The Immune System / The Challenge to Mass Vaccination

submitted by Dr. Gary Farr Last Updated October, 1, 2003

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Asthma and Vaccines

Asthma is an autoimmune disorder that tops the list of chronic respiratory diseases found in children. Although public health officials attribute the recorded increases in asthma to better case diagnosis, more air pollution both indoors and outdoors and smoking, some scientists find evidence that vaccination and lack of contagious infectious diseases in early childhood may later encourage the development of asthma and other allergic conditions.

In 1996, the British medical journal, The Lancet, published a study that noted that the incidence of early childhood diseases in Britain had fallen in the 20^th century while those allergic diseases such as asthma, hay fever and eczema rose sharply. The researchers hypothesized that certain childhood infections, especially measles, may protect against allergy.

The authors of the 1997 Science article "Asthma: An Epidemic in the Absence of Infection?" concluded that "childhood infections may, therefore, paradoxically protect against asthma." And the authors of a study in a 1997 article in Epidemiology concluded that "it is theoretically possible that immunization may contribute to the development of allergic disease," including asthma.

In a 1997 issue of Epidemiology, New Zealand researchers reported that of 1,265 New Zealanders born in 1977, 23 received no childhood vaccinations and none suffered childhood asthma. Among the 1,242 who got DPT and polio shots, 23 percent later had episodes of asthma, 23 percent had asthma consultations and 30 percent had consultations for other allergic illness.

In a 2000 study, researchers, in reviewing data from the National Center for Health Statistics from 1988 to 1994 and comparing vaccinated to unvaccinated children, found that a child who received DPT or tetanus vaccination was 50 percent more likely to experience severe allergic reactions, more than 80 percent more likely to experience sinusitis and twice as likely to experience asthma as those children who were not vaccinated. The authors concluded that "asthma and other allergic hypersensitivity reactions and related symptoms may be caused, in part, by the delayed effects of DPT or tetanus vaccination."

Autism and Vaccines

The dramatic rise in the numbers of cases of autism in the past few decades, particularly since the early 1980s, has been increasingly linked to vaccination in recent years, as it has become more evident that autism has a biological and not a psychological basis. The medical literature identified only a handful of autism cases in the 1940s. After the DPT vaccine became widely used in the 1950s and the new live virus measles vaccine was in routine use after 1965, the numbers of autistic children began to grow.

By 1979, the combination live-virus MMR vaccine was added to the routine child vaccination schedule and given to children at 12 to 15 months of age while federal grants were given to states to provide free DPT, live oral polio and MMR vaccines to children in public health clinics. In California, where cases of autism have been monitored since 1970, there was a steep and steady rise in the numbers of autism cases beginning in the early 1980s.

The old theory that children were made autistic because their mothers were "cold" and did not provide enough nurturing was discredited in 1964 by the pioneering autism researcher, Bernard Rimland, Ph.D. The fact that autism appears to be a biological disorder has only slowly gained acceptance with the recognition that autistic children are suffering a wide range of immune and brain system dysfunction. In addition to classic autistic behaviors such as spinning, rocking, flapping, lack of eye contact and speech, many autistic children today have gastrointestinal disorders, seizures, learning disabilities and severe allergies.

The connection between vaccination and autism was first reported 18 years ago in DPT: A Shot in the Dark (which I co-authored with Harris Coulter), but today the subject of autism and vaccines has become the most controversial vaccine safety topic debated in the pages of medical journals, on broadcasts and in print journalism reports, in congressional hearings and in homes of parents of autistic children. DPT vaccine-induced autism is thought to follow post-vaccine brain inflammation that one 1981 British study (the National Childhood Encephalopathy Study) estimated occurs after 1 in 110,000 DPT shots. In the U.S. several awards for DPT vaccine-induced autism have been made in the federal Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP).

However, most of the arguments about the causal relationship between vaccines and autism have focused on the live MMR vaccine as well as on inactivated vaccines that have contained a mercury preservative, thimerosal.

