Vaccines: Analysing the Risk Vs Benefit Arguement
by Jagannath Chatterjee
Wednesday, April 25, 2012 http://currenthealthscenario.blogspot.in/2012/04/vaccines-analysing-risk-vs-benefit.html
When I started my campaign, sometime in 1985, on the internet from 2001,
doctors responded by saying that vaccine safety was beyond question, they were
as safe as water. Later as I intensified my campaign and cited peer reviewed
published material on risks from vaccines, they modified their stance to; well
all medications have some risk. Now they fall back upon the risk-benefit
analysis meaning that the benefits outweigh the risks. Today I will touch on
this topic in a generalised fashion so that all can comprehend what I am trying
to say.
I will start with the human rights aspect. Human rights laws framed after World
War II atrocities cover not only medical research/interventions but also
therapy. According to them there should be full disclosure for all medical
prescriptions and procedures and that the subject has the choice to accept the
risk or refuse, that is the patient decides what is suitable for her or him.
This is blatantly violated by medical practitioners who feel that it is they who
should take the decisions. In case of informed consent on matters of vaccines,
in developing countries there is no disclosure though there is a hint in
immunisation procedure training manuals that healthworkers should inform parents
that there are risks involved which is not done. In case of developing countries
there is only token standardised leaflets that do not reveal the full story.
Doctors usually avoid talking on the issue of informed consent. They will stare
at you as if you are an alien from another planet if you even broach the
subject. But I have been a little persistent. Indian doctors whom I have talked
to/corresponded with say that even hinting about a risk might prompt parents not
to vaccinate their children. This, according to them will severely compromise
the vaccination rates. This is a damning statement. So it seems vaccination
targets are more important than the life or health of the children. Parents
deserve to know the risks that their children face, whom they have conceived and
nurtured for nine months in their womb, on those their entire dreams and
aspirantions rest, when they are being administered vaccines, singly or in
combination.
Now about the risks from vaccines. I have pointed out again and again that
vaccine risk is a taboo subject that is always avoided, by manufacturers, policy
makers and the medical fraternity. When I complained to the WHO patient safety
unit about what they were doing to address the subject of ascertaining vaccine
risks they replied that the department is never allotted the required funds to
do so. This is the same with the FDA which licences most vaccines. GAVI & PATH
did not even feel the need to answer my queries on the subject. It has recently
been revealed that the FDA does not have the required cutting edge research
laboratory to conduct credible vaccine safety tests. In an article in
"Investigate Hers" - a family magazine from New Zealand, Merck employees have
complained that the vaccine safety team employed by Merck is not adequately
qualified and that Merck too has not appropriately upgraded its laboratories.
They said this was undermining the credibility of Merck, a prominent vaccine MNC.
In case of vaccine testing the onus is primarily on the manufacturer. The
procedures followed are highly questionable. The vaccines are tested on hand
picked healthy children while in real life vaccines are administered
indiscriminately to vulnerable, sick, underweight, preterm, immune compromised
infants, a fact pointed out and raised by senior pediatrician Dr T Jacob John in
India. In these tests the vaccinated children are compared to another group who
are either vaccinated with another similar vaccine, with other highly
reactogenic vaccines or with the vaccine ingredients minus the antigen. This is
so the studies can safely declare, "no significant changes were noticed in the
vaccinated children vis a vis control groups". The vaccinated children are
observed for usually for 14 days, as pointed out by Dr Sherri Tenpenny, or for
that number of days till the after effects start appearing. This is a
skulduggery that is an insult to the very procedure. Cases of deaths or very
severe adverse effects are often excluded citing that other extraneous factors
were behind them. For example, in the rotavirus vaccine clinical trial it was
observed that the vaccinated children suffered from respiratory tract
infections. However this was ignored as "the vaccine could not have possibly
caused that". So these trials are more about hiding vaccine risks rather than
trying to identify them.
There is a rule stating that there should a monitoring mechanism after the
vaccine is licenced and released. However this mechanism is very tardy to say
the least. There is neither the political will nor the medical endeavour to
ensure fair and accurate monitoring. In case of the OPV, the IMA in India made
the shocking declaration that doctors were advised to ignore and not report
cases of paralysis caused by the vaccine. It goes to the credit of the then IMA
chief functionaries led by Dr S K Mittal that such a monitoring was done and it
revealed that on an average 500 to 600 cases of Vaccine Attributed Paralytic
Polio occur every year. The IMA also reported that the OPV was causing cases of
Acute Flaccid Paralysis (a condition indistinguishable from polio) to skyrocket
and that a vaccine strain virus had attained virulence and was circulating in
the population. While the IMA quoted a figure of 30,000 AFP cases, the JSA
reported 1,25,000 up to 2007 and The Telgraph science correspondent G S Mudur
indicated a figure of 3,00,000.
