable vaccine-induced death, with these parting words: “We’ve changed our minds; her brain was not swollen. Vaccines do a lot of good things for people, Mr. Belkin.”

“Melody Peterson, who covered the pharmaceutical industry in her book ‘our Daily Meds’ reports that Doctors who fill out death certificates are instructed to call a ‘therapeutic misadventure’ a natural death.”

Vaccine-caused diseases and deaths are an unacknowledged epidemic. The FDA’s Vaccine Events Reporting System (VAERS), which is available and searchable online at www.medalerts.org stated that of November 17, 2010, VAERS listed 352,650 reports of vaccine adverse events. Former FDA commissioner David Kessler wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association, that “only about 1% of serious side effects are reported to the FDA.” Using that FDA commissioner’s own estimate, there have been 35.2 million adverse reactions since the inception of VAERS in 1990.

The author of the chapter describes his work as an investment strategist and how he used these skills to testify before the Congressional Reform Committee about his work and experience with his child. “In my opinion, the epidemiologist-statisticians from the CDC and state health departments are pseudoscientists. In my work, I use statistical models to forecast markets, so I am particularly aware of the capabilities and limitations of statistics. In the financial markets, statistical fraud has a cost. If you fake the numbers, you will eventually be caught, fired, and prosecuted (as in the case of Bernie Madoff, Enron, and others). The medical profession and government agencies like the CDC and the WHO seem to operate under a different standard. Estimates of disease prevalence are exaggerated, academic medical studies are ghostwritten by pharmaceutical employees, and the WHO’s declared global pandemic of H1N1 influenza fizzled out and turned into nothing more than a marketing campaign for the flu vaccine manufacturers….”

He then describes how he filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the safety data the CDC had prior to recommending the hepatitis B vaccine for new babies at birth more than 10 years ago. He wanted to see the statistical model they used to prove its safety. He has still not received any response from them.

He then describes the revolving door situation between government and industry. Julie Gerberding, the former head of the CDC, resigned from her government-appointed position in January 2009 and was named the president of Merck Vaccines in December 2009, the minimum amount of time she was legally required to wait before joining an industry that she previously regulated…. New Jerseys’ former deputy health commissioner, Eddy Bresnitz, was responsible for mandating the flu vaccine for babies and toddlers in the Garden State in 2008. He now oversees adult vaccines at the same New Jersey-based pharmaceutical firm, Merck and Company, Inc.

He describes the process through which a vaccine gets licensed and how the role of the FDA is mostly to help facilitate the approval process. The FDA does not conduct independent research on proposed vaccines. The government uses epidemiological studies to disprove causation between adverse events and vaccines or vaccine ingredients. Public health officials do not require randomized controlled studies. They say it is unethical to withhold vaccination from anyone, so they do not uphold a scientific gold standard in order to answer ethically troubling questions, especially regarding vaccine safety.

After licensure, a vaccine then has to be recommended by the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization practices (ACIP). He describes how all the members basically vote in favor of almost every vaccine proposal, and most of them had conflicts of interest, so even if they occasionally recused themselves from one vote due to specific conflicts of interest, the others would vote in favor of it and vice versa, so everyone scratched each other’s back.

After recommendation, the vaccine then needs to be enacted into law at the state level and the wheels and money of big pharma are used to help produce mandatory vaccine laws, relying on the myth of the “vaccine miracle” to sway legislators. As the author quotes, ”Instead of free market competition, their business strategies are built on compulsion. The public school system is an ATM for pharmaceutical companies who are laughing all the way to the bank.”

Due to the ongoing economic challenges of continually needing to increase profits and the threats to this of patents ending and the limited supply of new drugs, drug companies have been forced to devise strategies for their survival. To do this they have sought to 1. Expand to emerging markets, 2. Increase drug prescription compliance and 3. Expand the vaccine market. However, one challenge in emerging markets, such as China, India and Brazil are cheap generic alternatives. But exporting vaccines is potentially a good business and is now being supported by the WHO and Bill Gate’s Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) who are wanting to extend a U.S. style childhood vaccination schedule to other countries.

