Civil Defense Perspectives 34(2): March 2019
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), a disease outbreak is the occurrence of cases of disease in excess of what would normally be expected in a defined community, geographical area, or season. A single case of a communicable disease long absent, or caused by an agent not previously recognized in that area may also be reported as an outbreak.
Although measles was declared eradicated from the U.S. in 2000, there are dozens to hundreds of cases reported every year, generally attributed to travel from abroad. A peak of 667 cases in 2014 was followed by 188 in 2015 and 86 in 2015. In 2019, the 2014 peak has been surpassed. The last death in the U.S. attributed to measles occurred in 2015.
Why the nonstop news coverage? It appears to be related to the nationwide push to do away with exemptions from the nearly 70 injections of mandated school vaccines, except for narrowly defined medical exemptions. There is far less coverage of outbreaks that can’t be blamed on the tiny proportion of vaccine exemptors, or that result from an influx of unhealthy immigrants or from homeless drug addicts defecating in public.
For example, there were 6,366 cases of mumps reported in 2016 and 6,109 in 2017, nearly all in fully immunized persons. There were serious complications—much more common when mumps is delayed until adulthood—in 7%.
So far, the extreme in coercion has been reached by Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City, who has ordered all who reside or work in four ZIP code areas, adults and children, to get an MMR vaccination, prove immunity to measles, or pay $1,000. The threat of criminal penalties, including up to 6 months in prison, was dropped before the hearing on a lawsuit brought by five mothers. The areas covered by the order are home to many Orthodox Jews, some of whom claim a religious exemption. The lawsuit was dismissed.
“Millions Will Die”
Public health authorities claim that vaccines are one of the most important public health advances in history, and without them the dreaded childhood diseases will rage again. (I haven’t heard talk about the 500 million deaths prevented by DDT, or the millions, mostly in Africa, resulting from its ban.) Nearly 90% of the decline in infectious disease mortality, including from measles, occurred before 1940, when few vaccines or antibiotics were available. The decline is attributed to better nutrition and sanitation. In the U.S., the highest death rate for measles was in 1915, 14 per 100,000, three to four times less than the risk of being struck by lightning (ibid.). It is not even on the federal list of diseases for which isolation and quarantine are authorized.
Herd Immunity
Advocates of mandates harp on the need for herd immunity, and stigmatize children who are not fully vaccinated by the CDC schedule because they might get exposed to a disease and then might infect an immunosuppressed child.
The concept of herd immunity was suggested by A.W. Hedrich in 1933, based on his observation that measles outbreaks were suppressed when 68% of children had contracted the measles virus. Today, a claimed need for a 95% vaccination rate may be based on the fact that measles outbreaks occur despite a vaccination rate greater than 90%. The immunity rate may, however, be much lower because of waning vaccine immunity in adults. About 25% of people affected in the current outbreak have been vaccinated.
Vaccine Adverse Effects
Some patients with a measles-like illness have been recently vaccinated. About 5% of recipients of a live measles vaccine experience fever and rash distinguishable from measles only by real-time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). Since live but attenuated vaccine virus “cannot cause measles,” the manifestations are called an “adverse reaction.” A measles alarm was called off in Ann Arbor, Mich., because a child diagnosed with measles turned out to have a virus with the vaccine genotype. Testing for live virus in persons thought to have a vaccine reaction is discouraged though they may be shedding a live and transmissible virus. One might well ask whether immunocompromised persons should be protected from recently vaccinated rather than from unvaccinated children.
As the vaccine injury problem hit crisis proportions in 1986, the no-fault Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, funded by a 75-cent tax on each vaccine dose, was created to keep manufacturers in business. Since 1988, more than 20,123 petitions have been filed with the VICP. Of 17,576 adjudicated petitions, 6,465 were determined to be compensable, and 11,263 were dismissed. About $4.0 billion has been paid in compensation. For every 1 million doses of vaccine distributed, one person has been compensated.
Safety testing for vaccine is quite limited compared with that for drugs. Post-licensure surveillance relies mostly on the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). According to a study by Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, less than 1% of adverse vaccine reactions are reported to VAERS. One study found that 1 in 168 babies visited an ER within 2 weeks of a measles shot, mostly for fever, rash, and seizures.
The government and public health authorities vehemently deny the possibility that vaccines can cause autism, but there are defectors, such as Dr. Andrew Zimmerman, a former top expert witness. VICP has just ordered multimillion dollar awards to two children, who have a diagnosis of autism, for “encephalopathy.”
One effect of mass immunization has been to shift the age distribution of illness. Since measles now hits more adults and infants, it is considered four times worse than in pre-vaccine days. Mumps, pertussis, and chickenpox show similar effects.
Vaccines are not exempt from trade-offs, both for individuals and populations. The risk: benefit ratio depends on a number of variables. With mandates, liberty is also a casualty.
Censors
GoFundMe: All vaccine skeptics will be banned from the platform, for allegedly promoting misinformation.
AMA Pressures Social Media: In a letter to CEOs of leading technology companies, AMA’s executive vice president James Madara expressed concerns about “anti-vaccine related” messages that might “undermine sound science” and “further decrease vaccinations,” thereby threatening “to erase many years of progress” in controlling preventable diseases.
Vanished: After I printed out a “fact check” article on measles by investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson, I could not retweet the link because it had been removed.
