Are Vaccine Dangers Overblown?

[Editor's Note: July 22, 2001: I received two E mails yesteday on the same topic. One, was forwarded to me from a colloidal silver discussion list. It includes messages from different individuals beginning with a person, "dsweeney", who describes herself as a homeschooling mom who's now concerned that she made a 'mistake' by not having her baby vaccinated. Her concerns are addressed by a person on the discussion list who identifies himself as a 'physician', but doesn't idenify himself by name or E mail (which should send up a red flag). This self proclaimed, but annonymous, 'physician' makes his pro-vaccine opinions very obvious, but are they accurate? Our bashful physician claims that mercury contamination was first recognized and cleaned up by the vaccine industry itself without any outside prompting or criticism and that now there is no problem with mercury. (Oh really?). Without skipping a beat, he then boldly proclaims that most stories about vaccine damage and deaths are "mostly made up". (Good grief!)

The second E mail I received was from a reporter on the Indianapolis Star who wanted to find out if I knew of any parents in Indiana opposed to vaccines. My answer is posted along with her original message. The reporter never replied to me. Finally, some urls supplied by Chris Gupta which gives the reasons WHY there are so many people opposed to vaccines and a note from a Canadian friend who tells me of FREE meningitis vaccinations being offered for all young Canadians from 7 months to 20 years of age. Halleluyah, manna from above.]

From the discussion list, silver-list@eskimo.com
----- Original Message -----
From: ROGALTMAN@aol.com
To: silver-list@eskimo.com
Sent: Friday, July 20, 2001 4:12 AM
Subject: CS>Interesting Commentary about Vaccines

List: The controversy over vaccinations has been mentioned several times. Here's the other side of the argument. What exactly are wrong with this physician's and Paul Lee's (on the bottom) points? Roger

In a message dated Thu, 19 Jul 2001 11:15:50 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
"dsweeney" <dsweeney@swva.net> writes:

"> I am a homeschooling Mom- this would describe me!! "I am trying to eradicate a myth that is almost as prevalent as the Y2K nonsense that gripped the Christian and homeschooling communities in 1999. Just as I feebly tried to eradicate that myth ...), I am trying to destroy the myth promulgated by the anti-vaccination movement."

> I fell for this hook, line, and sinker. Three of my four children have had all of their vaccines, including my 17 year old who had the HepB vaccine before she went on a mission trip to Costa Rica this past April. I chose, through what I thought was a valid source, NVIC, to not have my baby vaccinated. What have I done? All I read for a year made perfect sense to me about vaccines.

>I came across this site yesterday from Jay Wile's website. Now I am concerned for my child, and myself for being such a gullible fool. Could someone please address vaccines in layman's terms for me? "

Response to Above Message:
I'm an internist rather than a pediatrician, but I have an interest in the area, so I'll take a stab at your questions (also Grand Rounds at my local hospital last week was about addressing parental fears about vaccines....)

>What about the mercury scare?

The concern about mercury originated in the legitimate medical community among people who study vaccine safety. There is no evidence that it is a problem, however mercury has been removed from most if not all vaccines, so the problem is now moot.

>And all the internet sites that have posted findings on the damage vaccines are causing?

Would you believe that they mostly make it up? There is a lot of sophistry in their arguments. For instance they will argue that the death rate from a given disease is much lower than the adverse reaction rate for the corresponding vaccine. That is a comparison of apples and oranges. The adverse reactions include everything from sore arms to fevers to febrile seizures. There is an extremely low incidence of permanent damage. Additionally, deaths from a given disease occur mostly in the unvaccinated population. Safety and efficacy is closely tracked both nationally and internationally.

