Vaccines: Evidence Based Medicine
Patrick Quanten
A doctor is a free professional who no longer is aware that his strings are being pulled.
Never mind the doctor, that is a lost cause. What about you? Did you get it already or are you still wondering around in the woods of confusion? Have you find your answers to the safety and efficacy questions of vaccinations? We are almost drowning in it whilst the authorities are throwing floating devices by the dozen, hitting us over the head with them and causing us headaches, with some of us having epileptic fits. Let’s pick out a few and spell it out, once more!
In the western world the number of whooping cough cases is rising every year, and this mainly in teenagers and young adults. It is said that this is a major risk to babies as parents play an important part in transmitting the disease to the children. Hence the idea of vaccinating pregnant women, even though the same authority warns pregnant women against any kind of toxicity introduced into the body during pregnancy (alcohol, smoking, etc.). First indications are said to be very positive! When are first impressions by the admission of the authority ever not positive? They are always very encouraging! The explanation which you can trek back through time is a very interesting example of the way authorities want you to think: we are right even if the reality shows that we are wrong.
The first whooping cough vaccination was made from bits extracted from killed bacteria. Never, at that time, did anyone suggest that parents were the cause of the infection. First impressions after mass vaccination programmes were introduced were very positive. Almost nobody died anymore from a doctor’s diagnosis of whooping cough, as the poor man couldn’t believe that a vaccinated person could get whooping cough. The medical authority admitted that some got permanent brain damage, but so what. You have to take some collateral damage for the good of the masses, don’t you! Nevertheless they came up with a better vaccine version, when they were ready, the acellular version made from certain components of the inactivated bacteria. This was once again incorporated in a vaccine together with tetanus and diphtheria (DTaP) and then the five-in-one with polio and Hib (DTaP/IPV/Hib). A neat way to hide any detrimental side-effects is to mix it in with other stuff!
The first impressions of the new vaccine were very positive, even though the incidence of infections in vaccinated children grew steadily year by year since the introduction of the DPT vaccine. It was stated that immunity dropped off quicker with the new safer vaccine, but this could be rectified by a simple booster injection at the age of four. Conveniently forgotten at this point is the fact that, traditionally, before the vaccination programme, whooping cough’s dangers only existed in very small babies, first few weeks of life. The first impressions of the effect of the booster injection were very positive, although less than ten years later they are now crying out for a new whooping cough vaccine that should work better, because this one isn’t doing the trick, they say. It has introduced whooping cough as a disease in older children and young adults where it previously was unseen. Luckily for the industry we have found willing subjects in fearful parents and grandparents to vaccinate with the same, now deemed to be ineffective, vaccine, completely forgetting that these people (certainly the young parents) come from a generation that already was vaccinated against whooping cough on a promise of a lifelong immunity. Now that same “protected” generation has become a major threat to their own children, apparently.
Frits Mooi, who is the whooping cough project leader at the Centre for Infectious Diseases of the Dutch National Institute for Public Health, states: “There is a consensus that the diminishing immunity is the main cause for the increase of whooping cough incidences, but we know little or nothing about the reasons behind this.” Allow me to repeat this statement, but in reverse. We know nothing about the reasons why whooping cough incidences are on the increase, but we are sure it is because of diminishing immunity. Would you love your car mechanic if he said to you “I have no idea why your car is behaving in this manner but I am sure it is the breaking system”?
So, it isn’t working. So, it has been responsible for introducing the disease later in life. What we now need is a new vaccine that we say is going to be better! Pull the other one!
Now, here we are, in the winter of 2015. Flu vaccine season! In the past three flu seasons, the CDC (USA) has claimed the flu vaccine’s overall effectiveness clocked in at between 47 and 62 percent while some experts have measured it at 0 to 7 percent. Other studies suggest that when children get a flu shot every year it can interfere with healthy immune responses and make them more likely to get influenza. Independent medical literature reviews document that flu shots don’t really prevent influenza or complications of influenza or influenza-like-illness associated with other types of viruses during any given flu season.
How does it work? Every spring, federal health officials select two influenza A virus strains (usually H1N1 and H3N2 subtypes) and one or two influenza B virus strains to include in flu vaccines released in the fall. This past December, CDC officials held a press conference and informed Americans that they were unaware during the selection process of last spring that one of the influenza A strains selected for the 2014/2015 flu vaccine – the H3N2 subtype – was starting to “drift.” It turns out that the genetically mutated subtype is the dominant influenza A strain causing the flu epidemic this year but it is not included in the flu vaccine.
