1994 measles jab: not needed
Source: 'What Doctors Don't Tell You' magazine, Nov 1995 www.wddty.co.uk
The great measles epidemic that was supposedly going to
sweep Britain in 1994 was never going to happen, evidence suggests. A £20m national
immunisation programme went ahead, nonetheless, and now at least 300 children are claiming
they have been permanently damaged by the vaccine, which government officials and doctors
assured them had no major side effects.
The British government gave the substantial order to the two drugs companies which had
sufficient supplies of the vaccine still in stock. The government has said it was unable
to offer the contract on the usual competitive tender basis because of the emergency it
was facing. Dr Richard Nicholson, editor of Bulletin of Medical Ethics, is calling for an
independent inquiry because "the campaign's protagonists misled millions of parents
into allowing needles to be stuck into their children for purposes other than those given
in public".
After sifting through scientific papers, Dr Nicholson has concluded that there was no
evidence to suggest there was going to be a measles epidemic (Epidemiology and Infection,
1995; 115: 139-56) . Even as it stands, government fears of 50 deaths caused by the
epidemic were grossly exaggerated and were based on old data, argues Dr Nicholson. The
government also underplayed the dangers of the vaccine. Data collected by the Communicable
Disease Surveillance Centre showed that one serious adverse reaction - a bleeding disorder
called thrombocytopenic purpura - was five times more likely than was previously thought.
Finally, Dr Nicholson described the campaign as "a gift horse" for the two drug
companies, which still had vaccines in stock intended for use with the combined
measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) jab. The government had their MMR stocks suddenly withdrawn
after discovering the strain of the mumps element used in their MMR vaccine caused
meningitis in at least 1 in 11,000 cases.
The stocks of the MR vaccine were still current, but had to be used by autumn 1994, just
when the campaign took place. "The campaign provided a very lucky break for the two
vaccine suppliers," said Dr Nicholson (Bulletin of Medical Ethics, August 1995).
Cases of meningitis were as high as one in 500 children vaccinated with the MMR injection
in one area of Japan, researchers from Kyushu University, in Fukuoka, Japan have
discovered. They studied cases between 1990 and 1993, when the Japanese government finally
withdrew the domestically-produced version of the MMR vaccine (The Lancet, September 9,
1995).