The author then describes how the pharmaceutical industry is seeking to get more compliance in prescription drugs and he quotes the CDC statistics on American’s drug use from 2007-2008.

  • One of every five children and nine out of ten older Americans reported using at least one prescription drug in the month prior to being surveyed.
  • 4% of kids up to age 11 used at least one prescription drug.
  • 9% of young people aged 12-19 used at least one prescription drug.
  • 3% of people aged between 20 and 59 used at least one prescription drug.
  • 4% of Americans aged 60 and over used at least one prescription drug, more than 76% used two or more drugs in the past month, and 37% used five or more.

He describes the phenomena of drug stores being used to market and push flu vaccines. You face an onslaught of flu ads in most stores and how pharmacists are becoming foot soldiers for flu vaccines.

There are currently 145 new vaccines in development.

The global vaccine revenues were $22 billion in 2009, an increase of 16% since 2008. Industry analysts predict that vaccine revenues will hit $35 billion by 2015. (And over 80 billion by 2025)

Approximately 1 in 99 children in the United States now receives an autism diagnosis. This is 13 times more than the average autism rate found in a 1993 survey – before the vaccine schedule increased dramatically. The future economic costs to society of medical care and welfare for a neurologically disabled population are staggering. (According to the CDC in 2020 it is about 1 in 50 births, and likely to be much higher than that)

This particular chapter is a stunning indictment of the vaccine agenda of our government, the medical establishment and the pharmaceutical industry.

Chapter 19 discusses the issues of high mercury levels in the childhood vaccination schedule. Needless to say, until the government began to even think about this issue, the amount of mercury given to babies through vaccines by the two month period was up to 500 times the safe level of Mercury that the government itself had stipulated in guidelines to mercury exposure. However, the government then dismissed that there was a risk due the mercury in vaccines and that any danger was insignificant in comparison to the threat of childhood diseases.

“The mercury concentration in the previously used thimerosal-containing vaccines and the current flu vaccines is exponentially larger than what is considered hazmat material or that is even allowed in safe drinking water, as outlined in Pediatrics:”

0.5 parts per billion (ppb) of mercury kills human neuroblastoma cells.

2 ppb of mercury is the U.S. EPA’s limit for mercury in drinking water

20 ppb of mercury destroys neurite membrane structure.

200 ppb of mercury is the level in liquid that the EPA classifies as hazardous waste

25,000 ppb of mercury is the concentration in the hepatitis B vaccine administered at birth in the United States from 1990 to 2001.

50,000 ppb of mercury is the concentration in multidose DTaP and Hib vaccines, administered four times each in the 1990’s to children at two, four, six, twelve, and eighteen months of age; it is also the current “preservative” level in multidose flu vaccines (in 94% of the supply), meningococcal vaccines, and tetanus vaccines (for children age seven and older). This can be confirmed by analyzing the multidose vials.”

So, as the author points out, it is OK to vaccinate your child with a toxic dose of mercury, but if some spills on the floor, it would require immediate evacuation of the building!!

The author then points out that the government recognizes “encephalopathy” (brain disorder, brain damage or change in brain functioning) as an outcome for the combination MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) or for the DTap (Diptheria, Tetanus, Pertussis) vaccines, but when symptoms of encephalopathy are diagnosed, it is diagnosed as autism and not as a vaccine effect. The author then describes a situation in which a child became autistic very soon after having 9 vaccines in 5 shots in one go. The government accepted liability but then refused to diagnose it as autism, the head of the CDC at the time fudging the facts for the media, admitting that a vaccine could produce autism like symptoms in a child susceptible to the vaccine due to a preexisting condition but that in fact, vaccines do not create autism!! In accepting that susceptible children could suffer autism symptoms after vaccines, and that now 1% of all children in the USA are being diagnosed on the autism-spectrum disorder, why aren’t children being screened beforehand for signs of susceptibility? The child described above had been diagnosed as having a mitochrondrial disorder before getting the vaccines.

