Book Review- Vaccine Epidemic: How Corporate Greed, Biased Science and Coercive Government Threaten our Human Rights, our Health and our Children- By Louise Kuo Habakus and Mary Holland
by Richard Pitt
The following is a detailed book review of this book. As I was reading the book and making notes, it felt important to document in detail the issues raised, given their importance in today’s world and for the future of our children’s health. Obviously, reading the book in detail oneself is important in being fully informed of the issues at hand. However, this review, in which I sympathesize very much with the arguments being made, is done to hopefully bring these issues further to the light. Also, given the recent ruling in California that allows doctors to vaccinate 12 year old girls against the HPV vaccine, (and also the Hepatitis B and other possible STD vaccines) without their parent’s knowledge or consent, makes the issues here even more significant.
This review has been done in a more “extractive” approach where I have taken out quotes and pieces from the book which felt important to include. So more than a review it is rather like an extraction of salient parts of it. It may seem rather piecemeal but hopefully will explore the main points.
The book begins with the arguments made on both sides of the debate. They use the terms pro vaccine and pro choice, which is an interesting choice of words to choose. The title to the introduction is “Vaccine Choice is a Human Right.” “All medical interventions require free and informed consent. To abridge that right is to violate the essential human rights to life, liberty and bodily integrity. By denying truly free and informed consent to vaccination, U.S. vaccine policy violates fundamental rights.”
Seventy doses of 16 vaccines are given from birth to age 18. All fifty states mandate from 30 to 45 doses of about a dozen different vaccines for admission to day care and school. Research shows that fewer than 10% of doctors report adverse vaccine effects. However, the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) has paid over $2 billion to 2,500 families since 1988.
The book outlines the basic questions about vaccination choice and the rights of people to question what is good for them and their families and the obligations of government to understand what they are mandating. The concept of utilitarianism is discussed, as it is part of the rationale used by governments to justify the greater good.
The book then begins with a discussion of the human, civil, and religious rights, looking at the science, history, ethics and philosophy around vaccine choice and the broader social and constitutional rights that free countries espouse to and that are also constituted into the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.
Modern bioethics began in 1947 at the criminal trial of Nazi doctors. As a result judges established 10 principles, on ethical standards for medical research. Foremost principle is that “the voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.” In 1948, the UN Gen Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) directly picked up the issue of human experimentation. Article 7 dictates that “no one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. In particular, non one shall be subjected without his free consent to medical or scientific experimentation.” It also creates an individual right to informed consent for medical research. The emphasis given the mentioning specifically medical or scientific experimentation reflected the importance of this matter.
Council of Europe’s 1997 Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine. (The Oviedo Convention). The Oviedo Convention reflects the ethical requirements in a society where the research community has become more aggressive in pursuing scientific knowledge, the boundary between science and medicine has become blurred, medicine has become more complex and difficult for patients to comprehend and medical research is no longer confined to national or jurisdictional boundaries. The convention guarantees free and informed consent to ALL medical interventions, not limited only to human experimentation – it abolishes the distinction between research and therapy and addresses the need for individuals to have adequate information about all medical interventions. The Oveido Convention requires consent for any medical intervention, including prevention, diagnosis, treatment, rehabilitation and research.
In 2005, the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) adopted the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights in the UNESCO Declaration. They made it clear that the interests of individuals cannot give way to the “sole interest of science or society.” Article 6 states that individuals must give “prior, free and informed consent” to any preventative, diagnostic and therapeutic medical intervention” and “scientific research”.
Even though declarations are not formal treaties, they effectively set a standard for individual countries to be measured by, which is what the UDHR has become. These declarations have particular relevance for vaccine policy given the tendency to mandatory policies and that the vaccine industry is basically in charge of defining safety verification, a conflict of interest which significantly impacts the protection of both rights and the health of those being vaccinated.
Scholars at the Harvard School of Public Health developed a Public Health-Human Rights Impact Assessment Instrument to evaluate possible human rights violations that occur when governments take actions in the name of public health that limit individual rights. They argue that such actions must be taken as a last resort and must only occur when they meet (the following), a number of stringent human rights conditions which they outline, ones that conform to existing United Nations Charter.
When looking at these criteria, it becomes apparent that they are not being conformed to in the current climate of mandatory vaccine policies and the influence of the pharmaceutical industry on the legislative process.
A case is made that mandatory vaccine policy for children is discriminatory as the same criteria is not applied for adults, even though vaccines wear off. Mandatory vaccine policies do not conform with international human rights.
