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The Immune System / The Challenge to Mass Vaccination
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By Barbara Loe Fisher
Barbara Loe Fisher is co-founder and president of the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC). She is co-author of DPT: A Shot in the Dark and editor of The Vaccine Reaction newsletter. She served on the National Vaccine Advisory Committee, the Institute of Medicine Vaccine Safety Forum and the FDA Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee.
It is one of the most successful public relations stories of the last two centuries: the worldwide acceptance of mass vaccination to suppress infectious diseases. Yet the universal use of vaccines as a worthy goal that prevents needless suffering and benefits all mankind has begun to be challenged by a growing number of parents and physicians in the United States, Canada and Europe. At the heart of the heated public debate is a challenge to the premise that mass vaccination with multiple vaccines safely and effectively controls diseases and improves individual and public health.
The voices of critics are heard in the living rooms of families whose children have been injured or have died from vaccine reactions, and in courtrooms and state legislatures, where parents are suing vaccine makers and challenging mandatory vaccination laws. At scientific conferences and in the pages of prestigious medical journals, researchers and physicians are risking their careers by discussing their research into vaccine side effects.
On network TV, millions are watching parents, who say vaccines hurt their children, square off with mandatory vaccination proponents, who say vaccines rarely hurt anyone at all. And in Congress, federal legislators are trying to come up with a way to fix the broken federal Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) while others are holding investigative hearings into vaccine safety issues and conflicts of interest involving vaccine makers and federal health agencies.
In the middle of this scientific, legal and political battle are defensive pediatricians backing parents into a corner and losing their trust and a booming pharmaceutical industry with billions of dollars invested in new vaccine development.
It has been 207 years since British physician Edward Jenner acted on a hunch and scraped cowpox pus onto the arm of an 8-year-old boy. He theorized that a mild bout of cowpox would prevent a more virulent case of smallpox, and then convinced enough people he was right because his procedure was quickly adopted by physicians. But it failed in Jenner’s own 11-month-old son and lethal reactions were legendary.
One mother in England bitterly complained in 1883 about mandatory vaccination laws that allowed public health officials to issue a summons, threaten parents with imprisonment, and impose stiff fines for refusing to vaccinate their children. She said, "In no country has the cry of the mothers been allowed a hearing. They who see and realize that their children suffer from this practice have never been consulted as to its initiative or its continuance. If the will of the mothers could be made potent and effective, this cruel legislation would be at once and universally repealed."
The mothers prevailed in Victorian England and got mandatory vaccination laws repealed in that country, where vaccination remains voluntary today. But 19th century physicians in Europe and the U.S. quickly adopted and promoted Jenner’s new procedure despite public protests. Physicians and politicians were desperate to keep epidemic diseases from invading the overcrowded, filthy cities of Europe and the New World.
They failed to realize that eliminating the root causes of poor health--poverty, malnutrition, water contaminated by human and animal waste, spoiled food, and industrial air pollution, among others--would help prevent the spread of many diseases. Today, effective public health measures such as improving sanitation, nutrition, living conditions, health education and access to affordable and convenient health care, especially in underprivileged populations, often take a back seat to achieving a 100 percent vaccination rate.
Health officials and doctors point to how successful mandatory mass vaccination policies have been in dramatically reducing the numbers of cases of once routine childhood diseases, such as measles. In 1965 before routine use of measles vaccine, there were more than 400,000 cases of measles reported in the U.S. By 1995 with nearly 95 percent of American children receiving measles vaccine, there were only 309 cases.
Baby boomers, who lined up in school in 1955 for polio vaccinations, witnessed the eradication of polio from the western hemisphere in 1979. These impressive declines in childhood infectious diseases have made mass vaccination policies the cornerstone of government preventive health programs around the world.
However, despite the millions of dollars that are committed by industry and government to touting the accomplishments and benefits of mass vaccination programs, cracks are appearing in the united front that the medical establishment has maintained for two centuries. In industrialized countries, dissatisfied patients and alternative health care proponents are questioning orthodox medicine’s basic foundations, especially its heavy reliance on surgery and synthetic drugs.
The proliferating numbers of vaccines are just one more target for increasingly well educated and Internet-savvy health care consumers, who are wary of the many magic bullets drug companies promote.
Where doctors once prescribed antibiotics for every sore throat and sniffle, prescription-dependent patients are now being blamed for new strains of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. A new drug promoted as a lifesaver today is sometimes pulled off the market tomorrow for killing those who took it.
In the April 15, 1998 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), an analysis of drug side effects found that toxic reactions to correctly prescribed medications make more than two million Americans seriously ill every year and kill 106,000, putting the side effects of doctor-directed drug taking among the top 10 causes of death in the United States.
Among children, antibiotics and vaccines cause more adverse reactions than any other prescribed medicines, according to a Canadian study presented at the American Academy of Allergy and Asthma in 1998. An analysis of Canadian data on more than 1,500 cases of drug reactions between 1985 and 1995 found that the antibiotics amoxicillan and ampicillan accounted for 24 percent of total adverse reactions, with vaccines coming in second at 19 percent.
As the over-drugged, over-vaccinated baby boomer generation comes of age, many are intuitively moving toward the notion that preventing illness and maintaining health requires better nutrition, more exercise, management of stress, adopting a positive attitude and a less toxic and medically intrusive approach. A 1998 survey in JAMA found 39 million Americans made more than 600 million visits to alternative health care practitioners in 1997, more than to primary care physicians.