There are always new scares about vaccines causing various diseases like MMR and autism or hep B and MS. Careful examination of epidemiologic data just doesn't support these connections. For instance, in France a few years ago there was such a scare about hep B that the government briefly stopped requiring the vaccine. Well, there really was a much higher ncidence of MS in the vaccinated population. However, at the time mostly just health care workers were vaccinated. Most health care workers in France were young women and MS is a disease of young women. If you compare MS cases in the
vaccinated population to MS cases in the general population, the vaccinated group does have a higher rate of MS. However, if you compare MS cases in the vaccinated group to MS cases in unvaccinated _young women_, you really see no difference in MS incidence. Similarly, careful examination of the MMR/autism data just doesn't support any connection between the two. There was even a recent! study published that suggested that autism could be predicted at birth, even before any vaccines were administered.

Anti-vaccine enthusiasts also point to the number of claims filed against vaccines as evidence of damage. There are claims, there are pay-outs, but there is still no evidence that vaccines actually cause the damage. However, if I were a parent whose child developed autism, I too would be angry and looking for someone to blame.

Another common tactic is too point to the low incidence of a disease. Why vaccinate against polio when there have only been ten cases of polio in the last decade and those were mostly due to the use of oral (live) vaccine in immune compromised people? Good idea, but only if you can close the borders. There was a polio epidemic last year in Haiti/Dominican Republic and that's only a short plane or boat ride away. Measles epidemics also occur regularly in Africa.

Anti-vaccine sites also regularly make claims about the lack of safety and efficacy testing in the vaccines that were introduced in the 1950s (polio, measles). This data is not that easy to access, but a year or two ago I actually did run across copies of the Indexus Medicus (I may have the Latin endings wrong, but this is the pre-computer yearly listing of medical journal articles)
for the late fifties. It was kind of fun looking up these old journals. There was an incredible sense of joy expressed in the dry old medical language as author after author and medical association after medical association reported the extraordinary success of their vaccination programs. The data exists; safety testing was performed, efficacy was verified.

If you have some other concerns, I'm sure that somebody on this list can address them for you.

> Thank you in advance for your replies.
> Sincerely,
> M (might post my name later, after I get over the shock of being such a putz!!)

[Editor's Note: Readers should notice that the above 'phhysician' (read authority figure) on vaccine safety doesn't identify himself by name or E mail address because he says he such a "putz". Well, I can agree with that part at least]

Response #2

I still think that the wildly bizarre thing about the anti-vax quax (and I live in Oregon)is that the only reason they are able to pontificate about not subjecting their children to "immunosuppressive" immunizations is because the vast majority are immunized and they are "effectively immunized" due to herd immunity. As long as the infectious rate is low, the likelihood of an infected child coming into contact with a NON-IMMUNIZED child is sufficiently low that they can "play the odds." I guess when the threshold of infected children is met the odds of remaining uninfected w/o immunization will increase. I wonder what their excuse will be then??

Sincerely,
Charles Morrow

Response #3

--- Paul Lee <pglee@mail1.stofanet.dk> wrote:

> > Soon the mercury will be out of all the vaccines, then what?
> > Kevin
>
> Well, since the real bottom line for the anti-vax quax is NOT the safety of their children or the rest of the human race, they'll continue to oppose vaccination in any form, > as long as it is identified with, supported by and used by their real enemies: "big business" (pharmaceutical > companies), "the medical establishment" (anything not CAM), "Big Brother" (FDA, AMA, ADA, CIA, FBI, bla, bla), > etc., or whatever else their paranoid minds are afraid of.
>
> To the degree that they are involved in so-called alternative medicine, they'll continue to do all they can to get more customers by undermining confidence in MDs, et al.
>
> Regards,
>
> Paul Lee, PT

E mail from Indianapolis Star Reporter

----- Original Message -----
From: Gina Barton <gina.barton@starnews.com>
To: <Editor@educate-yourself.org>
Sent: Friday, July 20, 2001 1:00 PM
Subject: (no subject)

Hello. I am a newspaper reporter at the Indianapolis Star and I am working on a story about the debate over vaccine safety. I am looking for Indiana residents who do not believe in having their children vaccinated. Can you help?

Please write back or call 800-669-7827 ex. 6068.

Thanks!

