Vaccines-Lethal Injections.PH

56 PENTHOUSE LETHAL INJECfiONS BY GARY NULL The author is a best-selling health-and-fitness expert. His most recent book is The Food-Mood-Body Connection, w ritten with Louise Bernikow and published by Seven Stories Press. IS SENT For more than a hundred years, two basic assumptions have been put forth by public-health officials. One is that vaccines are safe. The second is that vaccines are effective for the conditions for which they’re prescribed. The publ ic and our legislators have, by and large, accepted these assumptions as true, and as a result it is now compulsory in many states that children have as many as 33 inoculations before entering school. Some of these are given as early as the first few weeks of life. The problem is that it you dig around in the medical estab-lishment’s own archives, you soon discover that neither of these assumptions-that vaccines are safe, and that they are effective-is necessarily true. In fact, the situation with vacci-nation is analogous to that of chemotherapy: Both are pre-sented to the public as efficacious and safe, when, in reality, with a few· exceptions for each, they are neither. In both cases, then, personal decision-making requires research. Let’s start with The Journal of Pediatrics. which ran an October 1997 article summarizing reports to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. Between 1991 and 1994, 38,787 adverse reactions following vaccination were reported to this clearinghouse. Most of these cases occurred within two weeks of vaccination, and they ranged from less than serious reactions to deaths, which were most p revalent among children from one to three months old. Since only about one tenth of vaccine-induced reactions are ever re-ported, these numbers coming out of VAERS vastly under-state the real incidence of vaccine-associated complications. You also have to consider that this reporting system is not dealing with long-term complications. While long-term causal-ity is hard to prove, there are thousands of reports document-ing cases of meningitis, asthma, inflammatory bowel disease, diabetes, autism, chronic encephalitis. multiple sclerosis. cancer, and rheumatoid arthritis, among other conditions, that seem to be linked to vaccines. But the medical establishment does not generally want to acknowledge either the short-or long-term problems that vaccines can cause. This is something that concerns an increasing number of medical consumers, including Alan Phillips, the founding director of Citizens for Healthcare and Freedom. a Durham, North Carolina, group dedicated to rais-ing awareness about vaccine issues and supporting the right to choose. “The fact is,” Phillips says, “that in this country over a hundred deaths are reported each year following vaccina-tion.” Furthermore, “the FDA admits that 90 percent or more of serious vaccine adverse events are not even reported, and independent sources raise that figure to as much as 95 or 97 percent. So,” says Phillips, “any pediatrician or other person who says that this doesn’t happen is uninformed.” One of the problems that crops up with vaccine after vac-cine is that immunization often provides only temporary im-munity, whereas getting the disease naturally usually confers permanent immunity. Barbara Loe Fisher, president of the National Vaccine Information Center, of Vienna, Virginia, notes, “That is one of the reasons why they have to keep giv-ing booster doses. With OPT [diphtheria, pertussis (whoop-ing cough), and tetanus] and OPV [oral polio vaccine], you need up to five doses. They told us that with the measles vac-cine, one dose was needed for life. Then we started seeing more and more measles in vaccinated children. Now they are asking for a second dose …. Already, measles has mutated into a more serious form of the illness. When babies are no longer protected by their mothers’ antibodies because their mothers have only been vaccinated [and have not actually had measles] … these little babies are going to get a more severe form of measles.” There is a lot of guesswork behind vaccination practices. This bothers Jamie Murphy, author of What Every Parent Should Know About Childhood Immunization (Earth Healing Products), in which she stresses that vaccines are suspen-sions of infectious agents used to induce, artificially, immunity against specific diseases. The aim of vaccination is to mimic the process of naturally occurring infection through synthetic means. Theoretically, vaccines produce a mild-to-moderate episode of infection in the body with only temporary and slight side effects. But in reality they may be causing dis-eases rather than preventing them. “Vaccines produce dis-ease or infection in an otherwise healthy person,” Murphy says. “And so, in order to allegedly produce something good, one has to do something bad to the human body-that is, induce an infection or a disease in an otherwise healthy per-son that may or may not have ever happened.” Thus, she explains, “You have a situation in which everyone is being given a disease with no control over that disease. be-cause once you inject a vaccine into a person’s body, whether it contains bacteria or viruses or split viruses or whatever, you have no control over the outcome. Of course, what they want the vaccination to do is initiate the building up of our immune defenses, just [as] a regular infection would do. The problem is that the medical profession and science do not know, and have never known, what the infecting dose of an infection real-ly is. So they’re really guessing at the amount of antigen [a substance that stimulates an immune response] and other supplementary chemicals that they put in the vaccine.” Not only must doctors guess at the optimal amounts of vaccine components to use but the answers they come up with are thereafter the same for everyone. The standardiza-tion that characterizes vaccination practice is a problem brought up by Healthcare director Phillips, writing in the October/November 1997 issue of the alternative magazine Nexus. Immunization practice, he points out, assumes that all children, regardless of age and size, are virtually the same. “An eight-pound two-month-old rece1ves the same dosage as a 40-pound five-year-old,” Phillips says. “Infants with imma-ture. undeveloped immune systems may receive five or more times the dosage (relative to body weight) as older children.” Another problem, vaccine critics point out, is that introduc-ing antigens directly into the b loodstream can prove danger-ous. Jamie Murphy elaborates: “When a child gets a naturally occurring infection, like measles, which is not a serious dis-ease, the body reacts to that in a very set way. The germs go in a certain part of the body through the throat and into the different immune organs, and the body combats the disease in its own natural way. “When you inject a vaccine into the body,” she continues, “you’re actually performing an unnatural act because you are injecting directly into the blood system. That