Let me put that in plain English for you. Every year, in spring, experts select usually three strains to include in the flu vaccine, ready for the fall. This selection is made on an estimated guess as to what the flu virus might look like at the end of the year. This means, per definition, that what is included in the flu vaccine never is the reality of the flu virus you might encounter in the following spring. Or, in other words, the flu vaccine can never initiate an accurate immune response against the actual flu virus of the moment. Or, a flu vaccine will never protect you against the flu of the future.
The ebola crisis has illustrated this point beautifully. In the midst of the crisis the focus of the medical authorities was on developing a vaccine. This created a lot of public support resulting in large sums of money being injected into the programme. The promise was that the vaccine would be ready and operational by the end of this year. That is how long it takes to develop, at high speed, a vaccine once you have material to base the vaccine on. The authorities, of course, also knew that within the space of three to six months the Ebola outbreak would totally disappear by itself, but by that time lots of finances had been secured by the industry.
There is another problem with regards to flu vaccines and this stems from the fact that flu vaccinations come around every year and need to be planned properly. Let’s go back and take a look at the 2003/2004 flu season’s epic influenza vaccine fail. In the spring of 2003, federal health officials did know ahead of time that the influenza A Panama strain they chose for the seasonal flu vaccine was not a match for the emerging mutated H3N2 Fujian strain which was making people very sick. Influenza experts told the FDA vaccine advisory committee that the flu vaccine would certainly fail if two specific genetic mutations of H3N2 were not included. So what was the government’s rationale for allowing drug companies to produce a flu vaccine they knew was likely a non-starter from the very beginning? Well, the vaccine manufacturers said they couldn’t include the mutated H3N2 subtype in the vaccine because they would miss the fall 2003 delivery and marketing deadline! In other words, it was all about protecting a multi-billion dollar flu vaccine market and not about the health and protection of the population. Money comes first; after that nothing matters.
How honest are the Disease Control Agencies in the western world with their respective governments who are voting to give medical authorities and drug companies billions of pounds or euros to produce influenza vaccines that are being aggressively pushed on the population, including infants, children, pregnant women and health care workers using a pathetically poor evidence base?
They see influenza viruses as always mutating and evolving, recombining with each other and creating new influenza strains being shed and transmitted in body fluids and waste products of animals and humans. Vaccine strain influenza viruses, which are man-made mutations, are being introduced in the bodies of the vulnerable. These vaccine strains too can interfere with the natural evolution of the strains, producing unknown effects on the body and the environment. And yet, billions of dollars are being spent by government and industry to build more flu vaccine plants to create genetically engineered flu vaccines that contain insect and animal DNA, foreign proteins and novel adjuvants designed to hyper-stimulate human immune responses. In an irrational crusade to outsmart influenza viruses vaccine risks are increasing while vaccine failures continue to haunt the entire money-driven enterprise.
After decades of government propaganda trumpeting the benefits and minimizing the risks of annual flu shots, one-size-fits-all, cradle to the grave, influenza vaccine recommendations should be revised. If we are not ready to face the world without flu shots then it is time to adjust our behaviour based on what we have learned. They should call it evidence based medicine!Flu shot mandates should be repealed and vaccine manufacturers should be held accountable for vaccine risks and failures in civil court. By the way, in 2014 the authority paid out over 3 billion dollars of vaccination compensation in America alone. Not a bad figure for something that is totally safe, as they keep repeating over and over again.
And here is another one!
Get a measles vaccine and you won’t get the measles, right? Wrong. In the US, the source of a measles outbreak has been traced to a vaccinated person. A fully vaccinated 22-year-old theatre employee in New York City who developed the measles in 2011 was released without hospitalization or quarantine. This patient turned out to be unwittingly contagious, which is not possible in the current medical science! Ultimately, she transmitted the measles to four other people, according to a recent report in Clinical Infectious Diseases. Surprisingly, two of the four patients had been fully vaccinated too. And although the other two had no record of receiving the vaccine, they both showed signs of previous measles exposure that should have created life-long immunity, as medical knowledge has been so keen to assure us.
