Let me begin with a disclaimer.I give vaccinations in my office. I mean I personally administer them, not a nurse, me. I believe that vaccinations are useful at times.State Bill 277, the mandatory vaccination law bringing California into line with Mississippi and West Virginia has passed. I really don’t like it. I really don’t like the word mandatory, when it comes to health care. That is because it means someone else has taken upon themselves to decide what is good for you. They know that it really is for the best.The huge problem with that attitude is that it has proven wrong and is proven wrong every day in medicine. They absolutely do not know.Do you remember Fen-Phen, Vioxx, Bextra, DES or thalidomide? They were all common drugs that killed people. How about Seldane, the first antihistamine that didn’t make people sleepy? It caused fatal heart arrhythmias.These medication worked well for most people. The problem is that rare bad reactions do happen and if enough people use a treatment, some of them will die from the treatment.Bringing this back to immunizations, unanticipated and rare, but devastatingly bad responses to vaccinations do occur. One example is the paralytic disease Guillaine Barre that has been associated with influenza and hepatitis vaccines. The newest example of an unforeseen bad effect from a vaccination is the HPV vaccine for venereal warts. The government of Denmark has asked the EU to investigate adverse reactions in the 87 million europeans who have received the vaccine.Why?Some unusual and debilitating nervous disorders might be caused by this vaccine.One is a chronic pain condition. The other is a disorder that throws a monkey wrench into a body’s heart and blood pressure regulation system (POTS). I know of a young man with this disorder, who has gone from competing for a spot on the Olympic team to collapsing after he tries to exercise. His case is not related to the HPV vaccine but it demonstrates just how disabling this syndrome is and how bad the consequences can be from using a vaccine that authorities proclaim as perfectly safe. Other unanticipated, but significant consequences of vaccinations occur. One example is the vulnerability of infant to measles now because their mother’s breast milk can’t protect them. That was not true in the past when mothers were immune to measles because of their own exposure to the disease. Another example is the massive increase in the painful, sometimes disablingly so, disease called shingles among the elderly. Before the chicken pox vaccine, only a...
Long-time readers of this newsletter are aware of my skepticism regarding the flu vaccine. At the same time, headlines shouting about the looming flutastrophe can’t fail to grab my attention. The other day I walked past one of the televisions at my gym, and a graphic about hospitals turning away flu victims caught my eye. How horrible! Oh, wait. The routine emergency room advice in flu season is to “stay away”, because 1) most likely there is nothing an emergency room doc can do for you, 2) the flu is almost certainly not a medical emergency but 3) you WILL pass the illness along to other people waiting in the hospital. Some of them are barely clinging to life and so, please, just leave before your unpleasant illness leads to someone else’s death. It is strange that my viewpoint seems so out of sync. After all, the scientific evidence is that influenza vaccine does not do the job. In the past 10 years the flu vaccination rate in the US has doubled, but the death rate is unchanged. All evidence points to the fact that those who are most likely to die from the flu, the elderly and infants, are the least likely to be helped by flu vaccination. There is limited evidence that the vaccine is of significant benefit in any way. Furthermore, there have been a series of controversies and governmental hearings in Europe and the US about medical organizations acting as advertising agents of companies producing influenza-related vaccines and drugs, abdicating their ethical responsibilities. ONE possible explanation for vaccine ineffectiveness arises from the nature of the ever-mutating flu virus. Each year a panel of experts determine which specific forms of flu virus are likely to be the cause of the coming year’s epidemic. Then manufacturers produce that year’s vaccine against those strains. They have not been able to be particularly accurate, probably then compromising the vaccine. This year the CDC claims that the vaccine is spot on. That makes me unusually receptive to the possibility that this year’s vaccine might be effective. HOWEVER, such predictions have been wrong many times in the past. Furthermore, the CDC is not the independent body it should be. The Influenza Division at the CDC receives funding from the companies that make flu vaccines and antiflu drugs. Just as with the antiflu drugs, the CDC Influenza Division has ignored the determinations of truly independent experts, like the Cochrane Collaboration, when those determinations have been unfavorable to influenza vaccine. I have...