The stunning aspect of this chapter is the level of denial, collusion and dishonesty between all aspects of society in regard to vaccine damage. From the media to the obvious interests of drug companies and medical authorities and all the way through to the highest echelons of government. In an interview with Readers Digest in March 2010, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sibelius said that “we have reached out to media outlets to try to get them to not give the views of these people equal weight in their reporting to what science has shown and continues to show about the safety of vaccines.”

Forced Child Removal. This is the title of Chapter 20 by Kim Mack Rosenberg, JD. The author begins by discussing the powers of the Childhood Protection Services, who can forcibly remove a child from its parents for medical neglect if they choose not to vaccinate their children or treat their autistic children with alternative methods. In these cases, defining what is medical neglect is an important subject. The author quotes the Merck Manual…”Medical neglect is failure to ensure that a child receives appropriate preventative care (e.g., vaccinations, routine dental examinations) or needed treatment for injuries or physical or mental disorders.” Then New York law is discussed in regards to medical neglect, with language vague enough that it is easy to use it to accuse parents who don’t vaccinate their children. However, New York City Children’s Services “Parent’s Guide to New York State Child Abuse and Neglect Laws” directly mentions vaccinations as part of possible neglect. Doctors are likely to be the first people aware of a parent’s choice not to vaccinate and so, may take matters in their own hands, and if unsympathetic can report parents to the CPS.

Another unknown phenomenon in the world of health freedom is that every child born has blood taken away and put on a genetic data base, to be kept for a number of years, depending on the state and to be used in genetic research, as the state sees fit. There are very few exemptions allowed and most people don’t even know what is happening. In Texas, a judge ordered the Department of Health to destroy the blood spots of more than 5 million children, which had been retained since 2002. However, what was not even known to the judge at that time was that Texas also gave it to the U.S. Military to create a law-enforcement DNA database, sold it for $4 a spot to various corporations, and used it to barter with for-profit companies for laboratory equipment.

Francis Collins, head of the National Institutes for Health, has said, “Like it or not, every newborn will soon be genetically sequenced at birth by the government.”

“The government is building a Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) to catalog genetic information. It is an online, permanent, linked, lifelong medical record now under government construction. The information on the NHIN will be available to the government and others – without the individual’s consent, as permitted by the so-called federal HIPAA ‘privacy’ rule.” The author then discusses the legal implications of genetic coding and where this may go in the future with possible vaccines for certain genetic disorders and who has the right to this information and when a child should know that this information is in the hands of government and others.

Sherri Tenpenny, DO, in Chapter 22, quotes that “in 1983, the vaccination schedule from birth to eighteen years of age included twenty-four doses of seven different vaccines: polio, MMR and DTP. Now the government recommends that children receive seventy doses of sixteen different vaccines by the time they graduate from high school.”

She also discusses the arguments that people make for needing a “herd immunity”, that requires the vast majority of people to be vaccinated to maintain overall protection, and the blaming non-vaccinated people for increasing incidents of pertussis and chicken pox, even though most of the children who got the disease were fully vaccinated.

She also quotes the former head of the FDA, Dr. David Kessler, who said that only about 1% of serious adverse events (reactions) are reported. This could mean that there are potentially 1,200,000 adverse events from vaccines each year.

“Since the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program ((VICP) was created, 13,613 claims have been filed, as of November 3, 2010. VICP has paid or is committed to paying more than $2 billion in awards to 2,541 persons with more than 5,800 remaining to be adjudicated. The federal government grants awards for extreme reactions to vaccination, such as chronic arthritis, anaphylaxis, encephalopathy, and death. Mild to moderate disabilities and side effects are not eligible to awards.”