Gina Barton

My reply to above reporter:

----- Original Message -----
From: Editor <Editor@educate-yourself.org>
To: Gina Barton <gina.barton@starnews.com>
Sent: Saturday, July 21, 2001 12:32 AM
Subject: Re: (no subject)

Hello Gina,

If you want to discover why increasing numbers of people, from Indiana or any other state, are concerned and worried about etting their children vaccinated, why don't you ask the writers and researchers who've done the investigations an read the literature which overwhelmingly indicts the entire vaccine manufacturing industry as untrustworthy and duplicitous? The
safety propaganda promoted by the vaccine industry bears no realtionship at all to reality. There are dozens and dozens of web sites set up by groups of parents whose children have been killed or severly damaged because they went along or believed in the never ending stream of lies that comes from vaccine manufactures and their legions of governmental and organized medicine/hospital promoters.

If you really want THE story, why don't you try to find out how many babies and young children from Indiana in the past 50 years have died as a result of vaccinations? For those who weren't killed, how many suffered permanent nerve or brain damage from vaccines? You could find out a lot if you asked the right questions, from the RIGHT people (like the parents of
affected children) .

If you ask the SIDS Foundation what causes SIDS, they can't give you a straight answer, but I'm quite sure that they're working on all kinds of POSSIBLE answers. Just a few more years of research and a few more billion ought to do the trick.

Ask Dr Vera Scheibner (Australia) what causes SIDS and she will tell you definitively that VACCINES are the cause of the vast majority of Sudden Infant Death "syndromes". She ought to know; She found out the hard way with 40 years of research and mountain high piles of documentation -from the vaccine industry itself-to prove her case. Obtain her videos or read her
books and you will know what I'm talking about.

Do a search of these names for starters. Dr Len Horowitz, Dr Vera Scheibner, Dr Niel Miller. There are many others.

Get their books and read what they have to say. I'm sure with a little bit of effort , you could get these or other well known professionals opposed to vaccinations to give you an ear full. That is, if you really looking for a story.

I'll put out a call in my newesletter, perhaps someone from Indiana will respond, but don't wait for that. Sit at that computer terminal and DIG. There are reams of solid documentation at your fingertips. You just have to get cozy with a good search engine.

Sincerely, Ken Adachi

Urls on vaccine dangers sent by Chris Gupta <mbgupta@uwo.ca>

----- Original Message -----
From: Editor (by way of mbgupta@uwo.ca)
To: Recipient list suppressed
Cc: vaccines@garynull.com ; Gina Barton ;
Sent: Saturday, July 21, 2001 11:42 AM
Subject: Vaccine dangers overblown?

Ken,

This paper from Gary Null's site has the most balanced, referenced and understandable review on vaccines that I know. This adequately responds to points raised in the email attached below.

http://www.garynull.com/Documents/vaccines-2ndopinion_excerpt.htm

More resources are:

http://www.garynull.com/issues/Vaccines/VaccinationActionFile.htm

Another good source is Dr. Mercola http://www.mercola.com

You may want to add the following to your page:

Vitamin C was shown to cure polio just before the vaccine was invented - and then forgotten about. (See link off www.vitamincfoundation.org) The link is:

http://www.orthomed.com/polio.htm

Chris Gupta

Free Menigitis Vaccines being offered in Canada

----- Original Message -----
From: Daniel
To: Ken Adachi <editor@educate-yourself.org>
Sent: Sunday, July 22, 2001 8:55 PM
Subject: vaccines propaganda in Quebec

Hi Ken,

I read your newlsetter about vaccines

Just to let you know that our dear governement has just announced last week that they will offer meningitis vaccines for free on a volontary basis (...) to all young from 7 months to 20 years old !!!

What a wonderful way to render that generation ill at the same time !!!
damn it , we really have their plans right in the face ...

Apparently, a recent survey showed that 87% of the quebecers were in favor of meningitis vaccines ... very well done by the public disinformers

The operation will only cost 100 millions CAN !

We are scheduling conferences and manifestations to really inform the people about this corporate and NWO stuff.

Saw what they did in Genoa during the weekend ?

Talk to you soon,

your friend from Quebec
Daniel

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