The argument of herd immunity undergirds all compulsory vaccine policies. It argues that a majority of people need vaccination to sustain its effect and protect the minority who cannot be vaccinated for whatever reason. However, the book argues that herd immunity theory is questionable and that the figures of 70-80% is not proven. It is more an article of faith. The idea developed from the immunity conferred to a community after naturally catching a disease, which normally confers lifelong immunity. In the 1930’s and 1940’s, health officials began using “techniques of mass persuasion” and “aggressive salesmanship” to increasing compliance in vaccine goals. However, the argument is made that vaccine induced immunity is different to natural immunity, which mostly confers lifelong immunity whereas the former does not and ideally needs reviewing to ensure immunity is still active. Outbreaks of certain diseases, especially childhood diseases occur in fully vaccinated people. (This alone makes one question the whole logic of both the efficacy and mandatory nature of vaccines).
Over the past two decades, the U.S. government has paid over $2 billion to families of children who died or who have been permanently harmed by vaccinations. “A government that requires individuals – particularly children – to be vaccinated, knowing that some will die and others will be permanently disabled as a result, risks losing all moral authority.” So writes James Turner JD, one of the contributors to the book. He talks about when he was called up in 1970, by John Gardner, President Lyndon Johnson’s secretary of health, Education and Welfare (HEW) from 1965-1968, who told him about “unfortunate, indeed dangerous activities involving vaccines that had been going on while he was secretary.” At that time it was the National Institutes of Health (NIH), not the FDA that was regulating vaccines. Turner then discusses his interviews with government officials working in the vaccine arena, quoting their concerns about the vaccines used. The DPT vaccine was the “dirtiest material put into humans” quoted one. A cholera reviewer said “A glass of proper mineral water would work better than the shot.” The quality control officer worried about the amount of mercury in vaccines – in 1971!! The key scientific advocate for the creation of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said he had been fired in the early 1960’s for refusing to make the annual announcement urging Americans to get the flu shot. The attorney General found that NIH vaccine regulators were illegally exempting vaccines from drug regulation.
As a result of these findings, vaccine regulation was moved to the FDA from the NIH. Turner describes the development of vaccine regulation from the 1950’s when it was found that the Salk polio vaccine paralyzed over 200 people and killed 10, even though it’s side effects had been known to some researchers, who were overruled other scientists connected to Salk and the vaccine’s manufacturer. It was soon discovered what the problem was once people had died. Also there was concern then about the side effects of the flu vaccine, which even then was showing connections with Guillain-Barre syndrome. Then in 1963, Dr. Smadel worked to study vaccine safety and efficacy, having discovered that polio vaccines grown in live monkey’s kidney cell structure contained simian virus 40 (SV-40), a cancer-causing agent. Turner describes the fight within the NIH and then the FDA over vaccine safety and the suppression of data that challenged the government’s position on vaccines. Then came the 1976 swine flu debacle when the government decided to offer the whole country swine flu vaccine, only to see it create many side effects. This led to the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, which authorized cash payments for vaccine damaged children, but limited the liability of government or vaccine manufacturers. Dr Morris, one of the long term vaccine researchers, eventually sacked for his research revealing possible damage from vaccines, fought against this act, saying it would end any possibility of ensuring no harm from vaccines.
Since then, that act has been used by the government to deny compensation to many parents of vaccine damaged children. Barbara Loe Fisher, the founder of the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) is quoted when she testified before the California state Senate Committee on health and Human Services in 2002. The bill had been supported by the vaccine industry precisely because it protected them from legal responsibility. Even though the act stipulated that vaccine effects needed to be documented clearly and every vaccine given to be put into a record, with the lot number etc. this procedure is barely working. The Act basically moved accountability from manufacturers to the tax payer. And then, once the law was passed, against the wishes of even the U.S. government Department of Justice and the Department of Health and Human Services, criteria for evaluating vaccine damage was rewritten and every case brought before them was fought over, leaving over $1 billion in the vaccine injury trust fund untouched as 3 out of 4 cases are refused compensation.
Is Mandatory Vaccination Constitutional: Only 20 states have philosophical exemptions to mandatory vaccination. The Fifth Amendment of the constitution says, “No person shall….be deprived of life, liberty of property without due process of law.” The 14th amendment extends this, saying, “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall….deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Mandatory vaccines fail to provide due process to individuals.
Case law contains limitations on mandatory vaccination, e.g., a threatened or actual epidemic. It gives people the chance to opt out and/or conscientious objection. Today, even though these programs recognize these elements, in practice, they do not meet the requirements necessary to protect life.