As you are probably aware, and I have written about previously, the US is in the midst of a whooping cough epidemic. With a “business-as-usual” bias, a number of agencies, individuals within the medical community and representatives of major media outlets have blamed “ignorant and irresponsible” parents choosing not to vaccinate their children as the cause of this outbreak. That criticism is unfair, because, as many studies show, parents who choose to limit the vaccinations their children receive are better educated than other parents. Calling these parents ignorant shows that these commentators are themselves uninformed. It goes further than that, though. As I so often find myself writing, opinion is shifting and those “authorities” are beginning to see their own ignorance, or at least redirecting their blame cannons. In the past week compelling new data have been published, supporting the contentions of many (including me), that the vaccine is not doing its job. One expert speculated that as many as 95% of those currently developing whooping cough got the disease because their vaccine-created immunity waned. Some are then suggesting a return to the old vaccine, forgetting all of the serious reactions it created and data showing that it was not that effective. But, hold on. 95% of cases? Nowhere in the US are 95% of children vaccinated for whooping cough. Statistically, that would mean that children receiving the whooping cough vaccine would be MORE likely to get the disease than unvaccinated children. Sounds odd, but that very thing happened with the first version of the HIB meningitis vaccine. I have a lot of patients who are not vaccinated for pertussis. Although I have seen many patients with whooping cough over the years, I have yet to see one during this epidemic. Also, an anonymous public health official, working in an area where a very high percentage of children are not vaccinated for whooping cough, told me that every case of whooping cough she had seen in this current outbreak occurred in a vaccinated child. Who is...
The widely disseminated comments of many organizations and authorities would lead one to believe that any possible linkage between vaccination and autism has been entirely disproven. That is not so. The theory that there might be a connection is biologically plausible. One of the most consistent biological abnormalities among children with autism is their limited ability to detoxify heavy metals. It would be a real possibility then that repeated doses of a heavy metal like the mercury preservative, which had been used in nearly all vaccines, would lead to autism in some individuals. However, a theoretical possibility means just a hair more than nothing. A newly published study supports the view that there may well be a connection between vaccinations and autism. The authors of this study analyzed nationwide data to investigate the connection between total vaccination exposure, autism and speech or language impairment (SLI). Other studies have typically looked for associations between autism and some specific immunization. When the intent of an investigation is to test the theory that some component, present in many vaccines, might be an autism-causing factor, the design of this study, utilizing the sum of vaccination exposure, makes much more sense. These researchers took into account the potential confusion created by the timing of vaccine and diagnosis of autism or SLI. Autism begins before age 2 but is typically diagnosed years later. If vaccinations were causative, those first two years are when the child would have received them. So, these researchers used total vaccination exposures up to two years of age. Accounting for the delay in diagnosis, they used the rates of autism and SLI at age 8 for their analysis. Because the effect would become evident in individuals 6 years after their exposure, researchers compared rates of vaccinations in 1999 with autism/SLI rates 6 years later (2005). They then analyzed these data, controlling for known and suspected autism risk factors. They also performed statistical tests for potentially confounding health conditions and access to medical care (which might lead to higher rates of diagnosis), finding that these factors did not influence the rates of autism and SLI. These researchers identified what we call a linear dose-response. For every 1% increase in vaccination rates there was a 1.7% increase in the number of children having either autism or speech/language impairment. This study does not prove that childhood vaccinations cause autism. It does prove that the issue is unresolved and that caution about all vaccinations is warranted. Thimerosol, the standard mercury preservative formerly used in...
The mission of this site is to inform and empower you. Representing the sum of my experience as well as the latest clinical research, my perspective is often somewhat at odds with the simplistic articles appearing in the media. Applying the information here you can become healthier, stronger and hopefully happier. Look around and let me know what you think.