In 1998, an unsuspecting young British gastroenterologist suddenly found himself in the midst of a hurricane for discovering a possible connection between the MMR vaccine and autism. Andrew Wakefield, M.D. and 13 colleagues published a report in the February 27, 1998 issue of The Lancet about a new syndrome involving inflammatory bowel disease and autism in children. Eight out of 12 normal children who developed severe intestinal disorders soon after an MMR vaccination also became autistic. Previously five of those eight children had reacted adversely to vaccinations.

The team of British scientists, who had inadvertently stumbled upon the connection while studying Crohn’s disease and other inflammatory bowel dysfunction in children, emphasized that they had not proved a cause and effect relationship. They called for more studies to investigate whether persistent viral infection, either from natural disease or live virus vaccines, can lead to central nervous system damage in some children that takes the form of autism.

Nevertheless, in the same issue of The Lancet, CDC officials Robert Chen, MD and Frank DeStefano, MD charged in an editorial that, "vaccine safety concerns such as that reported by Wakefield and colleagues may snowball" when the public and the media "confuse association with causality and shun immunization." Other CDC officials discounted the study’s importance, saying the children’s health problems were "coincidental" and not caused by vaccination.

Soon after, a Reuter’s newswire story quoted Johns Hopkins Neal Halsey saying it was "highly inappropriate" for Wakefield and his colleagues to discuss a possible connection between the children’s health problems and measles or MMR vaccines. Wakefield was called before the Medical Research Council in the U.K. where British, US and WHO health officials criticized his report for unnecessarily frightening the public.

Undeterred, Wakefield subsequently published a study providing evidence for the presence of measles virus in the intestines of children suffering from autism and intestinal bowel disorders, while not finding evidence for measles virus in normal, healthy children. He continued to maintain that children with a pre-existing immune abnormality may be predisposed to sequestering the measles virus in the gut and that the MMR vaccine prompts them to develop autoimmunity leading to immune mediated CNS damage.

In 2001, the IOM Immunization Safety Review Committee examined the Wakefield hypothesis and concluded that "the evidence favors rejection of the causal relationship at the population level between MMR and vaccine and autistic spectrum disorders," but the committee also stated that "the proposed biological models linking MMR vaccination to autism spectrum disorders, although far from established, are nevertheless not disproved." The committee called for further scientific research into the occurrence of autism in children following MMR vaccination.

In 2003, Utah State University researcher Vijendra Singh published a serologic study in Pediatric Neurology reporting that measles antibody was significantly higher in autistic children compared with normal children and the antibody was directed against a protein. He hypothesized that autistic children have a hyperimmune response to measles virus which, in the absence of wild type measles infection, might be a sign of an abnormal immune reaction to measles vaccine strain virus or virus reactivation.

Shortly after Wakefield and his colleagues published initial evidence for an association between MMR vaccine and autism, in 1999 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) directed vaccine manufacturers to remove the mercury preservative, thimerosal, from childhood vaccines. EPA and FDA officials issued their directive in response to federal legislation requiring the evaluation of products containing toxins, such as mercury.

An analysis of mercury levels in childhood vaccines found that the total amount of mercury children were exposed to in routinely given vaccines (DPT, DTaP, Hib, hepatitis B) exceeded EPA toxic exposure guidelines. Mercury is a known neurotoxin which can cross the placenta and blood brain barrier and concentrate in the blood and brain but can also affect the immune system, kidneys and lungs. A pregnant woman’s exposure to high levels of mercury has been shown to cause brain damage in the fetus.

There was special concern about mercury in childhood vaccines because, as of 1991, the CDC and American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) had recommended that all newborn babies receive their first hepatitis B vaccine at 12 hours of age and again at one month of age. Hepatitis B vaccine, along with DPT, DTaP and Hib vaccines given at two months, four months and six months of age all contained mercury. By the end of 2001, all but trace amounts of thimerosal had been removed from DPT, DTaP, Hib and hepatitis B vaccines as manufacturers moved to package these vaccines in single dose vials that did not require a preservative (thimerosal is still present in DT and inactivated flu vaccine as well as certain combination DTaP-Hib and hepatitis B vaccines).