Comparison can be made with the questionable constitutionality of Capital Punishment in the USA. In 1972, the US Supreme Court declared that current moral and medical exemptions to C P were lacking effectiveness, leading to a 4 year moratorium on capital punishment until states adopted procedures for implementing the death penalty that satisfied the Supreme Court’s reading of due process.
Current mandatory vaccine policy does not make clear exemption options and people’s rights. Every state should have the right to philosophical exemption. Any mandatory vaccine must require the government to prove that those vaccinated may be harmed by those who are not and to prove the danger of the epidemic threat vis a vis the dangers of the vaccine. The 14th amendment protects an individual against unwanted medical interventions. Parents have the right to decide what is in the best interests of the child.
Today, a child is given 30-45 separate vaccines, in comparison to 5 in the 1950’s. The government has provided no effective procedural framework with public participation to adjust the compensation scheme to cover todays’ expanded vaccine mandates.
The Supreme Court’s seminal case in defining states authority over compulsory vaccine policy was Jacobson v. Massachusetts. The court was clear in defining that the state of Massachusetts had to verify that it was necessary for public safety or public health, but was careful to warn that, even during an epidemic, the police power of the state, might be exercised in particular circumstances in an arbitrary unreasonable manner, or may go beyond what was reasonably required for the safety of the public. “The Supreme Court did not contemplate that compulsory vaccination would be imposed outside of a clear public health emergency.”
In the early 20th century, courts invalidated vaccination mandates when there was no imminent danger from a disease. However, today, in courts, children harmed or killed by vaccines have very little due process. In fact, they have even less than in death penalty cases, in which this issue has been discussed in various courts in the land, including in 2002, when District Judge Jed S. Rafkoff found the Federal Death Penalty Act unconstitutional as there was too great a risk of innocent people being executed. Even though the Appeals Court overturned Judge Rakoff’s opinion, based on the notion that the accused do receive jury trials and due process, which children damaged or killed by vaccines do not even receive.
Therefore, the death of an innocent child in the wake of mandatory vaccination policy is shocking and violates the U.S. constitution.
The law considers vaccines to be “unavoidably unsafe.” Congress passed the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act in part to compensate families for “vaccine-related injury or death.” Essentially the act was a bailout to the pharmaceutical industry, forcing the public – rather than industry – to pay for damage from “unavoidably unsafe” products. Even though Congress intended for society to take responsibility for vaccine damaged children, the reality has not lived up this ideal. The government mainly denies accountability and refuses to give out payments for damage. Parents seeking accountability are forced to endure the full weight of government denial, who have all the legal and financial muscle to get their way. The vaccine injury compensation program (VICP) which is part of the Act passed simply does not work in favor of children and parents. The VICP is in fact a tribunal. There is no judge or jury or formal rules.
The following problems are outlined for the VICP.
Lack of judicial independence.
Lack of equality between government and petitioner. The VICP often compensates petitioner’s lawyers years later and can cut petitioners legal fees.
The lack of adequate access to existing science. Absence of essential science. The lack of basic science in recognizing side effects and when they could occur after a vaccine leaves a great onus on the petitioner to prove cause and effect, which can then be easily refuted.
The lack of transparency and the perception of arbitrariness. The government can keep secret certain cases and the compensation given from petitioners seeking address for a similar situation. There is no consistency
The lack of discovery. The court is not obligated to make documents available or witnesses available as part of the argument.
The lack of adequate procedural safeguards.
The government’s lack of burden to prove causation. The government is not required to prove the safety of a vaccine. Therefore the petitioner must prove the harmfulness of a vaccine.
The lack of a jury of peers.
The inappropriately short statute of Limitations. Petitioners only have three years from the time a vaccine-induced injury occurs to file a claim. The Vaccine Injury Table was set up in a time when it was thought that all vaccine-induced injuries happened immediately. This does not reflect many of the complications of vaccines seen today, including autism, seizure disorders, learning disabilities, arthritis etc.
The US Supreme Court heard a case in October 2010, relating to a vaccine damaged child, who developed convulsions after a DPT vaccine. After losing her claim in a VICP hearing, the mother sued in the Pennsylvania civil court, arguing that the DPT design was defective and unreasonably dangerous. The Pennsylvania Federal District Court and Third Circuit Court of Appeals decided that the plaintiff had no right to bring the claim to civil court. The Supreme Court will have to decide whether the mother has this right. This may be a very important decision for the court. As Justice Sotomayor asked during the hearing, “What is the inducement for them (the vaccine industry) to do it (fix defective vaccine designs) voluntarily.”