is not the natural port of entry for that virus. In tact the whole immune system in our body is geared to prevent that from happening. What we’re doing is giving the virus or the bacteria carte blanche entry into our bloodstr eam, which is the last place you want it to be. This increases the chance for disease, because viral material from the vaccine stays in the cells, and is not com-pletely defeated by the body’s own defenses. You overload the body.” . The generally accepted view is that vaccines are the magic bullets responsible for eradicating or drastically curtailing a variety of infectious diseases. But there’s an a lternative view-that these d iseases were diminishing on their own, without vaccines. Harris Coulter, Ph.D., coauthor of A Shot in the Dark (Avery), tells us, “The incidence of all of these infec-tious diseases was d ropping very rapidly, starting in the 1930s. After World War II, the incidence continued to drop as living conditions improved. Clean water, central heating, the ability to bring oranges from Florida to the north in February so the children could get vitamin C-these are the factors that really affected people’s tendencies to come down with infectious diseases, much more than vaccines. The vaccines might have added a little bit to that downward curve, but the curve was going down all the time anyway.” What if we stopped compulsory vaccination? Dean Black, Ph.D., an author, lecturer, and consultant on natural health, provides this perspective: “In 1975, Germany stopped requir-ing pertussis [whooping cough] vaccinations, and the num-ber of children vaccinated promptly began to drop. Today, it has fallen to well below ten percent. What has happened in Germany from pertussis over that period of time? The mor-57 tality rate has continued to decrease.” The pertussis vaccine is. in fact. a good example to use in illustrating com-mon vaccine problems. Barbara Loe Fisher, who wrote A Shot in the Dark with Harris Coulter. says that after studying the pertussis vaccine in depth, she had no choice but to question its effective-ness. “In 1985,” she says. “our organiza-tion made a presentation at the Centers for Disease Control. We questioned the health departments of eight states as to the vaccination status of children who had come down with the whooping cough in 1984, and discovered that more than 60 percent had been fully vaccinated.” In the course of research for the book. Fisher “interviewed literally hundreds of parents across this country. I listened to them tell the same story again and again of how they took their healthy. beautiful babies into the doctor’s office for a routine OPT vaccination. and then watched their baby scream and twitch and lapse into shock and die. Often those deaths were written off as sudden infant death syndrome. They still are. Other babies are being left with learning d isabilities or hyperactivity. Some chil-dren withdraw into autism. or become mentally retarded and racked with un-controllable convulsions.” Indeed. the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services estimates that every year approximately half a million OPT shots are followed by reactions severe enough to contraindicate the administration of more pertussis vac-cine. One in seven children should be turned away from further pertussis vac-cine. In practice. though, according to the NVIC, this does not happen. “With pertussis.” says Alan Phillips. “the num-ber of vaccine-related deaths dwarfs the number of disease deaths …. Simply put. the vaccine is 100 times more dead-ly than the disease.” But the most troubling aspect of the OPT shot. and the one that has made it the vaccine most fraught with controver-sy. is its connection to SIDS, sudden infant death syndrome. The first pub-lished report of SIDS after DTP vaccina-tion appeared in 1977. A German study presented the cases of 16 children who developed neurological complications or died shortly after receiving a pertus-sis shot. The complications included convulsions. some resulting in perma-nent brain damage, and polymyositis. a disorder marked by inflammation of many muscles. Five infants died within 12 hours to four days after vaccination. two after acute encephalopathy (brain-tissue abnormalities). Three simply died suddenly and unexpectedly. Many studies supporting a link be—-…._ “How did you manage to take it with you?” 58 PENTHOUSE tween OPT immunization and sudden in-fant death have been published. One, in the August 1987 issue of the American Journal of Public Health, showed that children were 7.3 times more likely to die of SIDS in the three-day period after OPT vaccination than in the period beginning 30 days after immunization. Unfortunately it takes a long time for research findings to get noticed. Someone who understands this well is Viera Scheibner. a controversial retired research scientist who wrote Vacci-nations: 100 Years of Orthodox Re-search (New Atlantean Press). Scheib-ner. who has spent most of her career researching the connection between vaccination and crib death, talks about the genesis of her work: “I was brought up and educated to believe that vaccines are good. Indeed. some 40-plus years ago, I had my chil-dren vaccinated. With the first child, we did not even link [her) chronic ill health with constant ear infections to the vac-cines she was given. Five years later. with the second child. we did. But even that didn’t make me think that there was something wrong with the vaccine. It took research into the baby’s breathing.” Scheibner goes on to say that in the 1980s her late husband, Leif Karlsson. a biomedical engineer specializing in patient-monitoring systems. developed a breathing monitor fo r babies: “Crib-death researchers thought that babies were dying of this mysterious affliction [SIDS] because there was something wrong with the breathing controls in their brains.” Scheibner and her husband collected from parents feedback on alarm situa-tions-times when the breathing moni-tors indicated increased risk levels. In doing so, she says. she and her hus-band “stumbled over vaccinations. be-cause all babies had alarms after vacci-nation. Of course they had alarms after a host of other stressful events as well. But all of them had alarms after vacci-nation. When we were just truthfully tell-ing these researchers and crib-death management centers that babies have alarms after vaccination, they looked at us strangely. And we didn’t know why. I mean. we were telling them the truth. Of course they knew about the controversy around vaccination. We didn’t. “But we continued in our research.” Scheibner goes on to say. “My late hus-band developed a computerized breath-ing monitor which gave a computer printout for a baby’s breathing. And we could monitor for weeks and weeks on end, because our monitor is a nontouch medical technology where the sensors go under the mattress.” Scheibner recalls how she and her husband started showing other re-searchers their computer printouts of babies’ breathing, which were interest-