Vaccines can and do disable and kill healthy people. When billions of people take them, year upon year, even remote risks translate into huge numbers.
Call it the Great Vaccine Blitz. In the past six months legislators have bombarded state capitals with new bills — more than 65 of them in 25 states – which could prove to radically transform notions of religious freedom, medical consent and American liberty. They are not all identical – they seek to do away with religious exemptions to vaccines, to expand adult vaccination, to mandate new vaccines, to identify and detain dissenters to public health policy – but they all serve the profit interests of the Big Pharma Public Health conglomerate. Senate Bill 277 which marched through California’s state assembly and was signed into law last month is just one that overrides parents’ personal beliefs and will force them to have their children injected with the full roster of shots before nursery school — 49 doses of government mandated vaccines by kindergarten.
The mainstream media has driven this legislative blitz. They whipped up panic about a run-of-the-millnon-epidemic of a non-life threatening spate of measles at Disneyland, cast dissenters as terrorists par ISIS, threatened them with job loss and imprisonment, and failed to report salient facts — such as that drug companies doled out millions to lawmakers in the past year leading up to the Blitz and legislators like Richard Pan who underwrote the California bill forked in $95,000. And that the World Health Organization and its labyrinth of Bill and Melinda Gates-funded vaccine promoters are cheerfully predicting the global vaccine market to soar from the current $25 billion a year to $100 billion by 2025. Nothing to report? Throughout the blitzkrieg Big Media have stoked fear and stifled dissent, all while reciting the “safe and effective” vaccine mantra like they were in a pharmaceutically-induced trance.
No Dark Side
But journalists have to be careful these days. Like those two reporters at the Toronto Star who obviously missed a memo and interviewed mothers whose daughters fell ill after getting the Gardasil vaccine against HPV, including one girl who drowned mysteriously in the bathtub without medical explanation two weeks after the shot. Before they could say “vaccines are safe and effective,” health “experts” piled on the reporters like a pack of Rottweilers. The story had “hurt public trust in [the] vaccine,” said the CBC quoting a weight-loss specialist. The Washington Post called it a “botched expose” and quoted the Star‘s editor saying, “It’s too bad there isn’t a vaccination to prevent journalistic misstep.” The paper’s publisher apologized for the “failure,” scrubbed the story from the internet and ran a letter from a bioethicist who forced Catholic schools to give out the HPV vaccine and a Bill Gates-funded immunologist interested in circumcision. It was titled: “Science shows HPV vaccine has no dark side.”
But could there really be no dark side to any pharmaceutical? Are vaccines such wonder drugs that they have no serious side effect for anyone?
Vaccine-Induced Narcolepsy
Consider another newsflash last spring that the vaccine blitzers would rather keep off the radar, a study in the journal Science Translational Medicine by Stanford scientists. They were researching a link between a swine flu vaccine (one of two that were widely distributed in the great 2009 “false pandemic to sell vaccines”) and a spike in cases of narcolepsy. Narcolepsy is an incurable disease that affects the brain’s sleep-wake cycle so victims suddenly fall unconscious, sometimes dozens of times a day. They also frequently suffer night terrors and cataplexy, remaining conscious but losing all muscle control so they randomly flop on the spot like rag dolls. It is life altering: with narcolepsy you can’t be a pilot or a football player or a cab driver. Swimming is out. For the rest of their lives narcolepsy victims need minding because they might just collapse while crossing the road or riding an escalator. Who would have dreamed a vaccine could do such a thing?
Thankfully it’s quite a rare disorder – usually affecting only two people or so in every 10,000. However, following distribution of GlaxoSmithKline’s Pandemrix flu vaccine, a child neurologist in Finland noticed a sharp uptick in cases and eventually epidemiological studies confirmed that children who received the vaccine were 12.7 times more likely to develop narcolepsy. Later studies in France and England corroborated the data.
A “Hit-and-Run” Attack on the Brain
Enter the Stanford researchers to figure out what was wrong with the vaccine. They sifted massive databases and found a flu protein that looked very much like the receptor for hypocretin (also called orexin) which is a neurotransmitter in the brain that regulates wakefulness. It turns out the Pandemrix vaccine contained 72% higher levels of that orexin-lookalike flu protein than the other non-narcoleptic flu vaccine in circulation the same year. To confirm their findings, they tested 20 blood samples from vaccine-induced narcolepsy patients; 17 of them had antibodies that reacted to both the vaccine protein and the orexin receptor. It’s called a “cross-reaction.”