“So, only 1 in 5 people get an award from the VICP and if the 1:100 figure is correct in terms of what the former head of the FDA said, then possible awards could be $2 billion multiplied by a hundred, that is $200 billion and then multiplied by five, which is $1,000 billion. That is just about as much as the U.S. government has spent on Iraq and Afghanistan. No wonder the government denies most cases of vaccine effects. It would cost the tax payer (not the drug company or doctors) a lot of money”. Editor.

Chapter 24 discusses where parents can turn for medical advice regarding vaccination. As the writer of the chapter reveals, finding advice in a world where doctors don’t even tell you of your legal options, that will refuse to have you or your family on their books if you refuse ANY vaccine, and where the Centers for Disease Control actively propagate and financially support the mandatory vaccine policy that states have legally enforced. A lot of money is channeled into maintaining a high percentage of vaccine compliance and who are convinced that any outbreak of a vaccinated disease is ONLY in those who choose not to vaccinate.

“The American Academy of Pediatricians (AAP) in 1982, rejected a resolution of its members to give comprehensive information to parents about vaccine risks and benefits. In 1993, the AAP led the successful effort to substantially reduce the amount of information that doctors were required to give patients under the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act. Public health and mainstream medicine prioritize vaccine compliance above the individual’s right to free and informed consent.”

A number of books, both pro and against vaccines are then discussed, with a brief review of each. The author states that “no country in the world vaccinates as early or as often as the United States. In the 1950’s, we had the third best infant mortality rate in the world….In the 1960’s, the United States began requiring universal, mandatory vaccination for school admission and has gradually and significantly increased the number of required vaccines since then. The United States’ infant mortality ranking has dropped precipitously over this same time frame; today, America ranks forty-sixth, behind every developed country but one (Poland), and many developing countries.”

Chapter 25 and 26 explores the story of Dr. Andrew Wakefield, who was a well respected doctor and researcher at the Royal Free Hospital in London, England. He became famous (infamous) as he published research on the possible connections between MMR vaccine and inflammatory bowel disease. In time this led to the longest and most expensive medical legal case against him by the British Medical Council (BMC). He was found guilty, had his medical license taken away and has subsequently left the country, now residing in the United States. The controversy surrounding his research and subsequent treatment by medical authorities and media is one that needs to be studied if one is interested in the concept of scientific objectivity and the vested interests of those who seek to crush any questions on the safety of vaccines.

Dr Wakefield was a physician specializing in inflammatory bowel disease. He became a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1985 and was accepted into the Royal College of Pathologists in 2001.

In the 1990’s, Dr Wakefield began to study a possible link between the measles virus and bowel disease. He published a 1993 study, “Evidence of persistent measles virus infection in Crohn’s disease” and coauthored a 1995 article published in The Lancet, “Is measles vaccine a risk factor for inflammatory bowel disease?” At roughly the same time, Dr Wakefield wrote an unpublished 250-page manuscript reviewing available scientific literature on the safety of measles vaccines.

So he was becoming an expert in this field and as a result was contacted by an attorney to ask if he would serve as an expert in a legal case on behalf of children injured by vaccines containing the measles virus. The author of the chapter then discusses the time line of events that followed this and the subsequent accusations and case made against Dr Wakefield.

In 1998, after Dr. Wakefield made a public statement that due to a lack of research into the possible dangers of vaccines, the MMR vaccine should be separated into individual vaccines. There was a “media firestorm” after this and the British government responded by making the individual vaccines unavailable (where before they had always been available individually). However, vaccination rates fell significantly after this and as the author of the chapter states, “measles outbreaks became more prevalent and included a handful of cases of serious complications and deaths. Some sought to blame Dr. Wakefield for irresponsibly scaring parents and triggering a public health crisis (instead of the fact that it was the government that removed the option of individual vaccines) However, it wasn’t until 2004 that the issue took another turn when Dr. Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet, stated that the 1998 article (written by Dr. Wakefield) was ‘fatally flawed’ due to a conflict of interest. Then a British reporter, Brian Deer published the story in the UK Sunday Times (owned by Rupert Murdoch) and then wrote to the General Medical Council (GMC) who initiated proceedings against Dr. Wakefield.