The IMA demanded identification, treatment and rehabilitation of the tens of
thousands of victims of the Oral Polio Vaccine but the health ministry did not
pay heed and the matter was allowed to die down. I have reported recently how
the cases of intestinal intussusception (an extremely painful condition that may
require immediate surgery or lead to death) and intestinal bleeding in children
following the rotavirus vaccines are being observed but not reported because it
could "scare other doctors" and also hinder the process of including this
vaccine into the government schedule. The doctors are thus programmed not to
report vaccine adverse effects. They are not informed or taught about serious
vaccine risks in their textbooks or are told that serious events are next to
negligible. They are also not always knowledgeable about whom to report and are
often afraid to do so fearing reprisals from their associations. Only deaths
immediately following the vaccines which are brought to the notice of the press
ever get reported. But in almost 100% of the cases they are dubbed as
"coincidence" or blamed on "program errors" and the vaccine is exonerated.
Health care workers will not report vaccine adverse effects as the entire blame
is usually put on them and they are punished.
Vaccine adverse effects do not occur immediately but may take weeks or months
before manifesting as the process is often slow and insidious though the end
result may be catastrophic. Doctors investigating vaccines say that even acute
reactions may take from five months to five years to manifest. Thus it becomes
very easy to dissociate the event from the vaccine and the cases end up by being
termed idiopathic or "cause unknown". Vaccine long term effects may span the
lifetime particularly as the inflammatory process set in motion does not stop.
Many of the vaccine ingredients lodge themselves permanently in the tissues, fat
cells and the brain and continue to inflict a steady and progressive damage
permanently. Attenuated live viruses introduced by vaccines may stay dormant for
long periods, often mutate, and can become virulent when the immune system
becomes weak due to any reason. As vaccines adversely affect the immune system
viruses and bacteria present in humans that were not virulent earlier are today
causing diseases, for example the Hib, which has coexisted since centuries with
humans without any averse effect, but which has become virulent and is now
causing meningitis and pneumonia in some immune compromised children and for
which yet another vaccine has been devised and is being forced upon the
population of mostly developing countries .
The other very dangerous aspect involves animal and human genetic material
contamination in vaccines. Such contamination is inevitable, cannot be
controlled, and cannot always be traced as our knowledge about zoonotic (animal)
viruses is very limited. Till date, despite the intention not to identify the
viruses, there have been traced 100 or so monkey viruses, bovine and avian
leukemia viruses, porcine viruses, cytomegaloviruses, the foamy virus and so on
in vaccines. No research has been done on their presence, continuation in the
human body and mutation or their incorporation into the human genome. SV 40, the
Simian Virus, the only one researched into for a short time before the
researcher was ticked off and the research stopped, is known to be behind many
forms of tumours and cancers in the human body. It is also known to be
transmitted to the new generation as it has contaminated the human sperm and
most probably breast milk as well. Junk DNA and RNA poses a graver threat as
they can incorporate into the human genome by a process known as reverse
transcriptase. According to medical scientists this form of threat is the most
dangerous that vaccines pose but serious concerns raised by medical scientists
are being ignored.
Knowledgeable parents who do their own research genuinely worry about vaccines
because of many reasons;
1. The nature of vaccine ingredients that are highly toxic in nature
2. How these toxins interact with themselves in a process called synergistic
toxicity is never studied
3. The child is given not one but many vaccines
4. Often the vaccines are administered simultaneously
5. The safety aspects of such simultenous administrations are rarely studied
6. The complaints of parents of adverse reactions following vaccines go unheeded
and they are often mocked at or threatened for raising the subject
7. Parents today know that vaccine adverse effects may take a long time to
appear
8. Whether infants, a category with almost no liver activity, with immature
immune systems and low kidney efficacy can really tolerate even one single
vaccine shot. Studies in other mammalian species have revealed that they cannot.
9. Vaccine shots have grown in number from 5 earlier to 70 shots of 16 different
vaccines, up to 45 of them mandated in the United States
10. Vaccine damage is extremely expensive to address and families go bankrupt
trying to take care of their children
11. Doctors do not understand autism and other developmental disorders in
children fully and they are programmed to treat them as purely psychological and
behavioral disorders of genetic origin. As a result the parents have to research
and treat their own children. Doctors who go against the grain and try to
biomedically treat these children are being persecuted and branded as quacks.
12. The children suffer from lack of communication and so cannot express their
pain and discomfort. They cannot take care of themselves, fall behind in their
studies, rebel and run away, throw serious tantrums that are difficult to
control, suffer repetative behaviour patterns, and thus are avoided by teachers
and nannies and the burden entirely falls on the mother who suffers endlesslly.
13. The presence of such a child in the family causes familial tensions
resulting in divorces and separation. There are cases of mothers killing their
own children and committing suicide unable to bear the trauma.
14. Compensation is not given, or is extremely difficult to obtain (only in
developed countries is compensation even considered) as the procedure goes
against the interest of the victims and the scientific apparatus have set
conditions that almost negate any chance of compensation. There are cases where
the judges have understood the situation but have said that their hands are
tied, and have described vaccines as "unavoidably risky".
15. The parents cannot sue the vaccine manufacturers because of an 1986 law
passed by Parliamentarian Bill Frist and supported by Ronald Reagan that
indemnifies vaccine manufacturers from law suits.