So here’s how it works: in goes the vaccine with ingredients designed to powerfully amp up the immune response to the flu protein. The immune system starts manufacturing masses of antibodies, which are like drones programmed to destroy the flu protein and they hang around for a long time vigilantly on the lookout for it (that’s what’s supposed to keep you flu-free all season). Except, the scientists figure, sometimes either large numbers of antibodies or inflammation breach the blood brain barrier and the drones slip into the brain where they mistakenly triangulate the orexin receptors and launch a full-on assault. Researchers call it a “hit-and-run”. They figure it’s the narcoleptic patient’s own immune system that destroys a hub of 70,000 or so orexin-producing cells in their brain that regulate wakefulness. Hence narcolepsy is an autoimmune disease against ‘self’.
Vaccines and the Autoimmune Epidemic
The swine flu narcolepsy saga is so important to the Great Vaccine Blitz because it so starkly contrasts the “no dark side” mantra from the Bill Gates crowd. And the narcolepsy findings are just one example in an emerging boatload of scientific evidence that vaccines induce autoimmune diseases.
That evidence was neatly rounded up in a medical textbook released last week called Vaccines and Autoimmunity (Wiley). It’s a collection of papers by more than 75 doctors and scientists and is edited by pre-eminent immunologist Yehuda Shoenfeld, founder of the Center for Autoimmune Diseases at the Sheba Medical Center in Tel Hashomer, Israel and a prolific research with more than 1,800 references to his name on PubMed and author of now 26 medical textbooks including foundations of clinical practice. Last year at the 9th International Congress on Autoimmunology (ICA) in France, which he founded, he was introduced to the 2,300 or so doctors in attendance as the “Godfather Autoimmunology”– the youngest branch of medicine and one of the fastest growing,
From Page One the textbook breaks with public health’s “safe and effective” slogan regurgitated by Big Media.
“[O]ur major aim is to inform the medical community regarding the various autoimmune risks associated with different vaccines,”
says the introduction co-authored with Nancy Agmon-Levin, President of the Israel Association for Allergy and Clinical Immunology and Lucija Tomljenovic from the Neural Dynamics Research Group at the University of British Columbia in Canada.
“Physicians need to be aware that in certain individuals, vaccination can trigger serious and potentially disabling and even fatal autoimmune manifestations.”
Vaccines are “an important tool of preventative medicine,” the editors allow, but the fact they are injected into billions of healthy, not sick, people means they should be held to very high safety standard and the current lack of “preliminary screening for underlying susceptibilities is thus of concern.”
In other words: vaccines can and do disable and kill healthy people. And when billions of people take them, year upon year, even remote risks translate into huge numbers. In the US alone, 10 million shots are given annually just to babies under one year of age. If just a tiny fraction, only one in 10,000, vaccines trip the immune system, that is 1,000 American infants with lives marked by poorly understood immunological damage and potential disability — each year. Of each billion people vaccinated worldwide, that’s 100,000 afflicted with immune-mediated diseases that disable and can kill.
But what if the odds are much greater than that? Is it just a coincidence that autoimmune diseases like MS, lupus and celiac’s disease are soaring? In the United States, autoimmunity is now a leading killer of girls and young women and second in line for all chronic illness, affecting about one in five Americans. Fifty years ago, Type-1 diabetes, anaphylactic food allergies, asthma, inflammatory bowel disease and seizure disorders were almost unheard of in children. However, since the number of vaccines given to children began rocketing in the 1990s, so have all of these immune-mediated diseases. Today 32 million American children — 43% of them– suffer from one of 20 chronic illnesses not including obesity. Compared to their parents, children today are four times more likely to have a chronic illness. And while their grandparents might never have swallowed a pill as children, in any given month one in four children is taking at least one prescription drug.
There are more than 100 identified different types of autoimmunity (for different types of cells the immune system attacks and the symptoms produced). Genetics can’t be responsible for such a rapidly rising tide, and public health has offered no explanation. But if one vaccine ingredient can induce an attack on a single protein and trigger a disease as devastating as narcolepsy, are other proteins vulnerable to similar attacks? Is that why another study found a huge spike in miscarriages among pregnant women who received the swine flu vaccine? What about all the other ingredients in vaccines?
Recipe For an Immune System Train Wreck
Not five pages into Vaccines and Autoimmunity is a formidable list (two pages long) of ingredients and known contaminants in vaccines which most people haven’t thought about. Ever heard of Dulbecco’s Modified Eagle Medium or porcine circovirus types 1 and 2? There’s the more familiar thimerosal (that’s mercury), aluminum hydroxide, formaldehyde, monosodium glutamate (MSG), MRC-5 cells including DNA and protein and WI-38 human diploid lung fibroblasts (measurable contaminants from aborted fetuses), processed bovine 14 gelatin, neomycin, glutaraldehyde, monkey kidney cells, polysorbate 80, hexadecyltrimethylammonium bromide, insect cell, viral protein…and so on. Who’d have guessed such things could be turned into remarkable health-giving preventative medicines?