Although public health officials have assumed that measles immunity lasts forever, the case of this woman highlights the reality that “the actual duration [of immunity] following infection or vaccination is unclear,” says Jennifer Rosen, who led the investigation as director of epidemiology and surveillance at the New York City Bureau of Immunization. The possibility of waning immunity is particularly worrisome as the virus surfaces in major U.S. hubs like Boston, Seattle, New York, and the Los Angeles area. Once again we hear the words “protection against the disease is unclear, but policy should not be changed”! Rosen doesn’t believe this single case merits a change in vaccination strategy—for example, giving adults booster shots—but she says that more regular surveillance to assess the strength of people’s measles immunity is warranted. That will help! From the case mentioned above we can already learn that signs of good immunity does not provide you with protection against infection. But hey, let’s do more tests; let’s use more public money to keep the illusion alive we are looking after your health.
If it turns out that vaccinated people lose their immunity as they get older, that could leave them vulnerable to measles outbreaks seeded by unvaccinated people—which are increasingly common in the United States and other developed countries. This is the official point of view. Strange though that this kind of statement occurs in the aftermath of a well-publicised case of a vaccinated person being the cause of the outbreak!
In the medical journal Vaccine, Dr. Gregory Poland, the journal's editor-in-chief, professor of medicine and founder and leader of Mayo Clinic's Vaccine Research Group, recently made surprising public statements about the poor effectiveness of measles vaccine in the MMR shot. For many years, Dr. Poland has been a strong mandatory vaccination proponent and has criticized MMR vaccine safety critics.
Public health agencies have been reporting measles outbreaks in the US for the past few years, which they often blame on unvaccinated individuals, despite the fact that in 2012, 95 percent of children entering kindergarten had gotten two MMR shots and so had more than 90 percent of high school students. With this high degree of compliance with a supposedly effective measles vaccine, many people have been wondering why the U.S. is seeing a resurgence of measles cases (from January 1 to June 6, 2014, the CDC reported 397 cases of measles and 16 separate outbreaks in the US).
For starters, it's important to remember that, like B. pertussis whooping cough and other infectious diseases, measles has natural cyclical increases and decreases every few years. These may occur even in highly vaccinated populations because the vaccine itself is not a guarantee of long lasting immunity and even two doses of MMR vaccine can fail to protect. According to Dr. Poland, who is conducting research at Mayo Clinic to develop new measles, mumps and rubella vaccines: "…the immune response to measles vaccine varies substantially in actual field use. Multiple studies demonstrate that 2–10% of those immunized with two doses of measles vaccine fail to develop protective antibody levels, and that immunity can wane over time and result in infection (so-called secondary vaccine failure) when the individual is exposed to measles. For example, during the 1989–1991 U.S. measles outbreaks 20–40% of the individuals affected had been previously immunized with one to two doses of vaccine. In an October 2011 outbreak in Canada, over 50% of the 98 individuals had received two doses of measles vaccine… this phenomenon continues to play a role in measles outbreaks. Thus, measles outbreaks also occur even among highly vaccinated populations because of primary and secondary vaccine failure, which results in gradually larger pools of susceptible persons and outbreaks once measles is introduced.
This leads to a paradoxical situation whereby measles in highly immunized societies occurs primarily among those previously immunized."
Now you get it from the horse’s mouth. Will you believe it now? Will it change our behaviour? Will we now relax in the knowledge that we can’t protect ourselves and that all efforts to try and do so is making our situation worse?
I doubt it. Evidence based medicine is what the medical authorities throw out into the world, implying that nobody does a better evidence base than they do. How do they engage with the kind of evidence presented here? They file it very carefully. In the bin. They continue on the same line as if nothing has happened and they act just as surprised the next time the same “evidence” appears on the table.
The tactic is to scare everybody if they even think about following a different train of thought, pursuing different evidence. And fear is a powerful factor. People drop their fear for something when they can replace it with a fear for something else, not to replace it with simple quiet acceptance. It is what it is, can be heard a lot these days, but in practise people cringe when they are confronted with the reality of the statement. They still believe they have to do something. People who reject vaccinations are very often searching for other ways to “protect”. Same fear, I’m afraid.
The truth, and serene calmness, comes from understanding life. In this case, know how infections truly come about. What do infections truly mean? I encourage you to understand what the origin of the germs is and to understand that viruses are not germs. Read more about these issues on the website www.activehealthcare.co.uk and consider following the course “Understanding Life”.
March 2015