The author of this chapter states that the VICP is not working and only is now used to insulate the medical industry from liability for vaccine-induced injuries.
In the following chapter, William Wagner, JD, makes the case that the rights of the parent to choose what is best for their child is an inalienable and fundamental right, embedded in “deeply rooted divine, natural, and common law traditions.” He traces these rights back to both biblical and philosophical traditions, quoting John Locke warning of the threat to liberty from the state usurping parental authority. He then quotes from the U.S. Declaration of Independence to confirm this position. He then makes the argument that when these fundamental moral principles are compromised, the government can rationalize the right to do things to citizens based on a utilitarian notion, like forced sterilization of women, scientific experimentation on African Americans without their consent and even the institution of slavery. He questions whether even the current Supreme Court will recognize parental rights as a fundamental liberty protected by the Constitution. “Replacing the sacred parental right to responsibly determine a child’s medical treatment with dictatorial government mandates inevitably erodes a country’s essential foundations.”
The following chapter is headed, An Urgent Call for More Research by Carol Stott, PhD, and Andrew Wakefield MB, BS, FRCS, FRCPath. They state that the National Academy of Sciences chartered the Institute of Medicine (IOM) in 1970 to serve as advisor to the federal government on issues affecting public health. Excerpts from many reports of the IOM over 15 years illustrate the continued lack of progress in addressing the paucity of research on vaccine safety. They then quote parts of many reports which again and again bring up concerns about vaccine safety and lack of scientific research and funds to do studies of possible vaccine harm. However, in the last IOM report in 2004, it denies a causal link between Autism and MMR vaccine or thimerosal, despite a lack of scientific research into the topic. The authors then make a case for the type of research that would need to be done to prove one way or the other whether a connection in fact does exist. A New York congresswoman Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) introduced a bill in 2007 to do just that but it never became law and even though the bill was reintroduced in 2009, the bill has not yet been passed. Why the necessary epidemiological research has not already been carried out was described by the former chief of the National Institutes of Health and current member of the IOM. “There is a completely expressed concern that they don’t want to pursue a hypothesis because that hypothesis could be damaging to the public health community at large by scaring people.” “I think that the public health officials have been too quick to dismiss the vaccine-autism hypothesis as irrational.” However, the American Academy of Pediatricians (AAP), in a press release in the fall of 2010, blamed non-vaccinated children for the outbreak of “deadly diseases making a comeback.” “The anti-vaccine movement threatens America’s children.”
However, the authors cite evidence from peer-reviewed studies that show increasing evidence of vaccine damage, especially in neurodevelopmental and immune disorders, including experiments on monkeys that were given the same vaccine schedule as for children in the years 1994-1999. Monkeys given a single dose of thimerosal containing hepatitis B vaccine (containing 2 micrograms of ethyl mercury – human children get 12.5 micrograms) “exhibited significant delays in the development of major survival reflexes – root, snout, and suck. The exposed animals took more than twice as long as the control group to acquire these reflexes, which are typically used to measure infants’ brain development and are vital to primate infants’ survival in the wild.” The authors discuss the evidence linking Hepatitis B vaccine with developmental disability, the DPT vaccine with Asthma, and the relationship between autism and environmental toxins.
The authors make the point that while there is still more research necessary to prove a clear level of cause and effect, the position of the IOM to deny any such effect cannot be backed up by existing scientific evidence. However, existing evidence reveals the level of misrepresentation by those whose “priority is not vaccine safety.” The authors discuss one piece of research by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), when looking into a possible increase in Autism in Brick Township, New Jersey, revealing how the CDC deliberately tried to obfuscate the facts and data.
The following chapter by Robert Johnston, PhD, discusses the historical resistance to mandatory vaccinations from all walks of society, going back to the 1720’s and continuing until the 20th century, “when by the 1930’s, only nine states (plus the District of Columbia) had laws on the books that mandated vaccination.” He states that popular skepticism about vaccines reignited in the 1970’s and 1980’s, inspired by, among others, Chicago Pediatrician Robert Mendelsohn, Mothering Magazine and the 1982 formation of Dissatisfied Parents Together (DPT).