“What is obvious,” say Shoenfeld et al., “is that a typical vaccine formulation contains all the necessary biochemical components to induce autoimmune manifestations.” And as for the residual contaminants, long presumed to be inconsequential, new studies “suggest that even these trace amounts may not be inherently safe.”
Immunology’s ‘Dirty Little Secret’
But the book focuses especially on the trouble with adjuvants — ingredients such as aluminum, mercury and squalene added to many vaccines to stimulate the immune response against the disease antigen in the vaccine. Live vaccines don’t need this help, because the organisms provoke the desired response, just like real infection but they also carry risks of causing the infection they’re meant to protect. (Everyone knows about how the live polio vaccine was replaced — in rich countries – because, as in the Cutter Incident, it caused more cases of polio than wild polio, right?). But killed virus vaccines don’t provoke the immune system enough to offer protection, unless they are delivered with adjuvants.
One chapter calls adjuvants as “the ‘dirty little secret’ of immunologists” because, just like the natural infections they are used to deter, they carry a risk of triggering chronic disease. Scientists knew this at least as far back as 1956 when they induced arthritis in Wistar rats – known as “adjuvant’s disease” in the industry. It’s incredibly ironic that rather than removing them from vaccines immediately, they tailored this “right nuisance” and for six decades now have widely injected adjuvants into animals to create lab models of arthritis, allergies, asthma, lupus and more — so they can test drugs for the diseases that are increasingly plaguing humans injected with adjuvants.
ASIA Syndrome
Autoimmune/Inflammatory Syndrome Induced by Adjuvants (ASIA) was first described in the medical literature in 2011 but in reality it just identifies the old phenomenon of vague post-vaccine symptoms including muscle and joint pain, numbness and tingling, weakness and chronic fatigue, which vaccine researchers and physicians have dismissed and ignored, but which actually signify progressive and insidious immune system damage that can take years to manifest into full blown autoimmune disease.
It is probably adjuvants in the heavily vaccinated farmed salmon, say scientists from the University of Padua Italy, reviewing their effects in animals, that frequently cause them to “develop mild to severe pathological changes” including impaired growth, decreased carcass quality, spinal deformities, eye disease and gut inflammation. Who knows what else they would develop if we didn’t eat them first.
Toxic Aluminum
Throughout the book’s 37 chapters, aluminum — the most common vaccine adjuvant — is fingered dozens of times as a likely suspect for triggering many diseases since it’s a well-known neurotoxin.
At the ICA last year, dozens of scientists reviewed a terrifying catalogue of recent findings about aluminum in vaccines: how it persists in the body long after injection and can migrate to brain, lymph, and spleen where it wreaks inflammatory havoc; how it was found in the nerve tissue of paralyzed Spanish sheep who wasted away and dropped dead in a post-vaccination plague that wiped out flocks, and how post-mortems revealed that it may have acted like a “Trojan Horse” carrying HPV-vaccine components into the brains of two young girls who died suddenly in their sleep following Gardasil shots.
Hence,
“There is a major unmet need for safer and more effective adjuvants suitable for human use,”
says Shoenfeld in his latest book.
I contacted the CDC in February to ask if, in light of new research on aluminum, any steps have been taken to address the problems with the adjuvants and I got a flippant response from someone in the public health labyrinth named Melissa Brower.
“The amount of aluminum present in vaccines is low and is regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA),” she offered. “The adjuvants currently used in U.S. licensed vaccines are safe. The most common side effects are mild, like arm redness or soreness where the shot is given (also called an “injection site reaction”). Severe injection site reactions are rare.”
Brower sent me a link to this CDC vaccine ingredient list (which looks remarkably like the one inVaccines and Autoimmunity) and assured me that
“Autoimmune syndrome induced by adjuvants is not known to be associated with vaccines that are licensed and used in the United States.”
This would be laughable if it wasn’t so revealing of willful ignorance in the CDC of the current published risks of a class of drugs given to the entire population.
On ADEM and Gardasil Brain Lesions
Surely Offit is familiar with the disease Acute Disseminated Encephalomyelitis, known as ADEM to the medical profession but virtually unheard of by parents although it is a well-defined risk associated with virtually all vaccines (so much for informed consent).