EPA’s Risk Definitions
Toxicologist Frank Schell, Ph.D., who worked for 20 years at the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), a sister agency of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), writes that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) redefines words to mean whatever it likes. For example, dioxin, trichloroethylene, and formaldehyde are classified as “known” human carcinogens in the absence of any epidemiologic evidence of a cause-effect relationship. Officially “safe” levels of exposure gradually went from conservative, to ultra-conservative, to completely ridiculous. In the “crisis” due to a change in water sources in Flint, Mich., not a single child ≤5 years of age had a blood lead level (BLL) of 45 µg/dL (or greater), the minimum level for which the current CDC guidelines suggest chelation therapy. Since 1960, CDC’s BLL reference concentration has been gradually lowered from 60 µg/dL to 5 µg/dL “to keep the fear alive.” Forty years ago, 78% of Americans had BLLs ≥ 10 µg/dL.
“Acceptable Risk”
Many billons of dollars have been spent trying to achieve the goal of a less than one in a million (10-6) increased lifetime risk of developing cancer from exposure to a level of a contaminant found after cleaning up a hazardous waste site. Kathryn Kelly argues that there is no sound basis for this criterion though implementation could cost $288 million per hypothetical cancer prevented.
In reviewing 132 federal regulatory decisions, some concluded that the de facto level of acceptable risk was approximately 1 in 10,000 (10-4). Many factors determine acceptability, but arguably it is a judgment decision properly made by those exposed to the hazard (ibid.). And what level is acceptable to mandate?
The only study published to date that compares autism in MMR-vaccinated with not-yet-MMR-vaccinated children, touted as showing that “measles vaccine doesn’t cause autism, even in high-risk kids” lacks the statistical power to rule out an increased risk as high as 1 in 10,000.
The Wakefield False Narrative
Every time there’s an outbreak of measles, the media brings up Dr. Andrew Wakefield, the Number One scapegoat for “vaccine hesitancy.” Inaccuracies in mainstream coverage are debunked:
https://thinkingmomsrevolution.com/discerning-journalist-8-wakefield-myths-deconstructed/ and
https://www.jeremyrhammond.com/2018/05/07/vaccines-autism-how-the-media-lie-about-the-1998-lancet-study/ .
Smallpox, Measles, and the “Sixth Extinction”
The precedent for mandatory immunizations was smallpox. The Compulsory Vaccination Act of 1853 in England required parents to vaccinate every baby before age 3 months or pay a fine of 20 shillings. Outbreaks followed in 1854, 1855, 1856, culminating in the Great Outbreak of 1871, with 42,000 deaths, 4 years after a more stringent Act passed. The “inoculation mania” was met with evidence-based resistance, and the Royal Commission recommended that mandatory vaccination be stopped. In 1889, the book Vaccination Proved Useless and Dangerous: from Forty-five Years of Registration Statistics by Alfred R. Wallace was published. People in the town of Leicester were so adamantly opposed to vaccination that 61 went to prison rather than have their babies vaccinated. Instead, the town developed a method of quarantine described in Leicester: Sanitation versus Vaccination by J.T Biggs, available from amazon.com.
The U.S. Supreme Court precedent for allowing compulsory vaccination was the 1905 case of Jacobson v. Massachusetts. The fine for refusal was $5 (about $125 today). The Court’s warning about the potential for “arbitrary and oppressive” abuse of police power going “far beyond what was reasonably required for the safety of the public” was soon disregarded.
Public health authorities strive to replicate the successful eradication of smallpox (except as a potential biological weapon), which they attribute to the vaccine, with the eradication of measles and other diseases through universal vaccination.
One result is the total loss of herd immunity to smallpox. The whole world is now as vulnerable as native Americans were when colonists brought the disease from Europe. As Dr. Andrew Wakefield explained at the 2018 meeting of DDP (https://youtu.be/75euzMAjIfw), we are seeing the decay of natural herd immunity to measles and other diseases, which operated to protect against the most serious morbidity and mortality. Nature is adapting with strains that resist the imperfect vaccine immunity. Might we see the same result as with resistance to antibiotics—perhaps leading to “the end of modern medicine” in 80 years—with growing populations of vaccine-injured patients, plus the re-emergence of diseases vaccines were supposed to prevent?
[More on smallpox is found in CDP, Nov 2000, Jan 2002, and Nov 2002, at www.physiciansforcivildefense.org, and in DDP Newsletter, May 2002, Jul 2002, Sep 2002, Sep 2003, Nov 2006, and May 2014, at www.ddponline.org.]
Vaccine Adjuvants
Almost all vaccines contain an adjuvant, often aluminum, that stimulates the immune system. Unlike ingested aluminum, which is mostly eliminated, injected aluminum accumulates.
Macrophagic myofasciitis (MMF), possibly a form of the recently described autoimmune/inflammatory syndrome induced by adjuvants (ASIA, tinyurl.com/y6nptd5c, tinyurl.com/y5hv6qsx), features aluminic granulomas from injections of aluminum-adjuvanted vaccines; many patients have cognitive defects. A genetic predisposition is likely. Oil adjuvants such as squalene can also trigger autoimmunity, especially arthritis, and may be implicated in vaccine-associated narcolepsy or Gulf War syndrome. Dr. Arthur Robinson discussed the possible role of adjuvants in vaccine reactions at the 2018 DDP meeting (https://youtu.be/HvQLyQ-QD84).