The following chapter, titled “Medical Ethics and Contemporary Medicine,” discusses the historical factors that lead doctors and society to ignore the Hippocratic Oath, “First Do No Harm”, and how before the 2nd World War, German doctors and society began to rationalize eugenic practices and the institutionalization of such philosophies. This is used to example what can happen when the State and its utilitarian ethics comprises the right to life and the interest of the individual. German doctors argued that the health of the State is of “higher civil morality”. American medicine has its own history where in the name of the greater good, human rights abuses were justified and where the eugenics movement wielded serious influence for a number of years. “The U.S. was the first country to carry out eugenics-driven compulsory sterilization programs under state statutes. Indiana enacted the first law in 1907 and the last forced sterilization was performed in Oregon in 1981.” “The Model Eugenical Sterilization Law published in 1914 served as the template for most state statutes and included an indemnification clause to protect physicians who performed surgical sterilizations from legal action…” similar to the legal immunity for physicians giving state-mandated vaccines. The author quotes from the Supreme Court decision that upheld the legality of Virginia’s compulsory eugenic sterilization policy in 1926. “Three generations of imbeciles are enough”, the majority quoted. “By 1944, thirty states had sterilization laws and more than forty thousand sterilizations had been performed.”
The author then cites the various times in which the U.S. government has embarked on medical experiments on U.S. citizens and others, including the famous Tuskegee syphilis experiment in which physicians denied treatment to African-American men. Another example was when Doctors deliberately infected “mentally retarded” children in a state school in New York with hepatitis in an experiment to track the development of this disease, which later led to an ethical debate of such actions. Another such debate and legal case developed when children of poor families were deliberately exposed to lead between 1993-1995 in order to assess a “cost-effective lead abatement level.” Parents were not informed of the dangers involved and two families sued, saying that their children had suffered brain damage. Judges found in favor of the parents, even though the experiment had passed through John Hopkins’ ethic review board. Even more extraordinary, the author cites cases in which thousands of children in foster care were used as human subjects in HIV/AIDS drug and vaccine trials sponsored by corporations and the government. In 1997, the FDA Modernization Act was passed (FDAMA), which the author says “encourages the use of children to test patented drugs and even provides manufacturers huge financial incentives, including six additional months of marketing for testing drugs on children.”
Other drug trials using children were then cited, which makes extraordinary reading, simply unbelievable that it can take place today but then again, as the author points, mandatory vaccination policies also lead to the death of many children, with precious little accountability or compensation for most.
Children, by the age of 15 months are exposed to over 33 doses of over one dozen vaccines.
The following chapter explores the concept of the greater good, the utilitarian philosophy that justifies actions and policies ostensibly for the wider benefit of society, but often at the expense of individual choice and freedom. Compulsory vaccination is based on this utilitarian argument, with the notion that it serves the greater good of the whole community. The author then makes the case that all the vaccines given have not been tested adequately for safety, including the mixing of many vaccines together in a short period after birth. The case is made that utilitarian philosophy cannot justify mandatory vaccination based on the lack of evidence to support its efficacy and the lack of research into the harm done by vaccines.
The following chapter begins with a recommendation in my kindle version of the book to read Ursula La Quinn’s book “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” It then follows with a mother’s story of how two of her children became autistic and the heartache than ensued. The great increase in autism spectrum disorder cases 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”.
In 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 her startling 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 round the clock care. She is but one of many children affected by the vaccine. (http://truthaboutgardasil.org). Remarkably, 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 has 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.
In Part Three of the book topics covered include the business of vaccines, mercury and autism, the law and our children.
In Chapter Seventeen, 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 then 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 official 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 are 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 amazing 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.
22.4% of kids up to age 11 used at least one prescription drug.
29.9% of young people aged 12-19 used at least one prescription drug.
48.3% of people aged between 20 and 59 used at least one prescription drug.
88.4% 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 then describes the phenomena of drug stores being used to market and push flu vaccines. One is onslaughted by flu ads in most stores now 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.
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.
This particular chapter is a stunning indictment of the vaccine agenda of our government, the medical establishment and the pharmaceutical industry.
The next chapter, #18, 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 mitochondrial 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 Twenty 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 phenomena 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, where 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. Does it get worse than this!
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 Twenty Two, 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 person 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 explores the story of Dr. Andrew Wakefield, who was a well respected Dr 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. 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. 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 Sunday Times 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. 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.
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.
I agree. This book adds a crucial perspective on a vitally important topic. Up there with Climate change and political and economic turmoil, this issue has profound implications for the health of our country and throughout the world, and for our fundamental human and legal rights to be informed and to make our own decisions about our health, without coercion or threat. We have a right to decide what we put into our bodies and our children’s bodies. Can we really trust government and profit motivated businesses to have our best interests at heart and even to have the scientific awareness and knowledge to dictate what is good for us. It really doesn’t look like it and the question is, 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 our fundamental rights. This book lays the ground for a crucial debate on this subject. We all need to know.