ADEM is sometimes called “atypical multiple sclerosis” because it is, like MS, a “demyelinating disease.” Myelin is a protein that surrounds nerves, like insulation around a pipe, and when the immune system starts destroying myelin, nerves stop conducting properly. Symptoms of ADEM are fever, headaches and vomiting followed by behavioral changes, confusion, nerve pain, speech disorders, blindness, paralysis, seizures, etc., etc..
“The widespread use of vaccinations in recent years (including new types of influenza vaccines and vaccines against HPV…) has caused an increase in reported cases of ADEM,” note two neurologists in a chapter in Shoenfeld’s textbook. “Severe, hyperacute and even lethal forms of ADEM do exist.”
Translation: Flu and HPV vaccines have exceptionally high risks of ADEM which can kill.
The scientists review the suspected autoimmune mechanisms at play in ADEM (similar to that of narcolepsy) and some of the published case studies: a 16–year-old girl blinded in both eyes with brain lesions 10-days after her second HPV shot; a 20-year-old girl with headache, vomiting, seizures, diffuse white-matter lesions and subcortical bleeding following her second HPV shot; a 15-year-old girl with headache, nausea, fever, brainstem and cervical lesions; a 16-year-old with “pseudoathetosis” (uncontrolled writhing movements) and lesions on her spine and brain…and so on. No dark side? Or are blindness and brain lesions not serious?
Tomljenovic and her colleague Christopher Shaw at UBC obviously think they are serious.
“Given that the death rate from cervical cancer in 9-20-year-old girls is zero, the short-term risks from the vaccine to otherwise healthy individuals seem to significantly outweigh the as yet unproven long-term benefits,” says their chapter on the HPV vaccine which reviews a number of manifestations of ASIA autoimmunity. “Recommendations for the continued use of HPV vaccines should be urgently and accurately reassessed.”
(I contacted them to see if they were referring to ASIA from vaccines in the US as well — for the sake of Melissa Brower at the CDC. They definitely are.)
Casualties in the War
What is obvious from a read of Vaccines and Autoimmunity is that there are going to be some casualties in the Great Vaccine Blitz. Some kids are going to wind up in wheelchairs, some kids are going to have brain damage and some are going to die.
We have been conditioned to accept the secular utilitarian view that the lives of some children must be sacrificed for the “Greater Good” of protecting the “herd“; at least it’s “rare.”
So you’d think doctors and public health types concerned about eradicating scourges of chickenpox and the like would bend over backwards when you lose the vaccine lottery. Motherhood champion Melinda Gates would charge in and say, “We’re so sorry you and your family are the ones who pay the price for the herd…now let the herd help you in every way we can and let’s study this to make sure it doesn’t happen to others.” Right?
Wrong. More likely you’d be treated like the Canadian mother of the dead Gardasil girl.
“The fact that one event follows another does not mean that the first event caused the second — in scientific terms, correlation is not causation,” declared ethicist Juliet Guichon in the Toronto newspaper. “For example, the number of shark attacks and ice cream sales rise when the weather is hot. The confusion of correlation and causation here is funny because, of course, the shark attacks don’t cause the ice cream sales increase.”
Translation: We have no idea what caused your previously healthy daughter to drop dead but it was definitely NOT the injection of neurotoxin, okay? She may has well have added: “Grieve somewhere privately please, you’re scaring people.”
Seriously. The parents of a 12-year-old boy afflicted with narcolepsy by the 2009 swine flu vaccine had to battle for three years to get a government compensation pay-out in the UK. The courts admitted the vaccine caused the damage but said his illness wasn’t serious enough to merit payment of £120,000.
It’s like some macabre Monty Python sketch; in the Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme, a victim must be considered at least 60% disabled, which it describes as equal to the loss of one hand.
What is your kid’s immune system worth to you? The government spent a ridiculous £1.2 billion peddling Big Pharma’s rubbish swine flu vaccine but fought tooth and nail over a meagre £120,000 for a child with uncontested vaccine-induced narcolepsy? You get the idea Mr. Burns is running the vaccine injury pay outs. (“He’s still conscious… sometimes? He has two hands? Excellent … Release the vaccines.”)
It’s the same in the US. Both countries have granted legal indemnity to the $25 billion a year vaccine industry so drug companies get off scot-free for vaccine damage. The National Vaccine Injury Compensation board in the US is a miserly excuse for justice that has even contested the number of diapers a vaccine-injured child would need for the rest of his life.
Greedy as Goldman Sachs. Or, is there something else these people are worried about losing, since they don’t usually mind spending taxpayers’ money? Maybe deep down they fear there are a lot more cases of vaccine injury out there and serious events are not as rare as they want to believe? Maybe if they admit to one, then they might have to look at other cases they’ve been cramming in their cluttered unconscious — terrible cases of dead babies paralyzed girls and lives destroyed. They might start questioning their long-held technocratic dogmas and the authenticity of medicine’s greatest miracle; they might just wonder if they’ve just traded natural infectious disease for an epidemic of man-made autoimmune disease. It’s hard losing your religion.