During the past four years, many parents with autistic children have become convinced that their children are mercury poisoned including those parents who founded SAFEMINDS. Scientists such as Boyd Haley, Chairman, Department of Chemistry, University of Kentucky, have given expert testimony in support of those concerns during investigative hearings held by Congressman Dan Burton (R-IN) in the U.S. House Government Reform Committee.

In 2001, the IOM Immunization Safety Review Committee issued a report that found the hypothesis that exposure to thimerosal-containing vaccines "is not established" but is "biologically plausible," and concluded that the evidence is inadequate to accept or reject a causal relationship between exposure to thimerosal from vaccines and the neurodevelopmental disorders of autism, ADHD and speech and language delay." The report called for removal of thimerosal from childhood vaccines and replacement of existing stocks of thimerosal containing vaccines with mercury-free vaccines.

An attempt by the vaccine industry to insert a rider in the Homeland Security Bill in late 2002, which would have protected vaccine manufacturers from lawsuits for harm caused by toxic additives and components of vaccines, such as thimerosal, further convinced parents that thimerosal is a cause of autism. The rider was eventually removed from the legislation, but parents of autistic children continue to be frustrated in their efforts to obtain recognition of thimerosal-induced autism as they seek compensation in the tort system and in the federal vaccine injury compensation program (VICP) for their children.

Evidence has been accumulating that suggests some children may not be able to excrete mercury from the body as efficiently as other children. In 2003, one study reported that urinary mercury concentrations were significantly higher in children with autistic spectrum disorders than in normal controls. The authors concluded that "data from this study, along with emerging epidemiologic data showing a link between increasing mercury doses from childhood vaccines and childhood neurodevelopment disorders, increases the likelihood that mercury is one of the main factors leading to the large increases in the rate of autism and other neurodevelopment disorders."

Autoimmunity Family History and Autism

The significance of a family history of autoimmunity and autism was highlighted in a 1999 study published in the Journal of Child Neurology which found a statistically significant correlation between a family history of autoimmune disorders and autism. When comparing the medical histories of families of 61 autistic patients and 46 healthy controls, the authors discovered "that the subjects who reported two or more family members with autoimmune disorders were twice as likely to have autism, those with at least three family members with autoimmune disorders were 5.5 times more likely to have autism, and those whose mothers had autoimmune disorders were 8.8 times more likely to be affected."

The researchers added "the percentage of family members with adult rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus and the category of connective tissue autoimmune disorders were greater in the autism group than in controls and approached statistical significance in these cases." They suggested that perhaps "individuals with autism inherit a genetic predisposition for autoimmunity that, in conjunction with medical triggers or other environmental factors, results in developmental and neurologic pathology."

Vaccines and the Law

If adverse responses to vaccination are under genetic control, then laws requiring vaccination are a de facto state-enforced selection and sacrifice of the genetically susceptible. Yet, refusal to vaccinate one’s children with every mandated vaccine in the U.S. can result in denial of an education, including enrollment in day care, elementary school, high school, college, and graduate school; denial of health insurance; denial of employment; and threatened denial of government benefits for poor children, including food and medical care. In addition, parents who don’t comply with vaccination laws have been charged with child medical neglect and threatened with having their children taken from them. Parents of children, even acutely ill children, are being thrown out of pediatrician’s offices in Texas and other states if the parents attempt to make independent vaccine choices for their children.

All 50 states provide a medical exemption to vaccination laws that doctors licensed to prescribe drugs can write. All but two states (West Virginia and Mississippi) allow exemptions for religious beliefs, but some states require that parents belong to a religion that has a written tenet opposing vaccination, although several state Supreme Courts have found this requirement unconstitutional. Some 18 states provide for philosophical, personal belief or conscientious belief exemption, but less than 1 percent of all children in the US are exempted from vaccination for any reason.

Although American vaccine laws fall under state, rather than federal, jurisdiction, as soon as the CDC recommends a new vaccine for "universal use" in children, state health officials automatically make it mandatory. So, while state health officials only required children to show proof of one smallpox vaccination to enter school in 1949, by 2003 most states required children to be injected with 34 doses of 10 vaccines.