16. Even then $ 2 billion has been compensated so far to select cases, 83 of
them for vaccine induced autism as per expert testimony of those very officials
who under oath admit to vaccine damage while negating them otherwise.
17. Even then officials will not admit that vaccines cause autism by offering
the explanation that the court awards were for "autism like symptoms' and not
autism which is strange as autism is till now a symptomatic disorder.
18. Recent law passed in California has waived parental consent for vaccinating
12 year old children against sexually induced illness, like vaccines for HPV and
Hep-B. Other states threaten to follow suit.
19. All efforts are being made to mandate vaccines for school and college
admissions and parental exemptions are being made more and more difficult to
obtain.
20. There is a revolving door between health institutions and vaccine
manufacturers. Dr Julie Gerberding, Head of CDC who had steamrolled many a call
for enquiry into vaccine safety, today heads the vaccine division of Merck. Dr
Thomas Verstraeten of the CDC is today with GSK. Dr Paul Offit of the Childrens
Hospital of Philadelphia has joined the IOM, USA. Many health officials and
vaccine industry employees have joined the vaccine wing of the Bill & Melinda
Gates Foundation.
21. Vaccine decisions are often taken by politicians or beurocrats who are
influenced by money paid into election funds by vaccine manufacturers.
22. Published studies on vaccine safety and efficacy are conducted by doctors
and scientists with conflicts of interest, which are often not declared but
later found out through public and activist investigations.
23. Medical journals have their functions conducted by donations from the
pharmaceutical industry which severely dilutes their credibility.
24. Pro vaccine books wriiten by doctors and pro vaccine articles or studies in
journals are procured in bulk by vaccine manufacturers which are then
distributed free to doctors and policy makers involved with vaccines to
influence their opinion and to prove that vaccines are scientific.
25. Institutions who form vaccination schedules are heavily financed by vaccine
manufacturers and their office buildings built by them or their annual events
sponsored by vaccine manufacturers. Individual doctors are also suitably
rewarded in the guise of foreign fully paid jaunts for continuing education or
gifts to influence their decisions.
26. Latest genetic studies into origins of autism have clearly stated that cases
of genetic mutations have been observed which could be due to external, termed
environmental, toxines. The Joachim Hallmayer study this September 2011 has
doubted the theory being pushed that autism is genetic.The Hallmayer study is
the largest done so far conducted upon 900 twins.
27. It is a fact that pediatricians depend entirely on vaccines and the
resultant illnesses for their income. Unless this issue is settled we are not
going to see any perceivable shift in vaccine policy in the near future.
So the overall picture is that vaccine safety is not even low rung priority of
any of the stakeholders, except for the public for whom it is the one and only
priority. In India, I have had access to meeting records where vaccine policies
are discussed and I can declare that vaccine safety is not usually even touched
upon. The whole thrust is on introducing new vaccines and of ways to finance the
decisions. India's latest Draft National Immunisation Policy seeks to sanction
all vaccines available in the market, a move that has been strongly opposed by
doctors and policy makers who say that such a move is due to the pressure from
agencies like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the international vaccine
MNCs. A petition signed by doctors and medical scientists has been submitted to
the Health Ministry against this policy.
Vaccine effectiveness has been questioned in published literature. According to
a published study in medpage, vaccine induced antibodies do not necessarily
translate into immunity. Cases of measles, whooping cough and mumps outbreaks in
fully vaccinated children have been reported in many countries. Vaccine
preventible disease outbreaks are blamed on non vaccinated children without
releasing key information about the disease outbreak in vaccinated children. The
herd immunity argument used to push vaccines into the maximum number of children
has been questioned as it is not based upon scientific evaluation. Whereas
countries such as Japan and Sweden concede cases of vaccine adverse effects and
pay compensation, those vaccines continue to be administered in other countries.
Vaccine batches rejected in developed countries are not destroyed but shipped to
developing countries. Currently a large batch of a flu vaccine associated with
risks is being considered to be shipped elsewhere. Companies have reportedly
even intentionally shipped infected ingredients of vaccines so as to cause
global outbreaks of diseases mandating further vaccines (the Baxter incident).
Thus we are compelled to come to the conclusion that the risk vs benefit
anlaysis that the vaccine lobby tom-toms to promote this highly controversial
procedure is, to put it very mildly and politely, seriously flawed.
All that I have commented upon here has been published in various books,
journals and is also available on the internet. I have merely collated the
information to create awareness about vaccine risks. Parents are advised to do
their own research before deciding to vaccinate their children. Always remember,
as stated by Dr Ajay Gambhir of India, past Vice President of IAP, and a good
friend of mine, that you have a choice and that no one can infringe upon your
rights to forcefully vaccinate your child. If that is done please hire a lawyer,
file a case of assault in the police station in whose jurisdiction the area
falls against the doctor or institution involved and bring the matter to the
notice of the IMA, IAP or the Health Department (You can go to their websites to
get the contact numbers). There is no law in India mandating vaccines. The
government and also the IAP merely recommends vaccines and tries to pursuade
parents to vaccinate their children through the media and by employing
celebrities to send out the message.