Vaccine Lottery
But the thing about the Great Vaccine Blitz is most people have no idea what is on the line. Not public health. Not the doctors. Not even Shoenfeld and his band of specialists can tell you that your kid is going to be 100% fine when you pump him full of 49 vaccines or if there will be any long-term effects. Vaccines were invented when they didn’t know an immune system even existed and researchers have barely begun to unravel the mysteries of that microscopic universe. They don’t know which kids are going to react or why. They don’t even know the odds. The Greater Good is all well and fine so long as it’s not your kid that gets the Lesser Evil.
Is it possible the growing “anti-vaxx” movement is just people who’ve already lost the vaccine lottery or seen others lose it and don’t want to play anymore? Maybe it’s just parents who’ve figure the odds of their son getting penile or anus cancer from sexually transmitted HPV are better than the odds of vaccine-induced narcolepsy. If you read your kid’s car seat manual and are worried about too much sugar at birthday parties, isn’t it worth troubling to find out what the ingredients in 49 vaccines can do?
The Dark Force
And even if they did have a way to find out who is at risk, do you really think drug companies would bother? If big banks are vampire squids, big pharmaceuticals are giant blood-feeding arthropods latched onto the human herd to complete their life cycle. They have no conscience. Pull them up for lying here and they crawl on somewhere else to feed. They already know aluminum is a neurtoxin and — they’ve known it for ages. Maybe they have some number-cruncher in the basement figuring out how each vaccine increases chronic disease treatment sales. Why would they change the program now when everything is going so swimmingly?
There are more than 120 new vaccines in the pipeline – vaccines for obesity, for cancers and even for autoimmune diseases. Laws aimed at forcing compliance make it easier for Wall Street to predict how many vaccines will be sold each year, and these predictions are sold to investors like annuities. They don’t want parents mucking up the rosy forecasts. The WHO doesn’t even bother to hide that it is acting as a vaccine industry incubator; it boasts about how the global vaccine market exploded from $5 billion in 2000 to $25 billion in 2013 and forecasts further “spectacular” growth: to $100 billion by 2025.
“Newer and more expensive vaccines are coming into the market faster than ever before,” states Miloud Kaddar a senior advisor and health economist at the WHO in his Global Vaccine Market Features and Trends report. “Vaccines are becoming the engine of the pharmaceutical industry.”
Much growth will come in the developing world which is about to be blasted with 60 new vaccines, he explains. (Yes, that’s six ZERO, although none are vaccines against poverty or dirty water). But much of the increasing demand will come from “new target population, larger emerging markets,” “higher prices and improved profitability for the industry (blockbuster vaccines).” Why do we never hear the WHO sounding like this in its press releases?
Credit is given where credit is due: with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation who have invested more than $4 billion ($1.55 billion this year) to the global vaccine alliance Gavi. (It’s great when “philanthropy” also pays big dividends.)
In this Brave New World where the Gates, WHO and drug corporations decide which drugs your children take, you can bet there will be more government mandates coming. There are bills to mandate more vaccines at school and to ensure kids in private schools and homeschools are “protected” as well. And it’s not just kids they’re after – “larger emerging markets” mean adults too. California SB-792 requires day care workers to be fully immunized against everything the kids have to be protected against. Nurses have been fired for refusing flu shots. Will teachers be next? What about anyone in public service of any kind? What if you can’t fly if you haven’t had your flu shot, or you can’t renew your driver’s licence until you’ve “caught up” on everything – HPV, meningitis, tetanus, bird flu, breast cancer, ebola, cooties, or whatever pandemic the Public Health Big Pharma conglomerate has whipped up this year?
Look how this hit ’em hard, hit ’em fast blitzkrieg of vaccine legislation is playing out in other parts of the world: in Australia they’re tying vaccines to welfare; in Iraq, WHO and UNICEF launched a 5-day nationwide polio immunization this spring, with 24,000 health care workers knocking door to door; and in Pakistan they’ve started putting parents in prison for refusing vaccination.
The Great Vaccine Blitz hasn’t really changed much from the early days when screaming mothers in tenement housing were held down by New York police officers while public health officials dragged their children to be lanced with vaccines made from smallpox scabs shaken in a jar of water. But now it is harder to hide. Freedom is in peril. Actually, freedom is circling the drain, but at least we should know what to expect.
Celeste McGovern is a Canadian freelance journalist in the UK.