The patients paid most of the $21.2 billion cost themselves because health insurance plans generally don’t reimburse patients or have limited reimbursement for alternative health care, such as chiropractic. The patients wanted alternative therapies primarily to "prevent future illness from occurring or to maintain health and vitality."
Embracing the more spiritual concept of achieving better health through better living rather than through better chemistry, members of the ME generation--who challenged every institution and social convention as teenagers--continue to exercise their counterculture instincts as adults and parents by asserting their right to make independent health care choices for themselves and their children.
And they have been joined by segments of the "X, Y and echo" generations who grew up going to health food stores with their parents and now can pick up bottles of Echinacea, Goldenseal and soy vitamin drinks at the chain grocery and drug stores.
The pharmaceutical industry and organized medicine, which have had a stranglehold on the popular imagination when it comes to how we view health, may be gritting their collective teeth about the people’s move toward herbal supplements and yoga and away from Ritalin and Prozac, but they are not about to tolerate independent thinking when it comes to vaccination. The public demand for the freedom to make vaccination choices puzzles and worries MDs, including some outspoken alternative health care advocates.
Andrew Weil, MD, a respected leader in the alternative health care movement, defends mass vaccination. Sparring with Richard Moscowitz, MD in Natural Health magazine in 1997, Weil asserted, "The debate about immunization could only be going on in a country where the people are mostly immunized.
If people in this country lived with these diseases, you wouldn’t hear them questioning immunization." Moskowitz, a clinician who specializes in homeopathy, countered, "For us to bombard a newborn baby with a whole battery of vaccines as, in effect, their first immunological experience I think is reckless beyond measure. I would say it borders on the criminal."
And as questioning parents are thrown out of pediatricians’ offices if they do not submit their children to every state mandated vaccine and the American Medical Association (AMA) and American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) adopt a "no exemption to vaccination" stance, parent vaccine safety and informed consent advocates are organizing in states and fighting for the right to freely make vaccine choices. In 2003, after seven years of work in Texas and two years of work in Arkansas, citizens of both those states won the legal right to exercise conscientious, philosophical or religious belief exemptions to vaccination.
Outraged by the success of the effort in Texas led by Parents Requesting Open Vaccine Education (PROVE), physicians and public health officials mounted a public protest in an unsuccessful attempt to convince the legislature in special session to repeal the conscientious belief exemption just signed into law by the Governor.
Sensing a threat to their dominance that could become contagious, even the international public health community got into the act. An article on what the parents in Texas managed to do became hyperactively discussed in the pages of The Lancet. PROVE President Dawn Richardson commented "I didn’t know we were creating an international incident by standing up for the right to exercise informed consent to vaccination. If vaccines are so safe and so effective, why are doctors so afraid of people having the freedom to follow their conscience and make informed vaccine choices?"
Vaccines are supposed to fool the body’s immune system into producing antibodies to resist viral and bacterial infection in the same way that actually having the disease usually produces immunity to future infection. But vaccines atypically introduce into the human body lab altered live viruses and killed bacteria along with chemicals, metals, drugs and other additives such as formaldehyde, aluminum, mercury, monosodium glutamate, sodium phosphate, phenoxyethanol, gelatin, sulfites, yeast protein, antibiotics as well as unknown amounts of RNA and DNA from animal and human cell tissue cultures.
Whereas natural recovery from many infectious diseases stimulates lifetime immunity, vaccines only provide temporary protection and most vaccines require "booster" doses to extend vaccine-induced artificial immunity. The fact that manmade vaccines cannot replicate the body’s natural experience with the disease is one of the key points of contention between those who insist that mankind cannot live without mass use of multiple vaccines and those who believe that mankind’s biological integrity will be severely compromised by their continued use.
Philip Incao, M.D., a Colorado physician who utilizes a multidisciplinary approach in his alternative health care practice, maintains that health is about the individual successfully overcoming illness. He is part of a group of physicians in the U.S. and Europe who are taking a holistic approach to health and healing that marks the paradigm shift that is occurring in health care. According to Incao:
"Physically, health is about balancing acute inflammatory responses to infection, which stimulate one arm of the immune system, and chronic inflammatory responses to infection, which stimulate the other arm of the immune system. Just like a seesaw, the two arms of the immune system must remain in balance to maintain health. Vaccines tend to stimulate only one side of the immune system. Overuse of vaccines to suppress all acute, externalizing inflammations early in life can set up the immune system to respond to future stresses and infections by developing chronic internalizing disease later in life."
However, visitors to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Web site are told that "vaccines give your baby’s immune system the chance to practice and make protective antibodies before real germs invade. If left totally to chance, your baby’s first exposure to a disease may be from a germ too strong for your baby to fight. That’s why before parents had vaccines for their children, many children died from whooping cough, measles, diphtheria and other diseases. Those same germs exist today but today’s babies are protected by vaccines."
At the center of the vaccination debate, then, are two equally contentious questions. First, is it better to protect children against infectious disease early in life through temporary immunity from a vaccine or are they better off contracting certain contagious infections in childhood and attaining permanent immunity? Second, do vaccine complications ultimately cause more chronic illness and death than infectious diseases do? Both questions essentially pit trust in human intervention against trust in nature and the natural order, which existed long before vaccines were created by man.
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