The author then discusses the accusations against Dr. Wakefield and that led to his medical license being revoked. That includes the accusation that he benefitted financially from a research grant, when in fact he didn’t get any of it personally, that the tests done on some sick children were unnecessary when in fact they were part of a normal protocol and the hospital was fully informed of them and made no objections. (All ethical approvals had been made and further the head researcher was Dr Walker-Smith not Wakefield). Furthermore, no complaints were made against him for doing these tests. The GMC charged that the 12 patients (Lancet 12- twelve patients with autism and gastrointestinal symptoms) were referred through the litigation effort (that their parents were involved in, seeking damages for vaccine side effects) whereas that was not the case. Parents started contacted him long before the litigation started. Also the GMC claimed that he took blood from his children’s friend’s party to use as a controlled sample. While he did do this and that it may have been unconventional, it was done with the full consent of parents, most of whom were his colleagues and it was done in a professional way.

Even then Brian Deer made other charges against Dr. Wakefield, including accusations that he fabricated data. These were not used against him by the GMC but this even reached the United States when the Department of Justice, in the Omnibus Autism Proceeding in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, which were looking into whether families could receive compensation for MMR-induced autism, depicted him as a scientific fraud. However in Dr. Wakefield’s 2010 book, ‘Callous Disregard’, Dr. Wakefield exposes that these allegations were fraudulent.

The author then summarizes the implications of the attacks and prosecution against Dr. Wakefield, who was ‘punished for upholding vaccine choice.’ Dr Wakefield then writes about his own experience and the implications of what happened to him for medical research and the questions of vaccine safety and informed consent. He discusses how the allegiance of medical authorities, Big Pharma, government and media seek to impose a rigid doctrine of pro-vaccine positions on an increasingly skeptical public.

The Afterword in the book makes it plain that vaccine choice is continually being eroded and suppressed. There is broad discussion to abolish philosophical and religious exemption rights. The authors feel this is going to continue with more mandated vaccines, more efforts to deny vaccine effects, to dismiss liability for injuries, more scare tactics about fictitious or mild diseases, like H1N1 swine flu, more vaccine injuries and deaths and more efforts to abolish all rights to choice. (Since this review was written in 2010, many states in the USA have removed further philosophical, religious and even medical exemptions from vaccines)

The authors ask people to get involved. First to go to www.centerforpersonalrights.org and to sign the petition there. Spread the word about the book. Get speakers to come to your community, get the book into libraries and universities and talk to friends. Let people know about the book and the website. Start a conversation.

2010

This book adds a crucial perspective on a vitally important topic. This issue has profound implications for the health of children throughout the world, and for fundamental human and legal rights. All people in the world have a right to decide what is put into their bodies. Can we really trust government and profit motivated businesses to have our best interests at heart and even to have the awareness and knowledge to dictate what is good for us. Where will all this go? What is going to happen in the next few years as drug companies seek ever more profit and influence over legislatures that pass laws affecting fundamental rights. This book lays the ground for a crucial debate on this subject.

2020

Moving ten years forward, the issues brought up in the book have even more relevance as the race for a Covid19 vaccine reaches fever pitch. The influence of Big Pharma and organizations like GAVI vaccine alliance, Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Initiative (CEPI), the WHO, all backed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are seeking to force a vaccine onto the global population. The political and health implications are profound as the human population may be part of an experimental vaccine programme and justified for a disease in which 98% of people do not get sick from it. Some serious questions of their agenda need to be asked and why governments worldwide are voluntarily or being coerced to accept this agenda. This should not go unchallenged.