Vaccinations - Do They Even Work and At What Price?

by Ingri Cassel

February 8, 2000

TO: The Bonner Daily Bee
SUBJECT: Vaccinations - Do They Even Work and At What Price?-----Ingri Cassel

Statistics show that Bonner County has the lowest vaccination rates in Idaho with less than 70 percent of its children receiving all their shots. Is this the reason there has been such an intense media campaign in Bonner County to vaccinate? Our local radio station has been airing a spot which may even strike a note of fear in the ignorant. The message in essence is that Bonner County will very likely experience a measles epidemic in the near future due to the low percentages of children vaccinated with the MMR vaccine. What they don't tell you is that a child who receives the MMR vaccine can still get measles. In an outbreak of measles in Texas in 1987, 96 percent of the cases were considered non-preventable. In other words, all the measles cases were either fully vaccinated, had a religious or medical exemption or were born before 1957.(These statistics are from the Texas Department of Health.)

But what about pertussis: won't we have an epidemic of pertussis (whooping cough) if we neglect to get our children vaccinated with the DPT vaccine? Not if we note the statistics of the 1997 pertussis outbreak here in Bonner County. According to the Panhandle Health District, 85 percent of the documented cases of pertussis had 4 out of 4 of their DPT shots and 15 percent had 3 out of 4 of their DPT shots. In other words, the Panhandle Health district did not record any cases among the unvaccinated or those who had 2 or less DPT shots. The CDC statistics for this outbreak in all five northern counties states that out of 253 reported cases, 81.5 percent were fully vaccinated or had 4 out of 4 of their DPT shots. The CDC report concluded that vaccination status had nothing to do with this particular epidemic.

So why do we vaccinate? Good question and the first topic of Vaccination Liberation's monthly series of four meetings. Dr. Kristine Severyn, a pharmacist who founded the Vaccine Policy Institute, spoke at the Association of American Physicians and Surgeon's 56th annual meeting in Coeur d'Alene on October 14, 1999 on the topic of mandatory vaccinations.

She opened her topic with the question, "how did organized medicine get to such a point where informed consent, a basic tenet of medical practice, gets thrown out the window, under the guise of disease prevention?" What she presented in the course of her talk was a nothing less than the bare facts of a cozy relationship between the pharmaceutical industry, our government, the CDC and our various states' health departments. Did you know that the CDC committee which sets national vaccine policy, the Advisory Committee on Immunizatrion Practices (ACIP), (until 1997) operated for more than 20 years without making verbatim transcripts of its meetings available to the public?

This is the same committee whose recommendations are mandated by state legislators. All other federal advisory committee meetings make verbatim transcripts available to the public one month after the meeting. But the ACIP (after 1997) chose to make available only heavily-edited minutes and even then it would take 6 months to a year to make these minutes available to the public. Meanwhile, ACIP policies were put into effect across the country while keeping the public in the dark.

And this is only the tip of the iceburg.  Here are a few facts to consider:

1) Every year, between 12,000 and 14,000 adverse reactions to vaccines --including irreversible brain damage and death -- are reported to the FDA. And the FDA admits that 90% of doctors won't report incidents of vaccine damage. In this state we've seen many cases of SIDS and children with seizure disorders and not one of them has been attributed to vaccines.

2) Every time we pay for a vaccine, a portion of that money goes into a Congressional fund called the federal Vaccine Injury Compensation Program to compensate the parents of the children  the government knows will be damaged or killed by the vaccine. $800 million has already been disbursed since the program's inception with thousands of cases pending. This same program currently dismisses 90 percent of all vaccine injury claims.

3) The existence of the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program protects vaccine manufacturers from lawsuits and fuels the increase in the number of vaccines being researched and mandated.    A few of these new vaccines which the federal government supports and is providing financial backing for are vaccines for E. Coli, stomach ulcers, fungal  infections; herpes; lyme disease; STD's such as gonorrhea, chlamydia, genital warts; AIDS; and tuberculosis.

Imagine having the following business opportunity: You produce a product which the government guarantees to be free from liability and the marketplace is every child born. It certainly doesn't get much better than that.....And the pharmaceutical industry currently has a monopoly on this "business". To date there has never been an independent, controlled study which proves that their vaccines are safe or even effective.

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Ingri Cassel is the president of the North Idaho Chapter of Vaccination
Liberation, a support group which provides a forum for discussing
vaccinations and alternative healthcare options. Meetings are held in
Sandpoint every second Monday of the month, 10 AM - 12 noon, at the Four
Women's Center, 518 North 4th Street. For more information, send a SASE
toVaccination Liberation, P.O. Box 1444, Coeur d'Alene, ID 83816 or write to
vaclib@dmi.net.